Quote of the Week: Other Lives

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.625 in Later Novels & Other Writings

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

This is the big one; if you read only one Raymond Chandler novel, it should be The Long Goodbye. It's almost twice the length of his earlier books and not structured like a traditional mystery - a loose, looping, allusive novel that can make the case, all by itself, that private-eye stories can be fine literature.

I don't know if the world needed to be told that in 1953. On the other hand, I don't know if "the world" has entirely learned it since then - the world is full of blindered people of all kinds. Some refuse to believe mysteries can be as good as any other novels; some read only private-eye novels.

I'm not going to describe the plot in any great detail - it's deliberately slow, and recursive, and is best experienced by reading it. I did flag a whole lot of quotes, and I might drop a couple of them in below, with some linking material, to give you a sense of the book.

But I can tell you it starts with Terry Lennox - a drunk, a man badly damaged by his WWII service, the once and future kept husband of a widely-ranging heiress, a man with his own notions of propriety and honor. Series hero and narrator Philip Marlowe rescues him one day - more or less from his wife - and comes to be his friend, in the way of men who don't get close to each other or ask each other many questions.

One night Lennox calls Marlowe and needs a big favor, no questions asked - to be driven to the airport in Tijuana. This is a mystery novel; Marlowe assumes and we the reader assumes that means someone is dead - and we're both right. It won't be the last death.

Somewhat later, Marlowe is hired - sort-of - to find the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who has disappeared on what both his wife and his New York editor are afraid is yet another bender. The Wades live in the same rich town and mix in the same circles as Lennox's wife; Lennox's sister-in-law is prominent there.

Maybe this is a good point to throw in a quote - here's Marlowe talking to the novelist's wife, on p.502 of the Later Novels & Other Writings omnibus:

"Look, Mrs. Wade," I said finally. "My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick."

That's the core point of any mystery novel - the why of a specific shocking violent act. And the best mystery writers, Chandler at their fore, make it clear that we can say some things about any particular act, especially in retrospect, but that people are strange and contingent and unexpected. Long Goodbye is a novel about people, the things they do and the ways they bounce off each other - often violently.

This is also the book where Chandler has the "main story" cool down repeatedly, almost as if his plot is dying out, as Marlowe goes on to other cases, other parts of his life, before looping back to that cluster of Lennox and Wade and the rest:

So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.

"Come in, Mr. Thingummy. What can I do for you?"

There must be a reason.

(p.549)

As I said, this is a long novel - especially for a mystery, especially for 1953. Marlowe isn't really investigating any of the deaths, and, for a long time, he's half-heartedly trying to get away from the bits of this puzzle he's entangled with. But this is what he does: he worries loose bits of string until he gets to the knot and untangles it.

In the end, we do learn what happened - to Lennox and Wade and all of the others, to the cops and crooks and millionaires and their daughters. This is a magnificent American novel, on the short list that everyone should read at least once. I'll leave it at that.

Usasgi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho by Stan Sakai

As I've warned before, my posts about series tend to get shorter and more perfunctory as I have less and less to say. I may end up rambling below, but I doubt I'll have anything particularly profound this time.

I'm still reading my way through Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series, a mildly fantasy-tinged adventure series set in a dramatically heightened version of Edo-period Japan, pitched at a level appropriate for middle-grade readers...oh, and all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, because Sakai started this series in the '80s for the Critters anthology. Anthropomorphic characters also suit his art style quite well, though there are all the usual questions of how multi-animal worlds work - are all these races interfertile? If a rabbit and a fox have children, are they hybrids, or are the boys rabbits and the girls foxes, or what? Do the races code specific positions in society, or geographic origins, or something like that?

In this series, they're mostly just animals because Sakai wanted them to be animals. Individual characters are kinds of animals that make sense for them specifically; I haven't made a study to see how families connect. Usagi himself clearly gets the hots for babes who are not themselves rabbits, for one data-point.

