Getting the Hell Out of Dodge

About half an hour ago, I finished updating a spreadsheet for work and uploaded it back to the company portal, meaning that I've officially finished all of the work I needed to do and that I can now consider myself On Vacation.

And so I am.

Tomorrow morning, very early, all four members of the Hornswoggler clan will be boarding one of those newfangled aeroplanes and jetting off to balmy Orlando, Florida, where we will spend the next week and a bit firmly ensconced in the arms of The Mouse.

I've scheduled at least one post to pop up every day that I'm gone, including several reviews (and one it's-not-a-review) and some more frivolous stuff as well. But actual real-time blogging will not resume until the evening of the 9th at the very earliest.

Don't do anything too ridiculous while I'm off the grid, O Internet, and I'll see you in a week.

At Least It's Not Yellow...

My "Manga Friday" column for this week featured a review of a collection of gekiga stories -- in this case, historicals set about a hundred years ago in small Japanese villages -- Susumu Katsumata's Red Snow.

Next week I'm on vacation and pretty much incommunicado, but if I manage to write something later today and get it into the ComicMix system, there may be a post or two from me there. But I wouldn't bet on it.

My Deadly Sins

Another one of those Internet quizzes, which I suspect I may have done before...but it's a Saturday, so it's an easy post. I got this from James Nicoll.

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	High
Wrath:	Very Low
Sloth:	High
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Low

Discover Your Sins - Click Here

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Every reader needs comfort: something to retreat to when things aren't going as planned, a calm oasis of perfection while the storm rages outside. For me, the books of P.G. Wodehouse perfectly fit that bill. Even better, he wrote over a hundred of them in his long life, so I'm still able to read new books when I need them.

And so I turned to The Inimitable Jeeves after Gail Carriger's Soulless, a nice novel that wasn't what I had thought it would be, an aborted reading of The Sheriff of Yrnameer, and some other things that weren't just as I wanted them to be.

Inimitable is from 1923, and was the first novel-length appearance of Jeeves (and his employer -- "master" would be entirely the wrong word -- Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, one of the idlest of the idle rich and dullest of the Drones), though it was actually a fix-up of eleven previously published stories. It's stop-and-start pacing betrays that origin, but Wodehouse has turned the stories into a continuous plot, so it all feels like one book, even if it isn't quite a novel.

As always, Bertie is dim and continually getting into scrapes -- the ones in this book mostly concern the lovelife of his friend Bingo Little, who keeps falling into love with unlikely females and calling for Bertie's help to win them. Bertie, of course, is very little help, but Jeeves's plots are cunning and true...though they're not always designed to do what Bingo or Bertie would like.

Inimitable is not quite top-drawer Wodehouse; it sees him still tuning the instrument of the Jeeves-Wooster stories, and organizing the elements that he would later turn into the most exquisite of farces. But "not quite as good as Wodehouse later got" is still vastly better than most modern humorists, and the world of Jeeves and Wooster is so timeless -- one part Gay Nineties, one part Roaring Twenties, one part pre-war gaiety, and several parts pure Wodehousian invention -- that it never feels dated.

And, as always, I have to give high praise to The Overlook Press, which has been publishing Wodehouse's books, four or six of them a year, in these wonderful small editions, for about a decade now. They make Wodehouse's work not just a joy to read, but a joy to have on the shelf.

Quote of the Week

"It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins."
- Chinese proverb

Publishers Weekly Also Thinks the Year Is Over

To me, this is like having Christmas decorations up in August -- there's still sixty days left in the year, folks! it's not over yet! -- but clearly no one listens to me. PW has just posted their top ten books of 2009, excerpted from a longer list of 100 top books which they'll publish in next week's issue.

And that's another thing -- you do the long list first, and say that the Top Ten list will be coming later, to build interest and get debate going. Geez Louise, do I have to tell these people how to do everything?

(Oh, well. At least the list has one book relevant to my interests on it -- David Small's not-as-great-as-everyone-says-but-still-pretty-darn-good comics memoir Stitches.)

Don't Go There! by Peter Greenberg

Greenberg, as the cover of Don't Go There! helpfully notes, is the Travel Editor [1] for NBC's Today Show, so many of you may already have heard of him. This is his latest breezy book about traveling the world, with an emphasis on the places he expects people will want to avoid.

Don't Go There! has seventeen chapters, each of them focusing on one particular kind of unpleasantness -- they range from air pollution to political corruption, from disease and natural disasters to unsafe and unpleasant trains, roads, or airports -- and counting up the worst offenders both in the USA and around the world. Interspersed are a half-dozen shorter sections which are not numbered in sequence with the chapters, but provide very similar lists and commentary in a few other areas, such as the most expensive cities, the most depressed destinations, and the most dangerous theme parks.

Most of us are unlikely to have the hugely widely scope for world travel that would make Don't Go There! particularly useful; those of us who do regularly travel to lots of different destinations are likely to do so for work purposes, and so have less control over those destinations than leisure travelers would. But anyone who likes to travel at all knows that the armchair kind of travel is almost as much fun as the real kind -- and cheaper, too. Don't Go There! is like hearing stories of someone else's travel travails while sitting comfortably wherever you happen to be. It has a lot of charts and statistics, which are fun to look at but probably won't make anyone change their bookings.

In short, this is a fine book if you come across it something like the way I did: in a library, to read on a whim. It doesn't provide much depth, and doesn't really cross-reference the different measures of horribleness to make a grand index of places to avoid, so it reads a bit like a collection of separate essays. Still, if only a few isolated facts stick in the reader's head, that will probably be useful.

[1] This implies that some people at NBC don't know the difference between what a text editor -- of magazines or books -- and a video editor do, since Greenberg is apparently the soliciting-pieces kind of editor rather than the cutting-it-to-fit-in-a-time-slot editor. Either that, or they just don't care. My money, as always with TV folks, is on "don't care."
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Listening to: Future of the Left - The Hope That House Built
via FoxyTunes

Melding with the Mainstream

There's a new Mind Meld post up at SF Signal, and I'm part of it.

The question this time is:

INTRO: Recent events and discussions once again bring the topic of genre fiction's mainstream respectability to the forefront. So we thought it'd be timely to ask this week's panelists:

Q: In your opinion, does literary science fiction and fantasy have mainstream respect? Why, if at all, does it need mainstream approval? What would such approval mean for genre fiction?

(This is actually the second part of a diptych answering the same question -- in best SFF form, the document got too long and had to be split in half for publication.)

To see my answer -- and those of my fellow Melders Lucius Shepard, Adam Roberts, James Enge, Tim Akers and several others -- go check it out. But you might guess that I didn't have a lot of sympathy for those who whine about not getting literary respect for their wish-fulfillment space operas.

Thy Neighbor's Wife by Guy Talese

This is the great smutty book of the baby-boom Seventies, one of the cornerstones of the mythology of the Me Decade and a major work in the canon of the New Journalism -- the exemplar of several things at once and tremendously popular and influential for many years. Coming to it thirty years later, though, the reader is struck by how diffuse it is, lacking a real through-line or conclusion. Perhaps there could never have been a conclusion to a book that was so thoroughly "the way we live now" -- we all did not stop living in 1980, and the way we lived kept changing, as it always does -- but Talese doesn't even make an attempt to sum the book up, just drags himself into the last chapter to explain what he wanted to do, or thought he was going to do, before bowing out quietly.

Thy Neighbor's Wife only explains itself in that last chapter, with Talese taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of all of the books that Thy Neighbor's Wife didn't become -- a consumer guide to massage parlors, Talese's own sexual autobiography, an in-depth look at the Sandstone Retreat, an examination of the intersection of nudism and sex -- before ending suddenly. Before that, it ran through twenty-five chapters, each one on a discrete topic, only slightly connected to the chapters before and after -- though he did circle back to a few topics: Sandstone, Hugh Hefner, and the place of Chicago in America's libido. Talese begins with a photo of Diane Webber (the model immortalized on the new edition) to tell the story of the late adolescence of a Chicago teen, Harold Rubin, who then disappears for several hundred pages. The narrative jumps from Rubin to Webber, on to Hefner, off to the couples who will later form Sandstone, and then wanders away into describing obscenity cases for a while (with the requisite thumbnail sketches of the then-current Supreme Court justices) before bouncing back to many of those earlier subjects for a while and bounding onward.

It's a scatter-shot approach, dizzying at times, and Talese's workmanlike prose moves it forward ploddingly, less leaping from topic to topic than building isolated foundations for various buildings in the same development. Talese hints at larger structures and plans, but refuses to speculate about them -- he'll only concern himself with the particular. One particular love affair of Hefner's is given in great detail, while a myriad others are left unmentioned or swiftly skimmed over -- probably because the one woman in question agreed to be interviewed by Talese, and the others didn't.

Talese wants to tell a grand sweeping story -- of how all of America changed its view of sex and love over the course of the decades of the '60s and '70s -- but to tell it entirely in particulars, and to tell it while keeping himself out of the story almost entirely (until that last chapter, unveiling his part in the proceedings like the Wizard of Oz). Unfortunately, the story is too big to be told that way -- Talese, from what he tells us here, never even visited most of the country, and didn't do any general or sociological research. He wants to present his subjects as exemplars of changing Americans -- but without saying what they are exemplars of, or how the exemplify anything.

And so Thy Neighbor's Wife comes across -- especially now, thirty years later -- as a collection of primary documents from the period, not a coherent single narrative. We see Hefner as he puts together the first year or so of Playboy, and then again at the height of its success in the early '70s -- but not how he got from one to the other, or what that meant (to him, or to America). We also see very little about what Playboy meant to the young men who read it -- and nothing about its place in the lives of the young women who appeared in it. In fact, if there's one single glaring flaw in Thy Neighbor's Wife, it's women -- they exist here almost entirely as objects, as beings seen from the outside. Talese is a man, and he gets into the heads of the men in this story -- from Hefner and Rubin to Al Goldstein of Screw and John Bullaro of Sandstone -- but not the women. The women here, as in the traditional American male view, control the access to sex, and are capricious and ultimately not understandable -- men can just try to figure out the rules so as to get as much sex as possible. And the problem then with this era was that the rules were changing radically and without warning -- that was good for men, since it generally meant that more sex was available, but it was also bad, since getting that sex required entirely different methods and plans.

I kept wanting Thy Neighbor's Wife to either stay on one subject long enough to cover it in depth, or to zoom out to a big picture once in a while to provide some context. (Sandstone was an outlier even in the sexual revolution -- but how many couples were swapping partners, in one way or another, in those mid-'70s years? How did the loosening of sexual morality affect people in the middle of their lives? How were the teens of the '70s different from those of the '50s, in ways that can be traced back to Playboy and Lady Chatterly and Henry Miller?) But Thy Neighbor's Wife is a book of reportage, not of analysis -- Talese never makes this clear, but his aim was to show what he saw, and not presume to make judgements about anything larger. And so Thy Neighbor's Wife is a book focused primarily on Chicago and Los Angeles, and even there on the Playboy Mansion and Sandstone, because that's where Talese spent the most time on the ground, talking to people. (And, as he coyly hints at in that last chapter, screwing around with at least a couple of those newly liberated young women before going back to his marriage.)

Thy Neighbor's Wife is still an important book, but all of the things that it did have been done since -- and mostly done better -- by many other books, each of them focusing on one aspect of that era and examining it in more depth. It's a decent starting point to the world of the sexual revolution, but it only leads on to other books that make more of an effort to answer the questions that Talese only raises.

Time to Quit Working; 2009 is Over

...because Amazon is already counting down the top 100 books of the year.

I say this every year, but what the hell?! There are a good ten weeks left in the year, folks -- you can hold your horses at least until it's December. It's not like the best books of the year are going to get away from you if you don't start nailing them to the wall in mid-Summer.

Movie Log: King of California

I haven't seen a movie as stripped down as King of California in a long time; it has two (and only two) major characters, with a third that's important but doesn't get much dialogue, and then a lot of walk-ons. Those two characters are a father and daughter, Charlie and Miranda, living somewhere in suburban California. (If the movie ever gave them a last name or a hometown, I didn't catch it.)

Charlie (Michael Douglas) has just been released from a mental institution as the movie opens, and this leads us to have severe doubts about the efficacy of the California mental health system. To be blunt about it, he's still quite crazy. (In flashbacks throughout the movie, we see that he always was at least a bit cracked, but that he's probably gotten worse as he's gotten older.) He's now obsessed with a treasure that he's sure a Spanish priest hid somewhere in their vicinity in the 1600s, which is just the latest in a long line of things he's been obsessed with.

Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) is the sensible grown-up in this relationship, despite the fact that she's not even seventeen. But she's been living on her own for the two years that Charlie was in the institution, and clearly taking care of both him and herself for years before that. She at first resists this latest crazy plan of her father's, but, finally, goes along with him and begins to believe in its possibilities.

Netflix defined this as an "indy comedy," which is why I saw it...but that's only true if "indy," as a modifier, means "not primarily funny and without a traditionally happy ending." It's a well-acted movie -- Douglas probably though he had a shot at an Oscar nomination, though I don't recall if he was talked up for it two years ago -- that tells its story well, but it is yet another indy-drama about dysfunctional families trying to make their way in the world. It will be entirely understandable if any particular viewer has had more than enough of that particular style of movie for this decade.

Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford

Jessica was once the most famous Mitford on this side of the Atlantic -- her The American Way of Death being of more interest locally than her older sister Nancy's almost autobiographical novels of the backbiting British aristocracy in love -- but her position may be slipping. And any of the Mitford sisters are always in danger of being subsumed into the myth of the Mitfords, that legendary six-headed female aristocrat that was simultaneously fascist and communist, married to all of the crowned heads of the world after being the most famous debutante ever, and speaking in private tongues to itself.

Poison Penmanship is a collection of Jessica Mitford's shorter journalism, most of it -- as the subtitle, "The Gentle Art of Muckraking," makes clear -- in the declamatory, j'accuse style of the '60s and '70s. It's been out of print since the original trade paperback edition of 1980, though, coincidentally, NYRB Press has a reprint planned for the middle of next year. (So this may perhaps be the time for a Jessica Mitford revival.)

