Quote of the Hour: Sadly True

Anything done more than twice becomes an immemorial tradition, and so it's now time for the twice-yearly run of Quote of the Hour.

I pull too many of these quotes from the books I read to use them up in the normal weekly pace, and so this is how I push them out into the world. See the previous installments from December 31, 2022, and July 2, 2023, and December 321, 2023.

 "Old age. I used to think old age was a kind of feather bed you gradually sank down into, but it's not. It's a goddam stone wall you butt your head into till it cracks."

 - Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King, (p. 411 in Novels 1944-1962)

Quote of the Week: Pull the Bandaid Off

We feared drama but we were addicted to it too. Because we were young, we thought we were strong. We thought we were hardened. We wanted the bad thing to happen fast, for the painful moments to be over so we could go on with our normal, boring lives.

 - Stewart O'Nan, Ocean State, p.60

Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

So I've been working on my own derivative version of the Bechdel Test. It's been lurking in the back of my mind, as I've been reading older books by men. I'm sure someone else - probably a woman; men like me take a lot more obviousness to notice sexism than women do - has already created something similar, probably better. But this is where I've gotten to.

There are two kinds of books by men: those in which women are people, and those in which they're not. I don't claim to have made any complete survey of the literature, but the 20th century seems to be full of books of the second kind, which is somewhat disturbing. (My impression is that the 19th was largely the other way.)

This crystalized in my mind - after several Gene Wolfe books recently, among others - when reading the 1968 experimental novel Steps by Jerzy Kosinski, from what I'm coming to think of the core period where a whole lot of men just gave up entirely on the idea of "understanding women." (As if that was a coherent activity to begin with, that "women" were a single thing one could understand - that's part of the "not seeing them as people" idea I'm talking about.)

This isn't a novel of character anyway, so it might not be fair. But the man in Steps is a clear, precise, defined character - my guess, closely modeled on his author. So the fact that the women in it are all cyphers and sex objects and plot tokens is very noticeable. (They might all be supposed to be one woman, as the man is one man. But, since they're none of them defined enough to be anyone, that's a moot point.)

Steps is a novel by courtesy. It's barely long enough to qualify under most definitions - 148 pages in the edition I read. It has no named people in it. It has no consistent narrative or plot. It does have a first-person narrator, but it's not possible that the same person is the "I" of every single section. (For large clumps, here and there - yes.) But it is prose, it is fiction, it is published between two covers - ergo, we can call it a novel.

It's made up of many - dozens - of short sections, the vast majority of them narrated by a first-person narrator, doing different things in different places. They all seem to be mid-century - there's nothing historical - and are somewhat more European-flavored than American, though that's a minor point. It might all be supposed to be set in the same country, but it doesn't have to be. There is a Party that is important in this country, or one of the countries, and it is clearly Soviet in its flavor, postwar rather than the darker more brutal interwar era. (I note here that Kosinski was Polish, born in 1933, and that he emigrated to the USA in 1957, as a young man, and never returned.)

The sections are varied, but the man finds himself in dangerous or uncomfortable situations regularly. He has little power most of the time...though he generally has power over women.

It's the kind of book that gets called a "meditation" or "vision" - that's lit-speak for "nothing consistent." The reader has to assemble any larger meaning himself. 

I found the writing compelling, and the vision of this man interesting. But, at the same time, the focus on sex forced me to realize that the women, or woman, in Steps is not a person - just an element of the plot, or an idea, or a sketch of "woman" for rhetorical purposes. And I'm finding that less and less acceptable, the more I notice it. So that ended up being my major takeaway from Steps: that women are people, and that books should reflect that. It seems a minor point, but it's rarer than I would like.

Fall Through by Nate Powell

This book is already dancing about architecture. So I worry that anything I might say would compound that - painting a picture of dancing about architecture. But here I am, and here I go.

Fall Through is Nate Powell's new graphic novel this year: it has what I think of as his trademark atmospheric, black-background, swirling pages and vaguely creepy, unexplained and deeply embedded fantasy elements. I found myself resisting it more than some of his earlier books: as always, I can only say how I reacted, and note that it's as likely to have been me as the book.

