Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling

Everyone is a snob about something. You might not think it that way about yourself - you just have a refined palate, and a deep appreciation of whatever-it-is, and long experience in knowing what the good and the bad of that thing is - but it is snobbery, no matter how it manifests itself.

And that's OK. It can be entertaining when it's not too heavy-handed, and at least half of the time the snobbery is actually grounded in some actual knowledge. (I may be being optimistic here; don't contradict me.)

A.J. Liebling was a newspaperman, which means he was a snob about a lot of things. Once you get out of the immediate job of who-what-where-when reportage, what being "a newspaperman" means is having strong opinions on the things you write about, and applying those opinions entertainingly to the news of the day in your area of expertise. At least, that was the classic form, in Liebling's era: lately, the opinionators are all talkers in various video formats, and couldn't write their way out of a paper bag.

I've been reading books by Liebling in the Library of America Liebling omnibus The Sweet Science & Other Writings in a semi-random order. It's probably not the best order - I started with The Jollity Building because I liked the opening of that book, and now just read Between Meals because it was the shortest - but if we all always did everything for the best what kind of a world would we have anyway?

Between Meals - subtitled An Appetite for Paris and mostly made up of memoirish pieces from The New Yorker from the late '50s up to the book's publication in 1962 - is very much a snobbish book, from an older man who is going to explain in detail The Trouble With Nowadays.

Luckily, Liebling is a lively, entertaining writer - that's the other side of being a newspaperman; when your copy appears in a gigantic daily collection of other writings, you need to be compelling or the readers will just flip to something else. And it's an old enough book that the snobbery is quaint: Liebling's position is that French cooking had then been in decline since just before The Great War, and was in the process of being destroyed by healthy eating and by children having better job opportunities and similar massive societal changes that he mildly deplored. He doesn't claim that French cooking is the only great cuisine, or the greatest - there's a sideswipe random appreciation of Chinese food that I found very in character for a New York Jewish guy - but it is his particular area of study and of appreciation, so it's the one he knows well enough to construct a "everything is getting worse" polemic.

Not that this is a polemic. Liebling is more interested in talking about the good times than in lamenting the current fallen state of the world, and gets into the latter mostly to contrast with the former - the days when he was young and on the make, free and happy in Paris on a large monthly allowance from his rich furrier father, supposedly studying medieval history but really loafing around eating and consorting with the local girls.

Since this is made up of New Yorker pieces, it's not really a single thing - it starts out with an extended appreciation of Yves Mirande, a French restauranteur and food writer of  the generation before Liebling, who had at that point (late '50s) recently died in his eighties. The rest of the book is made up of memoir-ish musings, somewhat anchored by food but not all that closely, of Liebling's days in Paris. He spent a year there as a young man from 1926-27 - that's when he had the allowance and was supposedly studying at the Sorbonne - and he also got back there in 1939, which he goes into in some detail. There's also a couple of childhood anecdotes, but the wartime and just post-war years are entirely missing and "now" (the end of the '50s and beginning of the '60s) is just the "after" comparison for Liebling, showing the world in its current, clearly fallen state.

Like everyone who writes about French food, especially of that era, he uses the French terms and tends not to explain or define them. This presents something of a barrier to a reader sixty years later, who has eaten none of these dishes and doesn't know enough culinary French to even know what they are much of the time. But I can tell that he enjoyed all of this rich food, for many years.

I can also see that he died less than a year after this book came out, at the age of fifty-nine. Caveat Eator, I suppose.

Liebling's prose is fun and energetic - that newspaperman thing again. I still think I haven't yet gotten to his famous/important/major (choose the appropriate adjective) books, so it's a good sign that I'm enjoying the oddball bits I've read so far.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 3: The Wanderer's Road by Stan Sakai

I don't want to predict, but I suspect this is where Usagi Yojimbo settles down into its long-term groove. The first book, The Ronin, collected the original anthology appearances, all of the shorter pieces. And then the second book, Samurai, collected the first big "mythology" story, giving more of the background.

This third book, The Wanderer's Road, came out in 1989 and collected issues 7-12 of the series - and there have been an additional thirty-six volumes since then, appearing roughly yearly.

This one has six one-shot stories, plus a jokey shorter piece from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jam. And, if I were a betting man, I would say that most of the following books are like this one - individual stories collected together - with maybe a quarter, maybe somewhat less, being more like Samurai, collecting larger storylines that advance the overall plot.

