Quote of the Week: All Lost in the Supermarket

People who have never had a period of living with anxiety and panic don't understand that the realness of you is an actual feeling that you can lose. People take it for granted. You don't get up in the morning and think, as you spread peanut butter on your toast, "Ah, good, my sense of self is still intact, and the world is still real, I can now get on with my day." It's just there. Until it isn't. Until you are in the cereal aisle, feeling inexplicable terror.

 - Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet, p.197

Zero Girl by Sam Kieth

Some creators consistently deliver detailed plots and realistic worlds and naturalistic dialogue. They make the suspension of disbelief simple, building worlds that make sense and connect to consensus reality and read as real.

But I'm here to talk about Sam Kieth today, so forget all of that.

Zero Girl was a 5-issue series from 2001 that wasn't collected until 2017; I missed it both times around. It was one of Kieth's first stories after he wrapped up his best-known property, The Maxx (for the first time - no creator ever really finishes their most popular work; they just put it aside until pressure builds too high demanding more new stories), and was not at that point connected to that universe.

I say that, but there's a clear Maxx Easter Egg in dialogue late in this book, and Kieth's afterword makes it clear that all his stuff is connected, as he learned, or built, after this story was done.

But it basically stands alone - I think the point is that there are later things that connect both to this and to Maxx - and likely in other directions as well, being as Kieth is all about the deep Jungian connections.

And, as usual with a Kieth joint, the premise is bizarre, the details are quirky, and the actions of the main characters often the worst choices possible assuming this was our normal world. (Which, of course, it is not.) Even the names can be difficult to believe, which brings me to our main character:

Amy Smootster is in her teens, a high school student in a place and a school that I don't think ever gets a name. She is a moody loner, stylistically and by nature. She is bullied by three other girls, who are the only other students at this school we ever see - they're equally '90s grunge types, but I suppose the more popular ones. Amy has a superpower, I suppose, in a very Kiethian way: her feet secrete some kind of psychotropic (or maybe reality-tropic) goo when she's embarrassed.

No, wait. Ashamed. Kieth is all about deep emotional connections and trauma, so it can never be the ordinary or garden version of any emotion: only the most powerful and personal.

She also has some kind of synesthesia - or, again, since this is Kieth, a deeper understanding of the nature of reality - in which circles are her friends and allies, while squares are enemies attempting to destroy her. And I mean literally: growing jaws, chasing her down the street, all that kind of stuff.

As if that's not enough, Amy also has a deeply inappropriate crush on her hunky late-20s school counselor, Tim Foster. And I'm sorry to say that both of them are mostly focused on the "we can't do anything about this attraction now, since Amy is underage...but maybe, in a couple of years, we could conceivably fuck." (Note: Kieth does not use the word "fuck." He's squishier and vaguer than that, as always.)

Oh, and Amy is also homeless, in a plot point that feels completely disconnected. She hates school, isn't doing well there, but the aunt she used to live with recently died so she's sleeping under a bench and...Keith is not about the realistic plots, so asking what she eats and how she washes her clothes and where she does homework is a useless endeavor. But it certainly seems like Amy has no reason at all to hang around this place and every reason in the world to go anywhere else - which I suppose is why Kieth has her crushing so hard on Tim, to give her some reason not to run away.

Kieth books always feel lumpy to me, in intriguingly unique ways, lurching from heavy-dialogue scenes in which no one addresses issues in the ways that would happen in the real world into psychedelic action sequences in which a character is chased out a window by his newly-ravenous mattress. It's like he has two modes: too-crazy talking, and too-crazy action. It's all too crazy; that's what makes it a Sam Kieth book.

Amy and Tim fight the Power of the Squares - that, minus my snark, is roughly the central plot of the series - and agree to meet again, in three years, when Amy will be eighteen and legally fuckable by Tim. (I'm sorry: that aspect of the book makes me cringe every single time it comes up, and I will not stop pointing out how deeply, deeply inappropriate it is.)

Sam Kieth is unique, and Zero Girl has all of the strengths of his work. I wouldn't call the ways it fails to intersect with actual reality weaknesses, exactly, but they are things to note, particularly for straightforward readers. If you haven't read Kieth, though, I'd recommend starting with a book that isn't so centrally about wanting to fuck an underage girl.

The Lighthouse by Paco Roca

This is a 2004 graphic novel - should I say bande dessinée? Roca is Spanish, but my sense is the term is used generally across Europe - that the creator's afterword notes was tweaked a bit for subsequent publications, finalized (or abandoned, if we're being Da Vinci-esque about it) in 2009. This English translation - which Roca might have kibitzed on, as his afterword talks a lot about kibitzing on the French and Spanish and other editions in the first years - was done by Jeff Whitman for a 2017 American publication.

So it's older that it might look, but maybe not entirely so. The original work is about two decades ago now, but I'm not sure Roca didn't touch it, one last time, before this edition.

The Lighthouse is one of Paco Roca's earliest works, I think, but that picture is muddy. He's been translated out of sequence here in North America, with The House from 2005 only arriving in 2019 and Wrinkles from 2007 lapping it handily in 2008. But he was already, according to that afterword, deeply into the working life of a cartoonist, coming off a complex book called Hijos de la Alhambra and working intermittently on the series Los Viajes de Alexandre Ícaro (neither of which, from what I can tell, has been translated into English) before diving into El Faro (the original Spanish title for The Lighthouse).

It's a relatively simple story, as that afterword says: mostly in one place, two major characters, some action but a lot of talking. It wasn't something that would require a lot of research and page design, and not in color. That's one of the things that appealed to Roca, he says: it was a palate cleanser (and maybe, if I'm being puckish, also a palette cleanser, given it's not in color).

I'll also point out that the US-edition cover is a collage of panels from the book, maybe because the US audience needed the obvious weenie: a book called The Lighthouse must have a lighthouse prominently on the cover. Roca includes a much better-looking painterly cover in that afterword, but it includes the carved breasts of a mermaid figurehead, which may have killed it for an American audience. (I hate to say it, but my country is crazy in some ways that are very obvious and very well known globally.)

Francisco is a young soldier, fighting for the Republican side towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. He's fleeing a disastrous battle, hoping to get across the French border to survive, assuming he'll end up in a camp there but knowing the Fascists will kill him if he stays. He doesn't make it to the border, but he does meet and is taken in by Telmo, the aged keeper of a remote lighthouse.

The book is about the two of them: what Telmo tells Francisco during his recuperation, the boat they built, the way Telmo rekindles a love for life in the younger man. Telmo has plans and dreams and schemes, which he draws Francisco into wholesale, while the reader probably notices they may not be entirely based on reality.

The war must return in the end, of course. And the young man must move forward, while the old man, having given his lessons, is left behind. We know how this story has to go. It all does happen, and it happens well. Roca makes Telmo's lessons valuable, even if they are based on less than solid footings.

This is probably a minor book in Roca's career; I've only seen his The House before so I'm mostly guessing. But it's the BD equivalent of a bottle episode: solid, interesting, accomplished, working within a limited space and accomplishing what it can there.

Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

Matt Haig is a novelist; I read one of his books long ago - The Dead Fathers Club, a riff on Hamlet that I liked a lot, offered in the SFBC, and still remember fondly - and re-encountered his name a year or two ago. He's someone I think I should read more of: his books sound like they're mostly fantastika, of the not-in-a-commercial-genre type, maybe mostly Big Ideas that appeal to non-genre readers, but that can be just fine.

But, since I'm a middle-aged man, the next Matt Haig book I managed to run my eyeballs over was Notes on a Nervous Planet, a non-fiction book that is somewhere between a memoir of his panic attacks and a book of affirmations of how to live in the modern world. (Yes: the kind of book I reflexively make fun of and have avoided for decades - we saw metric fucktons of such books in my days in book publishing, along with similar yardgoods, and I got very cynical very young, and have never shaken that mindset.)

Look: Haig is positive and thoughtful and interesting. He has a personal perspective and history that gives him some weight to talk about the distracting affects of modern life in general and "our phones" in particular. [1] I think he's right. I think this book is a good thing, and it's both short and pleasant to read. It is uplifting. It probably will, or already has, helped a lot of people navigate their own lives.

But it's still in a genre I look on with scorn, for inadequate historical reasons, so I think all of my praise will sound faint and "yeah but."

This is from 2018, so things have only gotten worse: when Haig wrote, Twitter was a time-stealing nexus of smart, interesting people and not a hellscape of right-wing assholes, for one thing.

And it's very much Notes: Haig has clusters of short chapters - some of them just lists, or quick affirmations, or similar mediations - that are organized loosely into a sequence of larger meta-chapters. There's a through-line about mental health, there's a lot of research about health and the effects of the Internet, there's a fair bit about Haig's history with panic attacks and some other quick glimpses into his life. But it's a loose book on a big, expansive topic: the point is to be positive, to circle all sides of the issue, and to give readers positive vibes and some tools to handle the endless spewing pipe of modern life and a sense that they can and should set up sensible boundaries for themselves.

All of that is good, and Haig is an engaging writer. It's also a zippy book, shorter than it seems due to a slightly truncated page-size and all of those short chapters. It reads quickly, it goes down easily, it make the reader feel happier and more empowered.

And the cover is friendly, too. People probably won't judge you if you read it on mass transit. (Mass transit still exists, right? I got forcibly made permanent WFH a few years back and got out of that world entirely.)

Look: I can't think of a single negative thing to say about this book, and yet I feel like I'm being vaguely dismissive here. I liked it. I think it was helpful to me, and will be more helpful to others. How's that, sirs?

[1] I tend to think that the kind of people who carried a book everywhere before smartphones were a thing don't get addicted to phones; we knew what we wanted to spend our attention on, went out of our ways to keep that with us, and gave it our attention. But we were always a minority.

Enlightened by Sachi Ediriweera

I think I'm writing for people roughly in my position: respectful, interested, only slightly informed. People who might have unexpected or unhelpful resonances with a book about different lives and different traditions on the other side of the world. (Do those old-fashioned clothes from Southeast Asia look like epic fantasy garb to anyone but me?)

I say that up front. If this is your culture, your tradition...well, I hope not to be wrong, or infuriating. But I doubt I will be helpful or insightful; you know this better than I do. Reviewers don't say that often enough, I think: what you see always depends on where you stand, so I want to be clear about where I'm standing and the things I can see from there.

Enlightened is a graphic novel, published for middle grade readers, about the life of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha. It's by Sachi Ediriweera, a Sri Lankan cartoonist, designer, and filmmaker. It is subtitled "A Fictionalized Tale," and it's about Siddhartha's search, but it's not a work of religious proselytization.

Maybe I should say that again: if there is a Buddhist equivalent of Chick Tracts, this isn't it. This is a lightly fictionalized biography of a person of world-historical importance, the kind of book young readers will find, hopefully enjoy, and then probably write a report about. Siddhartha's core insights are presented here, and the path he followed to find them, but the point is to inform, not to convert. [1]

Edirirweera tells his story slowly and quietly, starting with Siddhartha as a young prince chafing under the restrictions of his over-protective father. Ediriweera drops us into this world without explaining it, but the outlines are quickly clear: medieval-level tech, vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, what seems to be many small kingdoms living together peacefully, a mature and self-contained civilization.

Siddhartha's is a story about suffering: despite his father's coddling, he learns that other people suffer, that life is often pain. His people believe that they are reincarnated over and over, living lives slightly better or slightly worse, depending on the choices they made previously.

So Siddhartha grows up, still coddled and kept in the palace, with almost no contact with the outside world. He marries the princess of a neighboring kingdom, Yashodara. And when their son is born, he realizes he must break out and see the real world, and that this is his chance. He does; he runs away from his palace and wife and son and father and luxurious life, to join a monastery and live as a poor monk.

Years pass. Siddhartha has no contact with his old life. He studies and meditates and thinks and talks to other monks. In the end, he comes to a revelation: life is suffering, suffering is caused by desire, and so the only way to end suffering is to not desire. He teaches his new Eightfold Path, he gathers students, he becomes famous.

That leads him back to his old family. In the way of religious stories, there's a bit of anger, but everyone is completely convinced, almost immediately, by the obvious truth of Siddhartha's path. And so everyone comes to follow his path, as they can. I may be making this sound like a radical philosophy - and it could be one, in a strict form, all leave-your-goods-behind and break-the-wheel - but there's a lot of nuance. There's a huge spectrum between desiring everything and desiring nothing, and Buddha's path is a positive, peaceful one, as Ediriweera presents it - perhaps even assuming nearly everyone will fail, that eliminating all desire is a project over multiple lives, multiple passes through the world. I don't see any sense of hurry here: it's all about letting go of things, and the more you can let go of, the better off you will be in the end.

Ediriweera tells this story quietly, as I said, in an unobtrusive style with a few, mostly light colors overlaid on his black (for figures) and cool blue (for backgrounds) lines. It is a peaceful, undemanding look for the art, and entirely appropriate.

What I know about the life of the Buddha is scattered and random; Enlightened told me that story again in a clear, organized way and explained things to me that I probably didn't realize I didn't understand. It's a fine, meditative, thoughtful journey through the thinking and life of a man we could all do well to emulate - and I hope its path into the hands of the younger readers of North America is simpler and easier than I fear it will be.

[1] I expect to see various astroturfed mothers pretending to support liberty demanding it be removed from school libraries, though. This is a county where yoga is feared as a gateway drug to Buddhism. And, no, I am not exaggerating.

This Year: 2008

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

I knew I'd have a song from The Indelicates on this list. I knew it would be a pretty song, filled with bile and spleen. I kept circling three songs - Savages, Mr. Punch, and this one.

In the end, I picked the song about being a song, the one from the very beginning of their career, the one that sums up all of that bile and spleen, the one that can stand in for all of the rest: We Hate the Kids.