Mitford structured Poison Penmanship as a primer in muckraking -- journalism that goes after a practice or industry hated by the writer, taking a strong position but also doing solid research to aid in the attack -- with a long introduction on the principles of her work and afterwords for each article bringing them up to date (to 1979) and providing background. She doesn't seem to have noticed that the articles collected here show her moving from advocacy and muckraking (tackling large issues like prison reform, racism in the South, newspaper prejudice and the funeral industry) towards more general journalism -- particularly since she closes with the long piece "Egyptomania," from the German travel magazine Geo, in which she investigates the then-current digs in the Valley of Kings without any particular point of view. So an unfriendly reader -- someone inclined to muckrake Mitford, perhaps -- could use this book as evidence that success ruined Mitford, turning her to puffier pieces like "Egyptomania" and a similar investigatory journalism piece on a super-expensive Elizabeth Arden desert beauty clinic.

In 1979, muckraking was still exclusively the province of the Left; the very idea of similar work being done by the Right would be ludicrous. But the world has changed since then, in part because of Mitford and her fellow muckrakers, and now muckraking is not only bipartisan, but universal. (What are Perez Hilton and Gawker if not muckrakers of the most frivolous sort?) The Internet sometimes seem to exist purely for the raking of muck, and subsequent lobbing of said much at one's targets. We are all in the world Jessica Mitford built, but we have found that it's no longer "we" who attack "them" -- the war is now general, a Hobbesian war of all against all.

And so Poison Penmanship might be more useful now than ever before. Its specific examples might be old and out-of-date -- though the causes are still strong, often complaining about exactly the same abuses as Mitford did forty years ago -- but the lessons in advocacy journalism, in research and in getting the story solid before a reporter confronts a major hostile witness, are still as strong as ever before. And looking at the poor quality of muckraking currently -- since most of it could more honestly be called mud-flinging, with no serious attempt at research, analysis, or coherent thought behind it -- shows that Poison Penmanship is sorely needed now. Kudos to NYRB Books for bringing it back, and we should all hope for a rise in the general quality of muck raked about a year from now.

Dumb Sentences, Day 26,349

Today's Dumb Sentence comes to us via a tweet from Don Linn. (As always, we must exercise caution: tweeting something is not necessarily the same as agreeing with it.)

The sentence comes from Cody Brown, and reads:

"News is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible."

What's so dumb about it? That first noun can be replaced with literally anything and it still makes sense, positioning the speaker as a radical, tough-minded proponent of the cloud against the elite, as a free-thinker striding valiantly into the future. In short, it's utterly content-free, and serves only to say "I am a smart 21st century person. Please hire me as a consultant for your organization."

Try it yourself!

Policing is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Government is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Fire prevention is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Literature is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Banking is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Sandwich-making is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Garbage collection is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Movie Log: Paul Blart, Mall Cop

Thing 1, my older son, asked specifically to see Paul Blart, Mall Cop for one of our Family Friday Movie Nights, and I thought it was worth losing eighty-seven minutes of my life to make my son happy. Then he spent most of the movie hiding in various other rooms, since he really doesn't like emotional conflict of any kind. (Remind me to tell you the story of how he had a love-hate relationship with Thomas the Tank Engine at the age of three, since the trains were mean to each other. For that matter, remind me to tell you how I'd leave the room myself at about his age when the Star Trek re-runs got too much to handle. Genetics can pick up the things you never wanted to pass on to your kids.)

Mall Cop is a paint-by-numbers loser-shows-his-worth action comedy aimed at tweens, and I refuse to spend more than the time spent during the movie thinking about its plot. It's not bad, given what it is, but it's not in any way a "good movie," either. It's a cynical slab of entertainment that succeeds on its own terms, primarily because those terms are so low. And, yes, all of the funny moments are in the trailer -- the first half of the movie is slow and dull.

The most interesting thing about Mall Cop is that I could swear that it was actually filmed not at the "West Orange Pavilion Mall" -- which doesn't exist -- but at that mall near the Readercon hotel. But I don't care enough to check.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/24

Disclaimer: these "Reviewing the Mail" posts go up early every Monday morning and list the books I saw in the mail the week before. I have read exactly none of these books, though I hope to read at least some of them. This post contains whatever I already know about these books through rumor, innuendo, common knowledge, and whatever marketing materials were included.

First this time out is Elizabeth Bear's novel By the Mountain Bound, a prequel to last year's All the Windwracked Stars. (I still haven't read Stars, though it is on the giant stacks of books to be reviewed. And am I the only one whose urge to read a book decreases noticeably when that books spawns a series before I manage to get to it? I know there are people who prefer stories that don't end, but, at this point in my reading life, I'm much more likely to read a book than to commit to a series.) This series, as I understand, is fantasy, and inspired by Norse legends, with Stars set after what sounds like Ragnarok. Tor will publish By the Mountain Bound tomorrow in hardcover.

Cory Doctorow's new novel Makers will also be published in hardcover by Tor -- this one on November 2nd. But Makers has also been serialized for free online at Tor.com, so the dead-tree edition is not the only way you can read this story. I've read plenty of Doctorow's nonfiction (especially the online agitprop essays), but only one novel -- last year's Little Brother. But Doctorow is clearly one of the most important and inventive writers working in SF today, so I should read this.

Eoin Colfer has written a sixth book for Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide" series, because Adams's widow asked him nicely, and because the publishers offered him a sizable stack of cash. (Whether or not the readers were consulted, or would have wanted this, is a separate issue.) And so And Another Thing... exists; it was published by Hyperion on October 12th. I should reserve any further comment until I actually read the thing, and so I will.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Great American Comics series returns for the fourth year with a 2009 edition. The series editors are still Jessica Abel and Matt Madden -- they took over last year from founding editor Anne Elizabeth Moore -- and the guest editor for this year is Charles Burns. This heavy book -- it's on nice glossy paper, and has the heft to stun small animals if thrown with vigor -- was published on October 8th, though HMH oddly neglected to include any flap copy to explain the book to potential buyers. (There's a long-running struggle between designers and marketers within publishing -- one wants to make beautiful objects, and the other wants to sell as many widgets as possible, and their two aims do not always coincide. To my eye, those empty flaps are a case where the designer won a major battle with the marketer.)

I know CLAMP is a famous manga collective, and that their series xxxHolic is well known and respected...but the title always makes me think it's about a porn addiction. (And, not having read it, I'm not to clear on what kind of story it really is. So I've never been put straight in a way that sticks.) Anyway, I have here something called The Official xxxHOLiC Guide, which is the kind of thing a publishing company schedules in an attempt to keep a successful property going after its actual end. It's being published by Del Rey, and it will be in stores tomorrow.

There's a small press from Philadelphia called PS Books -- not to be confused with the small SFnal PS Publishing from the UK -- that mostly publishes a small magazine called Philadelphia Stories. (They've also published at least one novel -- Christine Weiser's rock 'n' roll story Broad Street -- because I've seen that, even if I haven't gotten to read it yet.) And they've just published a second anthology of the best work from that magazine, under the utterly appropriate title The Best of Philadelphia Stories, Vol. 2. It's available now from better booksellers, in trade paperback.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's new novel Diving into the Wreck is based on her acclaimed novella of the same name (and its sequel, "Room of Lost Souls"). It's a medium-future SF novel about salvaging and exploring ancient derelict spaceships -- which sounds right up my alley, since that's the next best thing to an enigmatic alien artifact -- which Pyr is publishing in trade paperback in November.

Kodansha Comics -- the American arm of the similarly-named largest publisher in Japan -- debuted with a bang on October 13th wit the publication of new collections of two of its best-known and most iconic properties. (At least to Americans; I have to assume that Kodansha hasn't stayed the biggest publisher in Japan by being known best there for stories two decades old.)

First is Akira, Vol. 1, the beginning of the Katsuhiro Otomo series that manages to be post post- and pre-apocalyptic. (Not to mention mid-apocalyptic, near the end.) I think of Akira as being something like the Japanese Watchmen -- it's not as formally complicated and knotty, but it both epitomizes and transcends the standards of its genre, and certainly was massively influential over here. (And probably in Japan as well, though there have been three or four entire generations of new manga-ka since Akira debuted.)

And the other one is Masamune Shirow's The Ghost in the Shell, which -- as far as I can remember -- mostly didn't take the definite article in its previous American incarnations. This book is also one of the major holes in my reading; I've never gotten to it, but it's nice to get another chance.
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Listening to: Heartless Bastards - Searching For The Ghost
via FoxyTunes

My Day

I intended to spend this afternoon working down the pile of books sitting on my desk to be reviewed -- I've read an even thirty books at this point that I haven't written about, going back to very early this year -- but I discovered new heights of work-avoidance instead.

My mother-in-law took The Wife and my two sons off to go apple picking in the wilds of New Jersey today, leaving me alone for about five hours. (Don't snicker; New Jersey does too have wilds. Even up here in the North. You just need to head in the direction of Pennsylvania until you hear banjo music.) I banged through two movie posts and one book, and then paused to move some books around.

Six hours later, I'd finally put up the bookcase my brother gave me when he moved to Portland back in February. (It's a tall one with glass doors, so it's very front-heavy; I needed to use two straps to attach it to ceiling joists and hammer a few shims under it, too.) And I'd moved a lot of books around to neaten up my office/study/hole in the ground. (I'd even done almost as much vacuuming as the space needed.)

What I hadn't done was to get back to the computer at all, for book reviews or time-wasting or anything else.

I'm going on a long family vacation one week from today -- very similar to the vacation I took at the same time last year, actually -- and I still hope to load up a lot of reviews for the days I'll be incommunicado. But some of them may be bunts, since I don't want to come back from vacation to these big stacks. (I warn you now...)

Movie Log: Absurdistan

In the Land of "Foreign" Movies -- that place primarily populated by humorous peasants of an ethnic group never precisely defined, whose words are heard mostly in voiceover (the better to dub them into a thousand languages) and who regularly find themselves in whimsical plotlines that eventually reaffirm the essential brotherhood, and unity, of mankind -- there is a district called Absurdistan. It would not do to concern oneself too closely with where, exactly, Absurdistan lies, in this German production filmed in Russian, but it's clearly in "that" part of the world -- away from the audiences for this movie, among the simpler people whom we either look down on for their primitivism or exalt for their simplicity.

There is a small, nameless village, presumably in central Asia (though it could be in Eastern Europe; all we know is that it was in the path of the Mongols), where about a dozen families live far away from everywhere else. The husbands are lazy and lusty, starting each day as if they're going to work but spending most of their time in the tea shop and then coming home at night full of desire; the wives do all of the work but seem to be only very slightly less lusty. The men are, of course, much happier with this arrangement than the women.

In this village, there are only two children -- at least that we ever see -- Aya (Krystyna Malerova) and Temelko (Max Mauff), who were born simultaneously and married at the age of eight. Now, they're in their late teens, and thinking about the first time they will have sex. A fortuneteller determines the precise time when they should enjoy bliss -- it has to do with two astrological constellations appearing in the sky -- and they wait the requisite time, with Temelko going off to "the city" for education, or work, or something (this isn't entirely clear).

But the laziness of the men has extended to the village's water supply -- the water comes via a long pipeline through the nearby mountains, but has not been maintained for years. And the flow of the water to the village's one outlet is now a trickle. The men, of course, will not fix it, since they won't do anything.

And so when Temelko returns, Aya runs from him, and tells him they won't be having any sex until the water is fixed. The other women hear this, think it's a great idea, and make the sex strike general. Soon, the village is divided into two zones, and the lazy men are using their ingenuity to get to the city and its whores, only to be stopped by the guns of the women. (They never even consider the expedient of actually fixing the water pipeline, of course.)

Temelko mopes around for a long time -- the actor Max Mauff has a very mopey face, unfortunately, and there is barely any dialogue in Absurdistan, so he gets even mopier in pantomime -- but eventually does what he has to do. The village is saved, love is restored...and all but one of the men still haven't done a lick of work. Sounds like someone's idea of Utopia!

Absurdistan is charming, but just a bit too deliberately so. There's nothing surprising or unexpected about it -- except perhaps when Aya appears naked on a roof in what I'd been assuming was a Muslim area -- but it runs through its well-worn plot with grace and vigor. The movie does know that all the men but Temelko are useless, but gives it an Easterner's shrug, as if to ask, what can we do about it? It should not be seen with any thought of real gender politics in mind, but will be quite entertaining taken on its own level.

Stitching It Up

I reviewed David Small's NBA-nominated comics memoir Stitches on Thursday for ComicMix -- yes, I'm late in linking to it, but what can I do? I was not quite as positive as some other people have been, but that's typical for me. There is quite a lot that's impressive about Stitches, but I wouldn't consider it a masterpiece, and I'm not sure it would be on my ten best of the year.

Your mileage may vary, of course -- and it's a major graphic novel that should be read widely.
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Listening to: Bess Rogers - Sunday
via FoxyTunes

How Sad I Am

I forget to set up Google Alerts for a lot of my books that I really should...but I have a "David Itzkoff" alert that comes through every day (mostly with a pile of "Arts, Briefly" Times blog posts) that I scour to see if he's doing anything SFnal. He hasn't for ages.

I feel like a boxer who's been out of training for too long...

BookScan Bestseller Lists Come to Wall Street Journal

Publishers Weekly reports this morning that the Wall Street Journal has come to an agreement with BookScan -- the Nielsen service that reports on retail sales of books in the USA -- to replace WSJ's old, self-created bestseller lists with new lists based on BookScan sales from the previous week.

The new lists will be available in the traditional WSJ flavors of fiction, nonfiction, and business, but will also include "genres such as travel and cooking, or topical interests such as presidential memoirs."

The lists were to appear first in the print WSJ and on WSJ.com today; I haven't been able to find them on the site.

Many civilians have expressed interest in seeing "real" BookScan numbers; this isn't quite that, but they will be able to see rankings based on actual reported numbers for the first time.

Yet Another Datapoint That Copyright Terms Are Too Long

Far too many literary heirs are complete assholes with massively inflated opinions of the worth of their dead minor-poet fathers.

Hands up -- who had even heard of Louis Zukofsky before this moment?
[via Bookslut]

Quote of the Week

"We think confidence games and hoaxes -- see, for example, most any David Mamet movie -- are sophisticated, elaborate schemes designed to slip by people's natural resistance to falsehood. But that's a mistake -- we don't have such a facility. A sucker isn't born every minute; a sucker is born every time someone is born."
- Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice, p. 111

A Book I'm Actually Looking Forward To

Blogging and reviewing can be a quick trip into cynicism -- if there's anything left to become cynical about after a few years in the publishing salt-mines. Most books look like widgets after a while -- they fill a particular hole in the market, and are interesting/useful/demanded by a particular kind of audience, but getting excited about books doesn't happen all that often.