So here we see how Usagi gets his companion lizard Spot - and how Spot moves on to another "human" master a few issues later. (Is there a word that includes all humaniform characters in an anthropomorphic series? They're all standing in for human beings, but the fact that they're different fake-animal species always seems like it should be more important.)

We have some poignant tales, and some sillier ones. We have the return of several recurring characters, notably the blind swords-pig Ino and the roguish rhino ronin Gen. We have some eruptions of the  supernatural, including the cover story, which sees Usagi battle a samurai who either has been touched by the gods or is just insane.

It's all solid work, and the changes of tone and level of seriousness help make the book work better - Usagi Yojimbo, even this quickly, was an engine for telling many different kinds of stories. As before, the tone is generally all-ages: these are stories about people killing each other with swords that are appropriate for tweens, which I will never not find an odd choice.

And, of course, if you like one of these books, there are forty or so more (counting Space Usagi and other oddball things) to follow it up with.

Portions for Foxes: Magnapop

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

This is one of the older songs in this series this year, going all the way back to 1994. Magnapop was a great, somewhat grungy power pop band of that era - like a lot of my favorites, I thought they should have been vastly more popular than they ended up being.

This is my favorite of their songs, a loud fast rush with singer (and co-songwriter) Linda Hopper nearly chanting, in a low almost flat tone, above very loud guitars. It has that jangly power-pop energy, driven by louder, grungier instrumentation, to make an intense rush of sound that comes to a perfect ending moment.

I think there's some pop-psychology going on here, but I've never spent a lot of time to tease it out: loud fast songs can be explicated, but they can also just be enjoyed. There's clearly some anger-management going on, though - and the singer is talking to the one with the anger problem:

Lay it down for the last time
And then turn away
Lay it down for the last time
Surely show your rage

This is yet another song that dives in, takes over, rearranges a bunch of things, and then slams back out. It does all that wonderfully, and I hope you enjoy it.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: The Heart Does As It Whilst

She had always been devoted to Smedley, though far from blind to the numerous defects in his spiritual make-up. If there was a lazier man in the world than Smedley Cork, she had never met him. If there was one more refreshingly free from principles of any kind, she had still to make his acquaintance. He was selfish, idle, and practically everything else that he ought not to be. Nevertheless, she loved him. She had loved him twenty years ago when he was a young man with money and one chin. She loved him now, when he was a portly senior with no money and two chins. Women do these things.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Old Reliable, p.20

Quote of the Week: Not the Fear of Doing, the Fear of Wanting To

But here's the thing, when I'm in a place, with nothing between me and a long, long fall, one long enough that I know I wouldn't survive, it isn't that I'm afraid I'll fall, it's that I'm afraid I'll jump. It's not like I want to die, I don't - if I wanted to die, I've had plenty of opportunities. But there's something about being one step away from death that makes me want to take that one step. It's an almost palpable temptation, and that scares me.

 - Steven Brust, Lyorn, p.66

The Old Reliable by P.G. Wodehouse

The Old Reliable is a person. A person named Bill, to be precise. And a woman, I should add.

This is a 1951 novel, though - as so often with P.G. Wodehouse - it's not set in a particular moment in time as it is in Wodehouse-land, where years bend and the external world impinges lightly if at all. It's set in Hollywood, and it's a studio-system Hollywood, more like the interwar years than the year it emerged.

At the center, and least important, is Adela Shannon Cork, the hot-tempered former star of the silent screen and widow to a millionaire. The mansion where the story is set - like a lot of Wodehouse, Old Reliable could be staged as a three-act play without a whole lot of work - is owned by Adela, but best known as "the old Carmen Flores place," after the Mexican film star who died the previous year and whose furniture is basically untouched.

Old Reliable has a fair bit of plot, but what it has even more is characters: maybe too many for its length; it doesn't give them all enough to do and many of their plot threads conclude very quickly in the end. Among those characters are Adela's brother-in law Smedley, once a Broadway impresario but now impoverished from backing far too many flops and reduced to living on Adela's tightly-pinched dime; the title character, Wilhelmina "Bill" Shannon, the brassy middle-aged older sister of Adela, formerly a screenwriter and now penning her sister's memoirs; the butler Phipps, who has a secret past as a safecracker; Bill's former writing colleague Joe Davenport, at the opening of the novel resident in New York and the young lover character of the novel; and Kay Shannon, Bill's niece (and thus Adela's as well) and Joe's love interest, who doesn't get much more personality than "the nice pretty girl."