Because Absolutely anyone can play the fucking guitar

It usually takes a band a while to get this cynical, to be this loud and negative about the industry they're in - somewhere later than the next-to-last song on their first record. But that's the secret weapon of The Indelicates: they're always disgusted.

Every generation gets fooled again
And every generation is the same
And its no good saying its not in your name
'cause it is in your name

Two great voices twine around that theme, cataloging this and that horrible thing about the music industry, throwing them out rapid-fire as if they could keep doing this for days.

Maybe they could.

It is a loud, demanding, driving song, making its case piece by inexorable piece about the horrors and crimes of popular music - the Indelicates have made a bunch of great songs in that mode over their career, and they're really good at it. (Let me also call out Mr. Punch (A Banishing) from the decade-later Juniverbrecher record, another rousing all-these-bastards-must-go song.)

Pop had a beginning, it grew and was tended
And now it is rotten. Let it be ended.

This is a song aiming to be the very last pop song, to sum up the entire rotten edifice, to make the case that it is all rotten and unsalvageable, and then end with the very last sound of pop music.

It didn't happen, of course. How could it? But that ambition, that sweep, is what great music is all about: demanding, insistent, unshakeable in its convictions. And it sounds marvelous: as it plays, you can believe that a song could end pop music.

No more music, thank you and goodnight.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 23, 2023

I have four books to mention this week - three that I found randomly on library shelves, while I was there for something else, and one that came in the mail. As always, I'll start with the mail.

The Corset and the Jellyfish is the new book from Nick Bantock, best known for the massively bestselling "Griffin & Sabine" books in the early '90s - those were clever and well-constructed, with physical letters nestled into envelopes in the books, using what I think of as pop-up book technology for different ends. My sense is that his career since then has been one part expanding upon that single massive success, with some subsequent Griffin & Sabine projects (a CD-ROM, a second trilogy, a stage play) and one part doing things that success enabled (lectures, painting, being part of the official committee selecting stamps for Canada).

This book may have vague links to the Griffin and Sabine series - the back cover mentions two loose touchpoints - but it's mostly its own thing, a self-declared "Conundrum of Drabbles." It contains one hundred very short stories with accompanying spot illustrations, in the style Bantock has used for Sabine's work. It looks like there is meant to be some kind of loose, or hidden, overall story or narrative. So quirky, but well within the space Bantock has worked before. It's a small hardcover from Tachyon Publications, publishing on November 7.

Now to the library books - I happened to be in the big library one two over last Sunday, grabbing a movie to watch with the family, and browsed the graphic novel stack while I was there. (Parenthetically: the libraries near me, and maybe those in the US somewhat consistently, shelve GNs in juvenile and YA sections, but not adult - I'm not sure why, but I was poking through the YA section.) These are books that looked vaguely interesting, but I know very little about any of them, obviously.

Tin Man was Justin Madison's debut; it came out in 2022 from Amulet, the books-for-new-people imprint of Abrams. It appears to be about two teens, sister and brother, who meet a Tin Woodsman - looking exactly like the one from The Wizard of Oz, though I think he has a different origin - and they affect each other's lives.

In Waves is a big book that attracted me with its cool green cover; it's by AJ Dungo and is something like a history of surfing and something like a personal story about how surfing has been part of his life. (Or probably both.) There also seems to be some kind of memoir of illness as part of it; I don't know whose illness.

And last is Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto, first in a series by a group of European creators (written by Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël, drawn by David Evrard, colored by Walter) translated by Dan Christensen for this 2019 US publication. It's about Irena Sendlerowa, who I just randomly heard about the other week myself: she was a young Polish woman during WWII and personally smuggled 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, saving their lives.

Quote of the Week: Je parle français?

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique in Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

 - the first line of The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse

Look by Jon Nielsen

Artie is a cute little robot in an apocalyptic, post-human landscape, roaming through a desert on Earth with a single job, that, frankly, seems a bit pointless. He has one friend, another robot, who pushes him to learn and discover more about his world, to break out of his programming, and to save something important.

I had to check the dates on Jon Nielsen's graphic novel Look, because the parallels with the Pixar movie Wall-E were so obvious that I wanted to believe this was from the late '90s and it was all parallel development. But no: this is a 2017 joint, so, unless I assume Nielsen (a fairly prominent web cartoonist) was living in a media-free cave during the Aughts, those parallels must be built-in, part of some plan.

Look is not officially a book for young readers, but it's tone is very middle-grade and it's entirely kid-friendly; I expect it has already found its way into a lot of school GN collections. And that means being similar to a twenty-year old movie might not be a problem. Ten-year-olds don't know automatically which robot story came first, or have a deep knowledge of robot stories to begin with (oh, some ten-year-olds will have a deep and abiding passion for robot moves, or any other random thing, definitely) - or care.

Back to Artie. He's the guy on the cover. His job is to circle a desert, endlessly, looking for something. Accompanying him, with a history we don't know at first, is the vulture Owen - who, quirkily, seems to have a problem remembering things, like a different Pixar character.

The story here starts when Owen goads Artie into breaking his routine, going to The Village to talk to "Mr. Hew" (who turns out to be a wise old turtle - oh, and this may be a minor SPOILER, but every last character in this book is actually a robot, even if they look biological). Artie has realized that he doesn't know what he's looking for in the desert, just that he's looking for something, and would like some more direction.

Mr. Hew doesn't know what Artie is looking for either, and sends him to The Factory. Artie turns out to be defective - that should probably be in quotes; but you know what I mean; you've seen stories like this a thousand times - and the large scary robots at The Factory try to reprogram him to forget everything he's learned and destroy his emergent personality.

Artie gets away, with Owen's help. They head out of the desert to see what else is in the world. And then the rest of the plot happens; I won't go into all of the details. It follows the path I mostly expected, though with some quirky surprises (ecological messages, sure, but a functional city portrayed positively?) and the requisite happy ending.

This is pleasant and zippy; Nielsen draws with thin crisp lines and gets a lot of life into the body language of his robots. It is a story pitched at that Pixar or kid-GN level, so don't expect deeper insights or more complexity than that. But it's just fine on that level, if possibly just a bit second-hand and familiar to an adult.

The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse

I forget just how much P.G. Wodehouse's books twine together. Yes, obviously he has the clear series: Jeeves and Blandings and Psmith, most obviously. But most of his books are set in a common world, even when he doesn't say so.

So I was amused to see that The Luck of the Bodkins, an officially non-series book that I just read, is a loose sequel to Heavy Weather, a Blandings Castle book I read last year, but a different sequel than Full Moon, another Blandings book I read earlier this year.

Full Moon comes back to Blandings; Bodkins follows Monty Bodkins, but they're both quintessentially Wodehousian, about young men and their young women, minor criminal capers, the struggle to find a suitable position (pays well, mollifies gruff older relatives, allows one to be near the loved one), and that sunny Wodehousian world, one part dream, one part Edwardian, and one part inter-war.

