A Sense of Doubt blog post #4040 - Did Alzheimer's Affect Terry Pratchett's Discworld?

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4040 - Did Alzheimer's Affect Terry Pratchett's Discworld?

This recent video from Rebecca Watson, whom I follow, caught my eye.

I needed a quick share as I am busy this week.

This video is worth your time, but if you'd rather not watch, the full transcript is reprinted below.

Even though I do not always agree with her, Watson is very worth following with a subscription on You Tube or even a Patreon subscription.  The links below will guide you to either or both.

Thanks for tuning in.

Watson video






https://www.patreon.com/posts/did-alzheimers-152181726
Did Alzheimer's Impact Terry Pratchett's Discworld?

Rebecca Watson

I have a variety of techniques I use to deal with the ongoing collapse of everything, most of them different kinds of drugs. But I also have healthy habits, like reading, and when it comes to reading purely for pleasure, I find myself turning back again and again to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

If you aren’t familiar, “Discworld” is a sprawling collection of stories that blend fantasy, adventure, and satire, often with recurring characters popping up here and there. There are guides online to help people decide what order to read them in, with some focusing on starting with the best bangers and others that focus on following one character through the years. When I started reading them a few years ago, I took the completely insane tactic of reading them in the order that they were published and not really thinking too much about them. So far, I have enjoyed this approach and highly recommend it to others.

Because I’m pretty much always in the middle of a Discworld novel, I perked up to recently see an entire scientific study about that series: “Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Tells a More Personal Story,” published last month in Brain Sciences.

Now, this is going to get a little sad but it’s old news to most: Pratchett published 41 Discworld novels (and even more one-offs) between 1983 and 2015. In 2007 at the age of 59, he announced that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He died in 2015 at the age of 66 from complications of that disease.

Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia can be difficult to diagnose before symptoms become very obvious and life-altering, which leads to worse outcomes for patients who don’t catch it early enough for interventions. And so, a lot of research has been done to figure out new ways to detect dementia as early as possible. One of these research avenues involves identifying very subtle changes in the way a person uses language, and so back in 2005 neuroscientists decided to examine the works of novelist Iris Murdoch to see if they could detect changes in her writing throughout the span of her 40-year career. Murdoch’s final novel was published in 1995 and received uncharacteristically negative reviews. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and died in 1999 at the age of 79. The researchers compared that last novel to her first novel as well as one she wrote at the height of her career, and found that “Whilst there were few disparities at the levels of overall structure and syntax, measures of lexical diversity and the lexical characteristics of these three texts varied markedly and in a consistent fashion.” Her later work displayed a marked decrease in unique word choices relative to the overall word count.

Building on that, in 2011 linguists performed a more robust analysis of Murdoch’s novels and compared them to those of Agatha Christie, who was suspected of having Alzheimer’s, and PD James, who did not experience any cognitive decline over her 94 years. Their results supported the earlier study, and further they seemed to be able to detect a more “impoverished” vocabulary in Murdoch’s novels a full thirty years before her death. They also felt that they had convincing evidence Christie did, in fact, suffer from Alzheimer’s.

So now, it’s not surprising that some researchers would want to perform a similar examination of Terry Pratchett, considering how many novels he produced, especially in the same world, over many decades. They chose 33 out of the 41 Discworld novels, excluding those that were very short or written for young adults, and looked for patterns in the vocabulary used.

They found a “significant decrease in lexical diversity across all word classes” beginning after the publication of The Last Continent in 1998, the 22nd book in the series–9 and a half years before his diagnosis.

So there we go! Pretty good evidence that it may be possible to diagnose Alzheimer’s early using a careful examination of a history of the patient’s writings. Right? Well, no, it’s not quite that simple.

First, let me point out some criticisms I’ve seen a lot about this study, as articulated by Marc Burrows, who wrote a biography of Terry Pratchett:

“First,” Burrows writes on Facebook, “the point where this supposed “decline” begins is just before the strongest run of his entire career — a decade of book after book that includes Night Watch and Nation, two of the finest novels Sir Terry ever wrote. To argue that his writing was already deteriorating years before those books appeared just doesn’t stand up.”

Okay, that is not what this study or any of the previous studies have shown. Yes, Murdoch’s final novel was panned but these studies do not have anything to say about the quality of the authors’ work. In fact, they are specifically looking for very subtle changes in word choice that literally require an algorithm to identify. Pratchett could very well have been using less diverse language while continuing to knock it out of the park when it comes to character development, storyline, and humor.

Burrows goes on, “Second, there’s a far simpler explanation for a drop in adjective use: he was getting better. At this point Sir Terry was writing at an astonishing rate — often two or three novels a year. His prose was getting cleaner and more disciplined. He was learning, bit by bit, not to let vocabulary get in the way of character, narrative and theme. That's mastery, not decline. Unless the argument is that Alzheimer’s made him a better writer, which feels… off.”

That is absolutely true, and it actually negates his first point: you do not necessarily need a unique array of words in order to produce a great novel. Yes. Correct. And Pratchett very well may have made a conscious effort to change up his style. So why didn’t the researchers consider that? Simple: they did. In the discussion section of their paper, they include a lengthy list of reasons why this is not a slam dunk case of a decline in cognition: “Age-related changes in writing style are expected, and it is possible that some of the observed changes represent natural stylistic evolution rather than disease-related decline.”

