Hypercapitalism by Larry Gonick and Tim Kasser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness

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

This time, it was hair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Worms of Kukumlima by Daniel Pinkwater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portions for Foxes: Le Butcherettes

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

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

This week, it's Tonight.

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 15, 2024

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

Here's what I unwrapped:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Week: Quick-Change Artist

The sign painter, a Mr. Hy Sky - a name made up of the first syllable of his first name, Hyman, and the last syllable of a surname which no one can remember - is a bulky, red-faced man who has rented space in the Jollity Building for twenty-five years. With his brother, a lean, sardonic man known as Si Sky, he paints signs and lobby displays for burlesque and movie houses and does odd jobs of lettering for people in all sorts of trades. He is an extremely fast letterer and he handles a large volume of steady business, but it lacks the exhilaration of prohibition years. Then he was sometimes put to work at two o'clock in the morning redecorating a clip joint, so that it could not be identified by a man who had just been robbed of a bank roll and might return with cops the next day. "Was that fun!" Hy howls reminiscently. "And always cash in advance! If the joint had green walls, we would make them pink. We would move the bar opposite to where it was, and if there was booths in the place, we would paint them a different color and change them around. Then the next day, when the cops came in with the sap, they would say, 'Is this the place? Try to remember the side of the door the bar was on as you come in.' The sap would hesitate, and the cops would say, 'I guess he can't identify the premises.' and they would shove him along. It was a nice, comfortable dollar for me."

 - A.J. Liebling, "The Jollity Building," in The Jollity Building (pp.440-441 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings)

The Road by Jack London

I first read this around thirty years ago, when I was about as old as London was when he wrote it. I'm now more than a decade older than London ever got, for what that's worth. And what struck me this time was how modern a book The Road still is.

It's a model for eight or ten generations of non-fiction bestsellers since, both the "memoir of this exciting and/or dangerous and/or horrible time in my life" book and the "let me tell you about this quirky side of life, which I lived for a while and so am an expert in" tome. And London's sentences and diction are crisp twentieth-century American; almost a hundred and twenty years old but very close to The Way We'd Say It Now.

The big difference is the way he plays off slangy terms - all of the hobo lingo - in quotations, not just the first time he mentions a word, but consistently. There's still a vague hint of that Victorian fussiness about "good" and "bad" words still lurking in his head, as if the "bad" words need to be corralled and signposted.

But that's about it. He's not fussy in any other way. His sentences can get long, but never convoluted. London was a straightforward writer of things that happened, in his nonfiction as much as his fiction. That's why he was so popular: he wrote for a wide audience, and, then as now, wide audiences like as few veils between them and the reality of a book as possible.

Not long ago, read London's The People of the Abyss, which was a book with a social aim. The Road, on the other hand, is a book of yarns - a book of "hey, let me tell you the crazy things I got up to when I was seventeen and immortal and rode the rails from one end of the country to the other."

The Road has nine miscellaneous chapters: it starts in the middle and wanders about, like a storyteller, late at night in some hobo camp, telling you his best stories in the order they come to him. It told the public of 1907 more or less what it was like to ride the rails back in the mid-1890s, and my guess is that was basically still the same in 1907 (and probably similar in the 1880s, and through the next couple of decades up to the Depression, too). About two-thirds of the way in, he finally tells the story of how he went out "on the Road" - he'd spent his mid-teen years messing about on boats in San Francisco harbor, both as an "oyster pirate" and working for the authorities chasing said "pirates," and one boat trip led him into a hobo camp, which gave him the bug for a different kind of travel - but the book isn't organized in any specific way, and doesn't tell London's overall story.

That's not the point of it. This isn't "how Jack London, Famous Writer, became a tramp and What He Did On the Great Railroads of Our Nation." It's "Hey, did I ever tell you I was a hobo for a year or so? I remember this one crazy time in Des Moines....." The stories are various and jumbled by design, the time sequence is not supposed to be clear.

It's a book by a great writer, but most English teachers would be hard-pressed to consider it Great Literature, or to wring Lessons out of it. I like it even better for that.