This time out, there are three young men: Monty, who is rich but needs to prove to his fiancée's uncle that he is stable and responsible by keeping a job for a year; Ambrose Tennyson, a novelist engaged to a spitfire Hollywood actress, Lotus Blossom; and Ambrose's younger brother Reggie Tennyson, being shipped by his family off to Montreal to take a dreary office job. (Reggie will find a girl to fall in love with over the course of the book.)

Most of the action takes place on the transatlantic liner RMS Atlantic, on its nearly week-long journey from England to New York. There, most of the cast are supposedly aided - but not actually so - by the steward Albert Peasemarch, who is specific enough that he never became a caricature to me. (Though maybe if I knew better the specific assumptions Wodehouse was working from in 1935, he would have been more obviously stereotypical.)

All three circle Ivor Llewellyn, head of the Superba-Llewellyn film studio, who also has to smuggle a very valuable necklace following the demands of his spitfire actress wife - kept off-stage the entire book, to better be a gorgon. Ivor is worried about Customs detectives, and Monty actually is a detective (of a sort), which fuels a certain amount of confusion and funny scenes. Lotus Blossom ("Lottie," originally of the Murphys of Hoboken) has a contract with Llewlleyn, as does Ambrose as the novel opens.

But Ivor discovers Ambrose is "the wrong Tennyson" - i.e., not the poet then dead for about thirty years - and tears up that contract. And having a spitfire actress nearby breaks up Monty's engagement. And Reggie is scheming to find a way to avoid being shut up in boring old Montreal - wouldn't some kind of job in Hollywood be better?

Complications multiply, including a stuffed Mickey Mouse and the singing career of Peasemarch, but, in the end, all of the couples are re-united (or united, in Reggie's case, as he falls in love with Ivor's sister-in-law), the diamond necklace is successfully smuggled, and all of the people who need a contract with Superba-Llewellyn get one, for the obligatory happy ending.

This was longer than the Wodehouses I've read recently, maybe because he had three couples to juggle, but it's prime-era Wodehouse, and a joy to read. As usual, I highly recommend reading Wodehouse whenever life gets to be too serious or you just need something dependably funny, sunny, and lovely.

Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo by Sandrine Revel

There's no obvious reason why there would be a loose series of biographical graphic novels, mostly about North American figures, translated from European originals. But there is one, from NBM, and it's been running for a decade or so.

It's not really a "series," I suppose: there's no unified trade dress. But the books tend to list each other on their card pages, and it's clearly one distinct thread in the books NBM publishes. And I've been coming to them, semi-randomly, as I notice that each of them exists.

It comes out of the fact that Europe has a larger and more robust comics industry, I suppose: that the world of bandes desinées is more varied than the US Wednesday Crowd equivalent - full of semi-junky adventure stories, sure, like any popular medium, but not defined by a specific, tight conception of those semi-junky adventure stories.

Anyway, that's how I came to read an artsy, allusive, non-linear "biography" of the mid-20th century pianist Glenn Gould, from French creator (painter, cartoonist, maker of children's books, illustrator, etc.) Sandrine Revel.

It's Glenn Gould: A Life Off Tempo, and it's a difficult book to sum up. It's a fine read: not bogged down with facts and dates and minutia no reader will remember, it tells a personal story about Gould's life, focused on his emotions and interior life, as expressed in what he did and said. It jumps around in time quite a lot, without signposting any of the eras: readers will look to see how old Gould is on each page to place them, and probably have a vaguer sense of overall chronology.

(I had to look him up to get the dates: he was born in 1932 and died, quite young, in 1982. He was also Canadian, which is probably more important than it might seem.)

Revel has a very illustrative style - I can see how she'd have success in books for children; she makes great pictures rather than trying to ape reality - and her work here often has lots of panels to show movement or time passing, especially of Gould playing piano. I would not have thought playing piano was something that would come through clearly in a comics format, but Revel does a brilliant job of that here, leading off with a visionary sequence that sets the tone and includes most of a page of just close-ups of Gould's hands as they form notes. (I know she has some specific piece in mind here, and I bet actual musicians can also tell what that is.)

So this is a biography of feeling and sense, not of detail and sequence. We see Gould a bit in his late childhood, but it's mostly about his adult career. He had a lot of quirks, to put it mildly, and Revel displays those rather than explaining or describing them. It's as if she's transformed Gould's work, which was all about sound, into visual elements, making a comics version of the Goldberg Variations.

I came into this knowing very little about Gould; I've probably heard his work - I went through a big Classical phase in the '90s, when I was more of an old man than I am now - but I'm not any kind of fan or expert. Readers who do know Gould, or how to play the piano, or the world of classical recordings, will probably get more out of this than I did. But I got more than enough, and I assume that you, whoever you are, would as well. This is a visionary biography of a visionary man, that brilliantly transforms sound into sight through its pages.

Finder: The Rescuers by Carla Speed McNeil

Creators have different views of their stories than readers do. There's background details that they mean as clues or indicators; there's the question of whether a series of events is unusual or typical; there's all kinds of things about a fictional world that stay mostly in that creator's head, molding the story but not necessarily being said in the story.

So reading a book with creator notes can be a very different experience than reading without them: the reader gets much more of the unfiltered Creator Experience, all of the "this means that" and "I wish there had been space to explain XYZ" and "everybody did M in those days; it was a super-popular fad for PDQ reasons."

I say this because I've been reading Carla Speed McNeil's Finder stories - thorny, thoughtful SFnal comics set on a transformed Earth perhaps a few thousand years on, after some unspecified major upheavals - in the omnibus Library editions, which have extensive, detailed page-by-page notes by McNeil. And I think I get wrapped around the notes, which give a sense of how McNeil creates worlds, how she thinks about societies, what she's interested in exploring about how people react to each other. And I frankly find that those notes make her societies feel much worse to me: more oppressive, more horrible, less friendly, more overwhelming, just utterly predetermined and regimented in varied but always unpleasant ways.

So I read Talisman a decade ago, in an edition without notes - and still spent time there digging into the worldbuilding and assumptions, since I'm that kind of reader even when a creator doesn't give me a key to the puzzle. But I've really been thinking more seriously about this world after reading Finder Library, Vol. 1 in 2018 and then three stories in Vol. 2 over the past year: Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, and now The Rescuers.

I still think this world is horribly dystopian, probably even more so than McNeil does herself. It's one of those "two diametrically opposed opposite ways of life" worlds - think of The Dispossessed - and those tend, at least for me, to make both options cruel and forced and unappealing.

But this time around, I had a related thought, which helped contextualize things. Creators always have ways of organizing worlds and stories in their heads, like everyone else - some ways of thinking are more typical than others. We're all familiar with the Engineer Method: every problem can be solved, everything can be reduced to specifics, everything is a matter of bringing the appropriate resources and insight to bear with the appropriate leverage.

McNeil is something like the opposite of that. She works from an Anthropological model: what weird things would this kind of society do, if they were allowed to do anything? What's the usual way these things go, and how can that be more story-rich? How much contrast can I draw between these two societies; how far can I push each of them? And what kind of unlikely things will grow up in the interstices between societies?

