Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Life Goals

She played the part of the good daughter, dutifully listening to her father's colossal delusions of how the thing between him and financial success was a couple gnomes doing topiary and not, you know, the fact that he was a short-tempered, sullen asshole in a rusty truck with the business sense of a drunken troll and tried to tell herself that all she needed to do - all that had to happen for all this bullshit to stop - was for her to make it into a college somewhere and just fucking vanish from this miserable town forever, like everyone else she had ever liked.

 - Auston Habershaw, If Wishes Were Retail, p.31

Quote of the Week: Composing a Dispatch from Foreign Lands

Love, patriotism, zeal for justice and personal spite flamed within him as he sat at his typewriter and began his message. One finger was not enough; he used both hands. The keys rose together like bristles on a porcupine, jammed and were extricated; curious anagrams appeared on the paper before him; vulgar fractions and marks of punctuation mingled with the letters. Still he typed.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, p.190

If Wishes Were Retail by Auston Habershaw

Alexandra Delmore just needs a job for the summer. She's a rising senior, a little too outspoken and grumpy and countercultural for the suburban somewhere she lives in. (From internal evidence, deepest Pennsylvania, not too close to any city you've heard of.) She doesn't have any close friends or serious skills, and her family are all deeply annoying in their own ways.

So she's been striking out in all her interviews, partially because of that outspokenness and partially due to the lack of specific skills. But then Alex answers one weird ad, and finds herself interviewing with the Jinn, formerly of the Ring of Khorad, for a position as his assistant in a kiosk at the local mall.

Selling wishes, of course. As you do.

Alex needs a job, and this is a job, and she's getting a bit desperate. So, despite an initially fiery conversation with the Jinn - he's demanding, and has very particular ideas of how to do things that are not necessarily in tune with the modern world - she does get the job.

This is a humorous fantasy, so it gets more complicated from there, of course. The first chapter is that interview - it's a great way to introduce the characters of both Alex and the Jinn, and to show how both of them are hot-headed, pushy, and narrow-minded in their own ways. If Wishes Were Retail spins out from there, with Alex and the Jinn sitting in a dying mall, waiting for customers and granting wishes, as Alex's home life adds its own spice to the mixture.

The kiosk is dead at first, because the whole mall is dead. But Alex engineers a viral moment, which draws attention, which draws customers - and that makes them first quite successful, and very quickly causes troubles with the mall management.

Because the granting of wishes causes some interesting, unusual....unprecedented situations in a mall, which are not happy or pleasant for everyone. So the wishes go big, the wishes go small - the wishes even go BOGO for a while.

Oh, and did I mention the gnomes? There are also gnomes in this novel. We don't know why they're around, just like we don't know why or how the Jinn got free of his ring after so many centuries, but he's not the only supernatural entity around. Frankly, I would have liked a bit more worldbuilding from author Auston Habershaw, because it feels like there should be something in the background that meant jinn and gnomes - and, as some characters mutter, maybe other creatures - are now common when they didn't use to be. But this novel doesn't get into that: it posits that there are jinn, and that this one, for reasons of his own (which we mostly learn) has decided to sell wishes in the human world. It also posits that there are gnomes, who do a whole lot of labor for a whole lot of people under conditions that seem to be a cross between Gilded Era-exploitative and Harry Potter house-elf exploitative. That also starts to be rectified by the end of the novel, and Alex has a small part in that.

More centrally, Alex learns that her family is not quite as horrible as she thinks they are, and that getting out isn't as simple and obvious as she hoped. The Jinn learns more about how humans work, and possibly ways that he can use his power more usefully and helpfully. And, like so many humorous fantasies, we readers all learn a bit ourselves, and get a happy ending. It's a fun, zippy fantasy novel set in a recognizable modern world, with amusing dialogue and a couple of believably hard-headed and often-clashing main characters in Alex and the Jinn. Anyone looking for a solid humorous fantasy that doesn't require too much suspension of disbelief is in for a good time here.

The Treasure of the Black Swan by Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral

I thought this was pure fiction, some kind of adventure story. That's what I'd expected from Paco Roca's other work, and the vague Tintin-esque vibes this book gave off reinforced that.