The ninth collection of that series is Daisho, collecting some stories from issues 7 and 8 of the 2nd series that weren't in vol. 8 (Shades of Death) and the full issues 9-14; it reaches almost to the end of the Mirage series (Usagi started with Fantagraphics, had a short run with Mirage, and then settled in at Dark Horse for twenty years and 160-ish issues); the current edition came out in 2010 but seems to be an only very slightly updated version of the original book 9 from about 1995.

The stories here mostly flow into a continuous narrative, though those two lead-off stories are both closing off loose plot threads from earlier volumes. Most of the book sees Usagi caught up in helping out a town taken over by slavers, and then chasing their leader after "General Fujii" steals Usagi's swords. After that, we get a flashback to another great lost love of Usagi's life - we're only up to Lost Love #2 at this point, but we're also only twenty-some issues in, with a hundred and sixty to go, so Usagi could have a hot anthropomorphic babe in every town by the end of the series if I'm counting correctly.

This particular Lost Love is the We Could Never Be Together type - she's the daughter of a major lord, he's the bodyguard delivering her to the arranged marriage, and they're on the run from the forces trying to murder her before that can happen. You've read that story before, but Sakai does a solid version of it here.

That's generally my take on Usagi, this volume and this previous ones - Sakai is professional and solid, telling stories well in a clean style, with solid dialogue and engaging plotting. There's nothing groundbreaking or surprising here, and it is all pitched so you could hand it to a ten-year-old. Is that enough? Every reader has to decide that - so far, I'm enjoying the stories, while finding them inherently limited.

Wandering Island, Vol.2 by Kenji Tsurata

Everything I said about the first volume of Wandering Island is still true for the second: it's a laconic, quiet story with a lot of Miyazaki influence, driven by images, with a thin plot and only one real character, the floatplane pilot Mikura Amelia. (Who, as you can see from the cover, spends a lot of her time in borderline fan-service-y poses either in that tiny bikini or, for a sequence here, entirely naked.)

Well, one thing is different, I suppose. I said I thought this would be a two-book series, that the plot was thin enough that I didn't see how it could run more than another couple of hundred pages. I was mistaken; a visually-driven series can keep going, I'm coming to see, as long as the creator has more images to put on the page.

Wandering Island, Vol. 2 is not the end. It needs at least one more volume, maybe more. According to an afterword by editor Carl Gustav Horn, the fifteen chapters here appeared in the Japanese  monthly Afternoon magazine between October 2012 and December 2017, with the Japanese tankōbon also copyright 2017, so probably appearing the same month as the last chapter it collected. This English translation, by Dana Lewis, arrived in January 2019.

On the other hand, I can't find any indication that creator Kenji Tsurata has published any further chapters of Wandering Island in the past eight years, so this may be entirely abandoned. Caveat lector.

The first volume ended with Mikura flying off to find the mysterious, moving Electric Island - she'd tracked its movements, and was sure she could catch it on this go-round through the North Pacific. The first chapter here is mostly "where is that wandering island?" but she does get there, landing right next to it despite the locals firing cannon at her.

She has a package to deliver, after all. She needs to give it to "Miss Amelia."

Most of this book is Mikura wandering, mostly silently, around the semi-ruined town that takes up most or all of the island, trying to map it so that she can figure it out. It's made up of buildings jammed together, with narrow, winding streets rising and falling up and down the hills - very Mediterranean, very Miyazaki. She sees some locals: mostly semi-hostile old men (the ones who fired that cannon, we think), one old lady is who slightly more helpful, one kid near the end.

We don't learn any of their names. None of them get more than a few words of dialogue. None of them explain anything, talk about this island, or advance the plot at all. They mostly all just tell Mikura to get the hell out of there, that she's not wanted.

Oh, and "Miss Amelia" is dead. The place she lived is entirely a ruin; she may have died a century ago.

At the very end, as Mikura is running out of the food saved in her plane, and wondering what she can possibly do next, that kid just happens to mention that there's "a store" on the island, of course in what seems to be the highest point. Mikura goes there, sees the shopkeeper...and this volume ends.