But it does still happen, once in a while. And I'm already eager to read Swords and Dark Magic, an anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders that has the following very impressive-looking line-up:

Introduction, Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan

“Goats of Glory”, Steven Erikson

“Tides Elba: A Tale of the Black Company”, Glen Cook

“Bloodsport”, Gene Wolfe

“The Singing Spear”, James Enge

“A Wizard of Wiscezan”, C.J. Cherryh

“A Rich Full Week”, K. J. Parker

“A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet”, Garth Nix

“Red Pearls: An Elric Story”, Michael Moorcock

“The Deification of Dal Bamore”, Tim Lebbon

“Dark Times at the Midnight Market”, Robert Silverberg

“The Undefiled”, Greg Keyes

“Dapple Hew the Tint Master”, Michael Shea

“In the Stacks”, Scott Lynch

“Two Lions, A Witch, and the War-Robe”, Tanith Lee

“The Sea Troll’s Daughter”, Caitlin R Kiernan

“Thieves of Daring”, Bill Willingham

“The Fool Jobs”, Joe Abercrombie

I cut my SFF teeth on swords & sorcery, and have wished for more of it for the past two decades. And those are some damn fine writers, curated by two excellent editors whose taste I trust. It's coming from Harper sometime next year, which means I have some time to figure out what publicist I need to start hounding for an advance copy....

Happy Birthday, Earth!

According to the immortal Bishop Ussher, the Earth was created at dusk on this day in 4004 BC, at approximately 6:00 PM. (I'm assuming Ussher would have meant Greenwich Mean Time, if he'd had the benefit of timezones, and that translates into 1:00 PM EDT. On the other hand, Ussher might have burned at the stake anyone who dared to hint at timezones; it can be difficult to account for the prejudices of a man dead 350 years.)

Therefore, at this moment, the Earth is officially 6012 years old.

Please celebrate responsibly.

Movie Log: Management

Steve Zahn plays even dumber than usual in Management, a rambling romantic comedy that has a sweetness that makes up for the aimless meanderings of the plot. He plays Mike, a guy who works as the night manager (and general gofer) at his parents' mid-level motel in Kingman, Arizona.

Mike is a fairly typical Zahn boy-man -- distinguishable from the various other modern sorts of boy-men mostly by being played by Zahn, and by being on the sweet side, rather than petulant or appalling -- and we don't get a good sense of what kind of person he is before Jennifer Aniston shows up, as traveling motel-art saleswoman Sue Claussen. Mike is smitten by Sue, but we can see his attraction is purely physical, and the audience suspects that he's reacted this way to dozens of women at the motel.

(To put it bluntly, he comes across as a borderline stalker: bringing wine to her room both nights of her stay and hanging around her room making uncomfortable conversation. He's probably supposed to read as sweet and innocent, but innocent doesn't go well with blind lust. She gets rid of him the second time by letting him touch her butt, which isn't as funny or sexy as the filmmakers might have hoped. Most of the first reel or so of Management is borderline uncomfortable to watch, actually.)

For no reason that I or The Wife could discern, Sue has a quickie with Mike in the laundry room just before she leaves town. This is badly motivated -- Sue is bemused by Mike, but there's no plausible reason for her to want to sleep with him; a random stranger from a bar would be at least as appealing -- but necessary to set in motion the rest of the movie.

For Mike is now completely smitten, and so follows Sue back home to a random office park outside Baltimore in a poorly-thought-out plan to...well, that's what happens when you don't think your plans out. Luckily, she's not instantly in love with him, or secretly carrying his baby, or such rot; she's polite and nice but bundles him back to Arizona before too long.

And the movie meanders on from there, with Mike making more cross-country trips in the course of ninety minutes than many of us make in a decade. They both end up in Aberdeen, Washington, where Sue has become betrothed to an ex-punk yogurt magnate named Jango -- played by Woody Harrelson -- and Mike gets a job in a Chinese restaurant and a sidekick in the owners' son. By the time Management detours to a Buddhist monastery, the viewer has long passed the point of being able to anticipate the movie, though it always stays amiable and pleasant.

Do Sue and Mike get together in the end? Is their a life-lesson to be learned? Are their plans for a life together massively unlikely, even if very good-hearted? Well, this is a romantic comedy, so you get one guess.

Management doesn't have a surplus of plausibility, so the viewer will have to spot it about a quart or so, or top off along the way when the tank runs low. It's a pleasant movie, but its characters are collections of traits rather than people and their motivations entirely controlled by the necessities of a very odd and rambling plot. Aniston and Zahn are both cute, which I suppose is the main draw -- unless you're looking for a romantic comedy that doesn't follow the usual cliches, in which case you are massively in luck: Management invents the cliches of the planet Zarquon as it goes.

Happy 80th Birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin

I know I've been snarky at times about "Bad Ursula" -- fannish shorthand for the tendency of some of her late-period works to rely rather more heavily on a thick thumb on the moral scales than the reader would prefer -- but she's one of the indispensable writers of SF & Fantasy. Even more than that, she's been a great writer for more than forty years, has never denied writing genre stories, and has been a wonderful voice of reason when speaking to and about the larger literary world.

If Ursula K. Le Guin had not existed, we would not have been able to invent her. So my heartiest congratulations on reaching this milestone birthday with her wit, vigor, and literary power undiminished -- her recent novel Lavinia, which I have not read myself, has been widely lauded -- and my most fervent hopes for at least twenty more happy and productive years to come.

Another Design-My-Cover Contest

This one comes from my colleagues over in Wiley's Higher Education division, and I'm particularly pleased to see two things that they're doing very right which other contests have gotten wrong:

• It's targeted specifically at design students, and the contest reaches out to them through their professors.
• It explicitly says that the winner (and two finalists) will get paid for the design, and how much that award will be.

All other make-my-cover hopefuls, take note. And if there are any design students out there, would you like to try your hand at the cover of the new edition of Robin Landa's Advertising by Design?

Movie Log: The Pink Panther Strikes Again

Cub Scout activities forced the usual Friday Family Movie night to reschedule for Saturday afternoon, and the Hornswoggler menfolk assembled over oven-bake pizza to watch The Pink Panther Strikes Again. (This time, I'll do my best to spell Peter Sellers's name correctly.)

It's a direct sequel to the previous movie, Return of the Pink Panther, and sees Herbert Lom's ex-Chief Inspector Dreyfuss seemingly ending his stay in a mental hospital, completely cured of his obsession with killing Sellers's Clouseau. But then Clouseau arrives, and Dreyfuss is sent into a fit of madness (a hilarious one), and the plot is set in motion. Dreyfuss wants to kill Clouseau, but he does it in a very roundabout manner. (And, confusing my sons slightly, the title diamond never shows up at all -- it makes for a fine, funny movie, but they expected it and wondered why the movie was called "Pink Panther" if the diamond wasn't in it.)

Sellers is more integrated into the main plot this time around, which is nice to see; his comedy bits are just as funny, and they don't seem like interruptions in the "real" plot. There's a particularly good fight with Cato early in Strikes Again, and several other strong Sellers scenes. (The plunge down the stairs and subsequent interrogating-the-servants scene is particularly wonderful.) Lom is also very entertaining, chomping down on the scenery with energy and verve and playing the supervillain role (complete with a castle and a death ray) to a T.

I think, all in all, Strikes Again is funnier than Returns, but it's close. We may end up having to see the modern Steve Martin movies for a true comparison -- though I hope I can avoid that, given my respect for Martin's non-pandering work -- but I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the top Sellers Panthers are at least as funny as the new ones, even for their target audience: TV-addled boys.
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Listening to: Kate Tucker & The Sons Of Sweden - On The Radio
via FoxyTunes

Turkish Spam Update

After a long hiatus, the Turkish spam has returned. They're now trying to sell me women's clothing. (I think; I don't read Turkish.)

Turkish spammers are more professional and serious than their American and Chinese counterparts -- in fact, this message probably wouldn't be considered spam under the strictest definitions if it were delivered to someone who could understand it -- but they do clearly have trouble targeting the right audience.

They've also learned not to have the entire ad be one large JPEG, so they're advancing through the world of e-commerce in leaps and bounds. That does mean, unfortunately, that I can't just shove the whole ad here as an example. I did, however, pull one picture out as an example.

Attention, Turkish Spammers! I'm not the audience you want. I suspect everyone with an e-mail address that ends in "optonline.net" is not the audience you want. But you amuse me, so I will let you live, for now.

Giraffes and Prisoners

Today, for ComicMix, I reviewed two graphic novels with autobiographical elements: Lewis Trondheim's Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome and Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock 'N' Roll Life by Bruce Paley and Carol Swain.

Read it or don't!

A Meta Note on E-Books

I'm actually seeing sales figures for e-books now -- only one format (yes, the one you think) and only monthly so far, but that's better than nothing -- so this is just to say that if you suddenly see me stop being cynical and depressive about the possibility of ebook sales ever amounting to anything...that just might mean something. (Remembering, of course, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)

For now, though, I had a grand total of three books that sold even at double digits over the course of a month, so cynicism will continue for the immediate future.

The Evils of Bigotry

If you do much blog reading, you're probably seeing a lot of links to this post by Nicola Griffith about the horrible way Jackson Memorial Hospital of Miami, Florida treated the family of a dying woman.

It is absolutely reprehensible what these three evil people -- Jackson social worker Garnett Frederick and attending physicians Alois Zauner and Carlos Alberto Cruz, and, yes, I said evil and I mean it -- did to Janice Langbehn and her three children. (And I'm not looking all that kindly upon U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan, who is at the very least criminally deficient in compassion.) They took a horrible situation and found ways to make it worse at every turn; people like that have no place in the so-called "caring professions" and I hope there's still a chance they can be professionally censured, if not given more serious punishment.

I don't want to live in an America where things like that happen. This needs to stop happening. Deliberately keeping people away from their dying loved ones is evil, and there can be no justification for it.

A New Category of Spam

I got an e-mail this morning asking for "a cost to place this ad below in you paper and online in employment dept. i need cost for 9 weeks." From the shaky grammar and capitalization, I suspect it's from a bot and thus spam. It then list an ad that I should run in my paper -- I was momentarily tempted to claim that I'd done so and send an invoice for several thousand dollars.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this message is, though -- perhaps it's just meant as a test to see if the e-mail address is valid. (If someone replies "I'm not a newspaper, you dummy," it means there's a person there.) If that's true, then this is from the subcategory of spam that only exists to pave the way for more spam.

And, of course, is the spam-meisters could be that inventive about something constructive, we wouldn't be in a massive world-wide recession right now.

Happy No Itzkoff Day!

Today is the one-year anniversary of Dave Itzkoff's last "Across the Universe" SF column for The New York Times Book Review, and thus marks one full year of No Itzkoff. I'm declaring it to be a national holiday.

Sure, some could say that perhaps the global financial crisis, and subsequent nosedive in print advertising, had something to do with it, but I prefer to believe that Sam Tanenhaus came to his senses and has barred Itzkoff forevermore from reviewing SF for the gray lady. That's a great first step, Sam, but now you have to move on: hire someone who actually understands the field to review it for you. I can recommend a few names if you'd like...

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/17

If you've read these posts before, you can skip the next paragraph; it's what I say every week. (Though I've seen links to these posts that state or imply that I'm commenting on books I've read, which is precisely and entirely wrong -- and that leads me to think that what I write isn't necessarily being understood.)

Below is a list of books that arrived in my mail last week; some of them I specifically asked for, and some came because I'm on publicity lists. (And I'm on publicity lists because I review books and try to make sure to notify publishers when I do so.) I haven't read any of them yet. Many of them I won't end up reading. But I do want to give them all at least a little bit of attention -- I work in book marketing myself, and want to help other marketers and publicists reach their audiences if I can.

So: these are books I haven't read. But here's what I can say about them from a quick glance or prior knowledge.

First is Jeff VanderMeer's new novel Finch, which I have in advance-bound-proof form. It's publishing in trade paperback from Underland Press in November, and its the very last book about VanderMeer's fictional city of Ambergris. And I have to admit here, once again, that I keep piling up Jeff's books -- I have a copy of nearly every book he's written -- but that I've only read pieces of any of them. This one is a detective novel, so maybe that will give me a good reason to dive in here. (It's getting embarrassing at this point not to have read anything by VanderMeer.)

I also got a big package of books from Tokyopop this week -- all books publishing in November -- and most of them are things I don't know much about. But let me see what I can figure out about...

Game X Rush, Vol. 2 by Mizuho Kusanagi is described on its back cover as both being about "Japan's greatest bodyguard and greatest assassin caught in a deadly game" and "hot bishonen action," which leads me to believe the two characters in that first quote are both men and that they're at least heavily flirting with each other (probably not knowing each other's secret lives). I would not rule out actual bodily-fluids swapping, either.

Liberty Liberty! by Hinago Takanaga is from the BLU imprint and is even more obviously yaoi. (Why don't these companies send me some nice boyish ninja action I can share with my sons? I don't want to complaint about all of the m/m content -- I find the generic qualities of yaoi and related manga fascinating, even if that's not my particular area of interest -- but I do see more of it than I expected.) Anyway, this seems to be another "got really drunk and fell into bed with cute guy who I then end up working with" story, and appears to be complete in this volume.

Shinobi Life, Vol. 3 by Shoko Conami is yet another romance story, despite the bait-and-switch of the back cover copy's talk about deals with the devil and time-traveling rogue ninjas. (But I could probably be persuaded to read even the middle of a romance story if it has time-traveling rogue ninjas in it.) The ninja time-traveler in question is living with a highschool girl, and it looks like there's more emotional scenes of non-stop talking than all-out ninja action here.

The title of I.N.V.U., Vol. 5 (by Kim Kang Won) either stands for the four gentlemen on the front cover -- respectively Innocent, Nice, Vivid, and Unique -- or, as the back cover explicates, is a phonetic way of saying "I envy you." (Or, most likely, both.) This one is another romance, though with girls involved this time -- girls and boys together, I mean, not just girls. (Not that there's anything wrong with just girls. Or just boys. Oh, you know what I mean.) Anyway, the back cover is the usual middle-of-a-long series confusion, with lots of names and their complicated relationships to other names. Everyone is tormented and in love, I expect -- and not in love reciprocally, either.