But The Treasure of the Black Swan is mostly true, if slightly fictionalized - the story of the real Black Swan Project, and the court battle between a US undersea salvage company and the Spanish government, after the former plundered a shipwreck they pretended was somewhere else and from a British ship. It was also the basis of a TV series, LA Fortuna, which I didn't know before reading it.

Roca just drew this project, as far as I can tell. His collaborator, Guillermo Corral, is a career diplomat who was involved in the case, and Corral wrote this book - wrote in a version of himself as Alex Ventura, a very junior staffer at the Spanish Ministry of Culture who is our viewpoint and central figure.

I very vaguely remember seeing the coverage of this case from 2007 through 2015, though Corral has changed the names here. (And possibly some facts - there's a plot point about some attempted ratfuckery by the salvage company through the US Senate passing a new law that I think would completely fail on the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws.)

Anyway, the salvage company, here called Ithaca - the real-world equivalent is Odyssey - salvaged roughly half a billion dollars worth of gold and silver coins from a wreck. We see some of their actions, and think they're being at least a bit shady, flying it out quietly and quickly to Florida, and possibly trying to obscure exactly where in the ocean they were exploring. The Spanish government learns of the find, and sues for its return in US court.

The rest is the story of the court fight, with a US lawyer who has been battling Ithaca for decades brought on board - despite Ithaca trying to entangle his firm with a conflict of interest. Alex works with an expert whom he comes to have a romance with, and there's a lot of delving into records and trying to prove what ship or ships this find could potentially have come from. (I detected what seem to be a lot of shady discovery actions, or more accurately avoidance of actions, by Ithaca in this book, and I note that the real-world Odyssey had to pay a million-dollar penalty after the end of the litigation for what seems to be primarily that.)

Anyway, it's long and complicated, full of details and experts and motions back and forth in various US courts, but in the end, the good guys (the Spanish government) win, and the treasure is flown back to Spain and deposited in a museum. Oh, and Alex gets the "girl" - she's almost a decade older than he is, and more settled in her career.

Roca, as always, has a pleasant storytelling style, though it comes across more meat-and-potatoes here, where he has a lot of details (both the technicalities of litigation and just what all of these specialized salvage devices and ancient coins look like) to get onto his pages. This is a denser, more serious book than the Tintin hints might imply, and wouldn't be my first choice for an introduction to Roca's work - though it's great for anyone already interested in marine archaeology, salvage, or complicated court cases.

Bad Break, Vol. 1 by Philippe Riche

Sometimes names just slow down a crime story. You've got three main characters, you can see who they are, and you know what they're doing. So why do you need names?

That may have been creator Philippe Riche's point, or maybe the laconic style he uses in Bad Break, Vol. 1 - minimal dialogue most of the time, few captions except when showing someone narrating past events, only the minimum explanations required - just meant the names never quite made their way into the book.

Bad Break opens outside a junkyard, somewhere in France. A man removes his bandages, fixes his clothes, walks towards the owner and his helper. He's our main character, though he's the most mysterious: a tall, gaunt, bald man in what was probably once a very nice suit, a dealer in antiquities, mostly of the human-remains kind.

The beefy young assistant at the junkyard helps the dealer find a specific junked car, from a wreck just the day before. The driver was killed. Well, the dealer was the driver, and he's not dead now. But, as we go further in Bad Break, we realize he was killed in the crash. He's probably been killed a number of times, but it doesn't take. The dealer retrieves a briefcase of important material from the car, and asks the assistant to help him get back to the city.

The dealer is being pursued by a gang he calls "head choppers" - large tattooed men, possibly of a different nationality. They want to kill him; they try to kill him. The assistant uses the dealer's gun to kill one of them in a confrontation at the train station.

The third is a porn actress. We see her on a poster that says "Reb X" - maybe that's her name? She has a tattoo, a very specific tattoo. The dealer has been tracing the history of similar tattoos, through an old book. We're not sure why. We don't know how the "head choppers" figure into it. But the three set off together to find out the true history of the tattoos, chasing down an old man the dealer once knew.

This is only the first half of the story; they don't find the answers by the end of these pages. They only just barely get together. We as readers know the vague shape of the mystery, understand that there's something at least mildly supernatural - how else does the dealer keep coming back from death?