This is the story of a punk band, Diamond Mine. They formed in 1994, recorded a 7", did a bunch of touring, had a following. They lived together in a house, all seemingly in their early twenties. They were part of a wider punk scene across the Midwest and South, with clusters of more-or-less angry, more-or-less young people in every mid-sized town or larger, putting on mostly illegal shows in fields or backyards or wherever and running away when the cops came to break it up. None of that paid - if you actually made gas money, you were way ahead.

Punk, you know?

Jody was one of the four members of the band. She played bass and sang, at least some of the time. She wasn't the leader and songwriter: that was Diana. She wasn't the flashy guitarist: that was Napoleon. She wasn't the quiet, solid-as-a-rock drummer: that was Steff. But she's our viewpoint character.

Fall Through takes place mostly in 1994. But we also see Jody, seeming the same age, or just a few years younger, in 1978, back in what Gen X me thinks of as the actual age of punk. (Punk was a movement. It happened, and ended, like every other movement. Even early '80s hardcore was something else. Everything later was revivals and different things, just like "rockabilly" now isn't what it meant in the '50s.)

How did Jody get from being 18ish in 1978 to being 23ish in 1994? Well, that's the story here.

Most of the book is about a tour. It's the summer of 1994, and the four members of Diamond Mine are in a van, going from town to town to play shows with local acts - again, mostly not legally, and the only way they get paid is if they sell some merch.  Like any tour, it seems to be endless, days stretching on and on, each one like the last. Like it never began and will never end, just a single day, over and over again.

And that may be true. Diana wrote a song - "Fall Through" - and when Diamond Mine plays it the right way, at the climax of a show, they seem to change worlds or times or something. The flap copy calls it "transported to alternate worlds in which they've never existed but their band's legend has." I don't know about that: it all seems to still be 1994, and they have tour dates day after day, which implies their band exists and is known.

Really, it feels like a reset. Maybe different worlds, but not that different from each other. Certainly not the wild swings in time and space the description implies. All still that same tour, the same van, rambling through mid-America during the summer of 1994. More punk shows: one every night, potentially forever. Like August keeps resetting - this time St. Louis, the next time Louisville.

Diana seems to be doing this on purpose. Once there's a frightening figure - coming out of a surrounding cornfield, like a horror movie, during their set - that she clearly triggers the song, the spell to get away from. And it's taken a while, but the rest of the band knows something is wrong.

There are confrontations, but it's all in vague language - "moving forward," "sticking together," that kind of thing. I expect punks to be louder, more demanding - to swear a lot more, for one thing. (I guess these are well-behaved, Southern, second generation punks.)

So the book never explains what's happening or why. They talk around it a few times, but that's all. There's never even a "this band is going to break up" fight or possibility or option: it's as if they're all locked into this, no matter what they want or choose.

The situation does get resolved in the end, and we do circle back to 1978...but the ways and hows of it frustrated me. It's all thematically appropriate, but not dramatically. The plot doesn't go anywhere, the actions of the characters aren't really important to the ending. It's a book about an endless punk tour, about community and scene, rather than being a story about these things that happened to these people.

We never learn why this happened. We never learn how this song works. We never learn who that mysterious figure was, if he was actually chasing them, or anything. In the end, it all doesn't matter, all those explanations are beside the point Powell wants to make. But I was here to find out all those things, and I don't have any particular nostalgia for "wasn't it awesome to be young and in a punk band?"

So I found this book incredibly frustrating: it avoided all of the things I wanted to know and focused entirely on things I found vague and trite. It's lovely and thoughtful: Powell draws as well as ever and his people are real and precise. They just all waffle on about the least interesting things, and then go on to play another show as if none of that happened, which makes very little sense to me.

Your mileage may vary. If you've ever been in a band, particularly. And Powell is one of our best, so I won't ignore the fact that I might have missed something major. But the Fall Through I read was not the book I was hoping for.

Ocean State by Stewart O'Nan

Sometimes one of your favorite writers has a book where you love a lot of the writing, love the voices, really appreciate the craft...but still think it's a smaller, less-impressive take on things that writer has done before.

That's where I am today with Stewart O'Nan's 2022 novel Ocean State. He's a fine writer, who does very different things - all vaguely in the literary-novel space, about mostly normal people in a normal world (with a few exceptions) each book. Most recently, I've seen two historicals: West of Sunset, the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last days in Hollywood, and City of Secrets, the story of a Jewish arguably-terrorist in 1945 Jerusalem.