We don't see the shopkeeper clearly - we see his body, but not his face. He seems to be familiar to Mikura. I'm going to guess that it's her dead father, since it's that kind of story, and because there are so few characters that's an plausible guess. If there are ever any further chapters, maybe I can find out if I'm right.

This is a lovely book, with great images. I can recommend it on that level. Anyone coming to it hoping for answers to the questions raised in the first volume, though, will be deeply disappointed, and need to be ready to continue waiting - perhaps forever - for those answers. Anyone deeply interested in plot will also want to stay far away.

Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

About a year and a half ago, I decided to re-read the Lone Wolf and Cub series, a masterpiece and towering achievement of gekiga manga, created by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima in the 1970s. I figured I could get through the the twenty-eight volumes at least one a month, so it would take a couple of years.

Well, I'm now up to volume 8, so I think it will take a bit longer than that. And, as I keep saying for each book in turn, I doubt I'll have much to say: each book is very much like the one before; their strengths are their strengths; these are amazing works but what has to be said about them has been said, many times, over the past fifty years.

So I just read Chains of Death. It contains six stories. As throughout the series, they're all sequentially numbered - these are 39 through 44.

My sense is that this series went through phases or clusters - some groupings were more concerned with the central plot, some with one-off stories. They also take place in different parts of Japan, not that I'll be any good at explicating that. This book has a group of stories that take place during winter: snow and cold is important in several of them. It's also closer to the main plot; we see Yagyū Retsudō scheming in several stories, and get a flashback of his son's duel against our series hero, Ogami Ittō, for the position of the Shōgun's executioner.

The pleasures of this series, as always, is that odd mixture of the quiet moments of beauty - Kojima is masterful at depicting natural and everyday life - and the sudden interruptions of that life by extreme violence, which is what the audience, then as now, is here for. Otherwise, see what I - and many other commentators - have said about Lone Wolf and Cub earlier; it is what it is.

All of This and Nothing: Strugglin'

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week, we're back to Obscure, with the 2014 song Strugglin' from I Am the Albatross's self-titled record. They're obscure enough that they barely show up in a google search for their quirky, specific name, which saddens me - but the world is big and full of stuff, and most of it is hidden in one way or another.

I'm pretty sure this band is defunct - that their website is gone, that their Bandcamp page lists three releases ending a decade ago, and the aforementioned google search lead me to think that. But art can live forever, and I still listen to this song. (And I can't be the only one.)

There's a lot of people out there in the world tonight
A lot of people out there in the world tonight (x2)
That ain't gonna make it 'til the morning light...

This is another song that starts relatively quietly, and then goes on to burn the barn down. The lyrics are evocative, allusive, metaphoric. Something bad is happening - the singer's "baby" is "struggling," which is as specific as it gets - but the words are almost apocalyptic, all-encompassing.

When things can't get any worse, well that's when they do
Searching for a crack where the light shines through...

It has a shuffly, loud, borderline-lofi sound, and it blasts at top speed for almost five minutes - five great minutes. This is a song that shouldn't be forgotten, so I'll do my tiny bit to remind people it's out there.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 14, 2026

One book came in the mail this week: let me tell you about it.

Rick Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books for about the last decade - I think it started out as his weirder, quirkier projects, but there have also been a few historical-murder stories that looked a lot like the books he did for bigger publishers. So it might just be the way he initially self-publishes his work these days, which is just fine - I'm on the mailing list, so I get 'em.

The most recent book was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, which heads back a bit towards the quirky side. Geary did a more "normal" Billy the Kid book a few years ago with The True Death of Billy the Kid, which is a better bet for anyone who wants the story told in order with the facts lined up nicely. Alphabet, on the other hand, is in the style of a abecadary, with a big double-page entry (one full-page illustration, one page of text) for each letter of the alphabet, from Alias to Zero.

Billy the Kid is still a source of fascination for many - including Geary, I assume - which is why this book exists and has an audience. For, me, I'm mostly here for Geary telling me about historical murderers and showcasing his magnificently detailed pen-and-ink drawings.