This is a world full of people who do things The Right Way, and would never consider not doing so. Depending on their specific society, The Right Way is entirely different - but it's always detailed and specific and demanding. There is a neat little box for everyone, and everyone is kept within their neat little boxes - no matter what, no matter who (as specifically comes up in conversation in this book) needs to be murdered to keep those boxes neat.

I tend to doubt societies actually work like that. People fight against boxes, all the time. (Particularly when The Right Way includes "kill those people.") They have pressure to stay in those boxes, definitely - but a lot of that pressure is official, and McNeil's anthro focus means we never see the official side: law and government are vestigial or remote in this world, and what we see is that everything is enforced by custom.

But those are the kinds of stories McNeil wants to tell - and heightening tension through rigid customs is not anything new. I might wish we saw more official teeth in the enforcement of the Right Ways, and not just random people, but that's not the kind of story she wants to tell, apparently.

The Rescuers is a detective story, and I'm circling the questions about the underlying world because detective stories are all about learning the details of a particular crime and finding out the secrets of the people involved; I'm not going to spoil that.

Series-hero Jaeger is back in Anvard, the gigantic domed city that's the setting for most of the stories in this series. He's hanging out in some vague capacity at the palatial mansion of a nouveau riche guy who supports (and somewhat indulges) the "Ascian" people - the two societies in this world are the far-too-Amerindian "Ascians," who live as nomads and are Good because they are Close to the Earth (but are also horribly superstitious and seem to live short, dangerous lives); and the civilized domed-city-dwellers, who are organized into a huge array of genetic "clans," who police tightly allowed divergences from their standard (think dog breeds, but people) and tend to all work in a small related cluster of jobs allowed to that clan. (Don't think about where food for the cities comes from: the cities are all metal and stone; everything else is howling wasteland filled with violent tribes and what seems to be a large number of also often-violent nonhuman sapients. This is a Hobbesian world at its core.)

So: Baron Manavellin has a pseudo-19th century Great House, in parklike grounds, carved out from the bottom level of a vast Trantorian city. It's not clear how he became rich, but in Finder it always seems that fame precedes fortune, which is the case here: he was a hero as a boy, saving dozens of other kids from yet another (accepted, everyday) horror of this world. Manavellin has a mostly-Ascian staff, for I think mostly benevolent-overlord reasons. Jaeger is there; again, it's not clear why or what he's doing, other than mooching off other people, which frankly I think is the point of his life.

(Once again: I do not find Jaeger as compelling or positive as the author evidently does. He's like that one cousin who reliably shows up at dinner-time and equally reliably is nowhere to be found at chores-time.)

A shocking crime takes place during a big fete at the Great House. Police detective Smithson takes charge of the investigation; he's smarter and more dedicated to his job than is typical for police in this area of Anvard. (This, of course, is typical of the detective story: the detective must have almost-insurmountable obstacles, and must be battling nearly alone.) Jaeger has skills that would aid the investigation, but the place of the Ascians in Anvard is also tentative and shaky; they're not citizens, and what (few and paltry) legal protections might apply to the clans don't cover them. So he both doesn't want to help, and doesn't think it will do any good.

Well, of course it won't do any good! This is Finder; everyone has to stay in their boxes and let the standard horrible society run the same way it always does. There's no other way for people to live and organize themselves, is there?

There's a secondary plot as well, but I'll leave that out. It's more anthropology, more "we have to live this way because of Reasons; we can never alter our Ways because our Ways are The Right Ways."

I should say here that The Rescuers is a tragedy, more or less. Finder stories before this have mostly been about people finding kinds of happiness despite their straitjacket societies and tiny allowed decision-spaces. But The Rescuers is the "Oops! All Tragedy!" of the Finder-verse, in which all those anthropological details make a thicket no one can manage to get out of in time to make anything positive.

So this one is a downer, but it's a downer deeply informed by all of the bedrock assumptions and details of this world. I still think this world is mostly a tragedy, most of the time, for most of the people in it, and McNeil has just previously carefully picked her moments and characters to show a few non-tragedy scenes. (I think she disagrees; that's how fiction is.)

It's excellent science fiction, full of details and moments, in a big, rich society. (Not a nice one, but how many societies, real or fictional, are inherently nice?) I would never in a million years want to live in any world created by McNeil, but they're engrossing to visit in fictional form.

This Year: 2007

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

A decade ago, I posted the video for this song as "the truest love song ever."

I stand by my words.

My song for 2007 was then, and still is, Someone to Love by Fountains of Wayne, the band that took its name from a homegoods store I used to drive by almost every single day. (The store is gone now. The band is broken up, too, I think: was even before Adam Schlesinger died.)

Fountains of Wayne was always too smart for their own good, writing pop songs that were uneasily aware that pop songs were silly and ephemeral, songs that twisted their premises one or two more twists tighter, squeezing out the casual audience as they went.

But that extra twist is what made them brilliant, at least for a relentless intellectualizer like me. All the way back at their first album, they had a song named Please Don't Rock Me Tonight. And they had doomed-love songs from the jump as well, with the lovely She's Got a Problem.

But Someone to Love takes it further, in impeccable power-pop format. We get two strong verses, each introducing a main character: Seth Shapiro and Beth Mackenzie. They're both alone in the big city, both have quirky details quickly described, both looking for someone special.

We know how this kind of song goes. We're poised for the meet-cute and the forever-after.

After each verse, we hit that super-punchy refrain:

Don't give out
Don't give up
One of these nights you might find someone to love

But then the short third verse just murders the whole concept of a love song, in four quick lines.

Seth Shapiro is trying in vain
To hail a taxi in the morning in the pouring rain
Beth Mackenzie sees one just up ahead
She cuts in front of him and leaves him for dead

The entire song stops, catches its breath, and then...

We jump back to the refrain like a whipcrack, but it's almost wordless this last time. There's only one thing they can say, only one last thing left.

Someone to love

That's what we all want. But this is not a song about getting what we want. It's not the song we thought it was at all, but a colder, sadder, devastating song instead. That's probably why I like it so much.

Quote of the Week: In Which Shade is Cast at Great Velocity and Pinpoint Precision

Mr. Woodward's aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him has been generally understood as an admirable quality, at best a mandarin modesty, at worst a kind of executive big-picture focus, the entirely justifiable oversight of someone with a more important game to play. Yet what we see in The Choice is something more than a matter of an occasional inconsistency left unexplored in the rush of the breaking story, a stray ball or two left unfielded in the heat of the opportunity, as Mr. Woodward describes his role, "to sit with many of the candidates and key players and ask about the questions of the day as the campaign unfolded." What seems most remarkable in this Woodward book is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as insiders' inside story and each of which went on to become a number-one bestseller: these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.