Ocean State, though, reminds me a lot of O'Nan's The Speed Queen, another novel about a murder that starts in the first person with a confession. It also has elements reminiscent of his The Night Country, about teens around Halloween and horrific doings. And, not to give anything away, but I felt that Ocean State has a quieter, flatter ending than it deserved, a slow letting out of tension and flattening of affect when I wanted O'Nan to be heightening affect.

This one starts strongly, as O'Nan often does:

When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.

That's Marie, one of the four viewpoint characters. We get her in first person a few times throughout the book, particularly to open the novel and then again to close it.

All four viewpoints are seen in third person in the bulk of the book, taking turns. There's Marie, her mother Carol, her older sister Angel, and Birdy - the girl that Angel "helped kill."

Their voices are crisp and believable. I dog-eared a bunch of quotes; I usually do that with O'Nan. They inhabit a solid, complex world: working-class Rhode Island, high school and work and the minutia of everyday life. Angel and Birdy are dating the same boy, the rich player Myles - Angel officially, Birdy secretly.

(And how perfect is "Myles" with the Y as a name for that character? O'Nan is always really good at signifiers like that, at illuminating character though small moments and minor details.)

We obviously know from the first line what will happen, and we see it happen. It happens later in the novel than I expected, and more offscreen than I expected. 

I liked all of the stories - all four of the viewpoint characters are strong - without, in the end, thinking that they added up to the same novel. This is a short book, and it's more diffuse than it could be. Maybe I wanted a two-hander, just Angel and Birdy - maybe with something like the afterlife narrator of Night Country. Maybe I wanted a pure first-person account from Marie, what she saw at the time and what she realized later. Either of those, I think, could have been more focused than the four-viewpoint version. This almost feels like four intertwined but separate novellas about the same event, not all of which get to have a climax and dénouement.

But a novel is a long piece of prose with something wrong with it. What's wrong with Ocean State is a little annoying, a little disappointing in the end. But what's right with it is still major and impressive. I still recommend reading O'Nan, but I'd go to Night Country or Speed Queen before this one.

Nancy by Olivia Jaimes

It's not often that a syndicate gets praise for how they handle the transition on a legacy comic. This is the biggest example I can think of, and one of the biggest transitions in decades. By comparison, the new Flash Gordon artist this year is more typical: breathing new life into a beloved old feature by doing basically the same thing, just with more zip and energy.

Olivia Jaimes wasn't doing the same thing with Nancy in 2018. What was once a finely tuned engine of precisely drawn gags by Ernie Bushmiller had devolved into a bland collection of glurge, drawn by Guy Gilchrist as the demented spawn of Precious Moments and Art Frahm. But Nancy had been through transitions before: it's easy to forget that Bushmiller himself took over a strip then called Fritzi Ritz in 1925, added Nancy as a character, and shifted the whole strip based on what he wanted to do and what the audience wanted to see.

Jaimes - even today, her actual identity is a closely guarded secret; all that's publicly known is that she had a webcomic before Nancy, is female, and is believed to be relatively young - looked backwards to Bushmiller in some things, like her fondness for meta gags and references to "the cartoonist." She also dragged Nancy entirely into the modern world, something the very backward-looking Gilchrist had no interest in doing.

The syndicate seems to be pitching Nancy these days to actual kids, which is a major change from the last three or four decades. I don't know how many actual eight-year-olds identify with Nancy - maybe, she's prickly and demanding and self-centered and sure of her own righteousness like so many real-world kids of that age - but I guess that's working for them.

This book - just called Nancy - came out less than a year after Jaimes started the strip, back in 2019. I don't know if it's her complete first six months, but it's something like that: this is how it started, what the big transition looked like from the other side. Compared to the work Jaimes is doing on the strip now - more than five years later - it's simpler, starker in its drawing and more in-your-face Internet-meme-y in its gags, than the more organic, story-driven work she's doing now.

I miss some of that anything-can-happen atmosphere of the early Jaimes years: it felt a bit more Bushmillerian then, since he was always a cartoonist who would draw absolutely anything in service of the best gag he had for that day. But this book is a good record of those days: a somewhat blockier Nancy and Sluggo, their eyes bigger and less expressive, their clothes more templated and old-fashioned, their dialogue more aggressively mentioning newer technology.