Quote of the Week: The Law Is The Law, and We Can't Change It

Men, in their attitude to law, may, nowadays, be divided into those who believe that if an act is legal, it is irrelevant whether it is just and expedient, and those who believe that if it is just and expedient, it is irrelevant whether it is legal.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law, p.777 in Waugh Abroad

(Source of title quote.)

Robbery Under Law by Evelyn Waugh

I've been reading a bunch of Evelyn Waugh's travel books over about the past year, in a big omnibus called Waugh Abroad. I've generally enjoyed them: Waugh was a right-wing nutbar, just this side of fascist and absolutely loony in the ways only an upper-class Englishman converted to Catholicism in adult life could be, but he was also a fine writer with a great eye and a world-class grump. So seeing him go to various Third World - I think the term didn't exist yet, but that's what it was - hells in the '30s and complain about them is a lot of fun.

The next book collected in Waugh Abroad was Robbery Under Law, subtitled "The Mexican Object-Lesson." Waugh did travel to Mexico for a few months in 1938 and wrote this book immediately thereafter, it is true. But this, sadly, is not a travel book. It's a tedious, tendentious screed that is probably only of interest as an example of what the kind of right-wing people who thought fascists were really good at building roads and keeping the lesser races down but still were going too far in the whole government-controlling-the-economy-thing considered important in 1938.

Mexico, at the time, had been through a century or more of turmoil since independence, and had had a sequence of corrupt and/or incompetent leaders, who each in turn stole what they could and either fled or the country, or, more often, were murdered by their successors. In 1938, they were officially Marxist and had suppressed the Catholic Church, two aspects of their society that Waugh, of course, hated with every fiber of his being. So, being a professional writer, he therefore spent over two hundred tightly-set pages writing against those things at great and deeply boring length. Let me be clear: it seems like Mexico was a horrible place, run by thieves and charlatans for their own benefit, and had been (with slightly different fools and charlatans, each in their turn) for decades at that point. But the things Waugh was most annoyed about are the nationalization of the oil business and the breaking up of the large estates of the rural aristocracy. And one is hard-pressed, a hundred years later, to care about either of those things if one has anything like a modern political sensibility - even a very right-wing modern political sensibility.

I was hoping for stories of Waugh traveling through another corrupt, odd country and telling the reader about it. There is a quick list of sketched moments in one chapter here: all of the rest is argumentation. And, again, unless you're the kind of interwar Anglo-Catholic Waugh was - not necessarily deeply racist, but satisfied with the hierarchies of the world, since he's near the top of them, and sure that democracy is good for the right kind of peoples, the ones with mostly pale skins - you are not going to agree with a lot of what he says.

In fact, when he tries to cover the expected objections to his position, he inadvertently implies that things were pretty horrible. Oh, sure, he says, some bishops probably abused their power, especially far from the capital - how could it be otherwise? - and, of course, the upper ranks of the priesthood was mostly made up of aristocratic younger sons, who are used to living in riches and splendor, so you can't be surprised that they continued to amass great wealth and spend it on themselves, even once they were  in religious orders. This goes on in several directions, throughout the book, and the astute reader gets a good sense of what Waugh would be happy with: the stable, organized world in which people like him are firmly on top and the Indians - he says, magnanimously, that they're not necessarily mentally inferior to "the white races," that Mexicans as a "race" have interbred between the Spanish and the "Indians" quite a lot (and he doesn't even more than very slightly hint that might be the source of their ongoing political problems), and some of those not-purely-Spanish chappies have even become quite good priests! - know their place down at the bottom of the heap.

It's too bad, because clearly Mexico was a horrible place in 1938. Waugh, though, is not the one who can describe those horrors in a way that anyone to the left of Roderick Spode will agree with. I would only recommend reading this if you've already gotten through all of the good Waugh, and probably some of the other all-too-Catholic pieces as well. Or, of course, if you are a fanatically right-wing Anglo-Catholic with fascist tendencies: it'll be right up your street.

Lovers and Haters by Gilbert Hernandez

Look, Gilbert Hernandez is one of the giants of world comics, right? So anything I say here on a minor blog is probably pointless. He's also one of the most wild-hair creators I've ever seen, prone to run off in really bizarre directions - witness Blubber, witness the long series of "The Fritz B-Move Collection," witness Birdland and Garden of the Flesh and...just about everything he's done for the past two or three decades, frankly.