Riche draws this in a loose, deeply assured line, with rough panel borders and grey tones. He can draw a lot of specifics: that's clear from the opening in the junkyard, with pieces of cars that experts could easily identify. But his focus is on these people, and their mysterious quest. It's not over yet: there's one more book to come. But this first half of the story is interesting, quirky, compelling, satisfying.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

If you can divide anything into two groups, then humorous novels can be split into the sweet and the tart. Sweet is more popular, I think - Wodehouse is the great British exemplar, the most relevant for today's discussion. But also think Three Men in a Boat or The Importance of Being Earnest: sweet humor is often silly (Douglas Adams is another example from a later generation), and the stakes in the book might be important, but they're rarely dangerous.

Tart humor can edge into the sour - and here I might start mentioning Evelyn Waugh - with an undertone of disgust and unhappiness with humanity in general. If sweet humor thinks people are generally amusing and is fond of them, tart humor thinks people are inherently flawed, broken things, and all you can do is laugh at the awful things they do. On my side of the Atlantic, the great tart humorous novel of the last century is Catch-22; a lot of Kurt Vonnegut falls into that category as well.

Waugh is one of the masters of the tart humorous novel, and Scoop is one of his best books. It was published in 1937, loosely based on a trip he took two years before to Ethiopia as a correspondent for the Daily Mail to cover an expected war there. It follows one of the traditional humorous novel plots: a naïf is tossed into a situation he doesn't expect or understand, where he is too innocent to see the true picture, and where he blunders through mostly due to that innocence.

You see, the novelist John Boot asks a friend, the wife of a cabinet minister - I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume he's also having an affair with her; if so, he's only one of perhaps dozens - to help get him out of the country quickly and on a newspaper's dime, to avoid a woman he has become entangled with. She pushes the appropriate levers, but the Beast newspaper's functionaries and proprietor (Lord Copper) instead send one William Boot, who writes a twee weekly here's-some-random-rural-color feature for the Beast from his ancestral manse somewhere in the green and pleasant heartlands.

William Boot is not a foreign correspondent, and not really a reporter of any kind. But he's outfitted at vast expense and to a massive extent, and packed off to Ishmaelia, where everyone who's anyone is sure a civil war is brewing. There is no sign of a civil war in Ishmaelia, where the Jackson family - originally imported from America a few generations ago, and having proliferated to the point where one of them runs nearly every major commercial operation or government agency, up to the Presidency - are firmly in control, and vaguely popular with the people.

But of course the joke is that journalists create wars by reporting on them, and that's more or less what happens in Ishmaelia. The Fascists and Communists - or one could say the Germans and Russians, if you want to be more geopolitical and less ideological - are maneuvering, we at first think to get Ishmaelia into their spheres of influence. (We later learn that they, and various capitalists, are much more interested in Ishmaelia's mineral wealth, which is the real source of all the conflict - money, and potentially a lot of it.)

Boot - William, who we follow for the majority of the novel - is thrown into Ishmaelia and into the society of reporters, most of whom are friendly but competitive. He falls in love with a young woman whose husband - they are possibly not quite legitimately married, and he may have run off on her - is conveniently away. He wanders through his life there, not filing any dispatches for long stretches of time because nothing is actually happening. (Of course, Waugh's point is that reporters' job is to make up things, because nothing is really happening.) This makes his masters back in London unhappy, but it's the mid-30s, so communication is by cable - a few words at huge expense - and transportation takes months, so they send oddly-worded threats demanding more and better news from him, which he often misses seeing in the first place.

Boot ends up reporting actual major news, when there actually is something like a coup in Ishmaelia, and does the reflexive right thing - as defined by Waugh - because he's that kind of decent upstanding rural British upper-class chappie, and eventually gets to go back to England, returning home to his decaying manse and collection of oddball relatives. It's more-or-less a happy ending; he doesn't get the girl, but she was someone else's wife to begin with.

Waugh tells this story in often very short scenes; he had the knack, so important in humor, of dropping into a scene, showing just exactly what he needed to, and then bouncing back out to something else. Humor relies on speed and contrast and insights and reversals and precision of language, all of which Waugh brings to bear brilliantly in Scoop. It is a tart novel, verging on a sour one, with a message that the world is essentially corrupt and horrible, but it gives us a deeply amusing, penetrating view of that world, distanced enough than the darts don't pain us.