(Minor consumer note: I read this in the Library of America Novels and Social Writings volume, which seems to be currently out of print. Since London is well out of copyright, there are a lot of editions, and their texts might not be equally authoritative. It's worth seeking out a good edition from a real publisher for OOP material. I recommend LoA strongly for any writer they've published.)

Relationships According to Savage Chickens by Doug Savage

It's not quite tripping myself up, but...I sometimes specifically pick really short books to read so that I can have something to write about here the next day. (More often when I'm doing a Book-A-Day run, but at other times, too. Like right now.) But then I usually find that the really short books don't provide a lot of material to write about, because - and here may be the point where I'm stating the blindingly obvious - they are really short.

Now, that could be a feature: if I'm just trying to get done quickly, I read a short book, I write "hey, this book is short and is a really obvious thing" and go on with my life. But I feel like I'm short-changing you, my faithful reader.

(I address you in my head like that, when I'm feeling puckish, as if there actually is anyone who goes out of their way to read this random book-blog with no real theme and possibly the worst circa-2010 Blogger layout imaginable, in this the year of our lord twenty twenty-four. We all have our crotchets.)

Anyway, here I am again. Relationships According to Savage Chickens is a short collection of "Savage Chickens" strips by Doug Savage, one of a clump of themed books that came out around 2012 and only available digitally. (Well: now that I look more closely, this one and Zombies came out in '12, and there were three more last year. That's a good sign for the health of the ongoing Savage Chickens project, which I like to see: it's still a funny strip, and I like to see funny things stay successful.)

When I say "short," I mean "fifty single-page cartoons." That would be tiny for a book with a square binding, though about twice the side of a modern comic book - so I guess it all depends on perspective.

We start and end with "Romeo and Juliet" jokes. Savage is modern and at least mildly edgy; this isn't glurge in any way. I still like his rounded line: his chickens are just funny, with their big round eyes, their little wattles, and the way they look just a bit too big and ungainly for any possible situation.

As always, tastes in humor will vary. I think Savage is funny, and I wish he had more books that were somewhat longer (so I didn't feel awkward trying to write about them). I hope you will have a similarly positive reaction to his work.

Black Hammer: Visions, Vol. 2 by Jeff Lemire and a cast of thousands

Just so you know: I wouldn't pay attention to me about superhero comics. If I wasn't already me, I mean. I read very few of them, soured on the form something like twenty years ago, and think of the whole thing as a claustrophobic hall of mirrors, entirely devoted to never doing anything actually new or interesting.

The fact that, even this long after I paid attention to the form, I can still detect originals with half-decent accuracy is no credit to me: it just means the form is that hidebound and dull.

But I do read some of this stuff - mostly, recently, the "Black Hammer" comics usually written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by a rotating crew. And I read them the way some people watch NASCAR, watching and hoping for the crashes.

Black Hammer: Visions, Vol. 2 is the back half of a project from 2021, in which a group of other creators did one-off Black Hammer-verse stories. Is it "in continuity," you breathlessly ask? I dunno. Seems close enough to me. Probably. But these are stories not written by Lemire, not part of a larger plot, not going anywhere. (Insert my usual snarky comment about the core nature of superhero comics.) I read the first half a few months ago; this is the end.

First up is a Batman and Catwoman Daredevil and Black Cat Gravedigger and Bijou story, written by Kelly Thompson, drawn by Leonardo Romero, and colored by Jordie Bellaire. It is stylish and classy, another story of the big musclebound good guy ensnared by the dazzling, gorgeous female lawbreaker with hidden depths. I suppose we should have assumed Gravedigger had a story like that, since all his originals did, and this is it. It does exactly what it needs to do, and does it well.

Cthu-Lou gets another story, very closely paralleling the other stories he and his daughter have already appeared in, written by Cullen Bunn and drawn by Malachi Ward and Matthew Sheehan. As always, he's the Apocalypse Beast that doesn't want the job, so he gets domesticized, urban, darkly comedic versions of Hellboy plots. Here he foils one particular world-conquering plan of his extradimensional master - mostly in a fit of pique at being interrupted in his beer-drinking, TV-watching existence - as of course he will always do.