Mikansei No. 1, Vol. 1 by Majiko! is about a girl who time-travels back from the 23rd century to our time to become a pop singer. There doesn't seem to be much romance in this one, oddly -- I thought Tokyopop was trying to bury me with love -- but it certainly does look silly...though I imagine that's the whole point. The back cover also goes out of its way to mention that our heroine's skirts are scandalously short for her home century, which sounds like the Fanservice Alarm to me.

Zone-OO, Vol. 2 by Kiyo QJO is another fighting-demons book, though I suspect it might be mostly about one group of demons fighting another group. Anyway, there's the usual secret society of demons, battles for centuries, yadda yadda yadda, and the title "Zone-OO" refers to a drug that works on demons. I expect it has lots of fighting, but I wouldn't bet against a tormented love affari, since it seems to be that kind of month.

Aria, Vol. 5 by Kozue Amano is the source of an anime series I've never seen, if that helps any of you place it. It's the sequel to a previous series, Aqua, and is set on a Mars now almost completely water after terraforming led to the melting of its icecaps. (I think all of my hard-SF readers have suddenly had a coughing fit -- I just read 'em, I don't make any of this stuff up.) Other than focusing on a character named Akari and being set on Mars (now called Aqua), I can't really tell what the story is about, so it's probably not as high-concept as most manga.

Phantom Dream, Vol. 4 is by Natsuki Takaya, whom the cover helpfully reminds us is the creator of Fruits Basket. This one is yet another romance -- probably heterosexual, though I'm not willing to commit on the basis of glancing at pages of very very pretty individuals with very long hair all dressed in robes -- and I think it may be historical. Or maybe fantasy -- the back cover says someone has "new powers." It's about people in love against some kind of big background; I'm pretty sure of that.

The Twelve Kingdoms 3: The Vast Spread of the Seas is a light novel by Fuyumi Ono, not a manga at all. It sounds like a changeling fantasy -- there are two boys, each in a different world from the one he was born in and raised by strangers -- but the back cover doesn't say or imply these boys were actually switched for each other; it just sounds like chance that they swapped worlds. I don't know the series -- this is the third novel, as you might guess from the title -- so you're on your own from here.

I'm deeply confused about Tsubasa: Those with Wings, Vol. 3 by Natsuki Takaya (still the creator of Fruits Basket). I've seen something called Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE, from the CLAMP collective, and this doesn't seem to be related. (Is "Tsubasa" just some random Japanese word, like "sword" or "pomegranate"?) In this winged series, "The Tsubasa" is some kind of a thing, created by humans but with massive powers that various people fight over. (Over near the Reservoir, it seems to be a person's name.) Again, I'm entirely confused, and so just note that this thing exists, whatever it is.

And last from Tokyopop in November is Bloody Kiss, Vol. 2 by Kazuko Furumiya. There's a sword on the front cover, reference to a high-stakes tennis match on the back, and at least two vampires inside -- sounds like a typical Japanese highschool story to me! I have a sneaking suspicion that there's some deep breathing in this one as well, between the "ordinary girl" heroine and the obligatory dashing vampire.

Whew! That was the manga pile for this week, and now back to other things.

In the "seen again" category, there are two books that I saw in galleys (and haven't yet read) that are now finished books:

• It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies!, a songbook for a very different kind of Christmas by Michael P. Spradlin with illustrations by Jeff Weigel. Look for it next to the checkout wherever you buy books starting on the 27th; it was published by Harper.
  
• Sasha, the first in the fantasy series "A Trial of Blood and Steel" by Joel Shepherd and published by Pyr. It's hitting stores on the 20th.
  

I also have a self-published fantasy novel called The Demon Queen and The Locksmith, by Spencer Baum. (No relation to Lyman, as far as I can tell.) According to the back cover, it's a bout a teenage boy in a small New Mexico town who discovers that he's a "Hearer" -- one of the few (despised and outcast) who can hear a hum from a mountain north of town.

Steven Erikson has lapped me by an entire book despite the fact that he has to write several hundred thousand words for each of those books, and I only have to read them. I don't know if I'll manage to read the previous book (Reaper's Gale) before Dust of Dreams is published by Tor -- I am seeing it in galleys, so there's an outside chance that I can read both of those huge books to catch up before Dust is published -- but I do very much want to read both of them, and the impending tenth and final book of the series, The Crippled God, which will probably be along in another year. You know, it's just possible that Steven Erikson outputs as many words a year as supposedly more "prolific" writers like James Patterson and Nora Roberts; it's just that his words are packaged into bricks five or six times as large as those other writers'. Another interesting note: the spine of Dust of Dreams says "January-10," which I took as the publication date, but the back cover, which reprints the catalogue page, says that it's not coming until April (in both hardcover and trade paperback).

Christopher Hart wrote and drew Superheroes and Beyond, a book about how to draw overmuscled ubermenschen in the currently popular style. It's Hart's ninth book of how-to-draw-comics instruction and Watson-Guptill will publish it in November. I'm a cynic, so this looks to me like a huge catalog of exactly the sorts of cliches -- poses, actions, drawing styles, costumes, character types -- that I'd prefer to see expunged rather than taught to a new generation of still-innocent drawing students. But I suppose there are hundreds or thousands of young men (and maybe three or four women) who really want to draw this kind of lowest-common denominator comics, and maybe even a few with higher ambitions who want to know how to do this if they have to. Still, I'm not happy to be living in this world.

Del Rey sent me a copy of the "zero issue" -- and how I wish we could get rid of that utterly stupid concept -- of their comics adaptation of the Stephen King/Peter Straub novel The Talisman. The adaptation is by Robin Furth and Tony Shasteen, and is hitting better comics shops on the 21st. It has a flimsy sixteen pages for a low single buck, which I suppose is fair.

Last for this week is a smutty book -- perhaps that's why I buried it at the end? or maybe it's just the largest, so it stabilized the pile when I stacked everything up to write about it -- which is itself an adaptation of an equally smutty book. NBM's Eurotica imprint has reprinted Guido Crepax's comics version of that classic sweaty-palms book, "Pauline Reage's" The Story of O. (I remember sneaking peeks at the novel, in its then-current all-white-cover form, in a bookshop in Coconut Grove back in the summer of '85 -- some books you remember.) Crepax's O has been published before, in parts, but this is the first US edition to be in one hardcover volume.
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Listening to: Lindsay Jane - I Can't Rescue You
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Everyone in the world has regrets. The only real choice in life is to have most of your regrets be things that you did do, or things that you didn't do. The men in the heavy-metal band Anvil -- the center of the documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil -- are in the unhappy position of regretting the things that they had no control over, and so aren't sure if they did right or wrong.

Anvil was an up-and-coming back in the early '80s, just before that big wave of thrash/death/etc. metal really broke with Megadeth and Metallica and so forth. There's a montage of famous metal musicians, early in Anvil!, all talking about how great and groundbreaking Anvil was back then, and how they upped the game for everyone. (One may consider that these men are mostly being polite and charitable, depending on one's opinion of Anvil's music as shown in the movie.)

But Anvil never happened -- maybe because they were from Toronto, maybe because they were always on small labels, maybe because they never had a decent manager, maybe because of bad luck, maybe because their records never sounded as good as they could have, maybe because their songs just weren't good enough, maybe a thousand maybes. But the core of the band -- Steve "Lips" Kudlow, the singer and guitarist, and drummer Robb Reiner -- stayed together. At the time this movie was filmed, they were both in their early fifties, and had been playing together since they were both fourteen -- most of that time as Anvil.

The movie is then something like the portrait of a long-term marriage; Kudlow and Reiner have been together longer than most marriages, and have been that close most of that time. Kudlow is more annoyed by the failure of Anvil than Reiner is -- they hew pretty close to the stereotype of hair-trigger frontman and phlegmatic drummer in that. It's not the story of their failure -- they didn't exactly fail, anyway, just didn't succeed in the way that they'd hoped for -- but an examination of what its like to still be chasing that rock 'n' roll dream in middle age, with wives and kids and tedious day-jobs. Kudlow and Reiner are like the guys in ten thousand bar-bands across the civilized world, except that they saw that brass ring, and got close enough to almost touch it.

Anvil! has all the things a good rock movie needs to have -- the disastrous tour, led by the hard-working but overwhelmed manager; the big fight during the recording of the make-or-break comeback album; the interviews with die-hard fans; the montage of Big Names explaining why we should care about Anvil; vintage footage from when everyone was younger and had all their hair. If we sometimes get the sense that Kudlow in particular has seen too many rock documentaries and VH1 reality shows, and is trying to live the life he thinks he ought to have rather than the life he has, that's only to be expected. This is rock 'n' roll. It has to be bigger than life, or else it's nothing.
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Listening to: Local H - Hey, Rita [Live]
via FoxyTunes

Because I Haven't Posted Anything Silly In a While, and Because It Is Saturday Evening

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Garrote of Reasoned Discussion.

Get yours.

The Book of Vice by Peter Sagal

The vice beat is of perennial interest to writers and reporters, precisely because it's of such massive interest to readers. As Sagal writes near the end of this book, "God knows there are people who are having more fun than you, who are having more and better and frequent and more gymnastic sex than you are, who are enjoying adrenaline thrills and indulgences you can't even imagine" -- and the point of books and articles and TV shows like this are to poke around and see who those people are and what they're getting up to.

The Book of Vice is yet another tour of the world of sin, as usual written in a tone that suggests that the writer himself has no previous connection or understanding of any of this stuff -- perish the thought, he's an upstanding citizen, a quiet square type content to lick his stamp hinges or do something equally innocuous with his spare time -- but that he will penetrate this world and struggle through to its core in order to bring back salacious stories and anecdotes for his readers, who are innocent and normal, Just Like Him. This always feels like protesting too much -- Sagal wrote a whole book about sin, after all, and spent a good portion of the past decade researching and reporting and writing on the activities in this book, which shows he clearly has a certain interest in the subject -- but Sagal does come across as the required Normal Guy...though that does mean that the Normal Guys all deeply want to know what the non-normal are up to.

That's true, of course -- we do want to know what those people are up to in the other room, since we do have the lurking suspicion that everyone, or at least a lot of someones, are having massively more fun than we are -- and Sagal is polite enough not to rub our faces in it. But we are reading The Book of Vice because we want to know about swingers and porn and strip clubs and gambling and, perhaps, we'll pretend we're mostly interested in the non-salacious chapters in this book (on conspicuous consumption, lying, and the molecular gastronomy of the restaurant Alinea), but doing so would fool no one.

Sagal has that self-deprecating, I'm-just-a-mensch voice that goes best with this material, and The Book of Vice doesn't too obviously betray its origins as a series of magazine articles. (Books like this nearly always are assembled out of magazine articles, possibly because magazine editors are just as eager about sin as book editors are.) I'm afraid that The Book of Vice doesn't live up to its subtitle -- "Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them)" -- since it assumes that the reader is, like Sagal, doomed to forever be outside the circle of people who do these things. It's a sobering thought, but, in this world, there are those who do and those who read about.

The individual chapters are each pleasant, short explorations of one particular kind of vice -- or, to be more precise, of one place or person that is an exemplar of that kind of vice. (Sadly, Sagal didn't cover the canonical seven sins, particularly since he comes back to Lust several times.) They're journalistic rather than expansive -- Sagal is looking at these people, in this place, and explaining what they're doing. (And, yes, then drawing the usual journalist's giant conclusions about everyone in the whole wide world.)

All The Book of Vice can really do is confirm your suspicion that there are people out there having more fun than you are -- but it does so entertainingly, and Sagal is a fine guide to the worlds of sin and depravity, particularly since he makes no claim to be part of that world. This is a frivolous book, but that only makes it more sinful itself -- and therefore better.

British-Style Book Price Wars Come to The US

[from this Wall Street Journal article; go there for further details and reaction]

Wal-Mart's online division announced yesterday that they will sell ten top November hardcover books for $10 apiece, including Sarah Palin's memoir Going Rogue and the new Stephen King novel Under the Dome. Those ten books will also have free shipping, and Wal-Mart will also sell 200 hardcover bestsellers at 50% off cover price.

Amazon quickly countered, matching the $10 price on those ten books...and then Wal-Mart dropped their price on those books to $9.

Wal-Mart's CEO was quoted as saying "If there is going to be a 'Wal-Mart of the Web,' it is going to be Walmart.com." In other words: here, as in other categories, Wal-Mart is willing to lose huge sums of money to buy market share and muscle out the competition. The question is whether their muscle is sufficient to beat Amazon, which has been dominant in the online retail space for ten years.

Obviously, this is good for consumers in the short run -- lower prices are always good for consumers. But it's bad for publishers, and will be bad for the ecology of books in general; a world in which Wal-Mart sets priorities for bookselling is not a healthy one. As everyone in the business knows, prices that low either mean the retailer is selling at a loss (likely in this case, for now) or that the retailer is pressuring the publisher for ridiculously high discounts (which I expect to see soon, as has happened in the UK).

It's probably vain to hope that consumers will deliberately pay more for books, particularly in this economy, but that's what we're left with. Wal-Mart, among other things, doesn't report to bestseller lists or BookScan, so it will be difficult for publishers to even gauge how effective this promotion is -- they'll be able to tell how well their books did, if they are lucky enough to have a book at $9 from Wal-Mart, but they won't know how that compares to the other titles, or how it fits into the overall sales picture.

No good will come of this, mark my words. We'll be in as bad shape as the Brits within three years. It might be time to move to a saner, more stable industry, like sheep-farming or riverboat piloting.

Update, Oct. 20: Since the above, Wal-Mart lowered its price on those books by a penny to $8.99, to remain the lowest price.

And then yesterday Target entered the picture; they will sell seven of the ten books in question for $8.99, with the other three following "in the next few days." Wal-Mart again countered by dropping their price a penny.

The leaderboard as it now stands:

Wal-Mart: $8.98
Target: $8.99
Amazon: $9.00

I wouldn't expect to see B&N or Borders/Walden try to compete in this area, but we seem to have entered a new silly season, so I may be wrong.