Better Things: Pretty in Pink

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

It's not impossible that a re-recording would be better than the original - I can't think of any cases where a band re-did a song and made it better, but I might be forgetting something, and I will admit it's possible. But it's definitely not the way to bet: the first one is going to be the best one.

Case in point: the crunchy, jangly Pretty in Pink, the most famous song by the Psychedelic Furs, famously re-recorded not-quite-as-well for the movie named after it. Shame about that, really, but the original is still out there.

This is the iconic Furs song, and most of the time my favorite Furs song, but I have to give some love to the Furs' awesome, uncompromising first, self-titled record. In some other world, I might have picked India for this list.

(In some other, even quirkier world, I picked the entirely awesome Aeroplane (Dance Mix), which has been my favorite Furs song almost as often and almost as long as Pretty.)

But I'm here to talk about Pretty in Pink. It's a darker, sadder song than it sounds - darker than the remake, definitely. It's about a woman seen from outside, who's trying to be part of something, maybe to be loved, and is getting only disdain from the men she sleeps with. And it's not clear if she knows it, or cares.

That could be the positive spin, if you want: Caroline doesn't care that the men she sleeps with all

Talk of her notes and the
Flowers that they never sent

There's no sign in the song that this touches her. 

When I first heard this song, I took the title exclusively: these men are saying she's Pretty in Pink - i.e., she's attractive when she's naked, but only when she's naked. I'm not sure that's the only interpretation, but I still lean that way; the men's causal cruelty is central. This is a song of the male gaze, if you want to be reductive.

But, most of all, it's a loud, thoughtful, gnarly, crunchy song - one you can let wash over you or listen to closely, depending on your mood. Either way, she's still pretty in pink. And the men who walk through in their coats might disdain that, but it's not nothing.

She doesn't have anything
You want to steal
Well, nothing you can touch

Quote of the Week: To Say the Least

As for foreign food, it should suffice to say that foreigners have been eating it for years, and yet manage to survive in large numbers.

 - K.R.G. Browne, How to Be a Motorist, p.107

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen's Story by Stan Sakai

This one collects seven more issues of the early Usagi Yojimbo comic, plus a story from Critters, though the dates in the book are a little confusing. The book itself claims a first edition in September 1991, but says the stories included are copyright no earlier than 1992. Now, Stan Sakai is a fantastic creator, but I do think he's bound by linear time, so issues 32-38 of Usagi, which were published from February 1992 through March of 1993, could not be collected in late 1991. Given that it has a 1996 Sergio Aragones introduction, and the second edition is said to be December 1997...I'm wondering if that first edition is a typo or just a mistake inserted onto the copyright page so long ago everyone has forgotten about it.

This book is also the end of the initial Fantagraphics run of Usagi. A second edition started up - checks notes - what looks like the very same month from Mirage. That one only lasted sixteen issues, but then Dark Horse picked it up and ran for another twenty-plus years for over a hundred and fifty issues.

So I'll look to see if the beginning of the eighth volume seems to be more of an attempt to onboard new readers; this seventh volume, Gen's Story, is much like the books immediately preceding it. There's one long story that gives the book its title, this time featuring the return of the irascible rhino bounty hunter Gen, and featuring some historical backstory for him, alongside a cluster of shorter, relatively standalone stories.

We meet a female thief, Kitsune, who may be a love interest for Usagi, and then she returns in a later story. We've got a ghost story, in which Usagi is able to lay the spirit of a general he served under. We've got two shorter stories, one mostly humorous about young Usagi with his sensei and one where he's narrating an encounter with an evil witch-like character to Noriyuki, the young panda lord who has showed up in this series a few times. And there's "The Last Ino Story," in which Gen and Usagi find that blind swordspig and nurse him back to health, learning what's happened to him after their last meeting. (With about a hundred and eighty issues of later Usagi, I'm vaguely dubious anything of this era is "the last" anything, but it's possible he never shows up again.)

