Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

  The punnily titled Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is a historical critique of the author of plays like Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, one of if not the most influential writer in the English language has been subject to a number of conspiracy theories. For example, perhaps Chrisopher Marlowe wasn’t actually murdered and his death was all a cover-up that allowed him to be spirited away to write plays under the pseudonym Shakespeare. James Shapiro’s thesis: these conspiracies are bogus. Shakespeare existed and wrote the plays we attribute to him. I’m sure we’ve all heard some conspiracies that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. I even remember that in our high school edition of Macbeth the marginalia suggested that Christopher Marlowe wrote Act 3, Scene 3, and that is why there is an extra murderer that had never been introduced previously. Bunk, Shapiro would say.

Shapiro dismantles a number of common “clues” for Shakespeare’s inauthenticity throughout the book. For example, there’s the common belief that Shakespeare was uneducated because there is no record of Shakespeare attending school. Shapiro suggests, though, that Elizabethan England was not keeping records of the sort, but in fact plenty of people were educated, even if the attendance register is lost to history. The same goes for the argument that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly be as worldly as he presents in his texts. How could he possibly know about life in Italy, for example, if he never even left England? Well, Shapiro argues, often playwrights worked for play houses and were hired to write. The play houses would have their own collections of books that their writers would read and draw from—not that books were inaccessible in Elizabethan England; Shapiro points to some stats of how many book dealers existed. 

Shapiro works through a number of specific theories for alternate identities for Shakespeare that emerged in the years following his death, dismantling each one. He points to records that we do have (like lawsuits that bear Shakespeare’s name), the errors in peoples’ assumptions about Elizabethan writerly culture, famous frauds, and so on. Shapiro documents a fraud where one man wrote a wealth of extra missives, poems, and plays bearing Shakespeare’s name trying to convince others of a different Shakespeare. Even famous authors like Henry James and Mark Twain were Shakespeare skeptics, referring to “the author of the Shakespeare plays” rather than Shakespeare himself. Another prominent theory was that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s plays—but to what end? Why conceal his identity?

Perhaps most compelling is the undercurrent of Contested Will. Beyond an exploration of who Shakespeare really was, the book presents some reasons that people might buy into conspiracies. In some ways, it’s far more broadly applicable than we might anticipate from the outset. For example, Shakespeare is presented as a unique force; he’s essentially a divine being in the world of literature. Thus, at one point in history, we see the debate rise up to challenge Shakespeare, Shapiro suggests, alongside other forms of divinity worship. At another time, we see the pushes for and against individualism. Scholars examined the idea of Homer being multiple rather than a singular writer; by extension, people then examined the works of Shakespeare as collaborations between a number of unidentified people, again dismantling his singular importance. Alternatively, scholars could not accept that the plays are anything but the work of a singular genius, but that we have identified the wrong person and that we now need to pull someone out from obscurity. We can’t have a Shakespeare that is an upper class figure; we need a scrappy everyday hero. Essentially, Shapiro’s argument is that political, religious, and social issues are the driving force of conspiratorial thinking. I actually hoped Shapiro would put a finer point on it and bring everything into a distinct framework, but the intimation is enough as a starting place.

One of the main arguments against Shakespeare’s identity is that he is so hard to pin down and find documentation of in his time. Shapiro, though, argues against that line of thinking. He notes how the spelling variants make it more challenging to find definitive record of Shakespeare. There was Shak-spar, Shakespear, Shakspar, or other variants before language got standardized in its spelling, so we can’t find or maybe have destroyed records with variations in spelling. One argument against Shakespeare is that people in his time weren’t talking about him—but Shapiro points out that they were. There are references to him as an employee of theatre companies, for example. Sure, he did collaborate on some plays (and Shapiro names the actual collaborators, which is pretty cool), but that was part of the process. Stories were commissioned and workshopped and shifted for different venues. Essentially, Shakespeare was known to others and we do have record of the man and the actors that he worked with.

Shapiro goes into some analysis, for example, of how specific roles may be written for specific actors. There is textual evidence for the specific people who were cast in particular parts. Shapiro also corrects the record on at least some of the order of the plays, which a number of anti-Shakespeare conspiracists got completely wrong in tracking to track Shakespeare’s development as an author and to pair his plays with autobiographical moments of their preferred candidates. (Sidenote: is it appropriate to call these conspiracy theorists Shakespeare birthers? It’s the same phenomenon, sort of.)

One of the most compelling literary arguments Shapiro makes in the book is against biographical criticism. It was interesting to see how previous conspiracists read and misread the plays to match their theories of who Shakespeare was (Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, for example). They would match the characters with real world figures and ensure that each aligned. These biographical readings, Shapiro and other new critics would suggest, fail to do justice to the actual content or logic of the plays. There’s actually a compelling anecdote where Shapiro discusses Helen Keller’s literary career. She is of course known for her life story. What I did not know is that she wrote fiction, too, and Shapiro documents how Keller was frustrated by the fact that nobody was interested in her fiction because her life overshadowed her work. People longed for more autobiographical fiction. Shapiro shows the way in which our society became more invested in an individual talent and why that led to autobiographical criticism and, moreover, demanded a specific identity for Shakespeare.

