Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon by Yves Challand

When you discover a creator, there's always that question: is this work typical? If and when I come back for more, is it going to be the same sort of thing?

It's why genres exist, and why artists tend to stay within genres at least semi-consistently. It's why going electric - or country, or not country, or whatever - is a big deal: those are moments when big chunks of the audience can say "Hey, wait, this isn't what I was looking for" and walk away, possibly forever.

Of course, once the creator is dead, it's only of academic interest: no one's reaction is going to change anything ever again.

Yves Chaland was a Belgian comics creator who died young: his career spanned about fifteen years and he died in 1990 in his early thirties. I read his Young Albert a few months back: that was a half-page strip that ran in Metal Hurlant for about the first half of his career, and turned out to be more radical and political than I expected (in a good, committed, energetic way).

Chaland's most famous series is Freddy Lombard: the hero looks a lot like a grown-up version of "young Albert." (Though that may just be Chaland's style, or even how Belgian cartoonists tended to make their heroes blond young men.) So, going back to Chaland, Freddy was the next step - as far as I can tell, nothing else he did has even been translated into English, so it was an easy choice.

The Freddy Lombard series includes five albums: they've been published both as omnibuses and separately in English, but the current editions, from Humanoids, are individual and digital-only (for anyone else looking). And the first one is Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, originally published in 1981.

Our heroes are Freddy himself and his two friends, Dina and Sweep. They are young, they are poor, and I gather every book sees them wander into some new adventurous situation mostly for those young/poor reasons. Here, they're driving a clunker through the rain on a deserted highway, trying to get to Sedan for some unstated reason. But the car breaks down, and they trudge to the nearest town, Bouillon, and stop at the local inn for dinner and lodging.

Of course, they're broke, and can't pay. The innkeeper threatens to call the cops, but the local Duke, George Bouillon, is also eating dinner there, and overhears the commotion. He offers both to pay for the three and to give them jobs. His famous ancestor, Godfrey of the title, liquidated his holdings in 1096 to fund a Crusade - but the persistent rumor for the last millennium is that he only spent half the money, and left the rest stashed somewhere, with a coded message for his son to say where. George has only just now reunited the two halves of the coded message, and plans to find and retrieve the treasure - but he needs diggers to get into the secret underground cavern he expects.

Freddy and friends agree - this is the kind of series, I think, where they agree to do whatever, because that's how the plots go - and head off to bed in the inn, ready to dig up treasure first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, both the innkeeper and another diner at the inn each separately wring their hands in fiendish glee (well, not quite literally, but close) at the thought of stealing away this famous treasure from the Duke and his new friends.

But Freddy has a dream of Godfrey's era in the night, and that takes up more than half the album - pages 6 to 22 out of 29 - which has a vaguely parallel but separate plot, in which Freddy, Dina, and Sweep help save Godfrey from bandits, become part of his household, and are involved in planning for the Crusade. The two expected villains from the frame story, the innkeeper and the unnamed other diner, also appear here in similar villainous roles.

Freddy is awoken, leaving the historical story/dream unfinished, by a commotion in the morning: the bible with the secret map has been stolen! Oh, wait, no, it hasn't. Great! So they're off to find the treasure.

They do, and it's not what they expected. One of the villains then traps them in the underground cavern, planning to come back much later after they are dead. But there's another way out of the cavern, and a mysterious figure shows it to them before disappearing. So they get out - without a treasure, but free and alive.

Yay! And bang the album ends.

It's a fun adventure story on every page, maybe a bit juvenile but in that vaguely Tintin/Spirou style. The overall plot, though, is the kind that turns out to be pointless in the end: not only is there no treasure in the frame story, but the majority of the book is about the dream, with no plot resolution for that at all. I guess it could be seen as a cynical, dying-fall ending - and maybe that's what Chaland intended - but it's an oddly structured book that sets up a bunch of expectations and then deliberately fails to live up to them.

Weirdly, that makes me more interested in reading more of Freddy's adventures. Chaland was an excellent artist, in his own variation on that Belgian ligne clair style, and he's clearly structuring this story deliberately to confound expectations. Standard adventure stories are a dime-a-dozen, quirky broken ones are rarer and more interesting. Now I want to see if Chaland did that for the later Freddy stories as well.

Audrey Hepburn by Michele Botton and Dorilys Giacchetto

There are a lot of biographies in comics forms coming out these days - the ones I'm seeing tend to be from European creators, mostly French, so my assumption is that it's just a normal part of the larger comics universe there. And, of course, regular prose biographies are common, in the US like everywhere else, so it only makes sense that they would exist in comics form, too.