It can also take a while for a new Love & Rockets collection to percolate: first the stories appear in individual issues - which have changed format a lot over the years, and are now I guess roughly annual magazine-sized things - and then those stories are usually edited a bit for book publication, to include most of the material in L&R but tweak some pages and add more. So any one book is a record of a longer time than it might seem. This book, for example, was published in 2025, but the first piece in it is dated 2014.

So a lot of what I said about Gilbert's work when I wrote about the first six issues of the current L&R series back in 2018 (!) is still relevant here: this is some of the same material. Actually, I think this is the weakest of what I remember from that material, the stuff that was most tedious and repetitive.

Which finally brings me to Lovers and Haters, the 31st volume in The Complete Love and Rockets. (Note: that doesn't mean the "library editions;" there have been I think fifteen of those so far, each roughly twice the size of a "Complete" book. It also doesn't mean the really big hardcovers, like Palomar and Locas, which have even more material but don't reprint the smaller books directly. The counts of both series also also includes the work of Gilbert's brother Jaime; their material appears side-by-side in L&R but the two have never worked together. Oh, and there's also a few stories here and there over the past forty years by a third brother, Mario, who has worked occasionally with Gilbert, just to be more confusing.)

When I wrote about that current L&R series back in 2018, I said, optimistically, that "Gilbert wrote his way out of the swamp of Too Many Fritzes." But this book collects the plotline I thought of as Too Many Fritzes, and mostly includes material later than 2018, so I was not entirely correct at that time. (And I live in hope that the things I saw then that I considered stronger, and showing a movement towards more lightness and openness in his work, will be collected themselves, eventually.)

Fritz is the half-sister of Luba, who was Gilbert's big central character for the '80s and '90s. Originally, she was a psychologist, but that may have been completely retconned away by now. In these stories, she's in her late forties - just turning fifty near the end - and has been a bad actress her entire adult life. I say "bad," but I may mean "limited" - there's a sense that she appeared in almost entirely bad movies and may not have been worse than mediocre herself.

These stories, mostly a series called "Talent," circle around Fritz, her controlling but borderline incompetent boyfriend/manager, several skeevy porn producers, and a bewildering array of younger women who adopted versions of Fritz's name to cash in on her fame, mostly by working as strippers, in porn, and in fetish movies that might not be distinguishable from porn. There's a largish cast that mostly stands around saying the same things to each other, or announcing plot and background details, as they sarcastically cut each other down. You see, they mostly hate each other, even though a lot of them work on the same movies and have sex with each other regularly - in fact, working on the same movies often is having sex with each other.

This is weird and artificial and odd on a storytelling level - before I even get into the mostly-underlying plot idea of the mad scientists who invented some kind of human growth serum that gave all of the women breasts of various massiveness (the smallest are about the size of their heads) and some men similarly freakish muscles. Oh, and there's a guy with two dicks - that seems to have been natural, though.

Just the frenzy about Fritz is already silly, as if there was a massive global industry of Linnea Quigley imitators. With all of the other material piled on top of it, Lovers and Haters is incredibly difficult to take seriously. I'm not going to try to do that: it is deeply not-serious.

There's also a lot of moments or elements that seem out of place. Or maybe I mean that the timeline is really confused, and it's unclear when all of these events are happening. Fritz is married to a woman, Pipo, in a couple of stories late in this book, which doesn't seem to match at all with her relationship with her boyfriend/manager, and Gilbert's narrative voice doesn't comment at all.

I think this is mostly for Beto completists, who want to see what's going on with his main storyline. (Spoiler: very, very little; it's chasing its own tail through sex cults and breast-inflation fetishes.) In a few years, there will be another L&R collection by Gilbert, and I don't see any way that it can be worse than this. But I have been surprised before.