We return to the Land of Misfit Toys Limbo Land in a story by Cecil Castellucci and Melissa Duffy that asks the question: "what if Wonder Woman was a forgotten minor villain with the powers of Color Kid?" I'm not quite sure why the inhabitants of what's explicitly the home for characters who are not in stories and not being used are fighting with evil forces, since fighting is the core element of a superhero story. But this is another "isn't it sad to be a character without a story" story, another descendent of In Pictopia.

And last is a dark, gritty neo-western from Scott Snyder and David Rubín. It's the origin of The Horseless Rider, the requisite weird vengeance character of this universe - think Spectre or Phantom Stranger - mixed with one specific vengeance-taking.

Again, all four of these stories are professional and slick and solid...and all are deeply derivative and predictable, like a gymnast doing a good version of a required routine at some Olympic event. I may be the Russian judge here, I admit it. But I do wonder, as ever with Black Hammer, what the point of the whole thing is.

The Jollity Building by A.J. Liebling

I wasn't sure that this was actually a real book that existed separately - I read it as a section in the Library of America tome The Sweet Science and Other Writings, since I was looking to read some Liebling and this clump seemed the most appealing at that random moment - but a quick search shows me a 1962 paperback, The Jollity Building, and the cover-copy there exactly describes the thing I just read. So this was a thing in itself, once, if you have any worries on that account.

A.J. Liebling was a journalist of the first half of the last century - first a newspaperman, then a mainstay of the New Yorker, particularly in its early (and possibly slightly less snooty) days. Liebling, as I understand it, had a beat somewhat on the seamy side: boxing, con men, good times and colorful characters.

The larger Library of America book - the parts I didn't read - includes his title book on boxing, one that seems to be mostly about Louisiana governor Huey Long, another book about eating in Paris, and one about the then-poor state of the Press. (I doubt Liebling would believe that state had gotten better in the sixty or so years since then, but it's probably poor in entirely different ways that Liebling would never have expected.)

But this particular book was made up of two clusters of essays, or columns - "The Jollity Building" itself, and "Aye Verily."

"The Jollity Building" is a semi-fictionalized commercial building, in the Broadway district, around about 1940. "Aye Verily" was the name of a column, mostly about betting on racehorses, in the New York Enquirer - that paper later went National, you may know it in its later form - written under the name of "Colonel John R. Stingo," which was not the real name of the man who produced it.

So "Jollity Building" has three essays about various inhabitants of that part of new York in those days, starting from the most specific and honest (the owner/operator of a successful cigar shop) through the still specific but less honest (a profile of a "Tummler," or promoter who stands up night clubs regularly and usually pays his various compatriots more or less what they are promised) on to the larger crowd that are honest at least some of the time (the various inhabitants of that title building, from the small-time agents and bookers and others in offices to the acts that roam through looking for work to the young men on the make who set up in phone booths in the lobby, pretending that is their phone number).

And, in case I wasn't clear, "Aye Verily" is a profile of the man who writes as Stingo, mostly being a collection of the stories he tells, which are probably somewhat true, in some degree, at their core.

My main complaint - and it is a mild one - is that "Aye Verily" is notably longer than "Jollity Building," and that "Aye Verily" is constructed to highlight the writing of Stingo...but I picked up this book to read Liebling, and enjoyed his work better than his extensive quotes of Stingo. Stingo is a character, true - the decayed Southern gentleman of mature years, scion of New Orleans aristocracy according to his own account - but his writing is more clotted, more turf-specific, and just less interesting a century later than Liebling's.

I spent the back half of this book wishing that Liebling was paraphrasing Slingo rather than giving us the man in full, which is not the best way to read a profile. But wishing I was reading Liebling more directly did make me want to read more Liebling, which is what I was hoping for with this tester. So the experiment was a success.

Portions for Foxes: Dawn Landes

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

There must be other cases of this - I'm just not thinking of them right now. Surely there are other creative couples who broke up, and both made art about the breakup? (I'm thinking there must be a relevant Richard & Linda Thompson example here, surely?)

Singer-songwriters Josh Ritter and Dawn Landes were married, for not quite a couple of years, a decade ago. It didn't go well: they've both been polite and vague about it since. And they both made records coming out of the break-up: Ritter with 2013's The Beast in Its Tracks (where I would highlight the lovely, reflective, ringing, positive Joy to You Baby), Landes with 2014's Bluebird.