Even if you didn't catch "Sluggo Is Lit" the first time around, check this out if you like smart gag cartoons. Nancy was always a great engine for them, and Jaimes tuned that engine back up and got it running beautifully.

Portions for Foxes: Jenny Lewis

"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.

I seem to be using a lot of obscure songs in this series - well, this one isn't. It was a single only a few years ago, by a major artist, and many of you will already be familiar with it. (I think. I hope. The world of music is so fragmented and separated these days that it can be hard to say what anyone has heard, or knows.)

This week, it's Heads Gonna Roll by Jenny Lewis, a storytelling song about all of our inevitable deaths, and related things.

There are three verses. They're all addressed to someone - I have no idea if it's the same someone each time. I think so; that would make sense - but songs can mean many things, can be structured many ways.

Each verse is about the singer doing something, with different people, different places - you can think of them as moments from a jet-setting life, I suppose, but they're vague and separate enough that it doesn't come across that way. And then we hit the chorus, which feels like it's on a different level, more serious and stark:

Heads gonna roll, baby
Everybody's gotta pay that toll and maybe
After all is said and done
We'll all be skulls
Heads gonna roll

Whose heads? Why? Lewis isn't going to say, but I think it's all heads. All of us: her, the man she's singing to, the people in each verse, random people everywhere. It's not "heads gonna roll" in the usual active sense - that someone is going to do something to cause mayhem - but in the inevitable, Memento Mori sense.

It's a slow song, but not a dirge. It celebrates life, I guess, in its odd way, with its odd details from Lewis's life. It's a song that says "here's some things I did, and something about how they made me feel. I want to remember that now, since I'll be dead someday." And that's worth remembering, worth being part of.

Because the same is true for every one of us.

Quote of the Week: Learning Experiences

We had been on safari for a week, or maybe it was ten days - or only five. It was hard to say how long we had been gone. Things were going better than I could have hoped. We had had any number of adventures - and there had been seemingly endless hours of just being quiet and enjoying wherever we happened to be. I had been chased by a spitting cobra, which put to rest the idea I'd always had that a snake will only attack you if you bother it.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, The Worms of Kukumlima, p.453 in 4 Fantastic Novels

Hypercapitalism by Larry Gonick and Tim Kasser

You know if you want to read this book from the title. Maybe somewhat from the author, too: Gonick has been making non-fiction comics, most famously the Cartoon History of series, for forty-some years, in a caption-filled, backed-up-by-references style that crams a lot of facts and details into interesting pages.

Gonick tends to work with collaborators on his more topic-specific books, so this time out he's partnered with psychologist and academic Tim Kasser to tell the story of the modern American economy in Hypercapitalism: The Modern Economy, Its Values, and How to Change Them.

That last bit is the part that will attract or drive away people the most, of course. There's a whole host of libertarian techbros who think capitalism at its more rapacious is just perfect, and wouldn't want to change anything. (They'll likely change their minds, if they live long enough and get battered by life enough - but many such bros start off on Third Base and never do get battered by life; that's how they became such bros to begin with.)

Gonick's books tend to have a narrator figure: in this case it's a version of Kasser, our subject-matter expert, who walks through all of the concepts and structures here. They start off with the basics of capitalism - producers, consumers, profit, labor, competition, work - and then immediately get into the more modern additions, starting with the "person" of the corporation.

Like all of Gonick's books, it's in something that resembles comics, but is much denser informationally. Every page has blocks of seemingly hand-lettered text and a few scattered panels. It's a model that's remarkably good for getting across fairly complex topics and ideas somewhat quickly and at getting into the depths and complexities of its ideas without just skimming the surface.

Again, if you think corporations are an uniformly good thing, you will hate this book. Kasser and Gonick are mildly lefty, and, like so many pesky lefties, they have facts and data and research on their sides, to show how unbridled capitalism has been a bad thing for human beings and that bridles are common in various places all over the world and can be implemented wherever there is the political will to do so.

I think this is still Gonick's most recent book, even though it's from 2018. I like the way he organizes information, and still have hopes he's working on some random history book now that will pop up unexpectedly. He's like no one else in American comics, and his work is a real treasure: deep and thoughtful and well-researched and always aiming back to its sources. This is another fine book in that tradition, even if it is a somewhat more controversial topic.