Except that the comics form in the US has been shoehorned into a genre box for most of its existence - assumed to be only for superheroes and other visually splashy adventure stories, typically at least appropriate for children if not entirely aimed at them.

So I'm both happy to see them, and wonder, just a bit, about what that Euro market for nonfiction bande desinée actually looks like when it's at home. I'm sure that what makes it over to the US is only a subset - most obviously, the books about Americans and people who had major careers in America. So I wonder what those shelves look like, in a random store somewhere in Europe. But I don't know, and probably never will.

All that random thought was sparked by this new book: a solid, if a bit high-level, look at the film career of Audrey Hepburn, written by Michel Botton and drawn by Dorilys Giacchetto - two clearly accomplished, mid-career professionals from Italy whose work I've never seen before. It's a fairly new book: published last year in Europe and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this NBM English-language edition, which is out today.

Giacchetto has a bright, crisp style and an impressive focus on Hepburn's face throughout - she's good with depicting clothing design, too, and draws cartoony versions of all of the main characters while still keeping Hepburn obviously herself throughout. There's a lot of dynamics in her art, a lot of acting on the page in her figures, especially Hepburn. She doesn't slavishly mimic real faces for the other famous people in the book - her costars are often turned half-away or just show up briefly, though we do see a lot of her first husband Mel Ferrer - which also helps keep Hepburn central throughout.

Botton has perhaps a harder job, as he admits in a short afterword. The book is about 160 pages of comics, which is a lot - but still not much for a long, busy career in the movies, and even less for a full bio covering Hepburn's childhood and later UNICEF years. Botton does provide glimpses of both of those ends of her life, but not in depth: his core is that film career, which is what the audience really wants to see.

So we open with Hepburn at twenty, just about to get the life-changing part in Gigi, and there are only brief flashbacks amid the generally straightforward flow of successive chapters. Botton doesn't use captions or otherwise anchor the scenes in years or places, so - particularly for those of us who are not Hepburn fanatics - it may be opaque at times exactly what year a particular page takes place on, or whether we're in London or Hollywood.

But, of course, a more heavily written, caption-filled book would have less space for Giacchetto's art, which would be a great loss. So let me say, like most visual biographies, that this one is mostly for the people who know the general outlines already, who are Audrey Hepburn fans at least in a small way, and who don't need to be told the details.

For example, we never learn when or where she was born, and I don't think her third husband's name - he's an important thematic figure, supporting her in her late work with UNICEF - is mentioned, either. We do get at least a few panels about each major movie, usually with the name of the director and a sense of how it affected Hepburn.

Readers who love Hepburn's movies should jump on this book. Giacchetto isn't aiming to draw Hepburn slavishly, but her panels have Hepburn's energy and verve and style and enthusiasm and boundless smile. And the story is just the pieces those fans most want to see, arrayed well and told clearly. This is a model of the kind of book that knows what it needs to do and does it precisely.

Portions for Foxes: Swansea

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

This week: a quirky-sounding song of unrequited longing - something new and different!

OK, so I do have a clear style of music I like. So sue me.

This one is Red Mittens, from the Portland (Oregon) band Swansea, off their 2017 record Flaws. It's a semi-electronic dive into what feels like high school drama, as the singer stares and and sings to this one guy that she'd never actually say any of these things to in person. I say "sings," but it's mostly spoken, except for the refrain and a few other moments.

It's another song obscure enough that I can't find lyrics online, so anything later is my transcription, and errors entirely my fault.

I want to tell you I love Frannie and Zoey
I want to tell you I'm making a skirt out of neckties
I want to tell you I love....your...nose
But all I do is sit way back in the bleachers 
And watch your body
And I'm away from you by rows and rows

It's all on that level - specific, grounded, trivial-sounding. It's full of telling details of this one girl watching this one guy, who we're pretty sure has no idea, and never saying or doing anything about it.

Yeah yeah...yeah yeah

Take it as an object lesson of what not to do, or take it in remembrance of when you were also young and callow. (Which might be thirty years ago or yesterday, depending.)

Random Quote of No Relevance to Any Major National Figures Whatsoever

Mrs Pett, like most other people, subconsciously held the view that the ruder a person is the more efficient he must be. It is but rarely that anyone is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim, p.220

Books Read: October 2024

As always, this is an index, it's mostly for me, and it's not even useful until I update it after the posts go live. If you happen to be reading this on the Sunday it posted, I hope your life is otherwise rewarding and interesting, because this isn't gonna help there.

