Reading: J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Moving: ...

Listening: CNN and NPR

Watching: CNN

17 November 2000: Nasty, brutish, and short*

(Now there's a motto for you.) (Or it could describe my taste in shoes.)

I have got to stop wearing heels. If I'm not hip enough for Doc Martens, I have to find another sort of Oxford. I think I bought these pumps because I so very seldom even like shoes that I was desperate. This morning my knees hurt and I dreaded heels, because as comfortable as I, to my surprise, have found them, heels're still bad for my knees. So I unearthed my boots, the flat-soled, black leather, knee-length, no-zip, no stupid center seam, boots my sister gave me for Christmas nine years ago, and I'm wearing them. I had forgotten quite how big the hole between the right upper and sole is, but as long as the ground's not wet, I don't care. They're comfortable with my long black skirt and I'm all happy. My toes are happy. Some of the comfort I allegedly felt in my pumps was from having become accustomed to them, and another part of it was because they weren't as bad as they could be. I'm getting new boots.

---

Draco Dormiens Nunquam Tilillanus. This is allegedly the motto of Hogwarts as found on t-shirts and mugs and such sold in the Warner Bros. store. Translated as loosely as it's written, "Never tickle a sleeping dragon." Its syntax seems pretty sloppy, but I hardly know what I'm talking about there. I don't mind Rowling making up a fake Latin motto. What I mind is that this motto isn't Rowling's. Neither Jessie, Melissa, Dora, nor I remember it from the books. The motto appears on a Hogwarts crest. I don't mind anyone who isn't Rowling inventing a school crest for Hogwarts, but to invent a motto is too much like fan-fic, or worse, like making Calvin pee on a Chevy logo or Hobbes's post-dryer wobbliness being silk-screened on a t-shirt and called drunkenness.

Bill Watterson would never license because he didn't believe in it. A whole bunch of fake Hobbes would settle forever the question of Hobbes's Reality, and he didn't want that. Licensing would cheapen his work and his characters. I don't mind the violation of copyright, of t-shirts imprinted with their stolen images in sunglasses dancing to classical music at 78 rpm at three in the morning. I don't mind Calvin or Hobbes appearing in Deadheads' artwork as they assimilate aspects of their culture, with Calvin appearing in a Seussian landscape populated with Bears' Choice, Snoopy, Opus, and the Lorax, over the caption "What a long strange trip it's been." Apologies to Watterson because I know why it bothers him and I respect his reasons, but that's fine with me: though violates Watterson's copyright it doesn't violate the characters' integrity. What I despise is Calvin and Hobbes reeling, as Watterson drew them, over the caption "Friends don't let Friends Beergoggle." Or Calvin in blackface making racist comments about Reagan-Anne in a surreal Breathed landscape. Those two I saw in college. And Calvin pissing on a Ford trunk, as depicted on a bumpersticker on a Chevy truck, and vice versa, which I continue to see. And Calvin, Charlie Brown, and Bill the Cat staggering wastedly over the caption "I get home with a little from my friends," which I saw on campus and at Dead shows. Calvin is six. Watterson's character didn't get sloppy drunk, didn't lust after anyone, and wasn't racist. To portray him as such violates the character, and that's what bothers me.

So to draw something Hogwarts-ish doesn't bother me, because who knows what the school crest might look like? But to put a motto on it is to put words in Rowling's mouth, or worse, in Dumbledore's or in those of the founders of Hogwarts.

* Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan

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