As always, Usagi is upstanding and righteous, closely following the code of bushido and not particularly suffering because of it - this is a lightly moralistic series for younger readers, so the character with the rigid moral framework will be correct in every situation and events will arrange themselves so that he succeeds in his endeavors. Gen in particular exists to show an alternative to Usagi - not quite villainous, but clearly Not Right, like a young man bandying a girl's name in a Wodehouse novel. The fact that this entire social setup was exploitative and corrupt, enabling a vicious caste of violence experts who were able to terrorize peasants basically at will...well, that's just the way of the samurai, isn't it?

How to Be a Motorist by Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne

Humor can often date oddly - what one generation thinks is screamingly funny can fall flat with their children. Or worse, the cultural references shift or disappear, so the kids or grandkids are left wondering what was supposed to be funny.

Heath Robinson was a British illustrator and cartoonist in the first half of the twentieth century, specializing in over-complicated contraptions and odd combinations of items to do everyday things. (My understanding is that he had a solid career before that, and fell into the overcomplication line during The Great War, but I could easily be wrong.) At one point, the comparison was that Robinson was to UK illustration what Rube Goldberg was to US illustration - though I think both of them are half-forgotten these days, another two generations on.

So Robinson did a lot of illustrations and drawings, for magazines, for newspapers, probably for other outlets. They piled up, and fell into categories at least some of the time. Someone, possibly Robinson himself, thought it would be a jolly good thing to gather up those drawings and put them into a form people could continue to buy, so they could make him some more money.

And so there was a series of at least four short humorous "How to" books, with Robinson illustrations surrounded by new text by K.R.G. Browne. One of them was 1939's How to Be a Motorist, and I found a copy of that cheap recently, and read the thing.

It's a time capsule, necessarily. It's about the automobiles of 1939, which are somewhat different from those of eighty-five years later, and about the roads and rules of 1939 Britain, which are also somewhat different from the roads and rules near me, and are probably pretty different even from contemporary Britain. Browne says repeatedly that cars are more dependable and less dependent on the specialized knowledge of their operators than they used to be, which is true as far as it goes, but it went a lot father after that.

This is a book that very clearly started as a stack of drawings, which was organized into a sequence by Robinson or Browne or both, and then Browne wrote words to connect them all into a generally coherent narrative. It's also got a slightly musty tone to it, with Browne repeatedly referring to "my friend Mr. Heath Robinson" as if we might have forgotten why we bought the book. (It's always "Mr. Heath Robinson," too - stiff upper lip and all that.)

I was happy to find that it was still amusing, and that the problems of 1939 motoring are not vastly different - at least in exaggerated parody form - from those of today. Browne is working in a slightly stiffer mode than I'd prefer, but he was a British guy born in 1895, so one has to make allowances. This is a light silly book, just as much now as it was in 1939, but it's still generally funny.

I will say that the small format makes Robinson's drawings more cramped than I might have preferred - a bigger art-book style presentation is probably a stronger choice for Robinson appreciation, and, assuming I do go back to check out more Robinson, I'll probably head in that direction next time.

Thor by George O'Connor

When I wrote about the first of George O'Connor's Asgardian books, Odin, I said confidently that it would be a four-book series. This time, I tried to see if I could figure out where I saw that, and what the last two would be. (Number three is Loki, unsurprisingly - I got that from his publisher's website.) Perhaps my Google-fu is weak today, or the tide of AI slop is drowning out useful search results, but I can't now confirm that this will be a four-book series, or find any indications of what the last book will be.

I still think that is true, and that the fourth book will be about one specific Norse god - rather than being called Ragnarok, for example. My guesses are that it will either go to Frigg or Freyja, despite the few myths about either of them, so there can be at least one woman in this very boyish mythos, or that it will be basically the Ragnarok book under a different title, probably Balder or Tyr. On the other hand, O'Connor could throw us a curveball and do Frey. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Thor is the second book in the series: it was the obvious choice, as Odin was the obvious first choice. (Let's face it: if you do a four-book series about Norse gods, three of them have to be Thor, Odin, and Loki, period. The only thing to decide is that fourth one.)