And the song I have today is my favorite from Bluebird, a fine record of lovely sadness and an eye that's trying to look forward. Today I want to celebrate Cry No More.

No matter how hard I try pain lingers
Our love's gone dry like grease on my fingers
To need a reason why, just pull out the stingers

It's a quiet, contemplative song, mostly Landes's voice and her strumming guitar - with her own voice in the background, harmonizing, as a support, as if it's all the parts of her coming together to remind herself that she can and will get through this.

The title is something between a wish and an imperative. I'd like to think it's already happened, but it could be a vow:

Not gonna cry no more
I know what tears are for
I don't need to cry no more

We all have things that made us cry: big or small. And we all have that moment when we have to say enough and move on. This is a song for that moment, or the moment just afterward. It is lovely and true.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 7, 2024

One book this week, from the fine house of Tachyon:

Yoke of Stars, a new novel in the Birdverse by R.B. Lemberg, coming July 16th in trade paperback and digital formats. 

I don't think I've read Lemberg, though I know I've seen other books in this series (from Tachyon) - without entirely being clear about the specific series-ness of it. (What I mean is: some series follow a single main character in individual episodes, some follow a big cast in a big overall story, and some do quirkier things, like telling a lot of different stories in the same world. I get the sense the Birdverse is big and capacious, that each story so far doesn't necessarily lead directly to any other story. But, again: I'm going on vibes and implications in this book's back-cover copy, and am probably wrong at least somewhat.)

This one is about a person named Stone Orphan, about to graduate from the School of Assassins - just waiting to get the big graduation assignment, and kill someone to prove their skills. But instead of killing someone, Orphan seems to spend this book trading stories with a linguist - so this is more of an engine to embed further stories, or a manifold of related tales, than the adventure fiction you'd expect from a story starting with an apprentice assassin.

Quote of the Week: The Other Persuasion

My other grandmother [...] was a Glencoe MacDonald, strong and of few words, worshipping a stern God on whom she kept a close eye to see that he didn't get up to anything the Presbytery wouldn't have approved of, like granting salvation to Catholics and Wee Frees. She frightened me, for she was hard and forbidding and insisted that we walk miles to church on Sundays. On these walks I was naturally forbitten to take my ball; on weekdays I could dribble it along beside her, and on one occasion she even condescended to kick it, watching it with a cold eye to see that it rolled straight. It did.

 - George MacDonald Fraser, "Night Run to Palestine," The General Danced at Dawn (pp.86-87 in The Complete McAuslan omnibus)

Disquiet by Noah Van Sciver

There are times when I don't have much to say here. I read a book, I mostly liked it, I've already read a number of things by the same creator, I don't have anything particularly new or specific to say this time.

And that sounds so horribly minimizing, doesn't it?

But "this is good stuff, in line with the same person's previous good stuff" is actually very positive. (Right? I think so, anyway.)

So, with that caveat: I just read Noah Van Sciver's 2016 collection of comics short stories, Disquiet. It's a general, miscellaneous collection - everything I've seen from him previously has been more focused, from the graphic novels Fante Bukowski and Saint Cole to the self-explanatorily themed As a Cartoonist collection.

But this one is just some stories and art Van Sciver did, over about the previous five years, collected between two covers and assembled into a plausible order. They have different tones and styles and concerns - some modern-day, some historical, one more folkloric - and they're separated by individual pieces of Van Sciver art, so they each sit separately, like objects on a shelf. I like that in a collection, frankly - with prose, it tends to be a thing of making sure there are blank left-hand pages where appropriate, and maybe icons or dingbats or similar decorative elements, but comics-makers are more likely to just have more art, that they did, which can help to divide stories from each other.

I guess I might as well take the stories one at a time:

"Dive Into that Black River" is a nearly wordless, two-page spread, more of a poster than a narrative comic. It's the opposite of "hang in there, baby!" if you think of it as a poster.