(Though I do hate the fact that "we should improve society, somewhat" is considered controversial in my country these days. It's a sad world we live in.)

Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness

How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities - all things you don't know well, all things new and different - what sparks the thought "that one"?

This time, it was hair.

On the cover of Time Under Tension, her major 2023 graphic memoir, creator M.S. Harkness draws her hair as a giant, swoopy, structural thing - almost a separate, solid object, like a shark's fin. That said to me "this is a creator who is comfortable with caricature, who gets that cartooning is how to put complicated ideas down on the page. She's going to be interesting to read on a craft and structure level."

I don't want to say "I was right." Let's say I accurately noticed some clear strengths in Harkness's immediate, uncompromising work. Let's say that she both has the drawing and page-layout chops to tell a difficult story well, and both the material in her own life and the mental strength to turn that into art to work from. Let's say I was not disappointed.

This is autobiographical: I assume it's true as much as any memoir is, that some characters may be somewhat fictionalized or events moved in time or dialogue reconstructed to work better on the page. It feels real. Harkness has an immediacy, in her bold lines and her in-your-face storytelling, that tells the reader she is not fucking around here.

We open just before her art-school graduation, in what turns out to be an extended prologue that jumps back and forth in time during that taut moment of almost that is the month before that big day. All of the work is done; the group show is being hung. Harkness knows she will graduate. There's a moment where a teacher bluntly tells her "I had to keep everyone else from failing. I was never really worried about you. Your art career or whatever...you'll be fine."

This section sets up the tensions and issues Harkness will be working through during the bulk of the book, rolling out over most of the next year.

And, no matter what that art professor thought, she is not fine.

She's organized, focused, driven. She has a plan and multiple goals. She's working on her first graphic novel and studying to become a personal trainer. She has a sympathetic fellow-artist roommate as a support system, and is plugged into the larger comics world.

She's also doing random one-off sex-work jobs to plug holes in her budget. The book description says she's also selling weed for the same purpose, but we really don't see that in the story. She has a messy relationship with an up-and-coming MMA fighter - she is, or was, his dealer, and a fuck-buddy for this guy who already has a "girlfriend." She wants to be more to him than he's willing to give, and he keeps coming back but is at least honest about what's going on.

Behind all that is a horrible childhood: a sexually abusive father about to get out of prison and reaching out through some kind of reparations program to make an "apology" she wants nothing to do with. A mother who means well but who Harkness sees as weak and doesn't have much in common with.

I don't want to psychoanalyze her, especially based on her own presentation. But there's clearly trauma there that she's still trying to get away from, and a complex nexus of physicality: working out herself, helping other people's bodies get strong as a trainer, the random paid sex, the toll on arms and back from hunching over a drawing board. Time Under Tension isn't really about all of those physical demands on her body, and how they intersect with each other, but I wouldn't be surprised if her next book was - or the book after that. 

Harkness seeks out therapists, which doesn't go well. She knows she's driven and goal-focused, but feels like she's not connecting with people: they're all just roles in this march forward, each one just a piece of one of her projects.

She has to work it out herself, the same way she does everything. More work, more pushing forward, one day at a time.

In the way of comics, it may be telling the story of a few years ago: I see that Harkness is now thirty-one. Time Under Tension was Harkness's third book; the first two were also comics memoirs. She's said that she intends to do five books in this "series." But this one stands alone: it tells a full story brilliantly, with an unblinking eye on her own life and problems.

And her hair is magnificent. Harkness has a stark style with strategically deployed spots of black, and her hair is the most consistent large black element on most of these pages, drawing the eye to its complexity and unruliness. I wonder if we will see that hair settle down in future books, as Harkness moves forward in life and gets her demons more under control. I hope so. I'd love to see it.

The Worms of Kukumlima by Daniel Pinkwater

OK, you know I'm a big Pinkwater fan, and you might have noticed that I'm re-reading the books in his 2000 omnibus 4 Fantastic Novels - first Borgel and then Yobgorgel. (Those books are completely unrelated, despite the similarity of names, with Yobgorgel coming thirteen years earlier.)

The third book in that omnibus is the 1981 novel The Worms of Kukumlima, and - assuming you've read the title of this post- you know it's time for that one now. 