Thor is a fun character, so this is an energetic, amusing book. O'Connor takes pains, especially in his back matter, to make it clear that his Thor - the mythic Thor - is not quite the came as '60s Donald Blake or the MCU Thor, but you can see their common aspects. Thor is big and straightforward and strong and driven by strong emotion and not exactly dumb, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer and pretty easily led. The cover is a great indication of that: O'Connor's Thor is the kind of guy with a huge grin on his face, doing something he loves - in this case, smashing things with a magical hammer, but you know how gods are.

As in O'Connor's other mythological books (Odin, obviously, and his epic earlier Olympians series about the Greek gods), he weaves myths together into a single narrative, keeping the sense of multiple overlapping stories while still making the book a single overall thing. This time out, Thor is on his way back from something - we'll find out what, eventually - wearing rags, hugely happy with himself, and he wants an old ferryman to get him across the river on the border of Jotunheim and Midgard. That leads to Thor telling stories to confirm who he is - or maybe just to boast; it's hard to tell with Thor - and the book flows out from there.

Again, Thor is fun to read about, the kind of mythological figure that generations of storytellers delighted in because his personality is so perfect for stories. O'Connor - here supported with colors by SJ Miller - places Thor in a believable world, bleaker and darker than the Olympians' but full of life and people, and tells a bunch of those stories, going back to the original source material as he always does.

O'Connor's mythological books are supposedly for younger readers - at least, they're made so as to be accessible to middle-graders, and published via an apparatus that's really good at getting books in front of middle-schoolers - but myths are deep and wondrous things, and should never be left only to children. O'Connor knows that well, and at the same time knows that children are smarter than you expect and more focused than you imagine. His books have an impressive array of backmatter, scholarly enough for the adults reading and accessible enough for the kids, to explain all of the references and send more dedicated readers back to the sources.

The Pnume by Jack Vance

I've somewhat run out over my skis, here - I'm typing this post on the fourth of the four "Planet of Adventure" novels by Jack Vance before my post on the third book, The Dirdir, publishes. But I can link you to the first two: City of the Chasch and Servants of the Wankh.

The Pnume ends the series. I'll try not to repeat myself too much, but it began with an exploratory starship from Earth arriving at the planet Tschai, circling the star Carina 4269. An attack from the planet killed all but one of the crew. Adam Reith crash-landed on the planet, and the series is his story, as he learns about the various alien races living there - it had been invaded, over and over, for millennia, and currently has three invader races somewhat squabbling with each other and watched by the original inhabitants, the Pnume.

Gersen wants to get off Tschai and back to Earth. For the usual reasons, of course, but also to warn the unnamed spacefaring organization to which he belongs about the threat from the various races of Tschai. As Pnume opens, he's nearly ready - the plan to build a starship from The Dirdir is almost complete. But there is some treachery from the merchant who already betrayed him once near the end of Dirdir, and Reith is kidnaped, tossed into a sack and spirited away into the underground tunnels inhabited by the Pnume.

Well, he's run through the three main invader races already, so surely he has to have encounters with the aboriginals before he can finally make it off-planet, right?

Reith, as usual the hyper-competent Earthman of his era of SF, quickly escapes captivity, but getting back to the surface will be a more difficult task. He gains the aid of a "girl" - a young human woman of the Pnumekin, the human slaves/servants/undercaste - and drags her along with him as a guide. She eventually gets a name, which is not typical for Pnumekin, when Reith starts calling her Zap 210 based on her Pnume designation.

The two travel extensively through Pnume tunnels to find an exit, and then have a similarly danger-packed journey aboveground to get back to the city where Reith and his allies were building the ship. Human servants of the Pnume do chase them, of course, but, obviously, a 1960s adventure SF novel series ends with the hero succeeding at everything and taking his new girl off with him away from the alien world.

And so he does.

This series isn't exactly minor Vance - it's from his most productive era, and is full of inventive touches, fine scenes, and thoughtful descriptions - but it is very much an adventure story, told quickly and mostly straightforwardly, following a well-worn path. It's a decent introduction to Vance, but doesn't showcase the things he does best, or that are more particular to his work. Still, the whole series is available in a single volume, which is nice and convenient.

Better Things: Next To You

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I grew up in the '70s and '80s; there was going to be a Police song somewhere in one of these series. I always gravitated towards the loud and the noisy, so it would be from their earlier days. Not that Message in a Bottle isn't iconic; it is. And De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da is one of the perfect pop songs.