The book was pretty illuminating. I think it could have been used a little bit more of a push to lock down the frameworks for conspiratorial thinking that Shapiro exposes through case studies. The case studies are effective for showing errors in thinking and gives Shapiro an opportunity to correct the record and challenge the gaps in our own knowledge about the era and about Shakespeare the man. I’m not an expert, but I am persuaded.

Happy reading!

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

        I think what I dislike about Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director is precisely what makes it work. At its core is a set of moral questions about oppressive rule, complicity, guilt, and the ethical status of art. Within the framework of historical fiction, Kehlmann explores the life and work of G. W. Pabst, real-world Austrian director of The Joyless Street, Pandora’s Box, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and, under Nazi rule, The Comedians, Paracelsus, and The Molander Case—a film that was never released, lost when the Soviets came to liberate Prague, and a large focus of Kehlmann’s novel, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

There’s something enchanting about stories around lost media and the possibility of what might have been. At the outset of the book, World War II hasn’t started yet but the antisemitic context is well underway. Pabst has an idea for a film in which a group of people from different walks of life are on a boat when war is announced. The ship descends into madness; the passengers hurt one another, torture one another, and at the climax of the film it is revealed that the announcement of war was false, an illusion. Slowly, a man starts to play an old song on the piano and the group returns to normal, as if the previous hours had never happened. It’s a compelling premise that Pabst pitches unsuccessfully several times and seems to reflect his concern with a society that ignores its collective trauma with the illusion of art. By the end of the book,  Pabst couldn’t possibly conceive of the idea.

Essentially, Kehlmann’s novel shows us that story through a glass, darkly. One of Kehlmann’s strengths is switching the focal point strategically to give us perspective for the plot’s effect on his characters. There’s a certain filmic sensibility switching between characters, predominantly showing us Pabst, but also switching to his infant son’s point of view as we return to Austria, Pabst’s wife Trude at her book club, his dementia-ridden mother in her sanatorium, and flash forwards where we hear directly from Pabst’s assistant Franz Wilzek. There’s one passage about Jakob, the son, enjoying art class. Kehlmann describes how Jakob breaks down the whole into pieces: “The trick is to look at a thing as if it weren’t a thing and as if you didn’t know what it was” (119). He then describes the art process as “a collection of surfaces” where “white and black” are at play. This cubist abstraction has a depersonalizing effect, and indeed Jakob becomes a Nazi presumably by the same process. Leaping between these characters has a disorienting effect, particularly at the start of the novel, but aids in creating the ‘fog of war’ effect to obscure the implications of Kehlmann’s story beats. At the same time, it gives us a hint to their full characters rather than as just “white and black” playing on surfaces.

For some additional context, I’ve been reading the shortlisted books for the International Booker Prize 2026. Of the three I’ve read so far, The Director is a more conventional novel, driven by its story and cast of characters. While less experimental in its form, it still creates a reasonably compelling narrative, even if there’s a pervasive unsettling ambiguity.

Essentially, the book explores the viability and human cost of art produced under a fascist, totalitarian regime and the ways in which people are rendered complicit. Kehlmann reminds us several times throughout that filmmaking requires a team—lighting, camerawork, actors, extras, a director, production, distribution, and so on. At least two or three times, Pabst talks about the ‘rules’ of editing, which he prides himself in. One motion must always follow another. If we see a car drive off left, the next shot needs to start with a motion from right to left. There’s a sense of coherence in his perspective of editing, but more sinisterly a sense of inevitability. The idea that one motion must follow another is strangely close to the idea of people just following orders, of getting swept up in small concessions to Nazism and by necessity escalating to unimaginable atrocities. Perhaps it’s for these reasons that I had a Freudian slip more than once where I called The Director, mistakenly, The Dictator. At the end of the book, Pabst and his wife are examining a cave painting that depicts violent acts seemingly under the direction of a being whose head is comprised of red speckles and a set of eyes. Following Pabst’s rule for editing that the juxtaposition of images necessarily creates a resonance, the couple then discusses their old Nazi groundskeeper and suggest that it wasn’t Hitler or Goebbels who ruled, but men like their groundskeeper. It seems to me another statement on the ‘banality of evil’ as popularized by Hannah Arendt.

But it gets more complex. More ambiguous.

At the beginning of the novel, Pabst is living in Hollywood but is having trouble getting work as a director, relegated to terrible titles. He is called back to Austria to care for his ailing mother (although this ‘excuse’ is called into question by several others—why did he bring his whole family, including his son, for example?) and then remains because he’s injured on the eve of their departure at the hands of their groundskeeper Jerzabek (but was he? His wife denies that Jerzabek pulled the ladder from under him and that he was injured at his own hands). His motivations are unclear, but then Pabst is ‘coerced’ into the Propaganda Minister’s office under the premise that he can have great film projects that are ‘art’ and ‘not political.’ The scene is compelling, funny, and disturbing because the conversion is rooted in what cannot be said openly. Pabst is turning down the opportunity (indeed, he had previous run off and threatened to hit a Nazi that approached him in Hollywood about making films), but he’s not allowed to say no. The Minister gives Pabst the words to use to maintain decorum and avoid the threat underlying the conversation: this Communist, left-wing director is being offered the opportunity to work at making films for Germany or be sent to a concentration camp. The Minister has asked him there, but insists that Pabst asked for the meeting. Pabst tries to say his health reasons are preventing him from making films; the Minister says that Pabst is there to apologize for making Communist propaganda, being sympathetic to Jews, and so on. The Minister says he’s “unforgivable,” but here he is being forgiven all while being coerced into saying he’s sorry. A collective illusion.