Publishing opinion generally believes that these three accounts are buying the ten books in question at regular discounts -- probably the highest available under their discount structure, on the order of 60% off suggested retail price -- but are not getting British-style 70-90% discounts. Since the books in question are priced in the $24-$35 range [1], the general assumption is that these accounts are getting the books for between $9.60 and $14, and thus losing money on every sale.

But if this becomes more than a one-time pissing contest, these accounts obviously will start demanding higher discounts for programs like this, and will be able to play publishers against each other in their attempts to get those discounts. Wal-Mart in particular has long experience in those kinds of negotiations.

[1] Why on earth is the new Stephen King novel Under the Dome priced at $35? I know it has "A Novel" after the title, which is usually good for another two or three bucks, but that seems exceptionally high for a popular novel.

[update via a new Wall Street Journal article]

Quote of the Week

"The subject of what women look for in a partner is ripe for further research. For example, in surveys 72 percent of women claim that "a good sense of humor" is the most important factor. Yet one High Street chain of sex shops now reports sales of over two million vibrators a year (Ann Summers Press & Marketing Pack, January 19, 2005). Assuming an average product life span of seven years, by 2015 there will be more vibrators in the UK than there are men. Presumably they are not all being bought for their ability to make women laugh."
- footnote 2, section 11.2 (on p. 90) of Anthony Strong's novel Chemistry for Beginners

No One In the World Ever Gets What They Want and That Is Beautiful

"Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men."
- Stephen Marche, "What's Really Going On With All These Vampires," Esquire
via Booklsut

Movie Log: The Brothers Bloom

There's one brother named Bloom in The Brothers Bloom -- the other one is named Stephen -- which is only the first odd and confusing thing about this film. (It's self-consciously artsy enough that I feel compelled to call it a "film" rather than a "movie.") The two brothers are con men, as we learn when we see them as boys in the pre-credit sequence, learning their trade.

The next odd and confusing thing about The Brothers Bloom is the question of when, exactly, it's set. The characters wear clothes that are mostly inspired by the '20s and '30s -- black suits and hats for our heroes, similarly classy and non-contemporary looks for the rest -- and take steamships to cross the Atlantic. But there's a conspicuously modern sports car, and other touches make it clear that this is not set in the past. Perhaps it's set in some alternate world, or just a more stylish version of our world. Perhaps the movie itself is a complicated con game?

After those oddities, the rest of Brothers Bloom's stylish touches -- such as Bang Bang, the Japanese girlfriend/sidekick of Stephen, who says, I believe, precisely two words of dialogue in the course of the movie, or the semi-etched-on-glass, semi-scrawled-on-slips-of-paper occasional intertitles -- go down easily. Brothers Bloom is a movie confident in itself, and one that knows how to tell a story. It knows, for example, that if you do something repeatedly, you really should do it three and exactly three times. It knows that good stories set things up carefully, and then leave it up to the audience to recognize the payoffs. And it knows, most of all, that what we want is to watch fascinating people doing interesting things.

This is a story about con men and their cons, so it wouldn't do to talk too much about the plot. There are surprises and grace notes, cons revealed and cons left assumed, gunfire and explosions, fire and fake blood and real blood. Stephen and Bloom are young in the pre-credit sequence, and in their late thirties in the main plot of the movie -- Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) fully in possession of his powers as a storyteller and artist in confidence, Bloom (Adrien Brody) conflicted, depressed, and perpetually threatening to go straight. And Penelope (Rachel Weisz) is a gorgeous, vastly wealthy young woman whom they come into contact with.

Brothers Bloom is a deeply self-consciously stylish movie, very much in love with itself as a storytelling vehicle -- note, just for one example, how those three main characters are lightly borrowed from Joyce's Ulysses -- and it lives up to its own image of itself almost entirely. All the flash and stage patter does make it a primarily superficial movie; the emotional truths here are all familiar ones, so as not to detract from the glitter and shine. The ending reaches for emotional depth, but doesn't quite achieve it -- Brothers Bloom had spent too much time being slick and witty to be able to stretch that far back in the other direction -- but it is fitting and poignant, which is good enough. Brothers Bloom is a quite good con-man movie, for all the fact that it's trying so very hard to completely transcend being a con-man movie in the first place.

I'm Hiring Again

Once again, I'm looking for a Marketing Assistant, to work with me and my boss (and with two other Marketing Managers) to support a high-volume, high-energy line of books for finance and accounting professionals. (We're not everything in this section, but we're a lot of that stuff -- 300-350 ISBNs a year.) We're looking for the usual motivated self-starter looking to get into publishing, and also (preferably) someone with some knowledge of and/or interest in finance, economics, and business.

If that job sounds like a good fit for you, drop me an e-mail.

Note that this is not editorial, not the pretty-pretty fiction side of the business (which has been shedding jobs for the last year or so), and not glamorous. It can be a lot of fun, though, and Wiley is a great company to work for, with lots of smart, motivated, interesting people doing excellent work.

Social Networking Policy

This is one of those posts that I'll just link to for eternity, and probably only amend very slightly as necessary. It's always been clear in my head, but I doubt it's as clear outside that space.

Anyone can read this blog. Anyone can comment on this blog, once they jump through the minor word-verification hoop. I've only deleted spam comments so far, and I intend to only delete spam comments -- that's not an invitation to test my limits, though. There are no in-group-only posts here, and there never will be.

On Twitter, I don't auto-follow people, but I do check out those who follow me, and have followed some. I don't keep up on Twitter nor tweet as much as I think I should, so it's very likely I haven't seen anything specific that "everyone knows about."

After some waffling about, I'll accept any friends on Facebook. I haven't yet deleted anyone there, but the day may come. I also spend very little time directly on Facebook; it's mostly a port of this blog and the Twitter feed.

On LinkedIn, I only connect with people that I have a professional connection to. If I don't already know you, I won't connect to you. If we've worked together and I might not remember you, please feel free to ask to connect and remind me of who you are. Authors do count as people I've worked with, as long as we've been connected through a particular book at some point.

My e-mail is relatively public, and anyone can e-mail me. I may not always respond -- quickly or ever -- though.

I'm not active anywhere else; there are plenty of other Andrew Wheelers in this world (and at least one other Hornswoggler), but they're not me.

Another Sign of the Publishopocalypse

Thomas Nelson jettisons editorial control for a new imprint, West Bow Press, which will be entirely packaged by "self-publisher" Author Solutions.

One more time: money flows towards the writer. And if you pay a company to publish your book, neither you nor they can be said to "self" publish anything.

More From the Top Shelf

I bought a bunch of books from Top Shelf from their recent sale, so let me talk about three of them quickly together:

Tales Of Woodsman Pete by Lilli Carre -- Tales is the first book by Carre, who has since had The Lagoon published. Lagoon was a full-fledged graphic novel, and it was impressive -- even if I didn't quite think it was entirely successful. Tales is a rawer, earlier, more DIY kind of work; if it doesn't collect some minicomics it might as well have. It's a small-format book, about 5" x 7", with under eighty pages of comics. The stories are mostly about the solitary fellow on the cover, who is Woodsman Pete. He lives alone somewhere deep in these nameless woods, with only his taxidermy animals and his impressive beard to keep him company, but he keeps up a monologue much of the time, generally in the vaguely philosophical area with digressions about his dead wife and anything else that comes into his head. Tales also has stories of Paul Bunyan, the legendary giant tree-feller, who has a very similarly toned monologue -- though he's primarily worried about killing women accidentally, and his place in the world -- though he does talk to his blue ox, Babe, and so gets responses some of the time. There isn't a lot of range to Tales of Woodsman Pete; it's wistfully thoughtful all the way through, with minimal activity, and if it was much longer it would wear out its welcome. But it's just fine for its length.


Lone Racer by Nicolas Mahler -- Unlike the other books of Mahler's that I've seen -- Van Helsing's Night Off -- Lone Racer is not wordless, though Mahler's character designs are as idiosyncratically deformed here as in the other book. Lone Racer is that big-nosed fellow on the cover, our first-person narrator. He used to be a famous race-car driver, back when he won regularly. Now he's older and slower, with younger, more fearless drivers passing him all the time, and so he doesn't win anymore. He's depressed about that, and about the fact that his wife is in a hospital, and spends much of his non-racing time hanging around in a bar. Lone Racer isn't as amusing and oblique as Van Helsing was, but it's still pleasant; Mahler has a light touch and never lets this story get as serious as it might.


Trenches by Scott Mills -- This one is a WW I epic told entirely in what looks like newspaper strips -- they're usually placed on the page in a 2x2 grid, but the relentless closeups and the few panels per page give the reader an impression of seeing a big story through a keyhole. Mills' art is loose, energetic and appealingly cartoony, all expressive squiggly lines and carefully placed tone, but his camera stays close to his figures at all times. The story follows two brothers from Hull who become soldiers in 1914 and their (clearly more aristocratic) commanding officer from London. The war, of course, is hell, and no one makes it back unscathed. But Mills' art, and particularly his choice of framing, doesn't serve this story as well as it might -- his dialogue and dynamic art is fine, but it's as if he's staged the Great War in a shoebox.

DIY Bookscanning

Another comment that I'm dragging over here to make a post; from this adoring look at a homebrew bookscanner at The Millions. Needless to say, I'm not as happy-go-lucky as they are:

You know, there were plenty of people who created homebrew gadgets to cut those large plastic packages off of CDs in stores, or to make a Faraday cage in their pockets to foil detection systems, or to play tones into a pay telephone to get free calls. All of those people were ingenious, and all of them made neat gadgets.

And they were also all thieves, using their ingenuity to steal things that didn’t belong to them. Google and this guy are just the latest manifestations of that impulse — they’re yet more people who will do anything to avoid having to actually pay for the things they want. (Reetz admits that he started this project because he was “appalled by textbook prices” — he wanted something, but preferred not to pay for it.)

And what, exactly, is a “book-scanning special op?” Is that a clandestine mission deep into the heart of the “enemy” — a bookstore or library — to copy secretly something that he doesn’t have the right to?

Is your next post going to be an adoring look at the ingenious ways one can abstract valuable books out of rare book rooms and antiquarian booksellers? And if not, why is that kind of book theft not the one you choose to glamorize?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/10, Part Two: Everything Else

See the earlier post this morning for all of the weekly introductory fluff; this post contains thoughts and notes on the review books I received last week that aren't being published by Yen Press. And so I'll dive right in:

There's a new edition of Fritz Leiber's great seminal urban fantasy Conjure Wife -- it's from 1943, two to three generations before all these Janie-come-latelies, with their tramp stamps and high heels, crouching on the covers of their books (pardon me if I sound like an old coot, but this really is one of the great little-known predecessors to the modern genre) -- from Tor's Orb imprint. It was published September 29th in trade paperback, which means it should be available everywhere now. Conjure Wife isn't quite as good as Leiber's later urban fantasy novel Our Lady of Darkness, but it's a fascinating novel of magic and power struggles, and an eye-opening look at a pre-feminist conception of female power.

Steven L. Kent's "Clone" series for Ace rolls along into a fifth volume with The Clone Betrayal, a November mass-market paperback. I haven't read any of 'em, but I expect that they're filled with slam-bang military action the way you like it.

Also from Ace in mass-market in November, and also the latest in a military SF series, is Kris Longknife: Undaunted by Mike Shepherd, the seventh in that series. I similarly have no informed opinion about these books, since I haven't read them either.

Devon Monk's urban fantasy series about Allie Beckstrom, a magician and a magic-policing Hound, hits a third book with Magic in the Shadows, coming from Roc in November. I'm now zero-for-three on these Penguin series, for those of you keeping score at home.

And DAW's anthology of the month for November is The Trouble With Heroes, edited by Denise Little, which features 22 new stories about great heroes seen in a "behind-the-scenes" way, by mostly the usual suspects from previous TeknoBooks anthologies. (Some of them are medium-sized names, like Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Laura Resnick, but I see the same names in these books very regularly.) The interesting thing with Heroes is the cover, which I can't quite figure out. Is the smiling wench supposed to be someone who's charmed the unseen hero out of his armor? Is she his maid, cleaning up after him after he came home from the wars? She's got a vaguely harlot-esque air, but I can't quite figure out who she's supposed to be or what she's doing. Please leave any suggestions or ideas in the comments below.

Switching from prose to comics for a moment, I have here a new graphic novel by Jesse Lonergan, Joe & Azat. It's loosely based on Lonergan's own Peace Corps experiences in Turkmenistan, and is about a young American in (yes!) Turkmenistan. What little I've heard about Turkmenistan makes it sound fascinating -- they've got a self-obsessed dictator who's slowly renaming everything (down to the days of the week and the months of the year) after himself, his mother, and the country. Joe and Azat will be published in November by NBM.

I have two books this week that I've seen once before: first is Prince of Stories, a guide to the fictional worlds of Neil Gaiman by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden and Stephen R. Bissette, which is coming in a new trade paperback edition from St. Martin's Press on October 27th. So if last year's hardcover was too rich for your blood, this one may be just right.

The other return engagement is James Enge's This Crooked Way, his second novel about the wandering rogue Morlock Ambrosius -- I saw it as a bound galley a few weeks ago, but it's now a real book, published October 6th from Pyr.

Harry Turtledove's The Golden Shrine is the third book in the prehistoric fantasy series that also includes Beyond the Gap and Breath of God; Tor is publishing it in hardcover tomorrow. Interestingly, the book itself makes no mention that it's the third in a series -- I hope that doesn't mean that the series isn't doing well, since I liked the first one quite a bit. Wikipedia seems to think that this series is a trilogy, but the book -- being silent on the whole part-of-a-series question to begin with -- has nothing to confirm or deny that.

Time Travelers Never Die is, if I'm not forgetting something, Jack McDevitt's first standalone novel since Infinity Beach in 2000. It's also, as you might guess from the title, a time-travel book. I've liked all of Jack's books that I've read, though some people do fault him for being excessively old-fashioned. I haven't read a McDevitt novel in several years now, I'm surprised to notice, so I might make a run at this one.

Katharine Kerr has been writing novels about the fantasy realm of Deverry since her first novel, Daggerspell, back in 1986. But her new book -- The Silver Mage, which is also the fourth volume of the current sub-series, "The Silver Wyrm" -- is being billed as the last-ever, concluding book in that long series. So if there's anyone out there who has been waiting for the end to finally get started on Daggerspell, this is your official notice.