But if I'm picking one song, it has to be Next To You.

And I usually start out with lyrics, but what's most impressive about Next To You is Stewart Copeland's drumming - fast, intricate, detailed, precise. He stops and starts more than once, but is always in time, in this very fast time. It's frankly awe-inspiring.

It's a punky, loud, fast song of longing, all quick notes and that relentless chorus.

I sold my house, I sold my motor too
All I want is to be next to you
I'd rob a bank, maybe steal a plane
You took me over, think I'm goin' insane

All energy, all longing, all power, all done in less than three minutes. What more could you want from a punky single?

What can I do?
All I want is to be next to you

Quote of the Week: Wanting

The heat pounded into his room from outside. Today it was almost too hot and humid to bear. He wished he could afford air-conditioning. He wished he could afford anything. He also wished that Kerry had not punched him in the face. Dinnie might have been inexperienced but he knew that this was a poor start to a relationship. It had not made him like her any less.

 - Martin Millar, The Good Fairies of New York, p.130

Anna by Mia Oberländer

Books that are obvious metaphors can be tricky. Especially if you're not quite sure exactly what they're a metaphor for.

I think Anna is Mia Oberländer's first major graphic novel - it says it was created as part of her thesis in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences - so I don't have any prior work to check, to see what her usual method of working is. (The edition of Anna I read was translated by a person whose name was printed, vertically, in a fussy scripty font - apologies if I get it wrong but it seems to be Nika Knight.)

In the German mountain town of Bad Hohenheim, we see three generations of women, all named Anna. Perhaps for clarity, the grandmother is Anna1, her daughter Anna2, and our blonde narrator Anna3. And we immediately think that this will not be a naturalistic, straightforward story.

Anna2, and eventually Anna3, are exceptionally tall. Extraordinarily tall, strikingly tall, unusually tall, remarkably tall, uncomfortably tall. They have gangly super-long legs and torsos maybe a bit longer than normal. They tower over all of the rest of the people in the town - even the men, I think, though the point seems to be that they're too tall for women, and that makes them generally unattractive to men and that they stand out in a way women shouldn't.

There's clearly an element of feminism in this metaphor - there's a TV talking head who has an extended sequence giving advice to exceptionally tall girls which is the clearest indication of that part of the theme - but Anna2 and Anna3 are also clearly meant to be strange for women, outside of the norms, different in an unsettling way. They can't be feminine in the way their society expects - they're too big, taking up too much space, gangling randomly about, clearly out of place. We see Anna2's size being commented on when she's still a baby, her long legs erupting from a carriage to splay all over.

Is the metaphor about women who "take up too much space" - who are too big, too dominant, too much not deferential and quietly "feminine?" Maybe, but I think Oberländer's point is more focused on tall than big - it's tricky to know her connotations for both words, since she originally worked in German, but height is important here.

This is a mountain village, after all. Mountains are tall. Mountains can be climbed, perhaps more easily with long legs. Tall people can see farther at the top of mountains, and may be more at home there.

Oberländer tells this story in chapters, skipping around in time. We see Anna2 as a baby, Anna1 as a young girl with a dog with equally long and gangly legs, Anna3 as a young woman telling us the story and looking for love herself. Oberländer has a conversational tone in her captions, as if Anna3 was telling us this, in fits and starts, coming back to one thread and then another, telling us her family's history.

Oberländer tells her story in big blocky drawings, characters often seen head-on. She typically has only a few panels to each page, jammed next to each other with thin ruled borders. Her lettering is florid, scripty, a bit difficult to read to slow the reader down. The drawing, though, is much cleaner, clearer: the pictures are understood instantly, while the words take just that bit of effort.

Again, I can't tell you exactly what the metaphor means. It may not be that precise, to have a single meaning, in the first place. It's a story about women that stick up, that can never hide in the crowd, that are out of place where they grew up and need to make or find places for themselves. That's the general territory: a family of women, how they interact, what the "normal" grandmother thinks and does and says when her daughter and then granddaughter are notably different, when they stick up out of normal life so much it can't be overlooked.