As a brief aside, there’s a great scene that takes place in the sanatorium after Pabst’s mother has been placed there. She is genuinely suffering from dimentia, often mistaking her son for her husband and her grandson for her son. She starts saying some things that could be construed as being against the party and it’s revealed at the end of the chapter that many of the elderly there are able to get away with things because they’re seen as infirm. One of her fellow patients tells her privately, “We’re safe here, our confusion is tolerated, but you musn’t take that for granted” (172). Essentially, the elderly are able to escape the collective illusion: “I had to do a great deal to be allowed here. Outside they would have come for me long ago. But no one is looking here. After all, we’re very old. Our brains are fragile. Thankfully, we are the most uninteresting people” (172). The chapter ends with their delusions running together: for the man, intentionally, for Erika Pabst, genuine—it’s an open question as to which is better.

The most challenging part of the text is when Pabst is working on his final, lost film The Molander Case. Midway through the book, we see Trude at her book club, where they always read bland, sensationalized novels by the same Nazi author every time. Eventually, Pabst is enlisted to make the film adaptation of the novel. One of the things that perplexes me is how and whether he resists Nazi rule via the film. For example, he casts the same actor as the ‘good’ prosecutor and the ‘bad’ prosecutor—giving direction to act, essentially, like a Nazi official in one of the roles. It seems to be implied that Pabst recuts and edits the film to disrupt the original story and part of me thinks that casting the actor in a villainous Nazi-coded role would allow him to engage in commentary. When the author of the original work storms in, demanding to see the film (before it’s even cut), he sees one minute before getting into a rage and saying that he’ll have the director sent to the camps. Given that he’s a staunch Nazi, it feels like a moment where Pabst is onto something subversive—he even comments something to that effect; the more the author hates it, Pabst says, the more likely it is that they’re onto something really special. In one part of the film, Pabst uses presumably Jewish extras in a crowd scene in which people are watching a virtuoso violinist play, somewhat reminiscent of the film Pabst had earlier proposed. Pabst has some of the extras do horrific rictuses. For instance, one of them is instructed to bite her lips harder and harder until she bleeds. He says he’s going to intersperse the images for a second into the crowd shots. When his assistant says nobody will see it, Pabst says that’s part of the point—there’s just enough to make them doubt, to make them think about what they saw. It feels like he’s up to something subversive, like he’s trying to prove Walter Benjamin’s observation that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The artistry of the violin is undercut by the horror we barely see.

So, there are lots of seeming virtues for the film. Pabst even defends the film, telling his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist” (270). Years ago, I remember seeing an interview with Chris Hannah that bad political contexts are good for art—it’s not worth the cost. Here, Pabst is committed to making his masterpiece in spite of, or perhaps within the context of, totalitarianism—but he does seem to be trying to do something good.

But.

But.

At the opening of the book, we are witness to a talk show where a confused man is interviewed about being Pabst’s assistant. The talk show host starts asking about The Molander Case and the assistant, whom we know a little better by the end of the book, starts protesting that the film was never shot. He’s under the pressure of the surveillance:

“I look at the screen. See myself looking off somewhere—of course, the monitor isn’t the camera, you have to look into the camera to see yourself looking out from the monitor, except then you obviously can’t see yourself because you’re looking into the camera, not at the monitor. And now the monitor, even though it’s showing me, is showing something else at the same time, and to avoid seeing it, I close my eyes, but that doesn’t help, and I still see them: black-and-white people in a concert all. From high above I’m looking down on them, as if I were flying, a crystal chandelier is shining brightly, I’m sitting next to the camera on the arm of a long crane. They’re all facing forward, because they’re not allowed to look up” (13-14).

This early moment points to the disjointed nature of perspective. He’s trying to see himself, but he can only see himself from the angle of the camera. He never gets a full perspective of himself, and in the latter half of the passage we see his compulsion towards repression. He’s trying to avoid seeing what he can see and he’s taken back to the filming of The Molander Case, which he pretends was never shot. It’s because the movie, for all its seeming good intentions, is tainted by its context.

Before Pabst starts filming The Molander Case, he’s working on another project produced by, if I remember correctly, Leni Reifenstahl. It’s a difficult shoot. It turns out that the extras for the film are brought in from Maxglan—a concentration camp for Sinti and Roma people as a stop en route to Auschwitz. When filming, Pabst makes a comment about one of the extras, more or less, saying that he looked like he’d experienced the traumas of life and that’s what he wanted from the actors. When we get the reveal of where these extras are from, Pabst can’t stop ruminating on the comments he made, haunted by the implications.

So, it makes it harder to justify his change of heart when filming The Molander Case. Pabst is placed in an impossible position where he has to finish the film within three days, but the extras can no longer make it. To get a massive crowd shot, he brings in, presumably, inmates from a concentration camp. It’s complicated because it feels like maybe it’s meant to make a statement, especially with the interspersed shots of their suffering (or is it meant to suggest they are barbarous?!), but the move is exploitative. Sickening. Pabst’s assistant Franz is particularly affected; he sees his old pediatrician, one of the inmates. It’s the most obvious example of Pabst making art on the back of the most inhumane conditions possible and really casts a shadow on his project. The shroud of ambiguity is also there; I had the impression that maybe those extras were all killed in a fire immediately after the filming—I think there’s description of the sky blackening. It’s not definitive. Worse, Franz is devastated and when he tries to talk about it with Pabst, the director tells him he’s mistaken and that it was all soldiers who had been brought in.