Here's what I read this month:

Philippe Coudray, Bigby Bear, Vol. 2: For all Seasons (10/5, digital)

Hervé Bourhis, The British Invasion! (10/6, digital)

Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams (10/6, in The Demon Princes, Vol. 2)

Bryan Lee O'Nalley, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (10/11, digital)

Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, What I Tell You Three Times Is True (10/11)

Howard Chaykin, Hey Kids! Comics! (10/12, digital)

Mike Mignola and Jesse Lonergan, Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea (10/13, digital)

Xavier Betaurcort and Yannick Marchat, New Life (10/19, digital)

Julia Gfrӧrer, Laid Waste (10/20, digital)

Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Library (10/20)

Reza Farazmand, Hope It All Works Out! (10/25, digital)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 4: The Bell Warden (10/26, digital)

John Banville, Snow (10/26)

Juni Ba and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber (10/27, digital)

Charles Willeford, Pick-Up (10/27, in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s)

Rick Parker, Drafted (10/28, digital)

I plan to read more books in November, in case you're wondering.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Sects Can Lead to Breeding

The girls thought the altar and the candles and the Mass very cute; one of them had been sometimes to that kind of service in Cambridge, Mass., at a place she called the Monastery, which Father Chantry-Pigg said was where the Cowley Fathers in America lived, but the other girl and her parents were not Episcopalian, they belong to one of those sects that Americans have, and that are difficult for English people to grasp, though probably they got over from Britain in the Mayflower originally, and when sects arrive in America they multiply, like rabbits in Australia, so that America has about a hundred to each one in Britain, and this is said to be on account of the encouraging climate, which is different in each of the states, and most encouraging of all in the deep south and in California, where sects breed best.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.52

Quote of the Week: Whether You Want Hope or Not

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you, as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

 - Matt Haig, The Midnight Library, p.134

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

It's always a surprise, reading the supposedly-funny books of the past. Some of them still work - for at least some modern readers, and remembering they weren't ever funny for everyone anyway - and some of them can fall into that weird netherworld where the reader can't even figure out what was supposed to be funny.

The Towers of Trebizond is a 1956 novel by Rose Macaulay - the last-published book of a writer born in 1881, a voice-driven book largely about varieties of Christianity and the problems of faith, taking the form of a travel book and mildly satirizing the contemporary world of the travel writer along the way. That's the kind of thing that could easily feel very old-fashioned and fall flat today.

I don't know that I took all of the religious convolutions as seriously as I might have, but the comic material still worked for me, and the narrator's voice - the long run-on sentences piling up like logjams, circling every side of a question endlessly - was lovely, amusing, and deeply engaging in a way I really didn't expect such long sentences and paragraphs could be.

The voice is what makes it work, I think: the characters are mostly driven by manias, from the formidable feminist and Anglican would-be missionary Aunt Dot to her traveling partner, the far-too-High Church Father Chantry-Pigg, to all of the various oddball secondary characters this small group of English people meet in their travels across Turkey, supposedly trying to see if there's scope for a major missionary outreach to bring the locals to the Anglican Church. Laurie, the narrator, is a generation younger than Dot, just as tangled up in doctrinal questions but in a funnier way, and is presenting all of this in her long-winded, show-all-sides-of-the-question narrative to an unknown audience.

(Laurie and Dot are supposedly writing a book about their trip, but Towers of Trebizond is nothing like that book - Laurie's contributions were largely to be illustrations, which the novel doesn't include at all. It could, perhaps, be seen as an expanded, standalone version of the additional prose Laurie was expecting to contribute, the more travel-related material, if the reader is prepared to be very generous.)

"Group of obsessives go somewhere and bounce off the locals" is a time-tested comic plot, and Macaulay gets some good material out of it here. Though, again, this book is so heavily narrated that the bouncing is somewhat muted - this is a book that's funnier about how Laurie tells the reader what happened than about what actually happened. There are amusing moments, and lots of quirky characters, but this is a lightly plotted book - just a succession of day-to-day events, mostly small, that happen to a small cast.

Macaulay does manage to have unexpected emotional depth in her ending, which is mostly unrelated to the rest of the book plot-wise, but deeply connected to her thematic material. And I should also probably mention that Laurie - though in this book at least thirty or forty years younger than her creator - is very much an author insert, and the material of Laurie's life and background is drawn closely from Macaulay's. So this is the kind of comic novel with unexpected depths, the kind that is, at its core, serious about its religious questions without needing to keep them free from ridicule.