There's also a not-overly-intelligent English nobleman resident in the house, who isn't really involved in the main plot, and a couple of Hollywood-wannabe policemen who show up a couple of times in the third act.

As usual with Wodehouse, there are two kinds of troubles that need to be sorted before the happy ending: love troubles and money troubles. Bill has been pining for Smedley for twenty years, while he has been content to be a bachelor. Joe has asked Kay to marry him more than a dozen times, but she doesn't think he's serious enough for her. Bill and Joe have an opportunity to buy a literary agency - a license to print money! - but need twenty thousand dollars to do so. And rumor has it that Carmen Flores kept a diary - full of crackerjack gossip about all of her affairs and battles and everything else a "Mexican spitfire" would be involved in - which must be hidden in the house somewhere and which could be sold for a fabulous sum, either to studio heads who would suppress it or to a publisher.

The diary is found, it changes hands multiple times, and it does end up in a safe for a time - did I mention the butler is an ex-safecracker? that's an important plot point - and multiple characters are assumed by others to be full of ready cash when they are nothing of the sort.

In the end, it all ends happily as it must - that's how Wodehouse novels work. This is a solid, if a bit short and straightforward one, from his mid-career - funny and well-constructed but running a bit to standard Wodehouse furniture and not quite long enough to really take best advantage of all its material.

Mazebook by Jeff Lemire

Creators don't have the same views of their careers as outsiders do. From my side of the comics page, Jeff Lemire's career clearly divides fairly cleanly into two sections: the books he writes for other people to draw, mostly superheroes and overwhelmingly serialized adventure stories; and the ones he draws himself, dark Canadian-set literary explorations of death and regret and loss.

But in the now-typical sketchbook-and-background section of this book, Lemire talks through how he came to make this story, and he describes all of his projects as part of a general undifferentiated mass - basically interchangeable, as if they didn't use different skills or different parts of his brain. (He basically says he jumped into this project because a Black Hammer "Skulldigger" project wasn't gelling for him, which is just a wild tonal shift for me.)

That may be just part of the same overall creator mindset: the kind of thing you need to internalize if you're going to have a career making art in public. The same way that a creator, of any kind, in any medium or genre, always thinks of what they do as central and most important in that form - of course, it has to be, or else why would they spend that much time and energy on it?

So I may think Mazebook is more differentiated from other Jeff Lemire projects than he does: that's just the way it works. But, for other readers out there, this is Lemire in indy-comics mode, for all that it was originally a five-issue miniseries: dark, brooding, along the lines of The Underwater Welder or Frogcatchers or the "Essex County" books.

Mazebook is about death and loss. William Warren is a building inspector in Toronto: his daughter Wendy died about a decade ago, of the usual looking-sick-in-a-hospital-bed kind of thing. Wendy was a tween then, and her death wrecked her parent's marriage: her mother Elena is now remarried with a younger child. William, though, is stuck in his grief: getting through each day, exactly the same as the one before, sad and backwards-looking and utterly stuck.

The story starts as he's starting to worry that he's forgetting Wendy's face - that time is moving on, no matter how much he's trying to stop it. And then he gets a mysterious call, in the middle of the night, that seems to be from Wendy. She's trapped in a maze. She needs him to get her out. And so William sets out solve the last maze - the one Wendy had next to do when she died - to find her and save her. It doesn't quite go as he thought it would; this is a Lemire book.

Is that call real? Do all of the places William goes, the creatures he meets really exist as he sees them? Within the story, it's as real as it has to be - you can think of Mazebook as a psychological drama or a supernatural one, as you prefer, or some complex mix of the two - I think it's somewhere in that middle, myself. That it was Wendy, in some sense, that much of this did happen as we see it.

There is something like a happy ending, but I should say not the obvious one. Lemire's books about loss and death are about loss and death - and the point about loss is that something is lost, gone forever.

Lemire draws this in his usual scratchy, organic style - I love that look, it has a supple power and an immediacy to all of those rough-looking lines, and I love the way this book has such a real sense of place, how grounded the fantasy elements are in the reality of present-day Toronto.

Salome's Last Dance by Daria Tessler

When I have to make a random choice of what to read next, I try to ask "what looks weirdest." It's a metric that's served me well, since way back my freshman year of college, when I walked into Poughkeepsie's mighty Iron Vic Comics for the first time and walked out with a stack of new-to-me things that I'm pretty sure included Flaming Carrot, Cerebus, and Nexus.