The final turn of the book is even more complex. We see Pabst after the war, completely devastated and adrift after his film reels were mistakenly swapped for an identical bag of horseshoes. His wife is making a film that parallels them and shows, actually, a little bit of emotional nuance. Trude can’t forgive him for what he’s done—everything else, maybe, but not for bringing their son with them. She is haunted by his enthusiasm for joining the Hitler Youth and has long ago stopped loving Pabst. Pabst never saw his film again—but there’s a final twist. In the concluding chapter of the book, we return to Franz, now infirm and struggling with his memory (but how much of our memory is unintentional, the book asks, and how much of our memory is edited like a film?). It is revealed that Franz actually did have the reels returned to him from the horseshoe man but never came forward to give the film back to Pabst, despite his decrepitude. He also publicly denies the film ever existed before returning home and stashing it away in a closet. The fact that he refuses to acknowledge the film and operate in a sense of denial causes some ethical quandaries, especially because it’s not as though he destroyed it. He’s hoarding it, never to be seen.

The book is a challenge to our ethics. It makes us think about how complicit we are in the creation and enjoyment of art that’s built on the lives of others. It’s a consideration of our role within a bigger system. The ambiguous ethical position is frustrating, but important. For example, one of the chapters refers to how book critics no longer exist—only art appreciators. They are great at describing books and films, but they do not offer judgment, even positive judgment. You can’t call someone a good actor because that implies the existence of bad actors, or the possibility of a bad actor. Kehlmann clearly implies that we ought not be so passive, but also that the lines of involvement are often hard to grasp in the moment. There are three moments in the text where Franz experiences or remembers his pediatrician talking to him. The book ends on a reprise of their conversation: “Then the doctor would come. ‘Franzl, are we sick?’ His cool hand on my forehead. And then I thought, he’s not sick, Dr. Sämann, so why does he say we? Only I am sick” (331). This idea that we are all implicated together is what makes this novel so haunting, so perplexing.

One passage I see as critical is the description of the director as a profession. It encapsulates so much of how collective guilt functions. Pabst narrates:

“Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director” (64-65). 

The passage has a strange distancing effect. On the one hand, the director is seen as having created nothing. In that sense, perhaps Pabst is devoid of culpability. He has the plausible deniability that it’s other people causing the harm, not him. This would all happen without him. In a twisted vision of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, we see that all of the agents capable of independence except the director. The idea that artists can operate independently, but the director requires collaboration. He’s necessary and unnecessary at the same time, necessary only because of a collective illusion, a collective belief that a director is guiding all of them. It recalls the scene in which Pabst and Trude recognize that Hitler and Goebbels didn’t have the power: it was their groundskeeper. It’s hard not to see these positions as being mirror images of one another.

I’ll admit that, so far, this isn’t my favourite book in the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist, but it does give me a lot to think about, or perhaps more appropriately, more to be haunted by. There are some pretty clear parallels to our current situation when it comes to injustice, guilt, collective responsibility, and the awful origins of great art. It’s worth the read, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Happy reading!

The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog

        Filmic language operates through juxtaposition: we interpret meaning by the proximity of images presented in succession. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Werner Herzog film in full, but the logic of cinematography is readily apparent in his The Future of Truth. Herzog’s book is a strange, little volume whose title makes it sound like it would be philosophy—and it kind of is—but it’s one that operates through association.

In the opening to the book, Herzog explains how philosophers have not been able to adequately define truth and so he has no grand ambitions for his own work. All the same, Herzog explores the idea of truth—not an objective truth, but an emotional truth that seems to govern our age. The circuitous route Herzog takes to get there is strange. The chapters are about topics as diverse as expeditions to the top of Mount Everest and Elon Musk’s mission to Mars and the plots of operas. There are a few common threads that pop up: fake identities, fake news, manipulation of reality through technology, but the way they weave together is primarily suggestive. Intuition guides us through.

Herzog shares vignettes that fit within the broader theme. For example, there is a chapter about Family Romance, LLC and Herzog elucidates the layers of deception involved in the project. (I should really watch this film). In reality, there’s a Japanese business that rents out people for special events—if you have someone unpresentable in your family (like an alcoholic father), you can rent out a stand-in, brief them on the background, and save face. In the film, which Herzog said was mistaken for a documentary, the actual owner of the business appears as a key figure in a story of false identities. At the core: everyone is lying. The hired father is a fake, but the woman he works for and her daughter share stories about a trip they never took. Deception operates throughout the film, but then also after the film there was meant to be an interview with Yuichi Ishii (the CEO) and one of the lonely men that uses the service. Yet, the lonely man selected never actually used their service and was in fact one of the rental family members. Herzog reports that it was a scandal and a loss of face. These layers of mistaken identity run through the text in an interesting way; it’s almost like the reverse of a doppelganger narrative.