Louder Than Words, Actions Speak by Sergio Aragonés

Sergio Aragonés is one of the modern masters of comics; I freely admit that. He draws quickly, really well, and in a distinctive, inherently amusing cartoony style that's more flexible and subtle than it looks. It's hard to talk about his writing, since he usually works with Mark Evanier on anything that has actual words in it and so it's difficult to tell what's pure Aragonés and what Evanier adds to the mix.

I keep picking up his books, now and then: his drawing is just funny, and his pages filled with details. A lot of the time, it's been Groo comics, which I've been reading off and on since the late '80s when my kid brother was a big fan and I read anything in comics format that came anywhere near my eyes. And, let me be polite, Groo is a collection of a few running jokes - maybe a dozen at most, with some variations - assembled in slightly different configurations monthly for decades and then slightly less often more recently. And none of those jokes are what anyone might mistake for high-brow.

So, this time, I thought: let's try some pure Aragonés. Louder Than Words, Actions Speak is a big book - well over three hundred pages - of wordless single-page comics, nearly all of them in a multi-panel format. The jokes are somewhat older than I expected: this book came out in 2024, but it collects the 6-issue Louder Than Words series from 1997 and the six-issue Actions Speak series from 2001. So there are only a couple of cellphones here, and they're the kind with a stubby antenna at the top left and a scribble to show where the keypad is.

That's OK, because Aragonés is mostly using old joke setups anyway. There are lots of kids on skateboards, people at the beach, circuses and wrestling matches, angels and animals, priests and doctors, museums and aliens and cheerleaders, muggers and ghosts and Mexican bandits. The biggest group of cartoons are about dating, with jokes about condoms and family members hiding while the couple is making out and similarly durable funnies. I would be hard-pressed to find any surprising joke in the three hundred or so here, and it would be harder to find one that could be considered entirely original - but that's not what Aragonés is doing here.

Wordless jokes have to be at least somewhat familiar: they need to be understandable without words. So we get Tarzan or King Kong; we know exactly who they are. These are all, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, dad jokes - durable, dependable, slightly shop-worn; the kind you recognize quickly and can practically tell yourself. (Well, you could tell them yourself if you could draw like Aragonés, which, if so: that's impressive.)

So the material is very familiar. It's quite possible to do wordless jokes that are not quite this obvious, but Aragonés, I think, is from the Mexican equivalent of the Borscht Belt, where standard jokes grow on trees and the children grow up telling each other "take my wife, please!" at every turn. It's not a problem, exactly - it is what it is; he is the creator he is - but a reader has to accept it, and, preferably, be ready for it.

This book is definitely funny. But, no matter how old you are - I'm in my mid-fifties - it will feel slightly older than you are, and you need to be willing to go with that.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag edited by Edward Welch

Miscellaneous books are difficult to write about; old ones even more so. I'm going to try to explain what this book is, but I may be like a blind man describing an elephant - it's weird and quirky and very much of its time while also being a surprisingly early example of what looks a lot like a random listserv.

Captain Cuttle's Mailbag is a collection of entries, organized into thematic chapters, from the first series (1849-1855) of the weekly London magazine Notes and Queries. It was compiled for publication in 2017 by Edward Welch, whose short bio describes him mostly as a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. He also gave it the descriptive subtitle - as required for nearly every nonfiction book - "History, Folklore & Victorian Pedantry from the pages of 'Notes & Queries.'"

Notes & Queries was a reader-contributed periodical, described at launch as "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, antiquaries, genealogists, etc." Welch doesn't give us much of a sense of how it was laid out or organized, but the way it seemed to work was: some guy would send either an interesting note on some random thing he had noticed or researched, or a query about something similarly obscure. That note would be published, and sometimes other guys, from elsewhere in the UK, would chime in on the same subject, to amplify what the first guy said, give a wider context, or run off in their own direction - and those would be published in later weeks, leading to what could be a slow-motion conversation.