They also point out that after his diagnosis, Pratchett’s language may have changed due to related factors like stress, or having less time to write.

Burrow’s third point is “the big one — Sir Terry had posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a very rare form of Alzheimer’s that affects visual and spatial processing first. It isn’t a language-led illness in its early stages, and it often doesn’t touch memory or vocabulary for a long time. That’s one reason it’s so hard to diagnose. It doesn't work like other forms of dementia.

“When language problems do show up in PCA, they usually come via visual impairment — difficulty reading, scanning text, processing what’s on the page, that sort of thing. Many of you will have seen the heartbreaking footage of Terry trying to read from Nation onstage at the Discworld con and complaining of "shadows" on the page. It can slow access to words, but it doesn’t shrink vocabulary in this neat, statistical way. Terry himself talked about this a lot. He took great pride in being able to rattle off long lists of words when he was being tested, while being unable to copy simple pictures.

Even later on, when writing genuinely became a struggle, Rob Wilkins has been very clear that the issues were about keeping the shape of a story in his head and the character voices distinct— not about choosing words. And yet the articles making these claims don't mention PCA at all, which is extraordinary when you’re citing scientific research and talking about the effects of a disease. They lump all forms of alzheimers together.”

That’s also a great point: why did the authors lump all forms of Alzheimer’s together? Simple: they didn’t. I’ll give Burrows a break here and assume that he was ONLY reading some popular press about the study instead of reading the study itself (which is available in full for free), but if that’s the case it’s really better to actually point to those articles and criticize them and not the study itself. Because the authors do repeatedly point out that Pratchett had PCA: they cite research that found “that in addition to the well reported degradation of vision, literacy and numeracy, PCA is characterised by progressive oral language dysfunction with prominent word retrieval difficulties.”

And then we’re back to that discussion section, where the authors state plainly that “while PCA and Alzheimer’s disease share some common features and PCA is thought to be in most cases caused by Alzheimer’s disease, they are distinct conditions with different clinical presentations. It is possible that the linguistic markers of PCA may differ from those of Alzheimer’s disease. For example, PCA often causes severe reading impairments and “pure alexia,” which disrupts the writer’s ability to visually scan and review their own text. Writers unable to effectively read their drafts may struggle to detect unwanted lexical repetitions and potentially may contribute to the observed decline in lexical richness.”

So I’m not impressed by these quite common criticisms of the study, seeing as one is just wrong and the others are freely stated by the study authors as limitations. The authors also point out that they could only judge the books based upon their publishing date, with no way to know exactly when in his life Pratchett actually wrote the books. They also point out that unlike the 2011 study, they didn’t have a control author with no known problems with cognition.

Essentially, this was just another case study to add to the data.

That said, I will point out some critical thoughts I had about the idea that research like this will allow earlier detection of conditions like Alzheimer’s. While all of the writers discussed were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or strongly suspected by experts to have had it, these changes in vocabulary do not point to Alzheimer’s specifically: they point to cognitive decline, and that can mean about a zillion different diseases. Alzheimer’s, sure, but also Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s, dementia with Lewy bodies, depression, concussion, or medication side effects. Even if we had a nice little private algorithm running in our email outboxes that can detect declining cognition long before we notice it ourselves, that would be a real “well what the fuck now” situation. There would need to be a serious discussion about whether or not it makes sense to then run every test possible to try to narrow it down immediately, or whether you just have to wait and see what happens, terrified every time you walk into a room and forget what you were going there for.

I’ve talked in the past about the seemingly paradoxical problem of elective full body MRIs and gene sequencing: sometimes more information is actually worse for us, if it stresses us out and puts us through procedures that end up being useless. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

So, it’s an interesting study just for the sake of scientific inquiry, but I’m not sure it should give anyone a lot of hope for a way to easily detect early Alzheimer’s in the near future. And also, the takeaway absolutely is NOT “study pinpoints when Discworld fell off.” I haven’t even made it to the fan-favorite “golden age” yet but I’m fairly certain that Terry Pratchett could craft an entertaining story with a toddler’s vocabulary so I’m not worried about it.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2603.10 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3904 days ago & DAD = 558 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4039 - Today's Theme Song - "Survive" by David Bowie - Music Monday 2603.09

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4039 - Today's Theme Song - "Survive" by David Bowie - Music Monday 2603.09

Today's post was going to be a new mix of 1960s music. That's now postponed. It's not ready.

And I almost resorted to a reprint, and then I had a brainstorm, this song.

It fits my status for today.

"Give me wings..."

This is the no longer and even back then not so Daily Bowie post.

I am working on a roundup post of all the Daily and Not Daily Bowie posts. But many have broken videos, so that's a big project. I have rescheduled it for at least a year, maybe longer.

Thanks for tuning in today.

David Bowie - Survive (Official Music Video) [HD]

David Bowie

"SURVIVE"

- Album: Hours

- Lyrics David Bowie music by Bowie & Gabrels

Oh my, naked eyes

I should have kept you

I should have tried

I should of been more wiser kind of guy

I miss you

Give me wings

Give me space

Give me money for a change of face

There's noisy rooms and passion pants

I loved you

Where's the morning in my life?

Where's the sense in staying right?

Who said time is on my side?

