Nathan Bick

Legend of Korra is a successor to the very famous and well-regarded Avatar: The Last Airbender . Both are animated TV series from Nickelodeon meant to evoke the style of Japanese anime but made by and for Americans. Primarily geared towards young adults and children, the series nonetheless have garnered fans from more mature audiences, which is not so unusual for the “Hollywood” children’s shows since these are apparently designed with the parental viewer in mind as well. I watched Avatar as a child back when it was released in the 2000s, but just watched this successor with Nicole in the early 2020s, about ten years after its release.  As a refresher - Avatar takes place in a fictional Asian-inspired, mildly-steampunk world divided in four nations, each associated with one of the elements of fire, water, earth, and air. The nations each produce a fraction of people with a magical or mystical ability to “bend” their associated element, allowing a telekinetic ability to manipulate ...

  In the middle of 2022, I was listening to Douglas Murray on Lex Fridman podcast when I heard something that was astonishing - Murray quoted an unnamed “Persian friend” who proclaimed that there were only two truly great novels of the 20th century - Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa ( link ). This was humbling. I thought I knew something about literature, had read or was familiar with the great works and writers. I had of course closely read Vasily Grossman and wrote about it. But here was a work and a writer, ostensibly “obviously” among the greatest of the last hundred years, which I had not heard anything about? I was floored; I paused the video and researched. This was a sobering reminder to not be too high in one’s own self-estimation, and also a surprising joy. Putting aside any evaluation of Murray’s politics and ideology (which would be a long essay), he’s clearly respectable for his literary experience and perspective, and he...

  For a time a few years ago, around 2018 or 2019, my family (including the “MV Bicks”) conducted a monthly book club. We took turns each selecting the book, which I recall was the source of a little pressure - my family is well read and intellectual, so there was a pressure to make a good selection, something impressive or respectable which nonetheless was suitably representative of our interests and tastes. For example, I chose Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman. This novel by Olga Tokurczuk was among those selected but I can’t recall by whom. It was after her selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature, since I know my mother bought several copies at Politics and Prose, including the copy I just read - they all advertise the author’s prize on the cover. I shirked at that time and didn’t read the book, so this year I picked it up again on a whim, more or less. I had little knowledge or context about it and didn’t know what to expect. I was hopeful that reading this novel by an a...

  I read The Red Tent as a means to study the writing of female characters in novels. It’s a bit of cliche, but one nonetheless true, that many or most of the “great novels” of the canon are written by men and do not focus or execute well on the female characters of their stories, many of whom are limited to instrumental roles or are otherwise incidental to the plot. For example, there is the famous “Bechdel test” that assigns a simple True or False to a story depending on if in the plot there is at least one conversation between two women in which they do not discuss one of the men in the story. If the plot fails this test, it is seen as a non-feminist story with women as instruments or objects rather than genuine subjects. I am not sure if I was able to get past this in the story that I wrote this past summer, so I decided to study further in hopes of improving.  I decided to start at the beginning, so to speak. The thinking of Joseph Campbell on the wisdom embedded in an...

  I first read The Glass Bead Game in my high school years, I believe the sophomore or junior year. This would be 2011-2012, a full decade ago, as of this writing. At that time, I was infatuated with the ideal of abstract intellectualism, scholarship, and academics. I identified with that world, aspired to join it, and drew a kind of arrogance and confidence from the prospect of one day being within it. I looked down on other things and the people that preferred those other things. The copy of the book that I had was under the alternate title Magister Ludi . This exotic, latinate name lended it a mystique, an aura of hidden wisdom, and that played into my aspiration to access such wisdom which other people were either too stupid to reach for or to understand.  The work’s high respect given to academics is matched by that paid to music, another of my high school era interests. Clear to see why I loved this book - it apparently elevated exactly the kinds of things that I liked,...