 - Joan Didion, "Political Pornography," in Political Fictions (p.854 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)

Every reporter, in the development of a story, depends on and coddles, or protects, his or her sources. Only when the protection of the source gets in the way of telling the story does the reporter face a professional, even a moral, choice: he can blow the source and move to another beat or he can roll over, shape the story to continue serving the source. The necessity for making this choice between the source and the story seems not to have come up in the course of writing Mr. Woodward's books, for good reason: since he proceeds from a position in which the very impulse to sort through the evidence and reach a conclusion is seen as suspect, something to be avoided in the higher interest of fairness, he has been able, consistently and conveniently, to define the story as that which the source tells him.

 - ibid, p.864

Over the next several years, first on the Paula Jones story for the Post and then on the Paula Jones and the Kathleen Willey and the Monica Lewinsky stories for Newsweek, [Michael] Isikoff would encounter a number of such choices, moments in which a less single-minded reporter might well have let attention stray to the distinctly peculiar way the story was unfolding itself, the way in which corroborating witnesses and incriminating interviews would magically materialize, but Isikoff kept his eye on the ball, his story, which was, exactly, "uncovering" Clinton.

 - Didion, "Vichy Washington," (p.896 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)

And, most comprehensively:

In fact the interests and priorities of the press have remained reliably the same: then as now, the press could be relied upon to report a rumor or a hint down to the ground (tree it, bag it, defoliate the forest for it, destroy the village for it), but only insofar as that rumor or hint gave promise of advancing the story of the day, the shared narrative, the broad line of whatever story was at the given moment commanding the full resources of the reporters covering it and the columnists commenting on it and the on-tap experts analyzing it on the talk shows.

 - Didion, "Clinton Agonistes,"  (p.871 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)

The Unbelievable Unteens by Jeff Lemire and Tyler Crook

I've never created superhero characters. [1] So I could be talking out of my ass here. But I don't think there's anything inherent in the form that requires new work to slavishly follow the models of previously created universes, so that even the slowest reader can point to the models and get it.

I could be wrong, as I said. It certainly looks like that is absolutely required, because it happens every damn time.

The Black Hammer universe, as created by writer Jeff Lemire and his various collaborators, has been incredibly derivative from the jump, and I have to believe this is very, very deliberate. Lemire could write about people in fanciful wedgie-inducing costumes that are not immediately reminiscent of the comics he read in the '70s and '80s, so he must be doing it - over and over again, relentlessly - on purpose.

The Unbelievable Unteens is the X-Men rip-off. OK, maybe there's a bit of Teen Titans in the DNA, too, but not much. This 2022 collection gathers the four-issue series of the same name, plus the Free Comic Book Day story from 2019 "Black Hammer Presents...Horrors to Come" (co-written by Lemire with Ray Fawkes, with art by David Rubin). I think that FCBD story has already appeared in another collection, since it was very familiar.

The other big touchpoint of Black Hammer is nostalgia, as required in any derivative superhero story. So these are not stories about original heroes in a modern world, but instead stories about Not-That-Guy (for purely copyright reasons) in Almost-That-Story, from Back When You Were Young And Life Was Wonderful. Some of the stories specifically look back, and some are set in the past as a look back. But the creative eye never ever looks forward, or even to anything demonstrably modern.

So Unteens is a story set in the late '90s, where the Unteens are a fictional superhero group, written and drawn by Jane Ito. But! They were actually real, an actual '80s superteam, and Ito was one of them! A shocking revelation from her past will bring her face-to-face with her old teammates, and they must revisit Their Darkest Hour to save One Of Their Own from the horrible fate she's been in for roughly a decade. (I suppose I should give Lemire half-credit for a story that obviously references The Dark Phoenix Saga but actually has a different plot.)

This story is shorter and more direct than most of the Black Hammer-verse pieces, which made the end feel rushed and perfunctory. Previously, the sidebar stories have been more complex and interesting - they were actually stories instead of exercises in keeping the core cast in pretty much exactly the same situation while giving the illusion of Massive Events Unfolding. (Wait: didn't I already say this was a derivative superhero series? I hate repeating myself.)

As always, Black Hammer stories are professional, populated with realistic people who talk like human beings and have human concerns that sometimes even are important to the plot. The giant wodges of standard superhero furniture are dull and obvious, but they're the point of the exercise, so I have to assume they are not dull and obvious to the target audience. Given that this one was shorter, and possibly rushed to a conclusion, I wonder if even that target audience is beginning to tire of the endless exercise.

I suppose I can live in hope, as always.

[1] Well, not seriously. My friend group in college made up jokey superhero versions of ourselves, and I was 5-Man, with the incredible power to control anything in a group of five, inspired by a random shirt I had with a giant athletic-jersey-style 5 on the chest. I think we made up other characters not based on ourselves, too, and maybe some villains. My other main contribution to superherodom was the previously mentioned String Boy. We were all very fond of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, at least as a model for character creation, which may explain some of it.

Political Fictions by Joan Didion

We don't call it "suspension of disbelief" when we talk about non-fiction, but there's a similar mechanism in play: do we trust this writer? Do we believe she is telling, not just the truth as she understands it and saw it, but that she's coming from a viewpoint we understand and can follow, that we accept that her conclusions will naturally follow from her premises?

I've been reading Joan Didion's non-fiction over the past couple of years, in the big early-Aughts omnibus We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, and one interesting thing I've noticed is that I was willing to believe her instinctively about the '60s and '70s, when I was either non-existent or a child, but I started to question her premises once we hit the '90s and events that I saw myself as an adult.

I don't necessarily disagree with what she says, but I find I'm more skeptical, more interested in thinking through the implications and wondering what she's saying and not saying, what her premises were and how they rolled out over the years since.

Political Fictions is a collection of essays from 2001 - I say essays rather than reportage because Didion was always Didion, but these are close to reportage, some of them I-went-there-and-saw-this pieces and some of them what-all-of-these-things-mean pieces. Didion's introduction notes that she started being asked to write about politics with the 1988 presidential election: this has two pieces coming out of that campaign, one on 1992, a couple from the mid-90s leading up to '96, and a cluster around the Clinton impeachment and the lead-up to 2000. She's never engaging in horse-race coverage, which she disparages several times; her aim is to see larger pictures and bigger implications.

The through-line is the rise of the puritanical right wing, though she doesn't identify it as such; the first few pieces position this impulse as more bipartisan, frankly: as both parties narrowing their focus to "likely voters," to the relatively affluent and suburban and engaged. And she's never as plugged into specific campaign and political strategies as the "insiders," hers is specifically a view from someone elite - in the general, often derogatory sense - but not part of the quote-unquote Washington elite, a smart and engaged writer who knows a lot and has written about a lot but doesn't speak and think in the code of campaigns and elections.

Post-Gingrich, and especially post-impeachment, Didion is clearer-eyed about who is pushing the moral line, why they're doing it, who they hope to influence, and some inkling of the world they're trying to make. (We live in that world now, though that impulse fractured once it succeeded with Bush II and other strains of the right-wing coalition grabbed their own pieces of power, especially the war-hungry neocons.)