I got ears and eyes and nothing in my life

But I survive your naked eyes

I'll survive

You alone across the floor

You and me and nothing more

You're the great mistake I never made

I'll never lied to you

I hate it when you lied

But I'll survive your naked eyes

I'll survive

People boys all snowy white

Razzle dazzle clubs every night

Wished I'd sent a valentine

I loved you

I'll survive

Your naked eyes

I'll survive

I'll survive

My naked eyes

I'll survive

I'll survive

Naked eyes

I'll survive

I'll survive

I'll survive

https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/survive/

Survive

Survive.
Survive (Omikron sequence).
Survive (video).
Survive (instrumental).
Survive (Marius DeVries UK single mix).
Survive (VH1 Storytellers, 1999).
Survive (Top of the Pops 2, rehearsal, 1999). (& another rehearsal.)
Survive (Top of the Pops 2, 1999).
Survive (TFI Friday, 1999).
Survive (live, Net Aid, 1999).
Survive (Cosas Que Importan, 1999).
Survive (Nulle Parte Ailleurs, 1999.)
Survive (live, 1999, later on single).
Survive (Musique Plus, 1999).
Survive (Later With Jools Holland, 1999).
Survive (live, 1999).
Survive (Quelli Che Il Calcio,’ 1999).
Survive (Inte Bara Blix, 1999).
Survive (TVE Spain, 1999).
Survive (Bowie at the Beeb, 2000).
Survive (live, 2002).

The End

We did record an awful lot of stuff, and there really was every intention of going through it and putting out Part II and Part III. The second title was Contamination, and boy was that accurate. And it would have been nice to have somehow done it as a theatrical trilogy. I just don’t have the patience. I think Brian would have the patience.

Bowie, interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, July 2003.

For two years after the release of 1. Outside, Bowie kept promising its sequel albums would appear by the end of the millennium, in conjunction with a theatrical production commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, to be staged in Vienna in 1999 or 2000. There also would be a CD-ROM piece of the Outside puzzle, optimistically scheduled for 1996.

Interviewed by Ray Gun at the end of that year, Bowie said 2. Contamination (“hopefully that should be out by spring ’97“) would have “some bearing on the first one, but it’s completely different. It goes backwards and forwards between Indonesian pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries and today…it’s really becoming a peculiar piece of work.” There were at least 25 characters in the piece now: whether these included the likes of Nathan Adler and Ramona Stone was unclear, possibly even to its composer.

Life intervened. Brian Eno sold his house in Britain and relocated his family to St. Petersburg¹, while Bowie spent much of 1997 touring Earthling. The more unfeasible the Outside project seemed, the grander Bowie’s plans for it became.

In an April 1997 interview on the Mr. Showbiz website, Bowie said he and Eno had “formulated the storyline and decided to do it ourselves with no other musicians and to not meet while we’re making it…we’ll send the tracks back and forth between St. Petersburg and wherever I am.” Contamination’s Internet arm was carrying much of the dramatic weight by now (“we’d like to bump up all kinds of stuff on the Internet, so you get lots of photographic references…it’s kind of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not premise.”) While the 17th Century pirates were still in the mix, the “narrative” now also included diseases (“Ebola, AIDS, that new tuberculosis“), hence the title. Trent Reznor and Goldie were rumored to have been roped into it.

And even when the century was done and nothing had come about, Bowie wouldn’t let Outside go. In a web-chat in late 1999, he said he and Eno had recorded “over 24 hours of material. Problem is finding the time to sift through.” In February 2000, he told BowieNet users that, yes, finally, this would be the year he “pieced together” Contamination. Instead he re-recorded some of his old Sixties songs.

So in the end there was nothing: no CD-ROMs, no websites, no Robert Wilson-produced operas, no new Nathan Adler diaries, no new albums. Instead Bowie had spent the last years of the 20th Century trying his hand at seemingly everything else but Outside sequels: acting in films, hosting The Hunger, launching BowieNet, agreeing to BowieBanc, planning a Ziggy Stardust film/website/play, scoring the videogame Omikron: the Nomad Soul (see the past month’s entries).

No more Outside chapters may have been a blessing. 2. Contamination and 3. Afrikaans (a rumored but never confirmed title, likely a fan’s doing) could’ve been Bowie’s version of the Matrix sequels: more clues! more characters! more time-hopping! And smothering Outside‘s atmosphere in sub-Neal Stephenson exposition and garrulous mythology. When some fans distributed hoax sequences of 2. Contamination (“Ebola Jazz,” “Segue: The Mad Ramblings of Long Beard”) and even fake Nathan Adler diaries it was as inspired an end to the project as any Bowie could have offered.

Still, the slow collapse of the Outside trilogy left a hole in his ambitions. It’s arguable his frenetic activity in 1998-1999 was in part him looking for something, anything to replace his grand millennial folly. But the album he released in the waning months of the 20th Century was something far different from his and Eno’s projects. Its title could have been Inside.

Reeves Gabrels and I have written a lot in during the last few months and we might just record all these songs to see what will come out of it…We compose for the pleasure and our spectrum is wide, between purely electronic music and acoustic songs.

Bowie, Rock & Folk interview, 1998.

If ‘Hours’² has a counterpart in the Bowie canon, it’s Diamond Dogs: both albums are salvage jobs, their tracks refugees from a set of other, mainly stillborn projects, assembled higgledy-piggledy yet somehow managing to have a unified tone.