As usual with a Pinkwater book, it's told in the first person by a smart, observant boy - in this case, Ronald Donald Almondotter, spending the summer working for his grandfather Seumas Finneganstein at the latter's World Famous Salami Snap Company. (Which itself is a somewhat typical Pinkwater thing: a famously successful business, based on a quirky little doohickey - in this case, the metal pieces that holds the end of a salami together - and run by its goofy inventor with a tiny handful of other people.)

Finneganstein was an explorer in his youth, and his old compatriot Sir Charles Pelicanstein shows up one day, urging Finneganstein to join him on an expedition to find the fabled titular intelligent worms.

In a Pinkwater novel, a crazy idea is a good idea, so they set off for Africa to find those worms, flying with an as-goofy-as-expected air cargo outfit and picking up a couple of equally oddball drivers/guides once they hit Nairobi. Unfortunately, Kukumlima is a place you can only find if you're completely, utterly lost, so the fact that these guides are experts is actually a problem. But, eventually, they all figure out a way to travel randomly, get lost, and are herded by elephants into a gigantic crater in the middle of nowhere.

They do meet the worms, who are not quite as expected. The end of the novel involves our heroes needing to get away from the worms, which of course they also do.

Worms is a Pinkwater novel: it's goofy, and proceeds in a loose, almost aimless way, its plot wandering like the expedition whose story it tells. This isn't one of my very favorite Pinkwater books - it doesn't have as many bits of wordplay or silly concepts as some of his other books, and the worms are a bit un-Pinkwaterly evil - but it's a solid Pinkwater outing from fairly early in his career, and I'm not going to say anything negative about it. The closest I'll come is what I just said: he has other books that are even better and more fun than this. 

Proxy Mom: My Experience with Portpartum Depression by Sophie Adriansen & Mathou

Babies are hard. I think everyone knows that intellectually, but maybe not emotionally. My own first child was a needy, demanding, unhappy baby - I don't want to claim too much; this was a quarter-century ago, and I wasn't the main caregiver, either - so I have some insight but nothing like expertise.

The mother in Proxy Mom: My Experience with Postpartum Depression has a fairly typical, average baby: no more needy than most, no specific problems, nothing out of the ordinary. Just crying every hour or few hours, all day every day, needing something that's often not clear. Just an ordinarily demanding, life-altering baby, on top of everything the pregnancy and birth already did to her body.

This graphic novel is loosely a memoir - writer Sophie Adriansen and artist Mathou both lived through versions of this story, the same year, each having a first baby with a man who already had older children. And, from the story, I guess they both had problems attaching, with feeling "motherly," at least at first - that's a lot more common than people realize.

A baby is a wrinkled, red-faced, crying lump, capable only of wanting things. That's not inherently lovable. It takes a lot of hormones hitting just the right way to forge that connection, and sometimes it takes quite a while - sometimes it fizzles at first.

Sometimes, like with Marietta in this story, it's more overwhelming and painful than wonderful and special. And the realization that life is not going to be "like before, but with a baby" but instead "completely different, in ways you didn't expect" is frightening and unnerving: there's now this tiny person that is utterly dependent on you for everything, needy in a way no other human being has been for you before.

This is the story of about those first six months, the toughest time, for Marietta and her husband Chuck and baby Zoe. How she was overwhelmed by the pain at first, in the hospital, after a tough labor and pain during breastfeeding. How Chuck was the experienced one - but not the one whose body was battered by the birth, and not the one there all day every day with tiny needy Zoe. How she wanted that deep connection with her baby, but it wasn't there at first - how she found it, how she got there in the end.

There are no huge problems. This is not the kind of memoir subtitled "how I got through This Horrible Thing and it made me a better person." Birth is natural. Babies are natural. Crying babies and post-partum pain and being overwhelmed are entirely natural. It's huge for the woman going through it. It feels too big too handle: being responsible, every second of every day, for another person, a person who can do nothing at all for herself.

But Marietta made it through. She didn't get back "her old life, but with a baby" - she got back a new life, with a lot of the pieces of the old one, plus a baby, transforming everything else as a baby always does. Adriansen and Mathou have lived this, and they tell that story naturalistically and realistically, always through Marietta's viewpoint, always focused on how she feels about herself and her baby.