But I found myself wishing she had a longer view, and a clearer one, in the early essays here. There's an unspoken long shadow of the bland Reagan prosperity that she never mentions, the way the economy was good enough for those younger and/or poorer potential voters to quietly drop out of the process and let a mostly white, mostly suburban, mostly middle-aged (as of the late '80s, so Silent and Greatest and some early Boomers) bloc's concerns become cemented as "what America wants." She doesn't mention race at all, except obliquely, when talking about Jesse Jackson during the '88 campaign, but the US was a whiter country in those days, and the voting population even whiter still.

(She may have meant that, all of that. She may have thought she was implying it clearly enough. It's hard to say, thirty years later, when premises and expectations have shifted repeatedly.)

So there's a lot of interesting thoughts here, and a lot of interesting moments in the momentum of the American political world. This is a book that helps explain how we got to where we are today: not conclusive, not definitive, but indicative and useful.

Grandville Force Majeure by Bryan Talbot

This was the fifth and last of the "Grandville" stories, detective stories set in a vaguely steampunk world with some (mostly set-dressing) alternate-historical elements and an entirely anthropomorphic-animal cast. (Yes, it was an odd combination, which creator Bryan Talbot hit upon for reasons of influences and visual ideas rather than logical worldbuilding - but how many creators actually start from "logical worldbuilding" in the first place?) It came out in 2017, and I somehow missed it at the time, after enjoying the first four books of the sequence over the previous decade: the original Grandville, Mon Amour, Bete Noir, and Noel.

"Grandville" is the in-universe nickname of Paris, which was more important in the previous books than in Grandville Force Majeure, which takes place entirely in London. (Talbot is British, and his cast has been primarily British - his villains have tended to be French, but I've already said he's British once, so now I'm repeating myself.) Our series hero, Detective-Inspector LeBrock (the badger on the cover) is investigating a French crimelord, Tiberius Koenig, who is expanding his operations into London and, predictably, being brutal and destructive as he does so.

Force Majeure presents itself as a thriller, with Koenig's plans specifically to destroy and kill LeBrock seemingly unknown to the detective, but it's actually a mystery, with a long "here's how it really happened" section at the end to tie up loose ends. So, in retrospect, it's not quite as thrilling as it seems at the time; that's a slightly deflating thing to do at the end of a longish book, especially one ending a series.

Otherwise, Force Majeure has the strengths of the series: a big, colorful, quirky world populated with lots of weird characters - some of them Easter eggs to readers who recognize where Talbot has appropriated them from - lots of violent action, a compelling tough-guy central character, and a relatively play-fair detective story. There's less of LeBrock's romance with his ex-whore girlfriend Billie this time, since she's a captive of the fiendish Koenig for a stretch in the middle. And Koenig's plans are much more street-level than the grand world-dominators of the previous books: he's personally attacking LeBrock, but otherwise is just a guy who wants to control drug dealing, prostitution, and other illegal activities in a new territory.

Talbot's afterword teased brand extensions to Grandville - a TTRPG in progress and a TV show optioned - but I don't think those appeared, which is (sadly) the common fate of brand extensions. We did get five books, though, and the beautiful thing about alternate histories is that they don't date - they will be just as odd and specific ten years later as they were when they were created.

Grosz by Lars Fiske

Today I'm going to try to describe a nearly wordless book about an artist I'm not all that familiar with, by an artist I'm not all that familiar with. If I descend into potted history and bland statements, that will be why.

George Grosz - I probably could force Blogger to display the original German spelling of his name, but I don't have the energy for that this morning - was a German painter and caricaturist of the early 20th century (1893-1959). As you probably can guess from the intersection of the time, place, and field, Grosz was artistically radical and politically engaged: he was strongly anti-Nazi from the earliest days, moderately Communist (but, like so many others, disillusioned after a visit to the Soviet Union), and generally anti-clerical and anti-"high society." He escaped Germany with his family just as Hitler rose to power, living in the US for the last twenty-five years of his life before dying in an accident in postwar Berlin very soon after his return there.

Lars Fiske is a cartoonist and artist and maker of other kinds of books; he's Norwegian. His cartooning style is not a million miles away from Grosz's paintings: both are complex, full of overlapping elements and extreme caricature. And, maybe a decade ago, maybe not quite that long, he made a book about Grosz's life. In 2017, Fantagraphics published a US edition as Grosz. I didn't see any indication of a translator, but the text is minimal: Fiske may have done it himself.

Grosz is a potted life, made somewhat more elliptical by being wordless. We see Grosz doing things, and have chapter titles (with what I think are quotes from Grosz) and place/time tags, but we're not told the meanings of events and have to piece it all together ourselves. But we can follow it pretty well: Gorsz was a dandy of a young man, with big ideas for art, served in the army in the Great War where he apparently was wounded, loved American culture and strongly criticized German society, was involved in radical movements both artistic (Dada) and societal (Communism), ran afoul of growing oppression in Germany throughout the '20s, and eventually got away to the US, where his life calmed down substantially.

Fiske's art is extremely energetic, mostly black-and-white with some pops of color (red in particular) and a beige-ish overlay with geometric shapes of white cut out. Gestures are large, faces are caricatured, and he uses strong diagonals throughout - sometimes to divide actions into overlapping panels, sometimes as defining elements, sometimes as vanishing-point lines that he leaves in the drawing, sometimes just to be there. His drawings are visually dense: this is not a book to scan quickly.

I found I got a decent sense of the high points of Grosz's life, and came to like the hawk-nosed guy, who is a bit of a sex-mad loose cannon in Fiske's telling. Probably not just in Fiske's telling, too, and to the end of his life, frankly: Grosz died from injuries sustained by falling down the stairs after a long night drinking. Which is definitely a colorful way to go, especially in your mid-sixties.

Even if you don't care about Grosz - I didn't before I read this - Fiske's strong, assured cartooning and his aggressive linework make this a really visually interesting comic to read.

This Year: 2006

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

Some songs are demanding, even if you're not 100% sure what they're demanding. They hit you hard, overwhelm you, tell you their story. You know it's important. You know it's vital. And you make up your own reasons why, or explore what's there, trying to be sure of the truth.

Wake up you've got a lot of things to do
Wake up the sun is rising without you

My song for 2006 is Quiet as a Mouse, by Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos.

It's the kind of song where it's clear something is wrong from the jump, but exactly what is more murky. "Tourists" are doing things - "rob you of your home," "robbed me of my child" - but is that a euphemism for foreign soldiers? Or your own nation's soldiers? Or worse?

And he said times, they gotta change,
but so do we

It's urgent and dangerous, like a war or insurrection. And it's personal in some way - how the speaker feels is important, and shifts from chorus to chorus - "back was broke" to "life and love and hope" to "apathy and hate."

There's a guitar riff in the middle of the chorus that's perfect: a loud buzz saw of an interruption, bam bam bam. This is yet another song that uses that trick that always works: the verses are soft - though they get louder, each to the next - and the end of each chorus ticks up the noise and energy.

I still don't know exactly what this song is about. But I know I don't want the sun to rise without me.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 9, 2023

One book this week, from the library.