‘Hours’ had a few tributaries. One was the aforementioned Outside sequels. If Bowie really had recorded a day’s worth of music with Eno for 2. Contamination, it’s possible that something from it—a chord sequence, a stray lyric or a top melody—wound up on ‘Hours.’³ David Buckley, who interviewed Reeves Gabrels and Mike Garson in 1998-1999 for his biography, recalled in 2011 that both had told him there was still a lot of material recorded that had never been used (whether this was the Leon suites from 1994 or newer Contamination tracks is unclear).

Then there was Reeves Gabrels’ upcoming solo album. Gabrels had taken one for the team in 1995 by promoting Outside instead of his own debut solo LP, The Sacred Squall of Now. The plan was for Gabrels to finally have a big-ticket release, with an LP of songs co-composed with Bowie. He and Bowie, working in Bowie’s house in Bermuda in late 1998, wrote what Bowie estimated variously as anywhere from 30 or 100 songs, some of which were intended for Gabrels, including “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell,” “We All Go Through” and “Survive.”

Finally there was Omikron. Bowie and Gabrels also were writing pieces that had to serve two masters: the songs had to work as incidental music for a game sequence as well as on a Bowie or Gabrels album. The songs needed less abrasive guitar, more “ambient” synthesizer and steady basslines; they needed to be structurally loose, so that pieces (a bridge or a chorus, say) could repeat over and over again if a player got stuck on a particular screen.

By now, Gabrels was becoming creatively frustrated. He felt there should have been a follow-up to Earthling, cut in early 1998, to be the Aladdin Sane to Earthling‘s Ziggy Stardust: an elaboration and expansion of a sound, honed by months on stage. “The music had evolved, the band was playing great, the window of opportunity was there,” he told Buckley. So all the time that he, Mark Plati and Bowie had spent sifting through live recordings for a rejected live album was wasted: why couldn’t they have gotten Gail Ann Dorsey and Zachary Alford into the studio and cut a trio record?

So when he went to Bermuda in autumn 1998, Gabrels hoped for another start, that this could be finally the album he and Bowie had thought of making a decade ago, before Tin Machine had come along. An open collaboration, ranging from electronic music to hard, avant-garde rock, with no record label interests considered. After all, Bowie had a website now: he could just distribute the tracks to his fans should Virgin get cold feet.

Yet Bowie had different aims. Beyond taking the needs of Omikron into consideration, he was in a more traditionalist frame of mind. He’d enjoyed a carnival phase in the mid-Nineties; now he was in a Lenten mood. “There was very little experimentation in the studio,” Bowie said. “A lot of it was just straightforward songwriting. I enjoy that; I still like writing that way.”

This new album would be his severance from his Nineties obscurantist period: to make it obvious, he had the cover of “Hours” play on Michelangelo’s Pietà, with his new, somber curator persona cradling the dying “rave uncle” of Earthling. Both videos for the album would set Bowie in surreal domestic situations, with muted colors and lighting; the actor looking his age for once.

Gabrels conceded. As the album, as it took shape, was becoming somber and introspective, he needed to dampen down the guitars, to be sure that he wasn’t undermining the songs. It’s a small irony that the one album for which Gabrels received full co-composition credit is the one on which he’s essentially muted on guitar. And Bowie in turn wanted his vocals not to sound mannered. “I wanted to approach them just like a bloke. To give them a feeling of: anybody could sing these songs. They’re not difficult.”

Once he’d assembled enough songs for his own album (and so claiming the lion’s share of them—sorry, Reeves), Bowie began working on a narrative voice. He described this as being a distillation of some of his friends who, at age 50, were regretting their lives. “I’ve watched them flounder a little over the last 10 years, when they’re reaching that stage where it’s very, very hard to start a new life,” he told Gil Kaufman. “Some of them are affected with resignation and some of them, a certain bitterness maybe…they found themselves in relationships that aren’t what they had expected to be in when they were younger.”

You could call this a bluff, the equivalent of the man who asks a doctor about an embarrassing rash “a friend” has contracted. Sure Bowie was, by all accounts, happily married and would soon be a father again. He was rich, established, world-famous. Not that these conditions will prevent depression and regret from striking. But he was also creatively exhausted. He had fought and fought, for years, to make his music new again, to risk making a fool of himself on stage. Now his latest spectacle had failed due, in part, to his own lack of commitment; perhaps he was left wondering what he even had left to say anymore.

That said, the voice that Bowie used on much of ‘Hours,’ a melancholy sad sack, does seem crafted, even affected. The vocals are restrained, the lyrics are more quotidian, with dull rhymes and shopworn images. Was this in character, or was Bowie papering over, in his interviews, a sharp decline in his own songwriting? Was he charging his generation with his own creative depletion?

I’ll argue that ‘Hours’ is a flawed experiment, a secret parody: it’s Bowie attempting to do a record “proper” for a man of his age and stature. It’s his aging Baby Boomer lament album, his “September Songs” for a generation (the title played on unforgiving time and a common bond: hours/ours). He’d listened to nothing but his old songs before he wrote this album, he claimed, but he’d also obviously listened to his aging peers. Because ‘Hours’ is riddled with ghosts of old songs, with strains of lost singers: he’s mocking them, answering them, humbled by them. It’s one of his hardest albums to grasp, because it can be dull and ordinary and can feel strained: it’s like watching a once-great track runner struggling to run a 5k race. The question, left to each listener, is whether this mood is intentional: if the diminished figure in these songs is a subtle mask or if it’s simply the only voice Bowie could muster.

“Survive” was the first track to be released from the ‘Hours’ sessions. Its title wasn’t promising.