"The Lizard Laughed" is the story of one day in the life of Harvey, a middle-aged man in New Mexico, whose estranged son Nathan comes to visit. They're meeting for the first time in close to twenty years, since Harvey ran out on the family when the boy was nine. They go on a hike; the two have little in common, as you'd expect. It doesn't end the way Nathan expected, which is good for Harvey. Harvey didn't have any real expectations; he may be too self-centered for that anyway.

"it's over" is a two-pager in a straightforward confessional/realistic mode, in which a young man reconnects with an old girlfriend for a one-day fling on his thirtieth birthday - which also turns out to be a major (fictional) world-historical event.

"The Death of Elijah Lovejoy" combines a two-page text introduction to the overall life of that 1830s abolitionist with a comics retelling of the mob that attacked his printing press, burning it down and killing him. (This might be the most Van Sciverian comic here, to my eye, all sweaty/bloody men fighting for their rigid views in the19th century.)

"The Cow's Head' is some kind of fable, I think - a young woman (who has the same name as Van Sciver's then-girlfriend, who also wrote the book's introduction - possibly coincidence but I doubt it) is driven out of their rural hovel by her cruel stepmother, finds shelter, and is polite to a flying, talking head of a cow. (As you do, in fables.) This, as also happens in fables, leads to better things for her, though not for her sad-sack father.

"Down in a Hole" is a weird one, in which a former TV kid-show clown goes spelunking and is captured by the secret subterranean race of mole people. Both of those random elements are equally important, and then there's a twist ending. There's a lot going on here, and I bet there's some subtext or purpose I just didn't get.

"Untitled" is told in small-format pages - maybe it was a minicomic? - and focuses on a young woman, visiting her parents for Christmas. She lives nearby - close enough to bicycle - but rarely visits. It's a slice-of-life mood piece, so I won't try to explain the moods.

"Dress Up" is the doubly-narrated story of a good Samaritan/vigilante who foiled a robbery, as told by him to a young female reporter a little later, after the initial media furor has quieted a bit.

"When You Disappear" tells the story of a prison break, two men fleeing to New Jersey, there talking and separating. It's based on a dream, but is less "dream-logic-y" than that might imply.

"Punks Vs. Lizards" is a pulpy post-apocalyptic story about, yes, punks who battle giant  intelligent lizards that have apparently conquered the world. Our Hero defeats one particularly powerful lizard at great cost.

And last is "Nightshift," in which yet another young woman tells how she worked at a bakery overnights for a while, saving up money to get out of this unnamed town.

I found all of the stories interesting, and many of them compelling. They were aiming to do different things, and all were good at what they aimed to do (assuming I was correct). This is a probably a better introduction to Van Sciver than the two or three books of his I actually read first, if anyone thinks his work sounds interesting.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Being relatable is useful, sure - but have you ever considered just how many of the great protagonists are actually assholes?

I'm only half-joking. Think of Hamlet, Holden Caulfield, Sherlock Holmes - and that's just touching on the Hs. Even in comics, who are the characters you remember? For me, what comes to mind quickly are Joe Matt in his own comics, Vladek Spiegelman, Rorschach, Hopey. And none of those are people who would be easy to live with, or be friends with.

So when I say that Scott Pilgrim is shallow, conflict-avoidant, deeply immature and vastly more of a jerk than he's usually credited with...well, I'm saying he's one of the greats, I guess. 

I'm re-reading Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim books for no good reason - which is the only appropriate reason to tackle the adventures of this world-class slacker. See my post from April for the first book, Precious Little Life, and now I'm back with Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, the second book and title source for the 2010 movie.

I'm impressed at how self-assured O'Malley was how quickly: World is well-structured, diving in immediately with a flashback and moving forward both the immediate plot (time for evil ex #2!) and the longer-term arc of the series. This is the book where we really first see The Clash at Demonhead, which includes both Scott's ex Envy Adams and Ramona's ex Todd Ingram. The longest fight scene here isn't the one of Scott and Evil Ex #2 - O'Malley was already switching things up and playing against expectations this early in the series.

Another small touch I noticed and really appreciated: O'Malley does little "character cards" when people are introduced, somewhat consistently. But it's only the first time; you don't need to introduce the same person repeatedly. Except for Knives Chau, who is introduced a good half-dozen times in this book, always as "Knives Chau, 17 Years Old."