Herzog also hops between moments in history to show the broader significance of ‘fakes.’ One chapter, for example, is a “history of fake news” starting with the very founding of Rome and depictions of Nero. It’s a weirdly humanizing take on the notoriously awful emperor; Herzog accounts his pleas for suicide and failed attempts. There’s a desperation in the account that’s quite moving—and then a weird account of the four other Neros who tried to take his place, linking them to the multiple Elvises romping around Japan’s downtown hubs. From there, Herzog jumps to Constantinople and competing popes and forged documents that were discovered during the Renaissance. Brief detour: Herzog talks about his meetings with boxer Mike Tyson, who—who knew—became an expert on obscure historical figures while in prison. After that, we get into Potemkin cities and the open secret of those papier-mâché towns and “Peace Village” in the demilitarized zone in Korea, a place built for 200 people with parks for families that has no occupants but is nonetheless swept clean every morning. Herzog links that to The Truman Show and the Enron sham, where they had a dress rehearsal for employees to pretend like business was going great. We hop back and forth and forward and side to side through these moments to, I think, contextualize our current moment of ‘fake news.’ There’s a chilling account, too, of Jean-Bédel Bokassa having one of his political enemies killed and eating half of him, the other half kept in the freezer.

The Bokassa section of the chapter is an incredible historical anecdote. He fathered many children, and in particular a girl named Martine with a Vietnamese woman. As an adult, Martine showed up and was welcomed by her father as her favourite. However, after that, another girl named Martine from Vietnam came forward and announced that she was his real daughter—the first was a fake. Martine2 brought forward an artefact and some knowledge that only the real Martine could have. Bokassa ends up accepting both and married them both off the same day in identical wedding dresses…well, before arresting both husbands and putting them to death. In Herzog’s account, the details are hazy: it sounds like perhaps there was a conspiracy of one husband to kill the child of the opposing Martine. The fake Martine got “sent back to Vietnam” but the private plane was back within half an hour. The power of this story is haunting and absurd to me. It’s one of those situations where the truth is stranger than fiction.

With all this about “Fake News: A Brief History”, what is intriguing to me is that Herzog shows a great deal of restraint. There could easily be a genuine political argument here, a discourse about the value of authenticity or our power to accept delusions. And yet, we are just given stories. Stories with a great deal of evocative power, but without definitive conclusions. This, I believe to be Herzog’s thesis throughout: truth is not that which is objectively provable, but some deeper core.

Towards the end of the book, there is some more discussion of Herzog’s own film projects and the implication to me is clear that he’s drawing on a different conception of truth, one he describes as “ecstatic.” The power of film, and stories more generally, is to elevate us to this ecstatic truth that reveals to us something beyond that which is easily comprehended through the lens of fact. It’s an argument that we’ve likely heard before about fiction, but something about Herzog’s presentation allows The Future of Truth to embody that argument. It’s the resonant quality of the anecdotes, the evocative power of the vignettes, the tracing of a historical thread so thin that Constantinople and Mike Tyson can appear in the same sentence. A connective tissue.

Happy reading, truth seekers!

The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz

I’m interested in the revolutionary potential of joy, and to that effect I decided to check out The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz. The Black Joy Project celebrates and promotes diverse narratives of Black experience and in this text Cruz offers an overview of the projects aim, some of the diasporic history that necessitates it. 

The book is informative and offers good insight into some historical factors for the Black diaspora. In particular, Cruz gives some background into the Dutch colonization of Suriname, which I feel is underrepresented in historical accounts. While that stands out, Cruz provides excellent context for a number of countries and strives to reflect the experience of a number of Black communities; another highlight is pointing to Haiti as a model for historic revolution and resolve.

The book offers a reasonable balance of principles and specific initiatives. There’s an emphasis on joyful and small-scale interactions, including things as simple as having a photo booth at a conference to capture the joy of Black attendees, sharing Black joy on social media to keep it front and center, and so on.

When it comes to principles, there were a few things that stood out within Cruz’s framework:

1) Cruz emphasizes that we need to think beyond the revolution. If our prime motivation is for the revolution, Cruz points out that it’s somewhat short sighted—we need to think of the day after the revolution and envision the joy it will hold. That keeps us motivated and focused on our goals, not mired in the process and living just for the fight.

2) Drawing from the spirit of improv, Cruz refers to the “yes and” principle as our modus operandi in doing this work. It’s clear that there’s a history of trauma in a number of Black communities and ongoing injustice and suffering. Cruz takes a “yes and” to traumatic stories: for example, to the statement “America has continually mistreated their Black communities” Cruz might respond “Yes, and they’ve continued to thrive.” The “yes and” method is a way of returning to joy and focusing on what needs to be done. It’s also a way of highlighting ongoing success and next steps. The narrative does not get to end at trauma: the work and the joy both go on.

3) Put another way, joy has to come first. Like Gholdy Muhammad suggests in Unearthing Joy, when engaging in conversations around Blackness we tend to default to injustice, but that centers the injustice rather than the most directly impacted. I would argue the same goes for talking about Indigeneity—when we talk about colonization, we too often center the impact of colonizers and erase the rich and vibrant culture and contributions of Indigenous people before, during, and after colonization. Joy emphasizes the strength and vibrancy of racialized communities and resistance to the oppressive structures that try to break them. Cruz phrases this in a much more accessible way than I just have.