So, when one graphic collection I was reading just wasn't working - it was no one's fault, but the PDF was a bit too low-rez for how many and tiny the words were on the pages - I needed to quickly shift and read something else right then.

And I'd looked at this book, in my library app, at least once, and thought "Well, that looks weird."

And it was. I have no regrets.

I don't know Daria Tessler's work; all I've read is, just now, her 2023 book Salome's Last Dance. She has a neat organic drawing style - I see a lot of varied cartooning influences in it, from gags (maybe Gahan Wilson? she at least has a similar sense of the grotesque) and undergrounds and just a bit of Wolverton (that grotesquerie again). She's clearly comfortable with the creepy and unnerving - look at that dancing dog on the cover, for a start, in the stripper heels and the totally-wrong two pasties (if a dog has pasties at all, which I am not willing to grant, it should have eight) and the cocked hips and the navel piercing.

The plot is something like a collision of the "But I am Pagliacci!" joke and the evil-brain-scientist horror trope. A depressed magician, Magnus, has a phantasmagorical show featuring the dancing dog on the cover - the villains call it a "puppet," but I'm not sure if we're supposed to believe they're right; it could be a "real" dog - and also goes to Dr. Silkini to deal with his depression.

Skilini and his minion instead plan to dive deep into Magnus's head - this is literal; aided by odd substances - and steal the secret of that dancing dog, Salome from the bizarre recesses of his mind.

It does not go quite as they expected, but, then, nothing in this book goes as anyone would expect - that's the wonder and joy of it. It's a short book, but a lot happens - a lot of weird action, a lot of visual eye-kicks, a lot of odd dialogue that all completely makes sense within this world. And Salome's dances are shown as gigantic, Busby Berkley-style extravaganzas, impossibly larger and more impressive than the stages they appear on - that's what makes Magnus a magician, I suppose.

I don't know what any of this means. I draw no solid conclusions. But this is a work of remarkable imaginative power and depth, engaging and amusing on the surface while having depths I'm sure I haven't come close to plumbing. It is deeply weird, and I'm sure I made the right choice.

Lyorn by Steven Brust

I don't know that Steven Brust is planning to end his Vlad Taltos series with something like a trilogy. He's a quirky writer given to experimentation and odd ideas, so it probably wouldn't be that straightforward to begin with.

But Lyorn is the seventeenth book, in a series Brust has consistently said would be nineteen books long, and it certainly seems to be setting up for a big ending, throwing out plot elements and ideas that are not resolved in this book and don't have a whole lot longer to be resolved.

So: maybe not a trilogy. But the books that I expect will be called Chreotha and The Last Contract are definitely going to follow out of this book, and it looks like they will follow their predecessor in plot more closely than has been typical for the series.

Up to this point, you could read the series in any order. It wasn't a great idea: best practice is to follow publication order, because Brust wrote them that way, and he's a tricky writer who plays games with what the reader "knows," but it was plausible, and you could generally read each book as a novel that way.

From here, I doubt that will work as well. But who jumps in on book seventeen of nineteen, anyway? Just go back and pick up Jhereg; if you like that, read more.

At this point, I usually need to explain the background of the series, so let me pull back out this bit I wrote about Hawk a decade ago; it's still the basics:

The Vlad Taltos novels appear to be sword & sorcery, first-person caper novels set in a fantasy world where humans are a minority and tall, magic-using, long-lived Dragareans (whom humans call "elfs") are dominant and whose empire has a complex clan-based social structure and a millennia-long history. Vlad himself is a human who by this point in the series has attained and lost a high position in the Dragarean House of the Jhereg (organized crime), gotten an Imperial title, become reasonably adept at human witchcraft (quite different from Dragerean sorcery), made close friends with many of the most powerful and dangerous Dragareans alive, and been on the run for nearly a decade from his ex-friends in the Jhereg. Underlying that surface is a deeper story Brust will probably never tell completely: this all takes place millions of years in the future, Dragareans are a genetically modified successor race to humanity, much of the sorcery may have a mildly SFnal explanation, and these stories (with a few minor exceptions) have been narrated directly by Vlad to a mysterious figure from beyond his world who is taping them for unknown purposes.