And it's kinda a funny story - I tried to start reading this bande dessinée omnibus in the Hoopla library app a couple of weeks ago, but found the panels just too small. I decided to see if a real, live book would be better, and put a hold on the physical book in the very same library. (It seems to be slightly larger, so let's see if that makes it easier to read. I find mid-century Eurocomics were made for a larger format than they're usually published in these days.)

The book is Asterix, Vol. 1 by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, the 2021 Papercutz edition collecting the first three books in the series (originally from the early 1960s). I'm pretty sure I read some Asterix books, back when I was a kid, but I have no memory of which ones or when. So I'm expecting this to be one part reading-classic-kids-stuff-as-an-adult, and one part do-I-remember-any-of-this?

Oh, and Asterix, in case you don't know, is a Gaul, in 50 BC. He lives in the one little village not conquered by Rome; he's the little guy on the cover. The Romans are the main (mostly comic) villains, and the Gauls are the heroes in this series which...do I need to underline this bit?...was published in France for the French and created by French people, all about how plucky and brave and smart their ancient ancestors were. The term usually used is "beloved."

Quote of the Week: Smiles

She smiled and I got that sensation again, the one it's worth getting both your legs cut for. You know the one. I hope you know the one. How does that even work? What is it that makes us weak in the knees and makes our stomachs fall out just because someone smiles? I don't get it.

 - Steven Brust, Tsalmoth, p.106

And also

I didn't turn my head, but I knew she was smiling. I wish I could describe that particular smile. It's like, she was trying not to, but she wasn't really hiding it. Whenever she got that smile I had to remind myself what a tough guy I am so I didn't suddenly turn into a grinning idiot.

 - ibid, p.148

Things We Create by Axel Brechensbauer

We all have stuff. And so we all have relationships with stuff - that table we love, maybe for reasons we can explain. That one kind of packaging we hate, and keep telling our friends it should be changed like this - it's so obvious! Things that work well, things that don't work well. Things that just fit into our lives, and those that stick out - maybe in an interesting way, so we pay attention to it, or maybe in an annoying way, like a table with a top that extends just far enough on one side that you run into it all the time.

Axel Brechensbauer is a designer, sculptor, concept designer - and, obviously, cartoonist. As far as I can tell, he's Swedish, but seems to work currently from a studio in Barcelona. He's thought a lot about objects, their taxonomies and how they fit into human lives. And Things We Create is how he explains, or explores, all of that: how humans make and use objects, the ways those objects can be useful or ornamental, closer to nature or further away, all those questions of desire and usability and beauty and purpose.

Brechensbauer narrates this book himself, as a cartoon-mouse avatar, on large, bright pages that often seem like posters - well, he is a designer, we should expect his book to reflect that. He's fond of taxonomy and schemas; Things is largely an exploration of various ways for dividing, classifying, or organizing objects - physical needs vs. emotional needs, for example, or things that help us work more efficiently vs. things that help us enjoy ourselves more.

It's not exactly footnoted, but Brechensbauer cites experts across a range of disciplines as he goes - Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes in early, and Nietzche makes an appearance as well - as he examines how people think about their things, and how they use those things.

He's got a distinct viewpoint, and these are clearly things he's through about, but Things isn't dogmatic: it  comes across as a exploration rather than a manifesto, a guided wander through ways of thinking about stuff, as a designer talks about the ways this way of thinking is useful, and then about another way of thinking, which can help with something else.

Things is bright and clear and well-organized; it flows well and makes a lot of sense in its arguments and explications. Usually, with a book like this, there will be at least one thing that I balk at, and complain about, but Brechensbauer is reasonable and even-handed enough that I never had a moment like that. I might not find all of these schemas equally useful in my own life, but they all seem valid and plausible, especially for a working designer.

So this is a fine book for thinking about stuff, and clutter in our lives, and how we live with objects - whether you're unhappy with the number and complexity of your objects, trying to focus on truth and beauty, or some other permutation. Before I go, I should also mention Teo Jenish, who translated it: I didn't notice anything about the translation, which means it's a good one.

Tsalmoth by Steven Brust

This is a flashback. Normally, with a long-running series, I'd say "don't start here." But you probably could start here. It's a decent place to start. And it's a current book that's easy to find, so keep that in mind.

Steven Brust has been writing the adventures of Vlad Taltos for forty years now, and Tsalmoth is the sixteenth of a planned nineteen volumes. (Jhereg was the first, if you're a traditionalist and looking for the best place to start.) There are layers and depths to the world and its explanations - not all of which have been or will be explained - but, at base, it's a far-future fantasy, in which the various kinds of magic might have some  kind of technology really far behind them, or maybe not.

Vlad is an "Easterner" - a normal human - living in the Dragarean Empire. Dragarea is the major power of this world, and its people are a distinct race (gene-engineered from baseline humans, a hundred thousand years ago or so) that resemble traditional ideas of "elfs:" long-lived, tall, slim, no facial hair, aristocratic, obsessed with position and rigidly defined by their seventeen Great Houses (each with its own allowed careers, mental habits, and styles). Vlad is a low-level crimelord in the Dragarean House of the Jhereg; this book is set fairly early in the series (roughly fourth, according to the wiki), when he was rising and successful and planning to get married.

(At this point, I might as well link to my previous posts about books in the series, in reverse chronological order: Vallista, Hawk, Tiassa, Iorich, Jhegaala, and Dzur. I might also mention that the novels are titled after the seventeen Great Houses, plus one for Vlad himself - Taltos, the second book written - and a planned final book, The Last Contract. My post on Hawk is probably the most new-reader friendly, more background and less what-does-this-new-scrap-of-information-mean.)

So Tsalmoth is like the first three books, and a couple of other flashback volumes since: a caper book about an assassin in a fantasy world, not quite interchangeable but less specific and slotted into a particular moment in Vlad's life than the books set after Certain Unpleasantnesses.

Specifically, this book is about a debt. A guy died owing Vlad 800 gold. That's a fair bit of money; he doesn't want to let it go. So he pokes around to see if there's some way he can collect. And things get complicated, as they do in caper novels - there were secret plots of various people trying to do various things, and they are not particularly happy at this short whiskered dude poking his nose in and asking questions.

Luckily, Vlad is the series hero - no, let me be less arch: luckily, he is smart and skilled and, let's not forget, a working assassin, who also has a very impressive collection of high-powered friends and allies, some of whom have their own reasons for wanting to help out in this particular case.

Brust is a smooth, engaging writer at all times, and the Vlad books - particularly the ones in Vlad's voice, including this one - give him space to engage in great tough-guy turns of phrase and narration. The series started out as fantasy crime novels, and has wandered a lot since then, but this one comes back to that initial concept, and is deeply enjoyable both as fantasy and as crime.

Let me give you a quick quote to give you a sense of the writing, from p.7:

The next morning, I told Kragar to find out what he could about the family, which is one of the things Kragar is good at. Some of the other things he's good at are reminding me of unpleasant things I've agreed to do, unintentionally sneaking up on me, and being irritating.

If you find that amusing, you'll probably like this series.