As I wrote in the “Heroes” entry, Greil Marcus around 1975 had noticed the growing popularity of the word “survivor,” in films, on TV chat shows, and especially rock music: “Soul Survivor,” Street Survivors, “Survival,” “I Will Survive.” It seemed to me to speak for everything empty, tawdry, and stupid about the seventies, to stand for every cheat, for every failure of nerve. “Survivor” had once meant someone who had endured an unspeakable horror; it became an aging person’s self-deprecating boast. “I will get by…I will survive,” Jerry Garcia had tootled in 1987 (he didn’t, but again, neither will any of us in the long run).

So a song in which a 52-year old man sings about surviving seems emblematic of this rot: a reduction of life to its greyest elements. It could have been a song about his failing digestion. What saves “Survive” is the sour, occasionally defiant sense of regret in it: the singer’s not regretting a path he didn’t take, but simply noting that there are no more paths left for him anymore. In one interview, Bowie said that “there was a time in my life where I was desperately in love with a girl—and I met her, as it happens, quite a number of years later. And boy, was the flame dead! ” So it’s tempting to speculate that the woman in “Survive” came from a retrieved memory of Hermione Farthingale, Bowie’s lost love, who he’d used to symbolize everything he’d left behind in the Sixties. But the woman in “Survive” is still abstract to the singer, a place-filler he uses to stand for something else he can’t quite explain: a loss of his own potential.

There are a few Sixties shadows in the track: Mark Plati’s Mellotron, the Beatles playing clubs, “Time Is On My Side,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (the guitar hook heard at the fade, of course referencing Bowie’s nicking of it for “Starman” too). But the song “Survive” answers, very obliquely, is Nick Drake’s “One of These Things First.”

In Drake’s song, a young man sits and thumbs through possible lives: he’s like a boy watching soap bubbles floating in the air. “Could’ve been a sailor, could’ve been a cook.” He could have been reliable, steady; he chose not to be. He’s callous in how much he could hurt the person he’s speaking to. Could’ve been a real live lover, not the half-one that you got. “Could have been your friend,” he sings, attaching as much weight to that word as to his musings about being clocks and books. “A whole long lifetime/could have been the end.” Committing to someone would mean the end of his freedom, closing off all the other avenues that snake out beyond him. Drake wants to remain in the conditional perfect, in a happy state of possibility. He sings with graceful lightness, supported by Paul Harris’ piano, itself eager to break off into yet another line of thought, while Ed Carter’s bass is a squirrelly movement underground.

“Survive” turns up that singer again, finds him at the ebb of his life. No more mornings left for him. But he’s still committed to the what-could-have been, still bluntly denying reality, still wanting his space. “I should’ve kept you,” he mumbles. “I should’ve tried.” The verses seem to run out of breath, slouching into dull rhymes (“I should’ve been a wiser kind of guy“) and weary expiration phrases: “Iiii love you.” The choruses, feinting at a move to A major but winding up stuck back in the verse’s D major, struggle to voice the man’s few hopes. A descending bassline tugs him down to earth.

(Gabrels, who’d written much of the song’s music for his solo album, gets the best part in the play: the lead guitar, representing the noblest piece of the man who’s singing. Gabrels is the only bright color in the song: the little dancing phrase after “I miss you,” the counter-melody in the second chorus, the eight-bar solo that’s like a puff of hope uncorked from a bottle, the descending arpeggios that shadow the man’s growing ambivalence.)

He sees a woman across the floor somewhere, maybe at some class reunion. They could’ve been something once: they both know it, they both may not regret it. You’re the mistake I never made, he sings. She sees through him, as an old fraud, as someone who never settled for life in the hopes of finding something better. And he knows how she sees him, and that she’s right. But I’ll survive your naked eyes, as the song ends. There’s nothing but delusion, never was anything else but it (the song itself is a loop: opening and ending on the same Dadd9 chord, the two choruses bracketed by the two verses)⁴. The song ends with an older man’s sad defiance, which loses strength each time he says it, until he gives up and lets the song expire in his place.

Recorded April-early May 1999, Seaview Studio, Bermuda, with overdubs at Looking Glass Studios and Chung King Studios, NYC. It was the first release from ‘Hours,’ issued on a promo giveaway with the 8-14 September 1999 issue of Les Inrockuptibles. Subsequently on ‘Hours’ and as a 2-CD single (Virgin 7243 8 96486 0 7, 7243 8 96487 0 6) released on 17 January 2000, which included Marius de Vries’ mix, the Walter Stern-directed video clip and a live performance of the song from the Elysée Montmartre, 14 October 1999. Performed on a host of TV and radio shows and played live in 1999, 2000 and 2002.

¹: Eno told Mojo in May 1997 that he moved to Russia because “since London is now the hippest city in the world, I thought I’d get out for a bit…If you live in England and you finally scale the thorny path to celebrity, finally the critics decide, ‘Fuck me, he’s been around so long I guess we should leave him alone.’ You then find you get invited to do every stupid, pathetic thing going—you know, judge this competition, award this, and so on—and I just saw my life turning into a series of small events. I thought I’d go somewhere else where there aren’t any small events.”

²: Yeah, the official title of the album is ‘hours…’ I’ll refer to it simply as ‘Hours’ in all further references because the lower-case affectation irritates me and having to put in three ellipses every bloody time I mention the album would be a bother.