Is it still funny, almost seventy years later? I thought so: that's all I can tell you. This sat on my shelf for a decade, as a weird thing I thought I might want to read. Now it's a weird thing I did read, and I'm happy I did so. It's funny but not just funny, and the religious material is handled skillfully and is less parochial than I was worried it would be. You may feel the same.

Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater by Jean-Claude Forest

I like to center the positive, as much as I can, so I'll start out by saying: this book has a single, consistent plot throughout, and isn't a fix-up of disjointed stories like the first book. It still bounces around more than a little, since I think that's the way creator Jean-Claude Forest liked to work, but it's a roughly 80-page comics story from the early 1970s, which is earlier than I thought we'd see something consistent at that length.

So that is commendable, and interesting, and noteworthy.

Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater is still a Barbarella story: everything I mentioned about the first book is still here, to the same degree. It's very talky, and the talk is bafflegab most of the time. The world-building is a weird combination of overly baroque, quirkily uninformed, and entirely nonexistent. Characters are mostly ciphers who do things to make the plot advance another page or three - even Barbarella is, at best, a caricature mid-century "woman" subject to massive mood swings, from lust to anger to sadness, each one overwhelming at the time, in the standard pop-culture "Dames! What'ya gonna do?" laziness.

This time out, we begin with Barbarella as impresario of a circus - a sexy circus, in ways the narrative emphasizes but resolutely refuses to describe or show - in a milieu that seems to be just the solar system, though one filled with "worlds" (I assume habitats and terraformed moons, though I frankly doubt Forest thought that far). This is very different from the galactic scope of the first book's opening, but don't mind that, because a water-breathing man with a teleportation device has come to join the circus, for murky motives, and that will send the circus, for insufficient reasons, to "the obscure worlds," which "supposedly evolved in another space-time."

Like most of Barbarella, this is nonsense, but Forest commits to it: not just regular nonsense, but nonsense compounded and extended into a fantastic frothy edifice, by the time he's done.

Again, the bulk of the action takes place on one world: the spaceship Barbarella and her merry band of circus performers take to Spectra is important as both a method of travel and a plot token, but once they do the bafflegab aligning of time-streams and Barbarella is on Spectra, space-travel is off the menu for the rest of the book.

As in the first book, there are factions with silly names fighting over Maguffins with silly names and male leaders that Barbarella can fuck to get her way, as much as she wants anything in particular beside getting to fuck them. It probably all could make sense to the devoted mind, with enough study, several large sheets of graph paper, and gallons of strong coffee. But the point is that events happen, tables turn, Barbarella goes through all of her emotions (and the beds of most of the other main characters), and everything gets back to something like normal in the end.

Given the time-dilation effects, it should be several hundred years later in the normal universe at the end of the book, and there's a shrug in that direction, but who knows? As far as I can tell, this was the end of the Barbarella stories, and they stopped just as coherently as they began. (Which is: not a whole lot.)

Bottom line: there are very talky, confusing, goofy French comics, whose point was to be "sexy" in a way that will look quaint or pass unnoticed for most modern readers. Forest's art is dynamic and interesting; if you can see it large, and fight your way through the far-too-many captions covering it, that's probably the most intriguing aspect of Barbarella these days.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

I'm usually not one for the positive, heartwarming books, so I apologize if I start taking random unfair potshots at this one. It is positive; it's smoothly and engagingly written; I enjoyed reading it from beginning to end; and I only deduced the exact ending about 20% of the way into it.

But there are a lot of books where you know how they're going to end, aren't there? Every tragedy, most comedies, and a whole lot of drama, especially in genre fiction. Sometimes I think that's what makes a book popular: that the average reader is confident they already know the ending, and relaxes to let the author deliver that to them.

The Midnight Library is an afterlife fantasy; it's probably Matt Haig's best-known and most popular novel. It was a Good Morning America book-club pick, a #1 New York Times bestseller, and has three pages of laudatory quotes at the beginning of the copy I read. It was also published in 2020, a year when I think a lot of people were not just looking for an uplifting book with a predictable ending, but one that let them think about all the different ways their lives could have gone.