They tell that story in a lovely, immediate way through cartooning. Mathou's style is warm and inviting, big eyes and rounded bodies and slightly exaggerated expressions. Adriansen keeps the captions short and focused - this is the kind of book that could have a blizzard of expert opinions footnoted on every page, but she smartly knows they're not needed. Marietta's situation is natural: millions of women go through it every year, and need support and love and attention to get through it.

This US edition was translated and Americanized by Montana Kane from the original French, including, I assume, some facts and figures Adriansen includes along the way. I noticed the numbers were about the USA, but nothing else about the translation, which is the best reaction to a translation: if you don't notice it, it's done right.

This is the kind of book that says "you're not alone" to a huge number of women struggling with what is usually the biggest, hardest, most exhaustingly wonderful thing that they've ever had to deal with. It says that clearly, lovingly, from the point of view of another woman who has been through it.

Portions for Foxes: Le Butcherettes

"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.

I'm pretty sure this is a song about sex. What I don't know is how we're supposed to take it. Le Butcherettes are a loud, raucous band - maybe I should say "were;" I'm not sure if they're still together, though they're the kind of band that's mostly one person and her collaborators at the time - and this is a loud, demanding song.

This week, it's Tonight.

He just stares but it's not staring
It's sin tonight

The music is pulsing, compelling. The singer - bandleader Teri Gender Bender - is insistent, about a "he" and a "you" (who is probably also "honey") and what they're going to do - all of it in vaguely mixed violent/sexual terms. He and you might be different people - "you" might be another target of "he." Or maybe not. Or maybe both.

Tonight, honey
In my mouth, in my thigh
In my rib, in my backside
In the middle of my sleep

And the fascinating part is that it's not at all clear whether the singer likes this or hates it. Or, again and more likely, both. It's a loud, punky, short song that shouts and growls and screams, raising tension that it has no intention of releasing. It's all set in that moment of desire - someone else's desire - about being the target and the focus of attention.

And short songs can be great at just providing that moment, that feeling - doing one thing and doing it well. This one does.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 15, 2024

I had a birthday earlier this month - a half-decade one, the kind that feel like they should be important but really aren't - and so I got some presents. All of these books were presents, and all but one of them were things I bought myself: as I've said before, one of the great benefits of being middle-aged is that you can buy yourself your own damn presents, and get exactly what you want.

Here's what I unwrapped:

Authority, the second book in Jeff Vandermeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy. I read the first book, Annihilation, a few years back, and want to catch up on Vandermeer's books, though (at my current reading speed) that's not all that likely. But this gives me a new option on the shelf, and supports a writer I like, and maybe I'll get to it soon.

The Demon Princes, Vol. 2 collects the concluding two novels of the five-volume series of that name by Jack Vance. I've been reading the series over the past six months or so - I started it after finishing up a re-read of Vance's "Dying Earth" books, and will probably continue reading random Vance for as long as I can keep finding decent modern editions - and I needed this book so I can get to these books in the near future. Vance is one of the greats: that's why.

Lyorn is the new book by Steven Brust, the seventeenth in his Vlad Taltos series. The most recent one before this was Tsalmoth; from my post on that you could continue backwards, if you care. This is a wonderful, quirky adventure-fantasy series with occasional (usually very successful) outbreaks of writerly game-playing, and the books tend to basically stand alone for anyone who wants to dip in.

And last is Poor Helpless Comics!, a collection of the work of Ed Subitsky. I gather this is pretty much entirely the '70s and '80s stuff I was already familiar with from the National Lampoon; Subitsky moved into TV after that and made more money doing something not nearly as time-consuming and puckish as weird comics with too many tiny boxes. But this stuff finally got collected, which is both surprising and wonderful.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Dashing the Dreams of a Thousand Movie Chase Scenes Yet To Come

The roofs of passenger coaches are not made for midnight promenades. And if any one thinks they are, let me advise him to try it. Just let him walks along the rood of a jolting, lurching car, with nothing to hold on to but the black and empty air, and when he comes to the down-curving end of the roof, all wet and slippery with dew, let him accelerate his speed so as to step across to the next roof, down-curving and wet and slippery. Believe me, he will learn whether is heart is weak or his head is giddy.

 - Jack London, The Road, p.210 in Novels and Social Writings