The Dragon Book, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, is a major original fantasy anthology, being published by Ace in hardcover on November 3rd. It's got nineteen new stories by writers such as Kage Baker, Peter S. Beagle, Tad Williams, Harry Turtledove, Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee, Andy Duncan, and the folks listed on the cover. For the benefit of the Anthology Cops, I'll note that ten of the stories -- just over half -- are written or co-written by women, so this book is officially Correct on that basis. (Or perhaps not; I'm sure there's someone who will insist that anthologies need to over-represent women for some span of time -- possibly corresponding to that female complainant's expected short-fiction career -- to make up for the sins of the past.) I won't attempt to characterize the contributors ethnically, but that's more likely to provide complaint fodder from writers who did not have stories accepted into this anthology.

And last for this week is a book I've already mentioned once, since I bought it as soon as I saw it: Masterpiece Comics by R. Sikoryak. This copy came to me directly from the fine publicity folks at Drawn & Quarterly, and it serves to remind me that perhaps I should wait until a book has been out in the world a short time before I buy it for myself, just in case I'm on some publicity list somewhere.

And, with that thought in mind, I'll close by mentioning that I'm trying to figure out how long I should wait before I break down and buy Terry Pratchett's new novel Unseen Academicals. I'm particularly torn, since I have in hand another one of those 40% off coupons from one of our major bookstore chains...
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Listening to: Be Your Own Pet - Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle
via FoxyTunes

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/10, Part One: Yen

Every month, there's one week where I get vastly more books in the mail than the other weeks. I have my theories as to why this might be the case -- publishers that have a single on-sale date for most of their monthly books; publicists with a monthly list of things to get done at particular times -- but it's been that way for the few years I've been blogging/reviewing/checking the mail.

This is that week for October, so this week's "Reviewing the Mail" post has been split in half again -- this post will cover books from Yen Press (which either got behind in sending out review copies, to me at least, or is publishing a huge number of books this month) and one to follow in a few hours will list everything else (mostly SFF books, with a couple of graphic novels).

And, again, the potted explanation: I haven't read any of these books yet, and there's a good chance I won't end up reading any specific one of them. So there's no way I'll be able to review them all. But I want to give them all at least a little attention -- I work in the book business, and part of my budget goes to sending books out to reviewers, so I have a keen appreciation of the odds against any specific book getting much recognition -- so I list them like this each Monday, and say whatever I can about them from a very brief perusal.

Even divisions can have sub-divisions, and so this Yen post will be divided, like Gaul, into three parts:

Imprimus: Beginnings

I have three books on hand that begin series, so I'll go through them first; they're obviously the most new-reader friendly, and so are likely to be of the most interest to the most people.

Soul Eater is by Atsushi Ohkubo, and launched out of Yen+ magazine -- I reviewed a lot of the material in this volume when I covered the first three issues of that magazine just over a year ago. It's an energetic supernatural series with spiky-haired boys and curvaceous girls, pretty typical decent shonen material right down the middle of the road. It's being published this month.

Hero Tales, by Hiromu Arakawa, is also launching out of Yen+, but I'm not familiar with this series; it didn't appear in the few issues of Yen+ that I saw. This one is a historical story, with lots of swordfighting and an astrological organizing principle -- there's a legend that there will be seven heroes corresponding to the stars of the Big Dipper, and so those will be the "stars" of this series. I'd expect Hero Tales to be at least moderately popular, since Arakawa has a following from his her previous series Fullmetal Alchemist (which I've never read, but I've certainly heard of). This is also publishing this month.

And last of the debut series is Jun Mochizuki's Crimson-Shell, coming in November. It seems to be contemporary, with evil "Black Roses" and good "Red Roses" battling across the landscape (of England, as far as I can tell), mostly with swords -- though I expect there's some supernatural stuff in here as well. (And if there aren't some suspiciously tentacle-esque prehensile rose vines eventually, I'll eat my hat.)

Secundus: Secundus

The second cluster of books are second volumes -- close enough to the beginning that it should be easy to figure out what's going on, but not quite as new as those shiny first issues. Some of these I've seen before, and some of these I haven't:

And first of those is a book I probably would have bought about a week ago when I went to Borders for their graphic novel "buy 4, get the 5th free" sale -- Sumomomo, Momomo> by Shinobu Ohtaka. (I can say that because I actually looked for this second volume there, and didn't find it.) It's a parody of the usual martial arts manga series, with a hero who just wants to become a public prosecutor but is saddled with a spunky super-saiyan girl who insists she's going to marry him to have super-saiyan babies, and I found the first volume very funny. This second one was published this month -- bug your local store if you don't see it; it should be there.

And then there's Nabari No Ou, which is close to being Sumomomo, Momomo done straight, and probably suffers by that comparison. It's by Yuhki Kamatani, also publishing in October, and was also included in my look at the first three issues of Yen+ last year.

Jack Frost is massively violent, but has a crisp shonen style that makes it go down easily -- it's by JinHo Ko, who also does the art for the only megaviolent Croquis Pop but also writes this one. (And so that implies that he's the one pushing the level of violence here.). I covered the first volume a few months ago; this one is publishing in November.

And I just recently looked at the first issue ofYuji Iwahara's Cat Paradise, which is already coming around with a second volume. It's got a quintessential manga high concept: the student council of a high school that allows each student to have one cat secretly protect the world against ancient supernatural evil, with the aid of those (transforming, natch) cats. This one's also coming in November.

I'm happy to see the second volume of Svetlana Chmakova's Nightschool: The Weirn Books, since I enjoyed the first one, and wanted to know what would happen next. It's an October book, so if you've been waiting as well, you can find it now.

13th Boy, SangEun Lee's love-triangle manga about young teens that I found surprisingly supernatural the first time around, returns for a second volume in October.

I somehow missed the first volume of Ryu Ryang's Sarasah, though I saw the first three installments of the story in that oft-linked Yen+ review. And now a second volume is coming in November.

And last of the second volumes is Sugarholic by Gong GooGoo. I didn't see the earlier part of this story -- and I can be certain of that, since I know I would have remembered that author's name if I'd seen it before. (And I can only hope that it sounds much less silly back in Korea.)

Tertius: The Story Continues

The third and final group of books are later volumes in series; these are probably mostly for people are already know and like this story. (Although Yen seems to keep all of their earlier volumes in print, so interested readers could drop back to the beginning of anything that intrigues them.)

Higurashi When They Cry: Curse Killing Arc looks like a #1 -- it has "1" prominently on the cover, inside a blood-like splash of red -- but it follows the "Abducted by Demons Arc" and the "Cotton Drifting Arc," so it's actually the fifth volume in the series. It probably stands alone better than most fifth volumes, though. Higurashi is another one of those Japanese omni-media properties, with light novels, video games, and probably tea towels and office furniture all bearing the same trademark and featuring versions of the same stories. The manga is credited to Ryukishi07 (story) and Jiro Suzuki (art), and this one will be out next month.

Zombie-Loan, from the Peach-Pit collective, comes in with a 7th volume this month. I've reviewed a couple of the earlier books -- here's a link to my write-up of #4 -- and generally found them entertaining, with a background that either I'd missed the important explanation of or which doesn't bear too much thinking about.

Very! Very! Sweet, a teen romance series with Japanese-Korean political undertones from the Korean creators JiSang Shin and Geo, hits its fifth volume in November. (I reviewed the first one, dog's years ago.) I also note that it's translated by Jackie Oh, who I imagine has already heard far too many dumb jokes based on her name, so I'll forbear from adding my own.

Also hitting a fifth volume in November is YoungHee Lee's You're So Cool, another Korean teen romance comic. I looked at the first volume of this one last year as well.

Coming in at #6 on the Hot Hundred is Legend by Kara and Woo SooJung, which seems to have some fighting early on, but is mostly made up of pages in which people with unfeasibly large eyes and ridiculously over-feathered hair emote at each other for long stretches. I find, from Googling my name and the title, that I reviewed the second volume, which I had forgotten completely. What did we do before Google?

Goong, the slightly alternate-historical Korean teen romance, gets a 7th volume in November. I looked at the second volume some time ago, if that helps.

I haven't read Lee Eun's The Antique Gift Shop, which gets a 9th volume in November. The back cover copy mentions a mermaid princess, a human prince, and a "domineering, morbidly obese ex-ballerina," which could make for a different take on the Hans Christian Andersen story.

And last from Yen this week -- my, they are publishing a lot of books this fall, aren't they? And they didn't even send me Kazuto Okada's Sundome, Vol. 6, which is also coming in November, hint hint -- is the tenth volume of Angel Diary by Kara and Lee YunHee. This is another one I haven't read, so you're on your own here.

And now I'll take a metaphorical break, and be back in a couple of hours with the rest of the mail for this week.
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Listening to: Richard Thompson - Outside Of The Inside
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: O'Horten

The Wife proclaimed O'Horten "slow" right around the one-hour mark, which can be a sign that she's losing patience with a movie. But she claimed to like it when it was done, so I suppose it wasn't too slow in the end.

And -- let's be honest -- an episodic movie about the first days of retirement of a Norwegian long-haul train engineer isn't likely to be a gripping thrill ride to begin with.

O'Horten has been praised lavishly by film critics, but we all know that what professional critics like best isn't always what audiences like best. (Critics, after all, have to see lots of movies, and so generally start to prefer novelty, while audiences often are looking for the same thing with a new wrapper.) I found it slight, and not entirely living up to all of the praise, but it is an amusing movie -- and the dreariness and depression that we expect from Norwegians never arrives.

Odd Horten has been driving trains for his entire life, and he's about to retire as the movie opens. He hasn't done much else in his life; his mother is unresponsive and living in some kind of care, and the closest thing Odd has to a girlfriend is a woman whom he rents a room from overnight in the city to which he drives his trains. Even his co-workers -- who are a pretty dorky lot, I have to admit, identifying train whistles from recordings at Odd's retirement party -- aren't close to Odd.

O'Horten is an episodic movie, but it does build as it goes along -- the episodes aren't completely separated. And things do keep happening to Odd: he finds himself in unusual situations quite a lot in what seems to be only three or four days. Don't go in expecting much of a plot, and you should enjoy it.

Idiots at Work by Leland Gregory

This is a completely frivolous book, the kind of thing that sits next to the cash register and is bought entirely on impulse. And I suspect that many of the stories in it have been circulating for quite a while, and a few of them may not be precisely true. But Idiots at Work is quite funny, and a quick, breezy read, so it accomplishes what it sets out to do impeccably and does it with some style as well.

Idiots at Work is a compilation of over three hundred utterly unsourced anecdotes about stupid behavior on the part of cubicle drones, customer-service cretins, moronic customers, feeble-minded government functionaries, and various others. In fact, if a story involves at least one person doing something that they get paid for, or simply being at their place of employment, it would fit into this book.

Some of the pieces are dialogues -- generally between one normal person and one idiot -- and some of them are short quotes, but most of them are narrative anecdotes, usually just a couple of paragraphs long. All of the bits have one thing in common, of course: they show people being intensely dumb.

Idiots at Work is a perfectly adequate diversionary book, suitable for the smallest room in your house or similar situations -- I read it in snippets at bedtime over a month or so. And if some of the stories strike you as possibly dating back to the mid-'80s, you may well be right...but it doesn't mean that they're not still funny.

Update: And speaking of idiots, I had to delete a spam comment that came in right after this posted. All spam comments get deleted, folks or bots, without fail. So just go somewhere else with your tinned meat products.

The Idler's Glossary by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell

This is a tedious little bit of pseudo-intellectual fluff, devoted to the proposition that the only life worth living is the frivolous, leisurely one of the idle rich or (more to the point) of the overpaid and underemployed academic. Kingwell provides an introduction which I would have taken as a parody of the grand academic style if I'd noticed even a hint of wit in it, and Glenn brings us a sequence of smug definitions, delineating a world in which only the stupid and dull people actually have to work.

There is a kind of book that fills me with the urge to start lining people up against walls and calling down the revolution; this is one of them.

Admittedly, I doubt that was Glenn and Kingwell's intention -- they clearly were trying to write a frivolous but semi-serious defense of idling, and Glenn does try to differentiate between idleness and laziness in many of his definitions. But the tone of Idler's Glossary is not that of a worker avoiding toil, it's that of a man who thinks the world owes him a living, who views everything else with contempt and disdain. Good for Glenn and Kingwell if they have the means to live lives unencumbered with work, but they can't expect the rest of us, who don't have their advantages, to cheer for them and their ostentatious languor.

Free Mojo Nixon

For a limited time -- they don't say how limited, or what that time is, precisely -- Amazon has nearly everything ever recorded by the king of psychobilly, Mojo Nixon, for free. If you grew up in the '80s, as I did, you might already know who he is. If you grew up later than the '80s, Mojo might be of primarily anthropological interest -- and stop making me feel old, OK?

If you're innocent but interested, I recommend Frenzy.

Later: I had an opportunity to quote the Dead Milkmen again, and I flubbed it:

"If you don't got Mojo Nixon, then your store could use some fixin'!"

Movie Log: Spaceballs

Spaceballs was last week's Family Friday Movie, and I have a bit of warning for anyone else thinking to show this to their young'uns. I remembered all of the dick jokes, and didn't mind them -- it's a Mel Brooks movie; you have to expect that -- but I didn't remember how much swearing there is in Spaceballs. (It's a PG movie, but from 1987, when the standards were very different.) There's one muttered "fuck," a barrage of "assholes" in one scene, an array of other "asses," quite a lot of "shit," several "bitches," and probably a few more I have blocked from memory. (It may be necessary to have a talk with the Things soon about appropriate and inappropriate words, but I hope not -- they mostly won't say "suck" and chastise me when I say "damn." They're really awfully suburban white boys, come to think of it.)

On the other hand, they laughed a lot at Spaceballs and kept it around for another week to re-watch their favorite scenes (ludicrous speed, watching the videotape of Spaceballs, capturing the stunt doubles, "your schwartz is as big as mine," merchandising -- that sort of thing), which is a sign that they really liked it.

Spaceballs is a minor Mel Brooks movie -- everyone knew that at the time, and the two decades since it came out haven't made it any better. It's a parody of the first Star Wars trilogy -- and, along the way, of whatever other SF movies Brooks had seen -- and not a particularly good or coherent one. It is funny though -- there's a good laugh every couple of minutes at least, and a number of really fun scenes. And, really, that's enough for a comedy like this.