Because: Yeah, that's the point. In a cast of young people with poor impulse control, grandiose dreams, and vague plans, Knives is even younger and vaguer and more impulsive than all those twenty-three-year-olds who think they're older and sophisticated.

(Spoiler: every single member of the cast of Scott Pilgrim is baby-young. Like toddlers just wandering around Toronto. It's actually adorable.)

Otherwise, World is a fine example of how to transition from a book to a series - Life could have stood on its own, if it had to. (Any good first book must.) World, on the other hand, extends Life, adding more details, and sets up immediately for the next book and more vaguely for the entire back half of the series. The dialogue is zippy, the gigantic eyes are weirdly compelling, and the quirky worldbuilding (including a great River City Ransom homage that, even this time, I thought would turn into a dream sequence - no, not at all, that's how this world rolls) is specific and grounded in its nuttiness.

I was wondering if Scott Pilgrim was starting to get dated - too much an artifact of its era, too specific - but slackers are eternal, and it looks like video games will be as well. Twenty years on, it's still vital and true.

The General Danced at Dawn by George MacDonald Fraser

Can I start off by saying both the book title and series title are misleading?

This is supposedly the first of three books of "hilarious stories of the most disastrous soldier in the British Army." I read it in an omnibus called The Complete McAuslan. But McAuslan himself is mostly an incidental character here; he's a central figure in the last two stories, but only mentioned in passing - in kenning-style, the same two or three specific epithets each time - before that.

And this first book of McAuslan stories, originally published in 1970, has the title The General Danced at Dawn. Now, if you are me, you probably have a kind of dance in mind: this is not that. It's some complicated Scottish square-dancing kind of thing, all big men in kilts hurling each other across a dirt floor in a very, very masculine and military way. Apparently, this dance - George MacDonald Fraser, writing for an audience that I gather already knew everything he would tell them, never bothers to explain anything - is done in groups of four, typically four or eight. This one general, in town for a big fancy inspection of the unnamed Highland regiment that is the core of the stories, wants to go bigger - first a dance of sixteen, then of thirty-two, then sixty-four, and, the legend goes, even bigger before dawn that night.

The general himself supervised the dancing, and the dancing ran during the night, up to dawn. So, no, the "general" did not "dance" at "dawn."

Fraser himself was a junior officer in a Highland regiment right at the end of WWII; this (and I gather the succeeding two McAuslan books) are fictionalizations of his time there - these books are supposedly by a "Lieutenant Dand MacNeil," and are made up of stories that I believe originally appeared in some kind of magazine for old soldiers. They're loosely linked, told in chronological order, and the narrator is consistent and particular - not quite Fraser, but a fictional pose he can use to tell these cleaned-up, rearranged versions of things that I suppose really did happen, to him or to other soldiers back in those days.

So this is a collection of in-jokes, of men now all dead. Some of the in-jokes are general enough to be Scottish, or more generally British, or just men-under-arms. But a lot of it is this era, this war, these traditions of this kind of regiment, and if you're not a super-centenarian Scotsman with a Burma stripe, large chunks of the McAuslan oeuvre will be opaque to you.

It is pleasant and amusing - Fraser was always a sprightly, entertaining writer, even when he was indulging his most obscure tendencies. But, for an American of my generation or younger, it is very much an artifact from a strange and antique land, a dispatch from a world long dead and traditions that, as far as I know, may still be running in some form among bekilted men over in Old Blighty but that have never come within a thousand miles of my life.

I came to this book because I read the whole Flashman series back in the '90s - that's Fraser's core work; it's great; I recommend it highly for anyone who can stand reading about a real bastard of an antihero - and hit his other novels and even some of his nonfiction back then as well. The McAuslan books were the biggest chunk of Fraser I hadn't read. And now I know why: they're not for me, or for anyone on my side of the Atlantic.

Well, that's fine. I'm not so arrogant to demand that everything center me. If you are more British or military than I am, you may well find more here familiar to you.