N&Q seems to have been made up of a bewildering myriad of small items every week - again, not a million miles away from some early-90s email listserv. Welch organized this book into four large sections - Anecdotes of History, Relics of Folklore, Language and Literature, and Scientific Investigation - each of which is broken into maybe half-a-dozen chapters on more specific topics. Contributors don't really recur in this book, so it's one long string of variously pedantic and stuffed-shirt Victorian men (some clearly more cranks than others) writing in their best "serious" style to one another to impress each other with their erudition and/or request information for deeply specific and often pointless-sounding researches.

It's generally amusing and fun: the short pieces make it a good book to dip into at random times, and the organization means you can read four or five bits on epitaphs, or rural superstitions, or all the birds named in Shakespeare when you feel in the mood. The mindset is deeply Victorian, as you would expect: there's an occasional comment on something being "suitable for reading in the family," meaning that there's nothing that could possibly be offensive to the most nervous five-year-old girl imaginable. One might also detect certain attitudes towards the rural peasantry, foreigners, and women that the reader (one hopes) does not share.

It's a neat book that gets a reader deeply into the mindset of a previous era, and provides that useful parallax view: that people back then were still people, with a lot of the same concerns, issues, and problems as we do today, but that they also had substantially different backgrounds, standard ideas, prejudices, and mindsets. So they're the same as us...except in the ways they're massively different.

All of This and Nothing: Satin in a Coffin

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

Some songs are meant to be taken literally; I'm usually not fans of those. I love metaphors, quirky language, strange flights.

You said, "Do you believe what you're saying?"
Yeah, right now, but not that often

My favorite Modest Mouse song, by a long stretch, is the rattling, thumping, banjo-fueled Satin in a Coffin, a song about being dead, or pretending to be dead, and all that might mean.

Are you dead or are you sleeping?
God, I sure hope you are dead

It can be about anything killing you, or anything you worry might be killing you - relationships, substances, work, just living in the world. It is about any, or all, of those things, if you want it to be in the moment.

Well, everybody's talking about their short lists
Everybody's talking about death!

And that banjo, along with singer Isaac Brock's increasingly loud and tormented yells as the song goes on, are just perfect. This is a short song, but it goes exactly where it needs to.

Books Read: January 2026

During the first, and very cold, month of 2026, I stayed inside a lot and read books. (Spoiler Alert! I do that in all seasons anyway.) Here's what I read; links to my posts will be added later:

Jared Throne, Bridge Planet Nine (digital, 1/1)

Laura Pérez, Nocturnos (digital, 1/3)

P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings (1/3)

Philippe Riche, The Alliance of the Curious: #1 Sapiens (digital, 1/4)

Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson, Mystery Science Theater: A Cultural History (1/4)

Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 3: What Lies Beneath (digital, 1/10)

Pornsak Pinchetshote, Jesse Lonergan and Jeff Powell, Man's Best (digital, 1/11)

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (in Counterfeit Unrealities, 1/11)

Jeff Lemire and Malachi Ward, Black Hammer, Vol. 8: The End (digital, 1/16)

Lawrence Wood, Your Caption Has Been Selected (1/17)

Dave Barry, Class Clown (1/17)

Navied Mahdavian, This Country (1/18)

Matt Wagner and Brennan Wagner, Grendel: Devil's Odyssey (digital, 1/19)

Yasuhiko Nishizawa, The Man Who Died Seven Times (1/19)

Jean Zeid and Emilie Rouge, The Age of Video Games (digital, 1/24)

Caroline Cash, Girl in the World (digital, 1/25)

Peter Bagge, The Complete Neat Stuff (digital, 1/31)

James Thurber, Writings & Drawings (1/31)

I'm writing this right after having added the book I finished on February 1 into my reading notebook, so I can state definitively this time that I continued to read after this point. I expect I will list them here in time, too.

Quote of the Week: Vocations

In a subdued voice Jantiff stated that he had not yet discovered a specialty which he felt would interest him across the entire span of his existence. Lile Ravensroke replied that to his almost certain knowledge no divine fiat had ever ordained that toil must be joyful or interesting. Aloud Jantiff acknowledged the rightness of his father's views, but privately clung to the hope that somehow he might turn his frivolity to profit.

 - Jack Vance, Wyst: Alastor 1716, p.305 in Alastor