³: That said, the most obvious candidate for a Contamination leftover, the instrumental “Brilliant Adventure,” is confirmed by Bowie to have been written in Bermuda and was intended as part of the Omikron soundtrack.

⁴: Both verse and chorus open shuttling between tonic and flatted VII chords (so D to C in the verse, A to G in the chorus), darken midway through with a run of minor chords and each closes by setting up the opposing key (so the verse ends with a G that the A major opening of the chorus resolves; the chorus just sinks back to D).

Top: Thierry Gregorius, “Anloo wheat field, Holland, 1999”; Bowie receiving honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music, May 1999; ‘Hours’ cover photos (Tim Bret Day); still from “Survive” video (Walter Stern); “Survive” CD sleeve.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2603.09 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3903 days ago & DAD = 557 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4038 - DIE: LOADED - REVIEWS - Comic Book Sunday 2603.08

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4038 - DIE: LOADED - REVIEWS - Comic Book Sunday 2603.08

Die is back!

I am so thrilled.

The issues have jumped up my reading stack each month because this is GOOD STUFF.

Though I am reading Gillen's Power Fantasy in trades, I had to get DIE: LOADED in the individual single issues.

I have written about DIE many times. Here's three of the most relevant posts.

Friday, December 21, 2018

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1400 - DIE - a comic book review

Sunday, February 24, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1466 - Reviewing Die#2 - a comic about D & D

Sunday, September 20, 2020

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2042 - More Dying for DIE - games, scripts, and lots of Kieron Gillen

I love Die so much that I bought the individual issues of the first series, then the trade paperbacks, and then the hardcover omnibus.

I am on a book buying freeze right now, but I am barely holding myself back from buying the DIE: RPG, which I want very badly, even though I have no one to play it with.

Four issues are out so far, though I do not have the fourth one yet.

I am just going to focus on the first issue for now.

NOTE: I have had a problem with the COMIC BOOK ROUND UP links not working for years, and I think it is because the site often changes its URLs. These are current now. They may still have to be copied and pasted.

https://comicbookroundup.com/comic-books/reviews/image-comics/die-(2018)

https://comicbookroundup.com/comic-books/reviews/image-comics/die-(2018)/loaded-1

One of the most exciting things about DIE is that Gillen made it into a game, the DIE RPG hardcover I mentioned earlier.

DIE: LOADED #001 earned a 9.6/10 rating from critics and weirdly a 7.5/10 rating from readers. I have never put much stock in the comic book fan reading public at large and only trust those I trust and respect. But even for reactionary, opinionated, weird comic book fans, 7.5/10 is low.

The lowest score from the critics was a 9/10 and in just one of the seven reviews. There were two 10/10, one of which I am reprinting below.

From the introduction of the original series, I loved the idea of this book. Re-imagining the D&D character classes and situations of fantasy RPGs was a brilliant idea. Whisking away players from our world into that fantasy world was a borrowed trope from the 1980s Dungeons and Dragons TV cartoon, but one that Gillen and Hans adapted brilliantly.

But we knew at the end of the first series that a great deal of the world of DIE had not been explored and that it still existed. The characters were tied to it, and so more story seemed inevitable. Plus, Gillen indicated this intention in his newsletters.

For me, enjoyment of stories, especially episodic stories, has to do with investment in the characters. I am sure many others readers share this reason for reading. Once invested, I am usually loyal to a story even if there are flaws or aspects I do not like. With Gillen, I rarely feel there are flaws, though there are sometimes things of which I am not over fond. But despite those personal tastes, I am invested in the characters, and so I am ALL IN to borrow DC's current tag line.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!

If you are possibly going to read this series, and don't want spoilers, stop now.

And so, with great delight, I open the new issue of DIE:LOADED #001 to see Ash, the narrator, at home in Stafford, on earth in his baby's room.

One aspect of Gillen's work that I love is the natural and careful recap or basic information for new readers. Sure, new readers could jump in here, but they would be better served with reading the twenty issues of the previous run before embarking here. Names are dropped to know the players involved as we did not have much exposure to Ash's wife Sophia in the original issues, and she makes her appearance on page two since she's the new narrator and the main character of this issue once she leaves Ash behind for the world of DIE. There's the standard mini re-cap before the story actually begins, but there's no "formerly in DIE" story-specific recap. It's difficult to say that this issue is really meant for new readers. As a skilled writer, Gillen writes a clear story that new readers could follow but much of the back story is only hinted at or alluded to in cryptic remarks.

For readers of the original story, there are many aspects of this continuation that will fascinate and enthrall.

The biggest of these differences are the characters themselves. The original six are not returning. We will follow the adventures of six new characters. In the original first issue, all six characters gathered together to play Sol's game, and we were introduced to them. They were all gamers or at least people recruited to play the game, like Isabelle who was there because she was dating Sol or Angela, Ash's sister, who begged to come along and Ash relented, much to his deep regret later. This time, at least so far, the characters are not gamers and were not playing the game although we do not know who all six are yet. I have read three issues as I write this review, so I do have some advance knowledge but really of only one additional character, Sol's mom, Margaret. Sophia will meet the other adventurer, Angela's daughter Molly, at the end of this issue. Beyond that, we don't know who the other three characters will be or if they are featured in this first issue before the journey to DIE as are Sophia, Molly, and Margaret. However, it the pattern persists each new character will have a connection to one of the former characters as Sophia is Ash's wife, Molly is Angela's daughter, and Margaret is Sol's mom, which means the possibly Chuck's son, shown playing a Nintendo Switch, might show up though making him the fool would be rather predictable. An alternative might be Chuck's wife, Fiona, who is shown giving a toast or even his older daughter Violet, whom Ash said he knew best. Also, We see Matt's father and new wife, whom Ash and Sophia do not meet, which may be foreshadowing, but they are both older even than Margaret. As for Izzy, she shows up in the story (more on that in a minute), but we know very little about her and so very little of whom she's close to.