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, living in the provincial city of Bedford in England. She never became any of the things she at one point thought she might: not an Olympic-class swimmer, not the frontwoman of a famous rock band, not studying glaciers in Norway, not living with her best friend in sunny Australia, not married to the guy she practically left at the altar, not working in an animal shelter, not anything big, not anything impressive.

Instead, she has one weekly piano student (a teenage boy), she works in the local music shop, and that's about it.

One day, it all breaks. Her cat dies in the street. The music shop owner fires her. She forgets the lesson and loses her one student. Her never-husband sends pestering texts; her brother has stopped talking to her; her former best friend is living her best life in Australia. She decides she can't go on. She doesn't go on.

And she wakes up at the door of what seems to be an infinite library, where it is eternally midnight. Inside, she meets what seems to be Mrs. Elm, a librarian who was very kind to her as a child. And Mrs. Elm tells her the library is filled with books about Nora's life - one very heavy, very painful Book of Regrets, and an infinite number of green-covered stories of other lives. She can pick any one of the green books and fall into that life: if it's right for her, she'll settle in there and forget about the Midnight Library eventually. If it's not right, she'll bounce back and choose again.

Most of the book is made up of Nora going one by one through those major regrets and trying out the life where she did the thing: married Dan and helped run a rural pub, moved to Australia with her friend Izzy, kept swimming and entered the Olympics, stayed with the band and made it big, studied climatology and went to Svalbard with a research team, worked at the animal shelter instead of the music shop, agreed to a date with that nice surgeon who asked her once.

Of course, all of those lives have some good things about them. In a few, she's globally famous. In just about all of them, she's in a physically better place than her root life. But there's something wrong about all of them - her brother is dead, her relationship is sour, or she's just not that person after years of divergence. All of those lives are different because of a choice she made - but they're different in other ways, too. Her choices don't shape the whole world, just send her down different paths - she can't choose the perfect life, because it's not all down to her choices.

(You have probably figured out the ending by now, too. It is the obvious ending.)

She meets another jumper along the way, another person going through multiple lives. He's happy to have the infinite variety, and doesn't think he will ever pick one. Nora isn't happy with that idea, and also has been getting increasingly ominous warnings from Mrs. Elm when she bounces back: she probably can't keep going forever. In her root life, she's lying comatose in her grotty flat, suffering an overdose - time might not be moving in the Midnight Library, but it is moving somewhere, and eventually it will move enough that she will not be alive anymore.

The Book of Regrets gets smaller and lighter as she goes along and realizes she could have been unhappy in those other lives as well - maybe not as unhappy, maybe not unhappy in the same ways, but none of them are perfect.

And, eventually, Nora does need to choose the one life she will hold on to. And it is the one that it has to be.

I don't want to belabor the point: this is a very nice novel that ends nicely. Haig is positive and thoughtful, creating the kind of book that makes you feel happier when you're done - which is often denigrated in literary circles. It is maybe more than a little bit obvious, but many of the best lessons in life are obvious: we all know we're supposed to sit up straight, treat others as we want to be treated, and eat our vegetables. Midnight Library is like that.

Spy Superb by Matt Kindt

Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career - but he's found a new take this time.

Spy Superb has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers follow-up), and that is definitely intentional - but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than he was in his previous stories of spycraft.

This, instead, is a take on the James Bond idea: the suave, omnicompetent operative who can go anywhere, do anything, and always wins out for his side. (Which is, as it must be, our side, the side of freedom and democracy and English-speaking peoples.) Like so many other people doing James Bond takes over the past few decades - most obviously Austin Powers - Kindt makes that idea an obvious fake: no human being could actually do that, so what's the real story?

In Kindt's version - and this is explained in the first pages; no major spoilers here - the "spy superb" was constructed from the beginning in WWII as the perfect operative, by the fictional Half-Huit organization (co-run by the US OSS and their French equivalent). There was an original Spy Superb, but he died, stupidly, in his first mission, an immediate failure.

No matter: the organization realized they didn't need a Spy Superb: they needed the idea of a Spy Superb, and a series of patsies to do the actual work - each one handled by career spies, generally given one small task to do, usually not even aware they were doing spycraft, and often liquidated afterward for maximum secrecy. Then all of the successes of Half-Huit would be attributed to their immortal, unstoppable premier agent.

Fast forward several decades. The most recent Spy Superb has been killed by someone unknown. And a disk he had, containing details of all the previous Spies Superb and other damaging details of the program, is on the loose. So all of those other spy agencies could learn the secret: it was all a trick.