Quote of the Week

"'What ho! What ho! What ho!' I said, trying to strike the genial note, and then had a sudden feeling that that was just the sort of thing I had been warned not to say. Dashed difficult it is to start things going properly on an occasion like this. A fellow living in a London flat is so handicapped. I mean to say, if I had been the young squire greeting the visitor in the country, I could have said, 'Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall!' or something zippy like that. It sounds silly to say 'Welcome to Number 6A, Crichton Mansions, Berkley Street, W.'
- P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves, p.79

Movie Log: The OH in Ohio

It would be difficult to completely believe in The Oh in Ohio, a movie that aspires to the quality of sitcom. But it's a pleasant movie with a good heart, and a viewer who can overlook the obvious bits of dumbness and idiot plotting will have a fine time watching it.

Parker Posey is Priscilla, a woman in her mid-thirties whom, we quickly learn, has never had an orgasm in her life. She seems resigned to this, but it's made her husband, Jack (Paul Rudd) comedically and loudly de-masculinized -- although he insists that his sexual prowess is magnificent. (The viewer may doubt this, but there's a later scene in which another character fails to bring Priscilla to an orgasm despite what's clearly a lot of effort and six near-misses, so it's quite possible that he has done everything he can.)

After several very sitcom-esque scenes, Priscilla finally buys a vibrator -- one reason, perhaps, that she's never climaxed is that she claims to have never masturbated, either by hand or any external aid. At the same time, Jack is rushing home, since his best friend at work has told him that if he allows his wife to use a vibrator when he's not there, he'll have lost her forever. The inevitable occurs; Jack arrives to hear his wife have a screaming orgasm in the next room via the power of Duracell, and so he walks out of the marriage.

(It's inevitable in a silly, cartoony movie like this, where people don't talk about sex with each other honestly or have any openness to trying new ideas that might make things better. It's thankfully not inevitable in real life.)

Jack starts up an affair with a student -- he's a highschool teacher -- which provides the movie an excuse to flash some perky young breasts at the viewer and to show that Jack does, indeed, have "a magnificent penis." His story continues alongside Priscilla's, though he doesn't really get an ending -- and he certainly doesn't get either of the endings the average male viewer would want.

Priscilla, as is also inevitable in a story like this, throws herself into sex with abandon. The OH in Ohio deserves credit for never calling her a slut, but it clearly both thinks she's out of control and that sleeping with a lot of men (and one woman) is what a woman would of course do if she suddenly became orgasmic in mid-life. There's also a funny but very silly scene in which Priscilla is wearing panties into which she's thrust her cellphone -- if I need to connect those dots for you, this movie may be unfortunately too sophisticated for you.

In the end, Priscilla finds love, or at least her first orgasms caused by another human being, in the person of the biggest name in the cast who seemed most tenuously connected to the plot. The movie hints that this is because of the circumstances before that sexual encounter -- that she finally had to "let go" of her massive self-control -- but never makes this clear.

The OH In Ohio is funny but has an attitude about sex that I would have thought was at least thirty years out of date in 2006 (when it was released) and either a script that either didn't quite come together or a final cut that made the best of the scenes that actually worked. It's a good movie to see and feel superior to, if your sex life is at all better than Jack and Priscilla's, though I do think a lot of male viewers will identify too strongly with Jack and be unhappy with the way the movie turns out.

This Is Me, Jack Vance! by Jack Vance

No one else can write a Jack Vance sentence -- though many have tried, and a few have come close, there's nothing else like the insouciance and offhand wit of the real thing. Vance is 93 now, his guttering eyesight completely gone now and his literary career ended after his final novel, 2004's Lurulu.

But something -- perhaps the publication of the major new anthology Tales of the Dying Earth, in which many of Vance's friends, devotees, and followers among the SFF writers of the 21st century wrote new stories set in Vance's first-created and best known fictional world -- spurred Vance to write one last book. And so he dictated this book -- a memoir less rambling than many, though focused almost entirely on his non-literary life -- to his friend Jeremy Cavaterra, and there's one more Jack Vance book in the world. One Vance book we couldn't have expected, since he never liked to talk about himself.

The greatest pleasures in This Is Me, Jack Vance! are in those pure Vancean sentences and paragraphs, and in reading how Jack himself was once a young man tossed about by life, just like so many of his tough, spry heroes -- beset by arbitrary authority figures and always seeking the main chance. Those pleasures are strongest in the first third of this book, but they recur even towards the end, as in this splendid passage on pages 175-176:

Manny [Funk] and I had one falling-out, deriving from Manny's attempt to play the tenor saxophone and his conviction that he had succeeded in doing so. Sad to say, his best efforts yielded only halting discords which bore only the most casual relationship to the tune being played. This is a situation which, among musicians, always generates exasperation and hurt feelings.

Vance doesn't tell any secrets in This Is Me; at one point he narrates how one man ran off with another man's wife -- in Vance's borrowed car, no less! -- all the while carefully concealing the identities of the parties in question. But he does tell stories, and anyone who's read Vance's fiction knows that he can tell great stories. The matter of his life isn't exciting: he grew up in and outside San Francisco, did odd jobs and avoided WWII before becoming a full-time writer, and then puttered around on boats and took long vacations around the world for many enjoyable decades. But Vance tells stories about the things he did, and the stories are amusing and wonderful, filled with those unique and irreplaceable Vance sentences.

Look, let me find another one for you -- I'll choose a page at random:

On our first payday, I became aware of an inequity which I found irritating.

(page 30)

And one last short paragraph, in which Vance is being queried by the officer of a carpenter's union, on p.84:

The third question I forget, but it might have been something like "Which end of a nail goes in first, the sharp end or the flat end?" I replied that I thought it was most likely the sharp end.

If you've never read Vance before -- and you really should; the New York Times recently wondered aloud if Vance was one of the great writers of our time, and came perilously close (perilously for the Times, that is) to admitting that he is -- you should start with his fiction, something like the omnibus of the first three Demon Princes novels, or a selection of his short fiction, like The Jack Vance Treasury, or even The Compleat Dying Earth, which Your Humble Correspondent had no little hand in the publication of. But, for those of you who already know and treasure Vance, here is an unexpected treat: a sprightly and energetic book from a man of 93 whom we had all thought silent for good.

Incoming Books: October 5

I took a break in my usual busy selling-books-to-accountants schedule -- something I keep to even when visiting interesting cities, as I am now in San Francisco -- yesterday to have dinner with Jacob and Rina Weisman (of Tachyon Publications) at a quiet Mexican restaurant that I'm sure I wouldn't be able to find again on a bet.

But the important thing now is that you ask me what kind of car I have [1]...oops, the important thing now is that afterward they took me to Borderlands, one of the great SFF bookstores of this world. I'd bought from them at conventions before, but I'd never made it to the mothership before. So I met the hairless store cat, browsed for a while, and walked out with two shiny new books from two fine smaller presses:

This is Me, Jack Vance! is by, as you might have guessed, Jack Vance. It looks like a short memoir of his whole life, but even a short non-SF book from Vance is bound to be interesting, and I certainly didn't expect any more books from Vance at this point. (He's ninety years old and has been legally blind for a long time -- and I believe it's well beyond "legally" at this point.) This one was published by Subterranean Press just a few months ago.

Template is a novel by Matthew Hughes that PS Publishing brought out last summer. Somehow I hadn't managed to get it until now -- probably because I prefer to buy small-press books like this in person, rather than ordering them from massive online bookstores like the one I linked to from the title just a few lines ago. (Hey, I never claimed to be consistent.) I think this is related to his previous far-future novels, though it seems to have a space-faring element to it as well.

[1] Funny you should ask; I've got a Bitchin' Camaro!

'Twas Always Thus

I've seen some recent essays/blog posts/scrawled messages on freeway underpasses bemoaning the "recent" trend of books having long subtitles that explain everything about them. Supposedly, such subtitles never existed before very recently, and are a sign that the previously gentlemanly and genteel field of publishing has been overrun by The Wrong Sort, and that some sort of apocalypse is nigh.

Well. I don't actually believe that's true, for any definition of "that."

And I just ran across a great counter-example, mentioned in the letters column of the 9/22 New Yorker (yes, I'm running behind) -- a book from 1917 with the splendid title Henry Ford's Own Story: How a Farmer Boy Rose to the Power That Goes With Many Millions, Yet Never Lost Touch With Humanity.

Even better? It was ghostwritten by none other than Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter.

Publishing: in search of a quick buck since Gutenberg.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/3

Just like I say every week: here are a whole bunch of books that came in the mail last week. Some of them I'll eventually read and review, and some of them, with the best will in the world, I just won't get to. (And some of them, though I'll try not to say which, I'll never want to read.) So I do a post like this every Monday morning, to cast a little light on all of these books, just in case one of them is the book you've been looking for.

To start off, I've got a new anthology called The Secret History of Science Fiction, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel and publishing in November from Tachyon. It sort-of pretends to be an artifact from the alternate world that Jonathan Lethem's 1998 essay "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction" described; one in which Gravity's Rainbow won the 1972 Nebula, literary values conquered SF thereafter, and somehow SF remained a viable commercial genre afterward. (I thought Lethem's essay was a masterpiece of special pleading -- he basically was asking for the universe to be reorganized entirely around his then-current literary ambitions -- and I probably would have written about it extensively if I'd been blogging back then. Luckily, I wasn't, and you all were spared that.) Secret History gathers eighteen stories: all of them literarily ambitious and all of them with some scientific content. But half of them were written by "genre" writers, and half by "literary" writers. Of course, even the genre folks are pretty damn literary -- like Thomas M. Disch and Lucius Shepard -- and the literary writers are ones who dabbled in SFnal-like exercises regularly. The exercise would be more impressive if Kelly and Kessel dug out stories by Larry Niven and Mike Resnick and Stephen Baxter -- hell, how about Greg Egan? -- on the one side and the likes of Raymond Carver on the other. It's an interesting idea for an anthology, and the stories that I know are all good ones, but I'll want to take a close look to see if it's really presenting a specific argument about the field, or just mashing together a bunch of good stories.)

Also from Tachyon, but published in mid-September, if The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology, edited by the magazine's current editor, Gordon Van Gelder. It collects twenty-three major stories from the magazine's past, all from huge names. You can probably read some of those names on the book cover to your left, but, trust me, they're huge -- Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Shirley Jackson. That kind of big names.

(If I wanted to be particularly Erisian, I'd note that the former of those anthologies has 41% women and the latter has a mere 21% women -- and that neither of them has any serious minority representation -- and wonder if the PC Anthology Police would start holding their standard Hate-Ins in their directions. It has been at least a week since the dudgeon has been hoisted on the good ship LiveJournal. But I don't actually want the Diversity Cops to attack these books, so I guess I'm just stirring up trouble.)

I know Pyr is reprinting James Barclay's "Chronicles of the Raven" -- the multi-book sword & sorcery series about a band of adventurers that was published in the UK a few years back -- in order, but I've been seeing them out of order (and, I think, more than once each), and it's been confusing me. For example, this week I have Noonshade, the third book...though I could swear that I've already seen the third book. In any case, this one is coming out in trade paperback October 6th.

Ken Scholes's novel Lamentation was one of the big fantasy debuts of the year back in February, launching an epic fantasy series called "The Psalms of Isaak" and getting the usual burbling love from the usual epic-fantasy lovers on the Internet. (I haven't read it -- I've felt no interest in starting any new epic fantasy series in the last couple of years, actually -- so I can't speak to its wonderfulnesses directly. But the kind of people who like this sort of thing seem to like this particular manifestation of it very much.) And now the second book has arrived in the same year: Canticle, an October hardcover from Tor. I have nothing coherent to say about the second book in a series where I haven't read the first, so I'll just note that this book now exists, suggest that a fair number of people will be very happy at that, and move on.

Last week I saw one of the major graphic novel publications of the fall, The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, which W.W. Norton is publishing. I requested it from Norton, which might have gotten me onto one of their publicity lists that I didn't anticipate -- because this week they sent me The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas. It was translated by Willis Barnstone, and I am utterly unqualified to comment in any way about it. It's a very impressive book, and it's coming October 12th -- if any of you happen to be in the market for a new translation of the New Testament.

And I went shopping on Saturday, since Borders had a "buy 4 graphic novels, get the 5th free" offer combined with a coupon. Three of those five books are for my sons, but the other two are...

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley, which Oni published back in February of this year. Hey, I'm finally caught up! After I read this one, I'll have to wait for #6 just like everybody else.

And then there's Kazuto Okada's Sundome, Vol. 5, the latest in a sexually creepy (or creepily sexual) manga series about a highschool boy and the girl who teases him in yet more inventive and manipulative ways in every story. I've reviewed the first four volumes, but Yen didn't send me this one for review -- understandable, since I bet they don't get much in the way of review attention by this point in a series -- so I just had to pay for it myself. I'm deeply, deeply conflicted about this book, but I want to find out how it comes out -- and that's the test of good fiction, right?
----------------
Listening to: Over The Rhine - Drunkard's Prayer
via FoxyTunes

Fantabulous Fourth Anniversary Excitement!

Four years ago today, I broke down and started a blog -- mostly because I was going to be writing a blog professionally (for my then-employer) before long, and I wanted to get some practice in the form. A very few people know how that turned out, but, oddly enough, both I and the unlikely blog Antick Musings are still here.

And so, like I did for my first, second, and third anniversaries, here's a look back at the year that was, with many links.

Over the course of this fourth year, I've made 880 posts, which compares favorably to 2007-2008 (834), 2006-2007 (841), and 2005-2006 (809). It's solidly above the previous years even after last month's attack of lassitude, which is gratifying. (Wait. Am I saying that I need to post ever-increasing numbers of times each year? Do I really want to be shackled to that particular wheel? I must think about this.)

In case you've wandered here by accident and are wondering if Antick Musings is a personal or literary or publishing blog, the answer is Yes. And No. And Maybe. It's not any particularly defined blog, though I've wrested with the question of what exactly it is in a mission statement and a credo and an explanation. I see that I try to define myself about once a year, which means I'm overdue for my next attempt. This year I did finally explain the long and twisted tale of the real G.B.H. Hornswoggler, though.

My big post last year came at the very beginning of the year, and was linked very widely. It was On Being Skipped, an examination of why some books don't get into a bookstore chain at all and what the appropriate response to that should be. That sucker is still getting hits, which amazes me.