And so, a complete change of the core of the book with new characters and so far non-gamers, which is inventive and opens many possibilities.

Another great thing about Gillen's writing is how he sets a theme and works that theme through the comic or even an entire story arc. Here the theme is playing roles, which is what people do in ROLE-playing games, obv. Gillen drops the theme on page two (seen below): "everything is a role for me. Right now, I play it and play it as well as I can," Ash narrates. He also alludes to his "gender bullshit" as in DIE he is Lady Ash, female and heterosexual (interested in men) and on earth he's male, actually Dominic Ash, and married to Sophia and a father to their child, born when he was last in DIE, letting us know that this story takes place shortly after his return as his baby is still a baby. The "gender bullshit" is unresolved as Ash explains that he and Sophia discussed it and in response to her question of "what do you want to do?" Ash said, "Oh, I wish I fucking knew." This is great character development. It fits well with what we know of Ash, and it leaves open the question of further resolution of this "gender bullshit."

Gillen loops us back to the "role" theme in the very last panel when new narrator Sophia tells us "I have to the responsible one. That's a role I can play."

But how do we get there?

The story opens on Ash and Sophia saying goodbye to their babysitter for their first outing since Covid began to attend Chuck's Memorial Service. This event allows Gillen to recap a little as Chuck's corpse shows up on earth six months before the rest of the characters return, which strengthened their kidnapping story. Actually, kidnapped again, as the DIE comic is about their return to the world of DIE twenty-five years later. Ash's history recap merges into a look around the service and identifying members of Chuck's family. Along the way, a great deal of commentary from Ash, which both makes him a great narrator and Gillen a great writer, such as "I was scared to have kids. I left it until was nearly too late. How could he (Chuck) leave so many behind?"

In the wake after the service, Ash connects with Matt, and we see his Dad and wife, Megan, though no one meets Megan, which may be a hint. Though Matt also has two kids, which he talks about. Then Molly is introduced as she makes a scene: "WHY IS EVERYONE BEING SO FUCKING NICE ABOUT THIS ASSHOLE?" This moment also allows Gillen to remind invested readers and inform new ones that Molly was seen dead in DIE when Ash and the others were last there. And then, Ash and Sol have a chat as Sol's Mom departs, though not before Ash comments that she was always "Sol's mum" not "Margaret": roles.

And so, Sol tells Ash that he is going to publish "the game," which is what the world of DIE wants him to do to lure people there, and Ash loses it: "do you think that changes anything you selfish cunt?!?" I am not sure if I have ever read the use of "cunt" in a comic before. I am sure it's not the first time, but I cannot think of another. Sophia pulls Ash away, and they leave but not before taking their gifts from Chuck's estate. Ash opens his when he gets home -- a miniature for gaming that looks significant but I can't place it -- and Ash laughs, breaking the tension of the previous scene, just before Sophia, in the other room, announces that hers is "one of those nerd dice." And she's gone, and Ash is too late to save her.

And now the narrator switches to Sophia, in the world of DIE, the Realm of One.

And there's a voice helping her, someone from the original six, and it makes sense for it to be Izzy though that's not revealed until next issue.

Quickly, Sophia realizes that she is where Ash and the others went, the big mystery that they could never talk about, quite literally during the twenty-five years between the first and second visits due to a binding spell, a geas. We soon discover that Sophia will be just as engaging a narrator as Ash. She processes what's happening, remembers giving birth to Stuart and makes a comparison to her current situation, which is timely as the Fallen who threaten her say "Life, you have life inside, take it, cut it out." Now, this comment may only be because she's ALIVE, but it may also allude to the fact that she is pregnant and doesn't know.

The voice guides Sophia to get the die that brought her here and to pick her deity as the Godbinder of this game, which is the biggest clue of all that the voice is Izzy. And so she picks the Bear and a fox as her "totem," her "animal aspect" explained next issue in back matter for playing this deity in the DIE RPG. The fox connects to her past in a memory that is shared as she considers. She's transformed in a way that leads us to believe that these people will be enhanced to better face the dangers of DIE.

The Bear informs Sophia that to leave DIE they have to bring the "pack" together and say "the game is over" and mean it. He offers to do that for her, bring them, but "the debt will be significant." Sophia is smart enough to decline that offer. And then something with magpies, which I assume we will learn later.

And then Molly, who is a Rage Knight shows up, kills the foes. Sophia (Sophie) pledges to get them home.

That's a great first issue and brilliantly rendered with two narrators and the signature stunning art of Stephanie Hans and letters by Clayton Cowles.

And yes, as a reviewer I am always more focused on writing and story because that's my wheelhouse. I love the art, but I feel less qualified to comment on it beyond praise.

What's disappointing is the comments of readers, like "it would be a great TV show" or "I like that part, a lot like a video game." Sigh. Looks like the user reviews on ROUND UP were tanked by a single 1/10 rating by some moron. I hope to counteract that with my own.