To respond, the masters of Half-Huit activate the most delusional patsy possible: Jay, a wannabe novelist who is the guy on the cover. And their adversaries, sensing something big, send their best operatives: a Russian codenamed "Roche Chambeaux" and a Chinese woman who turns out to be a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, to kill what they still assume is a deadly super-agent.

Jay, of course, believes he is the best at whatever he does: he's the kind of guy who mansplains absolutely anything at the drop of a hat, even though (no: entirely because) he knows nothing about it. He wanders through assassination attempts and globe-hopping adventure, surviving due to luck and his unassailable belief that he's actually good at all these things.

There's a good fight scene early where Jay accidentally kills three highly-trained Russian agents in his kitchen, just by trying to talk to them. After that, the random luck quiets down: I would have liked to see more of that, more of the clearly ludicrous silliness. Kindt instead mostly plays the action scenes straight, having Jay accompanied by a competent agent who wants him alive for most of the rest of the book, and so Jay mostly survives because of someone else's ability rather than his own stupid incompetence.

That's my overall take on Spy Superb: it's fun, but doesn't go quite as big or silly as it could. Jay is an idiot: that's very clear. But we only see his idiocy save him once or twice - it could have been a lot funnier if it happened more often, more obviously, more blatantly.

There's no reason there can't be a sequel, though: even if Kindt doesn't want to use Jay again, the concept means there will always be more Spies Superb, someone else even dumber and less connected to reality. And what we have here is funny - and having it in the same scratchy, rough art style that Kindt uses for his serious spy stories makes it that much funnier.

Portions for Foxes: Laura Stevenson and the Cans

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

One of the great tricks across all media is the tonal mismatch - the chipper fairy-tale tone telling stories of woe and despair, the bright smash-cut movie all about ennui. Done right, it throws the material into higher contrast - sometimes with irony, sometimes a blunt honesty.

This song does something very similar, with a tinkling, cheery opening and mostly conversational tone, as Laura Stevenson (and her backing band the Cans) talk directly to some specific listener, telling what I picture as a girl of ten or so that she needs to be brave and strong for her family.

The song is The Healthy One. That's who Stevenson is singing to. And the title gives away the story, just a bit - if there's only one "Healthy One," what does that mean for the others?

Stevenson doesn't say, exactly. We don't know the timeframe. She implies she may not be singing about today. But the repeated chorus at the end gives us a hint, as the music swells and she belts it out:

And you will live long
You will bury them all in the ground
And your body will grow
You will bury them all

This is a song from 2011. I don't think it had a vogue nine years later - it was too much on the nose for right then. But more time has passed, those of us left are living long. I guess we're the healthy ones, for what it's worth.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 26, 2024

I have one book this week: I bought it from That Internet Retailer soon after I hit the end of the previous Jack Vance omnibus I was working through. I suppose I'm now re-reading Vance semi-seriously, but I'll have to see how far I get. (He wrote a lot of books over a long time.)

Planet of Adventure collects four Vance novels from the late 1960s, a series all set on one planet during (I think) the Oikumene period of Vance's loose future history. A human ship crash-lands on a far alien world, and the sole survivor makes his way across that planet to escape, finding several strange and warlike alien races along the way.

This omnibus is from 1991, and it's a bit odd to see something from the very dawn of my career in the SF field still in print in the same edition all this time later. But, then again, what would you need to change? The series was long-complete even then. And it does look like the cover changed sometime in the past thirty years, from a somewhat blockier, 80s-look Tor font to the current thin lettering.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Character-Building

Even among the summer people there are tensions. When you put enough affluent white people into a closed system, they will turn on each other eventually. That same summer, my wife signed up both of our children for lessons at the nearby yacht club - sailing for our daughter, rowing for our son, She did this because she had taken sailing lessons there herself as a child, and she hated it. She felt out of place and under-rich and scared, and I guess she wanted our children to have similar trauma. It worked: my son got bullied.

 - John Hodgman, Vacationland, p. 165

Quote of the Week: Inevitabilities

Her second favorite game is Go. She loves the feel of the stones. Each time she picks one up, she lets her fingers tell her how much has worn away under Oscar's fingers, under her own,. They are making the smooth stones smoother. There is one black stone with a fracture point, a weakness invisible to the eye, nearly across the middle. She loses track of it sometimes, then finds it again by touch. Put enough pressure on it, and it would break in two.

It will break one day: no matter.

 - Kelly Link, "The Game of Smash and Recovery," p.148 in White Cat, Black Dog