I formulated one law this year: Wheeler's Postulate on Controversy.

I combed through Publishers Weekly's list of 2008 bestsellers to pull out all of the SF/Fantasy/Horror titles I could find and/or identify.

In a year of many "fails" and controversies, I explained why arguing on the Internet is futile.

I wrote something like an obituary when one of the most important writers of the 20th century, J.G. Ballard, died in April.

I had a theory about "Amazonfail."

Every single Monday morning, I post a Reviewing the Mail entry, listing and writing about all of the books that came in the mail for review the previous week. They're all pretty much the same kind of thing, so I won't call any of them out individually. But they do seem to be, collectively, the most popular thing I do here.

I get those books in the mail because I review books -- I used to claim that I didn't do reviews, but I gave up on that stance a year or so ago when it got too silly to maintain -- though, in defiance of best Internet practices, I have still refused to settle down to any one genre or type of book. Among the more notable/interesting/idiosyncratic reviews I did in this past year are:

• Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
• Lawrence Block's Hit and Run
• Douglas Brown's Just Do It
• Matthew Stover's Caine Black Knife
• Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody
• W.E. Bowman's The Ascent of Rum Doodle
• Matthew Kneale's When We Were Romans
• Justine Larbalestier's How to Ditch Your Fairy
• Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers
• David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague
• a paired review I called Two Barrels of Bile
• Walter Mosley's Killing Johnny Fry
• Adam Rex's The True Meaning of SmekDay
• Charlotte Roche's Wetlands
• Terry Pratchett's Nation
• P.J. O'Rourke's Driving Like Crazy
• James Morrow's Shambling Towards Hiroshima
• Gene Wolfe's An Evil Guest
• Michael Lewis's Home Game
• Lawrence Block's Step By Step
• Harlan Ellison's The Other Glass Teat
• Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You
• China Mieville's The City and the City
• and Charles Stross's Wireless

I also continued to review comics, graphic novels, manga, and other descriptive terms for the same things over at ComicMix, and I'll link to a couple of those as well:

• Bat-Manga!
• Guy Delisle's Burma Chronicles
• Jason Lutes's Berlin: City of Smoke
• the Lynda Barry-edited Best American Comics: 2008
• Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library, No. 19
  
• the Ivan Brunetti-edited An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, Vol. 2
  
• Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button
  
• The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel
  
• The Special Edition of Ghost World by Dan Clowes (including a screenplay by Clowes and Terry Zwigoff)
  
• Three Dispatches from the Phillippines
  
• The Showcase volume reprinting Ambush Bug
  
• Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 3: Century, No. 1: 1910 by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
• Darwyn Cooke's Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter
  
• and David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp.
  

I contributed to the website Green Man Review much less often, but I did give them a long-simmering attack on The Witchblade Compendium, as well as some year-end thoughts about the best movies, books, and music.

My posts about movies are generally more cursory and slapdash than my book reviews, but I like some of those as well, such as the reviews for Hamlet 2, The Dark Knight, The Baxter (where I announced the beginning of the "short and funny" regime that has ruled most of my rental-movie selections this year), the extremely silly Wanted, Synechdoche, NY, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Up, Lost in Austen, Flash Gordon, and The Wrong Guy. I also occasionally liveblogged movies, usually when I was feeling both bored and puckish, as I did with Pineapple Express and the utterly ridiculous The Spirit.

Speaking of reviews, within a few weeks earlier this year, I reviewed Coraline in its novel, movie, and graphic novel (the last of six books in that long post) forms.

I do a fair bit of go-look-at-that blogging as well, which I won't link to here. (Linking to links makes the Baby Jesus cry, as I've said before.) I did discover TV Tropes in January, which led to the now-traditional time sink.

But I have done more substantial posts about less-usual topics, such as this Halloween post about the band Harley Poe, a note about the death of pin-up queen Bettie Page (mostly an excuse to post two typical pictures of her winning smile and other amazing assets), a quizzical glance at my weird Turkish spam, a round-up of the spoof posts of April First, and some thoughts about my relationship to my sons' cat.

I am a grump and a stick-in-the-mud on certain grammatical questions, and will insist unto my deathbed that rewriting can solve nearly all of those problems.

I've poked at the New York Times on occasion -- such as trying to explain their muddy bestseller methodology, picking on their (very occasional) SF reviewer Dave Itzkoff over his Anathem review, and then made fun of their bestseller list methodology yet again this summer when they trumpeted that an old Julia Childs book would hit the list for the first time...despite the fact that, by their own rules, old books aren't eligible.

I pondered the nominees for the major SFnal awards: Locus, Nebula, Hugo. And then I re-pondered the winners of the Nebulas. (On I related note, I also attended the Worldcon.)

I had two related projects this year: Saturday Is Bond Day, in which my two sons and I watched the first dozen-and-a-half movies in order, and James Bond Daily, in which I re-read all of the Ian Fleming books, also in order. (I'm the kind of guy who does things in order if humanly possible.)

I will link to my brother's cartoons as often as he makes them, which is very rarely. Hey, Dan, do some more cartoons! You're in Portland now, so you have no excuse not to!

I link to Amazon pretty regularly, in an attempt to make a couple of cents that I can then spend at Amazon -- it's a circle of some kind, I suppose -- but linking to those would be crass in this context. So I'll just be slightly crass, and link to the least likely, and probably most useless -- but most awesomely named -- of all of those posts, the one about the Automotive Part Finder Widget.

I did quite a bit of recycling this year, pulling old posts from the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written (which I seem to have completely abandoned for the last six or nine months, in case there's anyone here who's also there) and from my days on the Straight Dope Message Board. One bit of frivolity in that line was Accessibility, Fantasy, and Harry Potter. Along similar lines, I explained the concept of the midlist, listed things writers believe, wrote a bit about mass-market paperbacks, ponder the question of the next Rowling, repurposed a rewrite of Tolkien a la Monty Python, and considered the Millennium/White Wolf series of Michael Moorcock reprints.

Similarly, I reposted long comments from other places here occasionally, such as this note on a tiny controversy about Amazon reviews, and another piece about comics distribution and formats.

I complained about a bit of specialist terminology in a field not my own: first past the post.

And I did a lot of publishing-industry blogging, some of which shades imperceptibly into my numbers-wonkery blogging, such as in this examination of the economics of Jerry Seinfeld's new book deal. (A similar combination led to my scorn for a cross-country bestseller list.) I also tried to lay down the rules of self-publishing, though actual self-publishers mostly ignored me (as, probably, they should). I kept track of all of the layoffs and other unpleasantness on Black Wednesday, because that's the kind of always-look-on-the-bleak-side person I am. I also took a look at the question "Why Can't a Book Be More Like a Website?" after two much more plugged-in and thoughtful consulting/speaking types got to it first -- and, of course, I felt compelled to disagree with them. Jonathan Karp came up with a list of ways to save publishing, and I disagreed with them pretty much comprehensively. And then I was uncharacteristically positive, looking forward towards Dan Brown's new novel and calculating the coattails effect of the last Stephenie Meyer book. And I finallty tried to be a voice of reason in the recent brou-ha-ha about Barnes & Noble asking (or, perhaps, demanding) that authors link to their website.

Last year, November was very busy. I'm sorry to say that it looks like this year will be even worse. (The Hornswoggler visibly shudders.)

I was a judge for the Eisner Awards (for the US comics industry) this year, which I announced then then mostly mentioned off-handedly. I had a number of review round-ups of books I read for the Eisners, but most of the reading was crammed into the traditional college-cram-session-style judging weekend, which then led to a truly epic-length post about the books I read in March. I also thought about the the process, and the obligatory minor controversy about the nominees, afterward.

As required by the by-laws of blogging, I spent some time doing memes, such as this list of questions to be answered by iTunes, another list of SF novels annointed by The Guardian as must-reads, one of those too-many-questions things the Younger Generation keeps generating, another list of 25 things about me, and four or five very similar iTunes memes.

I had a short sequence of posts under the title Book Marketing 101, but haven't continued, due to time pressures and lack of obvious next topics. (Though I'm still hoping that people will suggest things they want to know about.)

And, as always, I kept one eye on the vast world of Andrew Wheelers, who are all tall and smart and well-spoken, strong men and true ready to serve their country (whichever one that happens to be) and the world to the utmost of their exceptionally high abilities. Won't you put your trust in an Andrew Wheeler today?

Since I now have linked to nearly all of those 880 posts from last year, I think that's enough. Year Five begins right now...as I head off to San Francisco on a business trip, and probably don't post much for most of this week. Such is life.

Movie Log: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs bears very little resemblance to the book on which its supposedly based, but that was only to be expected; the original book is less a story than a shaggy-dog tale without a punchline, and could have sustained a five-minute movie at most. The film that did result is full of obvious morals and Hollywood beats, but it's also much better -- and, most importantly -- substantially funnier -- than I expected. (The book is good at what it does -- it's almost certainly a better picture book than the movie is as a movie -- but it didn't make a particularly promising basis for a feature film.)

And so the movie has a young hero who doesn't fit in; he wants to invent things, but they never work out right. He also has a father who doesn't understand him, and wants him to join the family business (dull and faintly disgusting, as required). There's a golden boy in the town, who always outshines him. So far, so typical.

And, in fact, the beats of Cloudy follow formula pretty closely. The joys of this movie -- and it does have joys, actually -- lie first in the visual wonder of it. The modern 3-D processes are remarkably good, and Cloudy makes good use of them without flinging things straight out from the screen too often. It also follows the common style of having very cartoony human figures in essentially photo-realistic backgrounds, and that works quite well. Another joy is that it's visually and verbally funny a lot of the time -- the plot might be out of Screenwriting 101, but the dialogue is specific and right, and performed by an energetic, happy cast.

There's also one moment -- in which our hero coaxes his weather-girl almost-girlfriend into putting her glasses on and pulling her hair back into a scrunchie, then says something to the effect "You were pretty before, but now you're gorgeous!" -- that won Cloudy a lot of ground in my book. It's a movie that can twist the obvious in a telling and funny way, and a movie that deeply feels the appeal of geeky girls.

This won't play nearly as well at home, on a small screen and without the immersive quality of 3-D. But it will still be a solid movie for kids then, with that very common moral that it's still good to reinforce: you have to do what you're passionate about doing, no matter what other people say. It's not really a movie for adults without kids, but all movies can't be for all people, can they?

Traveling Again

I may have alluded to this before, but I'm off on another business trip early tomorrow morning -- I'll be running a booth at the annual meeting of the Association of Financial Professionals in San Francisco. And, as often happens on trips, I expect that blogging time will be at a minimum.

So I've loaded in a few meaty posts for tomorrow (Antick Musing's fourth anniversary!) and Monday, and I'm just hoping I'll have time to cobble something together for the following days. I'll be back on the east coast late on Wednesday night, but I expect I'll be buried in real work from that point on for several days.

If you're in San Francisco, and I should be seeing or talking to you, it looks like I will be free on Tuesday night, so please get in touch with me. If you're not...then I should be back to regular blogging here by next weekend (I hope).

It's Not Every Week That Has a Manga Friday in It!

Yesterday, I had one of my not-as-regular-as-they-used-to-be Manga Friday posts over at ComicMix, reviewing the first volumes of three series: Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales: Sanctuary, Yokai Doctor, and Amefurashi: The Rain Goddess.
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Listening to: Joshua James - Dangerous
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: Easy Virtue

Easy Virtue adapts a Noel Coward play from the '20s, so it's witty but more essentially serious than the standard for "comedy" these days. The Wife and I saw it recently, mostly because she'll see anything that's a period piece (though she prefers the 19th century) and because I have a weakness for watching attractive people in evening clothes throw verbal daggers at each other across drawing rooms.

It's another one of those stories in which an English aristocrat marries an American -- though, in this case, the American isn't rich, which is usually the case. (The English aristocratic family isn't rich any more, of course, but that's required by the form.) The aristocrat in this case is John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), who had seemed independent and free-spirited to his new wife Larita (Jessica Biel) until he takes her back to the ancestral pile, where he swiftly falls into old habits, namely coming under the thumb of his domineering mother (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Thomas, by the way, is brilliantly playing the part Emma Thompson was trying and failing to do in the recent Brideshead Revisited movie. And I say that as a longtime fan of Ms. Thompson.

The rest of the family consists primarily of two younger sisters, who are there to be a Greek chorus, to turn against Larita, and to form an estrogen cluster with their mother. There's also a mildly Byronic father (Colin Firth), who lost his faith in humanity during The War (the big one, of course), had to be dragged back home by his wife afterwards, and hasn't been good for anything since but brooding and tinkering.

Larita, a race-car driver, does not fit into this very rural household, where the standard amusements are lawn tennis, shooting, hunting, and similar sporty things. And so she slowly becomes one end of a tug-of-war for her husband, against her mother-in-law, and has mostly lost before she realizes what's happening.

Easy Virtue is witty and smart, a strong movie about families and regrets, how the past unstoppably controls the future, and was a real find. The acting is uniformly good, though Thomas and Firth get the best work in. It was essentially missed in theaters, but maybe it will find a more appreciative audience out on video.

Movie Log: The Return of the Pink Panther

I'm still introducing my two sons to the great silly movies of yesteryear through our Friday Family Movie Nights, and we hit The Return of the Pink Panther a couple of weeks ago.

From my cursory Internet researches, I deduced that this was the first of the big silly Pink Panther movies (after the first two funny-but-still-trying-to-be-serious-mysteries movies and that oddball one without Sellers), and so the best place to start with two slapstick-loving boys. It proved to be the case, and I expect we'll move on to the next one within the next few weeks.

The plot is generic Pink Panther movie: that title diamond is stolen, the authorities think it was done by the famous cat burglar the Phantom, and so both the actual Phantom (Christopher Plummer) and bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) investigate the theft in their own way. By this point, Sellers's scenes often had very little to do with the rest of the movie -- at least twice, I assume his script said something like

INT. DAY

Clouseau enters and does something funny with {item}

Luckily, Sellers is funny, often screamingly so. My sons were doubled over a number of times, and went back to watch the best parts through the rest of the weekend. So I count this as a definite success as a funny movie. It's a very loose bag of characters, certainly, but what a comedy needs to do more than anything else is make people laugh, and Return of the Pink Panther delivers that in spades.