In summary, the original DIE series subverted expectations with in-depth characterization, novel plot twists while deconstructing role-playing games. This new series looks to continue that trend with a new narrator and a new cast of characters and greater mystery as the end goal is unknown this time compared to last. Gillen's writing is sharper than ever and he thematically unifies the issue around the idea of "roles" outside of games as well as within them. Hans' art is a revelation, even more mature and moody than the first time around. Unequivocal, 10/10 and eager for more! Bring it on.

One of the 10/10 reviews below.

Thanks for tuning in.

https://comic-watch.com/comic-book-reviews/die-loaded-1-dad-of-boy

Review

When DIE, the comic series following a group people trapped Jumanji-style in a TTRPG fantasy world, came to an end in 2021, it seemed final. Both DIE’s players and its readers alike were returned to the real world. So when the 2022 hardcover omnibus loudly pronounced “Book One” on its spine, I approached those words with the trepidation of a spooked horse and the fevered hope of a conspiracy theorist. Now, two-and-a-half years later, I’m here to shout from my nearest available rooftop: “DIE BOOK TWO IS HERE! IT’S REAL! IT’S VERY, VERY GOOD!”

When creating a sequel, a great number of things can go sideways. A story might get too bogged down in summarizing past events or alienate its original audience in an effort to grow its audience. Alternately, it might alienate prospective readers and even old readers by expositing too little. The first issue of DIE: Loaded (a play on The Matrix: Reloaded and the concept of loaded dice) treads this tightrope in style.  Picking up a year after the previous series, DIE: Loaded #1 sees its characters reuniting at a memorial service for Chuck, the player who died inside the game world of Die. It is as much a reunion for the reader as it is for the characters, letting us know what some of DIE’s protagonists have been up to since we left them in 2020.  DIE’s main protagonist, Ash, returns to find their wife Sophie has given birth. Ash’s desire to explore their gender identity quickly takes a backseat as they find themself playing a new, strongly gendered role: “Daddy.” Meanwhile, Ash’s sister Angela is haunted by the future-knowledge that her nonbinary child Molly will enter the world of Die and die there.

DIE has always been about escapism, mortality, and the simple truth that sometimes escapism leads to missing out on the important parts of life worth being present for. DIE’s creators — writer Kieron Gillen, artist Stéphanie Hans, and letterer Clayton Cowles — are now setting out to explore how these themes relate to parenthood. The 2010s saw a surge of video games that put players in the role of dads protecting children against dangerous landscapes. In some cases, these dads were new to the scene, like The Last of Us’ Joel, who must protect a teenage girl named Ellie years after the loss of his own daughter. Other times, these characters were decades old,  like Kratos from the God of War series, given a son named Atreus in the eponymous 2022 game often jokingly referred to as Dad of Boy. While on the surface it may seem strange that suddenly all of gaming’s protagonists were becoming dads and adoptive dads, the reason for it was quite simple: game developers were growing up and having kids of their own. Frequent and perhaps infrequent readers of Gillen’s newsletter will likely be aware that this is a recent reality shift for DIE’s writer, too. 

And parenthood can be plenty terrifying even when Norse gods (God of War), fungal parasitic zombie plagues (The Last of Us), or deadly fantasy TTRPGs aren’t involved. “No one had warned me that with a child comes death,” writes Claudia Dey in her 2018 Paris Review essay “Mothers as Makers of Death”: “Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too.” Therein lies the horror of DIE: Loaded.

One may argue that more broadly it’s a story about the horrors of creating something—a child, a game—and putting it into the world. In the interim between DIE and DIE: Loaded, Gillen and Hans published DIE: The TTRPG (or DIE: the very pretty art book if you’re unable to play it). In a plot beat so meta it’s headache-inducing, Sol — Ash’s friend who was trapped in Die for twenty years — has excitedly told Ash about his plans to publish DIE: The TTRPG. The comic’s mid-arc twist and escalation, meanwhile, are quite surprising — albeit more surprising if you didn’t read last week’s Polygon exclusive first. 

Hans continues to be a master of her craft as the book progresses from the sickening greens, sterile blues, and warm orange light of the real world and leaves them behind for the vivid and dizzying world of Die. Hans’ characters are always intimately expressive and character designs within the fantasy world are striking. Several years ago, director Guillermo Del Toro coined the term “eye protein” as a contrasting term to “eye candy”: where eye candy only offers something pretty to look at, eye protein also leaves you with something to chew on. Hans’ work is eye protein. Every time I go back through the pages of DIE: Loaded #1—or older issues of DIE, We Called Them Giants, Journey Into Mystery #645 for that matter—I find myself appreciating some detail of her work I’d previously missed. 

At this point, you may be thinking I’ve left you with absolutely nothing new to discover or ponder for yourself. In truth, I feel I’ve only scratched the surface. Reading DIE: Loaded #1, it’s hard not to be struck by the density of its storytelling when compared to comics of the same length—often at a higher price point. It’s like realising Casablanca, widely considered one of the best films of all time, is only two minutes longer than The Room, widely considered one of the worst. I can confidently say that DIE: Loaded #1 is firmly on the Casablanca end of the spectrum.

Final Thoughts

DIE: Loaded #1 is a contemplative and dazzling meditation on parenthood, creation, and mortality from one of comics’ dream teams.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2603.08 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3902 days ago & DAD = 556 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.