4) Connecting with nature is critical. Drawing partially on the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Cruz examines the significance of nature as a model for resilience and versatility. For instance, Cruz draws on the image of moss and describes its many uses, linking it to the idea of community and fulfilling everyone’s needs. They also link nature to food and our practices surrounding its preparation, explaining the power of connection it brings. At the grander scale, they highlight the Afro-Indigenous Soul Fire Farm, who enacts food and land sovereignty as an avenue towards BIPOC independence.

5) Connecting with each other and reframing our experiences through the lens of joy is also critical. There’s a moment in the text where they narrate a gathering of predominantly Black attendees at which one mother is expressing her distress: her son was killed at the hands of police and was sobbing and, despite the fact that Cruz did not speak Portuguese, they could understand the pain. The event then became a collective mournful song that gradually transformed into a celebration song. It’s was a powerful account of reframing trauma through a joyful connection.

        Overall, The Black Joy Project is an account of optimism and hope. It’s informative without being overly theoretical and it’s specific enough in the accounts of initiatives while balancing the need for principles. It’s an accessible book that emulates its own call for connection. In some ways, the book isn’t anything revolutionary—but at the same, it absolutely is.

        Happy reading! Be sure to share your joy with others in the spirit of celebration and connection!

On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle

        Well, it’s the 18th of November again—at the start of the book, for the 1144th time. On the Calculation of Volume III finds Tara Selter once again awaking on a day in which everyone—or nearly everyone—awakes with no memory that they’ve lived this day before. If you’ll recall from Volume II, Tara was traveling around chasing seasons around the world and the cliffhanger of Volume II is that it appears someone else is having the same experience.

That’s where Volume III opens: Tara Selter has met a man who also has agency within the apparent timeloop. This immediately sets Volume III apart; it’s an engaging progression of the story as Tara and Henry get to bounce theories off of each other. Tara, with a dedicated academic interest in Roman history (ha!), is auditing a University lecture and due to her cultivated observational powers, she notices a man—and he notices her— as someone who was not there the previous day. 

This entry feels more personal, knowing that the other character has shared experience. In previous volumes, there were some tender moments between her and her sister and her husband, but there was always a sense of futility knowing that they would reset. Here, we get more of a connection, a sigh of relief that Tara is no longer alone. What Balle does that is brilliant, though, is giving just a hint of unease in a moment of respite. Tara acknowledges that there’s “a promise of more conversations, but not only that” (32). She takes a moment to reflect that “there is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibility for their baggage” (32). Balle subverts the idea of an uncomplicated companionship and adds just that extra bit of tension to an apocalyptic scenario.

Still, they get along well enough, mostly—they tell each other about their first November 18ths. In Tara’s journal, she explains that “Henry insisted on recounting every last detail. He described the pattern and play of colors in the glass, or at least he tried, and I reciprocated with details of my own. So we sat there, each with our own hues, light, and sensations, attempting to throw them into a shared pool” (39). There’s a couple of noteworthy pieces here. First, is the idea of reciprocity and shared experience, but there’s a subtle contrast here with Tara’s experience. The two of them share their experiences, drawing specifically on the visible and tangible: “hues, light” and the “sensations.” Elsewhere in the book, though, Tara gets obsessed with sound. She hears sounds and sounds within sounds, listening for the subtle gradients of, for example, the screeching of a train track or a puddle splashing. It becomes clear they have different ways of navigating. They also have different experiences of time and Tara points out some of their contrasting views. Henry describes the eternal change of season between fall and winter and how “he had enjoyed walking around in all these dualities” (39). He describes “two discrete sets of hours” and being between worlds, “parallel realities” (39).Henry “felt at home when, every so often, sunlight fell through the windows of his apartment: brightly colored through the upper panes and almost pristinely clear through the lower” (39). He has a clear division within him. A world of straight lines. Tara’s life feels more like concentric circles.

Where it gets really interesting seeing their different perspectives about what is happening. Tara’s revisits some ideas explored in previous volumes, including the concern that she’s a monster devouring the world, or that she’s at the bottom of a Roman urn inside a larger Roman urn inside a larger Roman urn ad infinitum (apologies for the mixed Roman-Latin presentation). Tara and Henry get into a heated philosophical debate about history, which I adored. I’ll try not to cite the entire passage I wrote down, but Henry sets out the idea that history has been about men and typically doesn’t focus on women’s concerns.

But here’s the thing.

Tara is a historical materialist. She is interested in the practical, tangible details of history (she was researching the significance of wheat harvests for Ancient Romans, for instance). So, when Henry offers his perspective about history Tara reflects: “Did he think that history was the history of power and men? That it was about great battles and great decisions? That I wasn’t interested in history because it wasn’t about me? Or about some kind of women’s world, which was my world?” (51). Henry protests that that is a mischaracterization, “but still, he thought I must feel excluded from historical accounts since they had never been written by women, for women, or about women’s lives” (51). He qualifies a few exceptions “as if women were the last passengers hastily pulled aboard a departing train” (51). Tara argues that if he was right, “shouldn’t it follow that I would only be interested in women’s things? If I could only be interested in women’s history, then surely he must also believe that my interest was confined to women’s things. Did he really think my interest in things was limited to hairpins and pot lids?” (51). Henry rephrases and says that he understood and she says she doesn’t understand how he could understand—a little obstinately, she admits. She asks a question that reinforces the way material historical realities cut across gender divides: “What then was this world of women that should interest me? Was a ship from the Bronze Age found on the seabed off the coast of Turkey more his history than mine? Were a thousand pounds of copper and a hundred pounds of tin intended for ships and weapons and axes the real history, after which a few pounds could be spared for the women? For hairpins and a trivet for the stockpot?” (51). She continues with even more pointed questions:

“And when did something become women’s history, anyway? Was it only after the ship with its raw materials and metals docked at the harbor, once those metals had been transported and processed and finally fashioned into a hairpin that it became my history? Did the raw materials belong to men’s history? And was he trying to say that there were two histories: one with wars and laws, with ideas and political decisions, with grand exploits and weapons and transports by sea and axes and cutthroat razors, and another with hairpins and kitchen utensils, with childbirth and children’s tears, and perhaps a loom in the corner?” (51-52).

