Back from my stay in beautiful North Berkeley! The visit really reminded me how much I like northern California, mostly for the things we lack here in San Diego – the trees, the bookstores, the milder temperatures, the cool little restaurants. If I could only afford to live there! If anyone in Napa County or environs would like to rent to a nice poet (and her husband and cat) for a year, please let me know…

I missed Comic Con, but I did see Hayao Miyazaki! We got to see an early screening of his latest movie, Ponyo by the Sea/Ponyo on a Cliff (whatever they’re calling it in English)and it’s a beautiful but strange film. It seems a more eccentric, more upbeat version of Hans Christian Anderson’s “A Little Mermaid” with an environmental twist. (He said in an interview he’s always hated the ending of the original tale, and I have to agree.) It had a lot more humor in it than most Miyazaki films; Tina Fey in the English dub plays the hilarious, feisty young mother who doesn’t really resemble any character Miyazaki’s done before. The drawing is purposefully childlike, different that the ethereal, elegant drawings in Howl’s Moving Castle. The two main characters are five years old, so a lot of the movie is geared towards a very young person’s aesthetic; the themes are similar to those in Princess Mononoke. I enjoyed watching it with children in the audience; their delighted laughter behind me reminded me that they were the real audience for this film.

Hayao Miyazaki, with a translator and in a conversation led by Roland Kelts (who wrote Japanamerica) gave a wonderful hour-and-a-half talk in which he discussed advice for young animators (“Draw what you see in life; then give a more experienced artist your drawing and ask for a tough critique”) and his frequent roles for strong women (“There are so many strong women now, I might have to start making films about little boys!”) as well as his views about apocalypse (generally, he’s pro-apocalypse)and how natural disasters can bring people together. He laughed a lot, expertly evaded questions like “which character in your films do you most resemble,” and was generally really fun to watch.

Berkeley itself is a beautiful campus and the weather was lovely and cool.

The Downtownster, an LA-area blog, also featured my poem, “Female Comic Book Superheroes,” on their blog today!