Ralph Azham, Vol. 4: The Dying Flame by Lewis Trondheim

This is the end: the concluding three albums of the "Ralph Azham" series, the final quarter of the story. It's just as knotty and complicated as the first nine, set in the same world of "blueys" who have specific magical talents themselves and a bewildering array of artifacts that also have very particular powers - individually, and in particular configurations, and when used by a bluey with the right powers.

Lewis Trondheim has always been a creator who delights in complication. I wonder if he has a notebook, or a chart on some wall, with all sixteen of those artifacts and how they interact, listing the powers of all of the blueys he's introduced, with scrawled notes at the bottom about the even greater complications he didn't quite get to. Or maybe he just all keeps it in his head.

The Dying Flame is the fourth omnibus of Ralph's adventures. It completes the story that ran through Black Are the Stars and The Land of the Blue Demons and You Can't Stop a River. Ralph started off as a teen, with an magical gift uncomfortable to his fellow villagers, deep in the hinterlands of the fantasy kingdom of Astolia. Now he's the Superintendent, right-hand to the King - after once leading an attempt to assassinate that ancient bluey king, and maybe not having completely given up on that aim - and also the official Chosen One.

There have been a lot of Chosen Ones. Every bluey is Chosen - and there seem to be at least dozens of blueys, each with a couple of quirky, potentially deadly, possibly destabilizing powers. There's a few more every year, after another conjunction of the moons. Blueys also develop additional powers over time - they're not stable. The old regime, when Ralph was young, used to carefully take the young blueys away and kill them - and as blueys now proliferate and squabble, some of those around Ralph can see the cruel wisdom in that. 

Ralph Azham is a story essentially about power, both political and personal. About how you can grab it, and kill for it - and go to great lengths to do things you believe are absolutely justified and right - and still not be happy, or secure, since there's someone else just as justified and committed to getting rid of you.

Ralph has wanted off that wheel for a while; it came up a lot in the third omnibus, and it's dominant here. He's cranky, unhappy, and it comes out every time he talks. He takes crazy risks - maybe because he hopes something will kill him, maybe just to feel that thrill of pure action and clear direction. We think he has good intentions. In a world of murderous factions and cutthroat politics, he's hugely more willing to not kill his enemies than is standard...or maybe wise.

This is the end. This is how it finally gets resolved, how Ralph gets a chance to get away - if he can just set everything else right, as far as he sees "right" - solve his and the kingdom's problems, and grab a moment to get away. But he has to solve those problems, face those enemies, and learn the last secrets of his world first.

This is a great fantasy series in comics form: it has most of the strengths of the Dungeon books Trondheim does with Joann Sfar plus the power of being a single, consistent, coherent story, planned from the beginning to have a real ending. And this is that ending.

Portions for Foxes: Killola

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

I like songs that start with a bang. Just in this series, recently, I could mention the Breeders' Safari or Headrush by Hot Springs. This one does something like that, leading off with the sound of a fuse burning, then a guitar riff, then the punch.

This Is the Way the World Ends was the lead-off song on Killola's 2008 record I Am the Messer - one given away for free on the Internet as part of a promotion, so it's how a lot of people were introduced to this band. (I hope they liked it. I did.)

This is yet another bad-love song, apocalyptic division. It is big and loud and overly emotional - I don't know if this is a break-up, exactly, but something's not right here, and the singer is panicking, going bigger and bigger to try to save this.

Truth hurts, and so do I...
I call your name in the middle of the night.

This is rock and roll - loud and immediate and personal and pushy. Singer Lisa Rieffel has an impressive set of pipes here, and belts this song out the way it deserves to be belted - it's a song crying out and demanding, and Rieffel can push it just as hard as it needs to go.

She's supported by a great tight band, too - there's some wonderful rolling drumwork around the two-minute mark, and the whole thing rises to a great, nihilistic, loud crescendo at the very end.

Three and a half minutes. Loud. Pushy. Demanding. This is how the world ends - with a bang.

Quote of the Week: Burglars Can't Be Choosers?

Then it dawned upon him that the man was running away from him, not toward him. His first impulse was to give chase, but prudence restrained him. Catching burglars is an exhilarating sport, but it is best to indulge in it when one is not on a burgling expedition oneself.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Pothunters, p.36