In addition to the critical considerations about history, I also appreciate that Tara is essentially reframing the conversation around the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. If we reconstruct a ship one piece at a time, at what point is it no longer the same ship? Tara connects it to the notion of history: at what point are things disconnected from one another? At one point does our interconnectedness fall apart?

Tara admits that she doesn’t know why she pressed the point so hard. She comments, though, that she felt like she and Henry were in a boat in the middle of nowhere and not knowing where they were going but that he suddenly was sawing their boat to pieces. She reinforces: “Our history was shared, I said. We have always split the work. Don’t tell me women didn’t take part in wars or that men never scrubbed floors. History is full of female spies and male housekeepers, I said” (52). She goes on to question how many times animals were caught in traps invented by women, and whether snares and knives are women’s history rather than men’s. “How much grain,” she asks, “did he think had been harvested by women? Should harvesting tools then be counted as men’s history?” (52) I’m lingering on this just because I find it so powerful and I suspect critical to Balle’s entire project. We’re dealing with time. We’re dealing with time not moving forward. We need to grapple with the implications of the progression or non-progression of time.

While I think this is a rich passage, I think probably my favourite reflection of Tara’s historical interests can be summarized in one phrase:

“I wasn’t interested in the outcome of the war but in the buttons on the soldier’s uniform” (49).

The book isn’t purely theoretical, of course—but it is slow moving. Between the first three volumes, we’re looking at 517 pages and the moments that could be classified as plot events are few and far between. Perhaps that’s why I found the midpoint of Volume III so startling. Tara has gone back home and lurks around her house like a ghost, not interfering with her husband’s routine as she did in the first book. As she gets more obsessed with sound, she hears a bang at the door and is alarmed: this is new. The audience feels the suspense rise as they realize that this is something new. She opens the door: “Her name was Olga Periti. She was not a bird. She was stuck in the eighteenth of November. She needed my help, she said. She spoke in English. She asked if I was Tara Selter and which language I preferred to speak” (105). It’s a gutpunch of a moment because not only has the number of people repeating November 18th increased by one, but it sparks so many more questions: How does she know this is Tara? How did she get her address? Why is she here?

The book progresses with an increasing cast of people who have found one another. Still no explanations for why they’re living the same day, but watching them seek each other out is a compelling turn. It gives the book a much more human quality where these oddball companions bump and clash with their visions for the ‘new world.’

Long story short, we build to a party of four partway through the novel and Tara outlines her experiences to them. She tells them about her husband and attempts to bring him into the 18th of November. She describes “sneaking up on the sounds and catching a smidgen of what is lost. About sounds that ceased to be empty shells once you got closer. A world that opened up” (125). She talks about her days becoming shapeless and the unravelling of her pattern: “soundless, unbounded, and utterly without shape” (125).

As the group grows, we have more positions to tend to. Olga had previously met Ralf, but the two separated after an argument about what they should be doing day-to-day. Tara goes about her days trying to cause as little harm as possible (her and Henry eat garbage because ‘good food’ does still disappear). Tara wants to leave “only the faintest traces” (127). Olga, however, wants to change the world in a more systemic sense, the specifics of which remain somewhat ambiguous. Olga’s friend Ralf, however, operates in a more localized sense. He wants to research every death, accident, trauma, and prevent them from happening—a task so totally massive that only people repeating the same day over and over would be able to achieve. Olga thinks this piecemeal approach is pointless, while Ralf suggests that acting locally is creating a new system. Ralf operates under the assumption that the day will, at some point, resume—neither Tara nor I are convinced. Olga objects to Ralf’s approach because “he was not solving the real issues. The structural ones. The fundamental  ones. The foundation itself” (128). Again, Balle offers a compelling several pages of philosophical debate between characters and then works towards one line that is representative of the entire debate: “Ralf thought Olga wanted to drain the sea of water. Olga asserted that Ralf wanted to correct commas” (128).

Ralf goes about saving people about to die in accidents and draws the rest of the group to the idea with a grand vision of developing a system of warnings. He literally gives a slideshow presentation, which has a touch of humour to it, making the entire project feel a bit like a timeshare. It sets us up (along with another twist at the end) for the fourth part of this 7-part series.

