a message to JMS

[B5JMS Poster]

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From: "Melissa Shogren" <bobsh at halcyon.com>
Date: 10 May 1998 14:38:19 -0600
Lines: 16

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I'm thirteen years old and watch your show. I like how it combines good
battle scenes with a good story. Too many science fiction movies have good
special effects and no story. People think of science fiction as big space
battles and laser shoot outs. The science fiction movies without the
elements I mentioned above are given bad reviews and have little box office
success, including Blade Runner and Alien.
Anyway, I home school and my mom wanted me to write this. What she wanted
me to ask is why you like the poem Ulysses. Sinclair quoted it twice in the
show and I read it was a favorite of yours. I kinda like it myself.
	Oh yeah, I also wanted to ask if you like comics, and if you do, which
ones? You got the Gaim costume idea from the Sandman, Neil Gaiman wrote an
episode, and I heard you were going to make a Elfquest show. 

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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 11 May 1998 09:47:49 -0600
Lines: 33

>Anyway, I home school and my mom wanted me to write this. What she wanted
>me to ask is why you like the poem Ulysses. Sinclair quoted it twice in the
>show and I read it was a favorite of yours.

Poems -- any incarnation of the writen word, really -- speak to us at various
points in our lives, and at different ages we derive different things from
them, meanings and subtleties and subtexts that we did not perceive before, but
which become apparent as new layers are added to us.  It's not that the work is
different, it's that we change and are able to see more in it.

Ulysses was always a poem that spoke profoundly to me of new beginings and of
endings, and of the ways in which we can, and perhaps should, face them...the
stubborn nobility of the human spirit that does not surrender despite pain and
overwhelming odds and the infirmity of age.  It is, at its heart, a *brave*
poem, and it stirs me like little else.

>Oh yeah, I also wanted to ask if you like comics, and if you do, which
>ones?

I've kind of gotten out of the comics habit lately, mainly because I've been
busy, and for a while comics kind of went south, the writing was falling apart.
 Now there's some good stuff being done, the Uncle Sam miniseries from DC, I'm
also intrigued by what they're doing in the new approach to Superman (using
many of the classic allusions and structures), and the new (to me) Martha
Washington books from Gibbons and Miller, and the new Mage book from Matt
Wagner, who has always been one of my favorite writers.  I think things are
starting to look up again a bit for comics.

 jms

(jmsatb5 at aol.com)
B5 Official Fan Club at:
http://www.thestation.com
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