Poking Around Pt 113

Sorry to have kept you waiting!

In a series first, there’s no title for this part; I deliberately left it out partially because I couldn’t think of anything that would work and I didn’t want a pun to detract the tone of the story at this juncture.  Titles are hard.

This wasn’t the easiest page to put together, and I confess to recycling a few panels.  But I hope you can read between the lines of what I’m getting at here; there’s a bit more to Bo than just ‘curmudgeon’ you know.  Please do enjoy.

TL Notes

I had to shrink Bo’s bookshelf to make everything fit on this page without it getting too crowded. Therefore, the text of the books is pretty difficult to read. So going from top shelf down:

• The Idiot by Dostoevsky:  A very lengthy 19th Century Russian novel following a protagonist who is deemed foolish by others due to his innocence and lack of social experience after spending time abroad.  However, said protagonist illuminates a lot of society’s foibles (conflict, desire, passion, egoism, and manipulation, thirst for power and money, etc) and its complex ambiguities, heightened by the fact we each only have our own perception to go on.  It’s considered a classic piece of literature examining the human condition.
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: (pronounced “Knee-Cha”) A 19th Century existentialist work debating how man could overcome their circumstance and become better people – that’s the briefest summary I can give here.  It’s also the title of that iconic theme by Johann Strauss II (popularised by the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey) and served as inspiration for the video game series Xenosaga (the spiritual ancestor of the Xenoblade games); the work is directly referenced in the third and final game.
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu: A military tome written over 2,500 years ago in Ancient China.  It’s the origin of which phrases like “Choose your battles”, “know yourself, know the emeny”, and “the best way to win is not to fight at all” stem from.
• Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:  A 1943 novella examining human nature, said to be based on the author’s experience of his plane crashing in the Libya desert during WWII.  It was adapted as an animated movie in 2015.
• The Outsider by Albert Camus: an absurdist 1942 French novella following a very apathetic individual, indifferent to the societal conventions.  It’s better known by its American title The Stranger.
• Stoicism: Not a book per se, but a Hellenistic (Ancient Greece between 323 BCE and 31BCE-ish) school of philosophy with three doctrines: the dichotomy of control (knowing some things are in our control and others are not); the responsibility (understanding that it is not things that upset us, but our judgements about said things); and acting with virtue (excellent) at every moment.
• Anthrozoology: Not a book per se, but the study of interactions between humans and animals and quantifying the positive effects of said relationships.  This includes the history of animal domestication, cross-cultural ethics of animal treatment and how these have changed over time and affective (emotional) responses from both humans and non-human animals.
• Mass Populace Complementation Project by Doctor Zyrus Akagi: The only fictional book on the shelf; Mass Populace Complementation Project is a riff on the Human Instrumentality Project in Evangelion.  Interestingly, the English term for what in Japanese was called 補完 Hokan (‘completion’) stems from a series of science fiction stories by Cordwainer Smith in the late 1950s, early 1960s; in those stories, all of humanity is maintained under a police state called the Instrumentality of Mankind.  Zyrus Akagi is a portmanteau of this Team Leader and this character.
• Pocket Book of Legends Ardayeus:  Riffing on this video game.
• Macroeconomics: The study of how a large-scale economy functions and how they interact with other economies.
• It’s Shirona: The Japanese name for Cynthia; I was thinking of this song and this other song and social media influencers.
• Counsellor Prudence Loff: A spoof on the formidable Mary Whitehouse, a self-anointed ‘guardian’ of British morals who hounded the media and demanded censorship of content she disagreed with. Loff is an ancient Anglo-Saxon surname that later became Lovejoy (merging with the French joie), hence the Helen Lovejoy quote.
  
  Previous instalments:  105 ,  106,   107,  108,   109,    110,   111,  112