Balle’s writing is somewhat documentary in its style. Tara reports objectively, almost like a scientific journal. At the same time, her voice offers some rich detail. Despite what I said about her emphasis on sound rather than sight, there’s a great series of imagistic moments. When describing conceptions of time, for example, Tara reports that Olga sees time as “tectonic plates sliding beneath each other, different layers of time” (164). Tara, by contrast, sees time “more like the edges of lawns or like weeds, or hedges and flower beds and things that merge together or overshadow each other as they grow” (164). If we return to the moment that Tara and Henry compare their first days, she also presents Henry’s description with rich detail: “The trees were still orange, golden leaves lay scattered on the ground, but winter was in the air. A crispness. As if Autumn was inside things and winter filled the gaps between them” (39). Tara recounts the visual details he provides and then says, “I told him about the sounds of the city, the philosopher’s tooth, the shoes I had followed. [...] I had found myself following far too many sounds, and each time I got closer, I discovered other sounds within them. Behind the hiss of the coffee machine, there was a heavier, metallic noise. Behind the clattering of  the tram, there was a sliding sound, an additional screech you didn’t hear at first” (79). She goes on like that a little further and I find it such a rich way of thinking through the world. It’s as though Balle’s narrator becomes more perceptive and, in turn, the journal she’s writing becomes more lush and precise in its descriptions.

I think Balle is working on a very special project here and if On the Calculation of Volume III is any indication, I suspect that the series will become more engaging, more bizarre. More compelling.

See you next time for November 18th, presumably, November 18 #1893 next. Happy reading!

Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West by Aidan Moher

I experienced some of my first RPGs as a child: specifically, I adored Earthbound and Super Mario RPG as Super Nintendo classics. A little later, when the world of emulation opened my world, I think I first got drawn into the vibrant colour of Final Fantasy V and the joy of job changes, which changed the look of the sprites in fun and engaging ways. I think I got distracted partway through the game and started Final Fantasy VI and was literally astounded by its gorgeous artistry and lively cast of characters. In grade 8, I bought Final Fantasy VII and joined the ranks of the kids that became obsessed.

I’m in good company with Aidan Moher, who sounds like he had a similar experience as a Canadian teenage boy wrapped up in the world of RPGs and punk rock. Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West is a love letter to that experience. Part of what makes the project work is that Moher takes a few paths when describing these games, allowing personal memory and experiences parallel to reviews, historical notes, and commentary. Drawing from both his voice and the voices of others gives the text a well-rounded and complete view of the history of RPGs—or at least as complete as a survey can be.

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which the children have a diorama competition. Principal Skinner reveals Ralph Wiggum’s diorama, which is a collection of in-package Star Wars figures. He exclaims: “Why, it’s Luke! And Obi-Wan! And my favourite: Chewie!” The enthusiasm in his voice is palpable and reading Fight, Magic, Items was a little like that for me: “Why, it’s Chrono Trigger! It’s Terranigma! It’s Eternal Sonata!” Even lesser-known titles get a place in his history. For the games I played, I felt that swell of nostalgia. For the games I hadn’t, I felt a curiosity to see how it fit in with the trajectory of the genre.

When it comes to describing this trajectory, Moher goes through a few threads that give the text a richness of detail. In describing the entries into the genre, Moher sometimes goes into detail about the development of technology to explain why games took the shape they did. Simultaneously, Moher includes details about the features or mechanics of games themselves and how they fit into, pushed, evolved, or revolutionized the genre. The title of the book highlights the rise of Japanese RPGs in the West, and I would say the book partly delivers on its promise to explain why cultural shifts empowered the Japanese aesthetic to ‘go global.’ It serves as a pretty compelling social and cultural history, so even if you’re not interested in JRPGs in particular, if you’re interested in video games there’s probably still enough here to latch onto—heck, even if you’re into anime, there’s some explanation of how it helped to push for Japanese culture in the West.

Like the journalist and author Jason Schreier, who is cited several times in the book, Moher weaves some pretty compelling narratives by drawing on particular figures in the world of game development. Moher provides brief profiles of game developers and tells some interesting anecdotes of their ups and downs. The creators of Dragon Quest and Suikoden and Fantasian Neo Dimension and Kingdom Hearts all get their due. Also, here’s a weird and wild fact that somehow makes perfect sense: author Haruki Murakami is connected to Earthbound because the creator of Earthbound Shigesato Itoi co-authored a short story collection with Murakami. The book is full of fun little tidbits like that.

Moher’s book does critique very well. He has a knack for highlighting what is best in these games. He explains why different games work—or, when the games are sub-par, at least aspects of why they work or what makes them significant. He comments on tone, characterization, plot, mechanics, immersion, music, and other hallmarks of good game design. For games that flopped, Moher identifies some reasons that they failed but still finds some reasons for praise. He’s got a generous, appreciator’s eye.

If there’s an area I’d like more of, it’s the analysis and interpretation of games. Granted, that’s not really what this book is. We’re dealing with history here, not philosophy or criticism. Still, when discussing Nier Automata’s multiple endings, repetition, and humanity, I would have loved to have gone more in-depth with the philosophical implications. There is some social commentary, like when discussing the all-male party of Final Fantasy XV and, rather than bemoaning the lack of representation of women in gaming, takes a moment to appreciate a game that shows male friendship, vulnerability, and connection. It’s maybe a bit generous, but nonetheless it gives some considerations for the impact of different game features.

Fight, Magic, Items is a gentle, informative non-fiction read. I’m tempted to think of it as a beach read, even. It inspires the nostalgia of childhood and a curiosity for the games I’ve missed. It gives me an appreciation for the underdog story JRPGs have had in the West and makes me really appreciate the diversity of the genre that’s out there. Guess I gotta get gaming.

Happy reading gaming reading!