JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Here is one of M.C. Escher’s symmetry drawings. Look at the white spaces and you see angels. Look at the dark spaces and you see devils.

It’s like humans. ‘Normal’ people turn into monsters. The person you least expect to do something courageous becomes a hero. How does this happen? The American psychologist Philip Zimbardo proposes an explanation in his TED talk from 2008.

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Arthur Rackham illustration of The Goose Girl.

Good people suffer. Bad people reign. Terrible things happen. There is ugliness in the world. Life is scary and it ends in death. The fairytales that really stay with you understand these things, and you believe them no matter how prettily Disney lies. When people say “That’s a fairytale” to refer to a story with an improbably happy ending, they must mean the Disney versions or Hollywood flicks. The best fairy tales are full of cruelty and terror, so when you hear in the end that “They lived happily ever after” you know they have paid dearly for their happiness (and you ignore that foreboding. . .).

Cornelia Funke, the author of Inkheart and Reckless, discusses her top 10 fairytales in the Guardian. The article contains links to the stories themselves. I still remember how disturbing The Goose Girl and The Six Swans were the first time I read them; what is it about girls, curses and birds?

I’ve been wearing eyeglasses since I was eight (Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. Ooh, soundtrack!).

The Smiths – Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

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If you prefer it with horns:

Mark Ronson – Stop me (feat. Daniel Merriweather)

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Read my column in interaksyon.com.

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I took the eyeglass frames I bought in Seoul to Nella Sarabia’s optical shop in UP to have my prescription lenses made.

This is the big matte version of Woody Allen’s glasses.
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Yesterday I had a photo shoot for the Philippine Star. Jay Lozada did my hair and make-up; it took 3 hours. The shoot at Blow-Up Babies took three hours—half an hour posing, two and a half shooting the breeze with Quark, Erwin and Adel. When I got home I was going to take the face off but decided not to let my tedium go to waste. My plan was to interview my cats but they weren’t cooperating. However Saffy was meowing loudly all over the house so I decided to read a Lydia Davis story involving a cat.

In my comparative literature classes with Professor Pachot Fernandez at UP I was the designated reader because I have a flat, expressionless voice.

“Absentminded” is in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

If you send me a video of yourself reading a favorite story, I’ll post it.

The selection process for the winner of LitWit Challenge 6.2: Recharging Your Brain was a no-brainer. The winner is angus25. Congratulations, angus25, please post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published. We don’t keep files on your true identities and contact information.) and we’ll let you know when your prize has been delivered to National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

Our Weekly LitWit Challenge needs a little kick in the crotch to get restarted, and nothing delivers that kick more effectively than sordid self-exposure. Yours. Previous challenges have shown us that there’s nothing like spilling your guts. You release bottled-up emotions, we get to watch, and we all feel better afterwards.

So we’re revisiting one of the all-time favorites: Letter to your ex.

Your assignment, which you will choose to accept because it’s so juicy, is this. Write a letter to your ex (or if you never got together officially, the object of your affections) telling them all the things you were dying to say but never got around to verbalizing. Observe the 1,000-word maximum, please, anything more than that is self-indulgence. Post your letters in Comments. The deadline for your entries is 11.59pm on Saturday, 9 July 2011.

The prize for LitWit Challenge 6.3: Letter to your ex, part 2 is this gleaming new hardcover copy of the bestselling Swedish crime thriller.

Don’t bottle up your emotions so they can turn into neuroses; post them here so we all have something sensational to read!

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Director Michael Bay with Autobot Bumblebee.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is purportedly a tale of good robots vs bad robots. But what is it REALLY about?

A. American industry, downtrodden, decimated and reeling from a recession caused by the greed and treason of its economic managers (One of the human villains is the head of a giant accounting firm), rises from the rubble just when everyone thinks it’s dead to save the world from alien oppressors.

B. Hollywood and the cineplex, having embraced 3D as a defense against downloading movies (and as a stratagem for raising ticket prices), attempts to redeem the 3D format after a series of pointless exercises (Movies like Thor and Green Lantern look the same no matter how many dimensions you pay for) by giving the audience something that will blow their eyes out the backs of their heads.

C. Like the rest of Michael Bay’s. . .oeuvre, it’s about Size. Transformers, Armaggedon, Pearl Harbor, it’s all the same banana. Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (According to reports it was originally ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ but Pink Floyd wrote them a letter) is indubitably the biggest of the lot, not just in terms of budget and special effects but for sheer hubris. It rewrites history, turning the Apollo space program into a mere subplot of the Transformers saga.

James Cameron, reigning king of the action world, invented a future history (the takeover by machines in Terminator 1 and 2) and an entire planet (Avatar) that he could play in; when he futzed with the past (like in Titanic) he stuck to the basic facts. Michael Bay recognizes no such restrictions. We bring up Cameron because we see Transformers 3 as a very large metal gauntlet thrown right in his face by the pretender Bay. Yes, T3:DOTM is Bay saying, “James Cameron, mine is bigger than yours.”