On top of that, Vlad now owns a Great Weapon - this is fantasy, so there are normal weapons, and special soul-destroying weapons (called Morganti; Vlad had one of those for a long time), and extra-special, named Morganti weapons with the power to kill gods. He's got one of those now, and, if you've got a god-killing weapon, then killing of a god is now on the table. One of the larger plots in Lyorn is about that: there are those who want to maneuver Vlad into killing a particular god for a particular purpose. My bet is that will be at least one of the plots of that last book - but there's one more book in between, so things could shift.

(If you want to dig into the history of the series, here are my posts for the last decade or so: Tsalmoth, Vallista, Hawk, Tiassa, Iorich, Jhegaala, and Dzur.)

After a couple of books of sidebar stories - or, perhaps I should say, after Brust filled in some important backstory; whole books function something like chapters in the overall story - we are returning to the main sequence of the plot, following (I think) Hawk. In that book, Vlad had come back to the big imperial city of Adrilankha with a huge price on his head from his former compatriots in the House of the Jhereg (organized crime; every bit of Dragarean society is organized to within an inch of its life and channeled into specific Houses and traditions and whatnot). And he managed to get the Jhereg to remove that price, by giving them an entirely new and hugely lucrative bit of organized crime to start exploiting.

But, as it turns out, there are plenty of other people who are still really interested in murdering Vlad, and one is the "Left Hand of the Jhereg," a parallel all-female, all-magical organization that handles other kinds of crime, which was not part of the deal, and which is still very very interested in making him dead.

Well, maybe not all of them. Maybe mostly just one influential leader, whose sister Vlad killed some time ago.

So Vlad hides out in a theater - as you do; he actually has good in-story reasons for it, though the Doylist reason is that Brust is organizing this particular novel around the rhythms of the stage - and there plots to get out from under this death sentence.

But, as I said, even if he does - and that's the plot of this book - he still has some larger, looming problems. He's no longer just some random minor Easterner; his soul was involved in major events of the history of this world and major forces have been maneuvering around him to put him into position to either kill a god or break the Cycle that organizes all of Dragarean society - or maybe do both.

Brust, as always, does this all in light-adventure mode. It's serious for Vlad, and I would not be surprised if he dies at the end of the series (he might not, but it's a possibility), but the books are amusing and light - he has in-universe songs, parodies of famous tunes from stage musicals, to open each of this book's traditional seventeen chapters - even as they're about assassination and death and the potential upheaval of this entire society.

Like the others, Lyorn is fun, it's quick, it's sly, and it's deeply entertaining. Again, don't start here, but it's a nice place to end up.

Portions for Foxes: Audra Mae

"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.

You know, by now, that I'm fond of metaphors - well, it's a great one, this week.

This time out, I have a short, sharp song, sung perfectly by its songwriter: The Happiest Lamb by Audra Mae.

I once loved a shepherd,
A charming, handsome man.
One wave of his hickory staff,
And I’d follow him ‘round the land.
‘Til one day I noticed,
I weren’t the only one,
There was all kind of other little pretty young sheep,
Havin’ all kind of pretty young fun.

If I'm not careful, I'll list the whole lyrics, and anatomize the whole metaphor right here. But I think you get it.

This is not the kind of "happiest" that is joyous and positive towards life, as you might guess. It's very much a "I am happier without you, you horrible person" song.

No shepherd man alive can grow the wool that gets him paid.

I do wonder about how far to take that metaphor - it could easily go much farther than just a relationship between two people, with one shepherd, multiple sheep, fleecing, getting paid, etc.. I think Audra Mae meant that implication, but wanted to keep it possible rather than obvious. But metaphors that can be more complex are only better.

This is a quick, smart, zippy song that has a gleam in its eye and an edge in its voice, one that tells all those other pretty young sheep to watch out for shepherds that want to fleece them, and does it with verve and energy to burn.

Quote of the Week: Disappear Here

L.A. had never been his city, and as the glowing late-night coffee shops and drive-ins slid by on both sides, he thought he understood why. For all its tropical beauty there was something charmless and hard about it, a vulgarity as decidedly American as the picture industry which thrived on the constant waves of transplants eager for work, offering them nothing more substantial than sunshine. It was a city of strangers, but, unlike New York, the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only by the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. The heat was unrelenting. On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

 - Stewart O'Nan, West of Sunset, pp.36-37

Tentacles at My Throat by Zerocalcare

You know how, when you're a kid, there are rigid rules to life that just seem to be there: generated by the kids themselves, random, unquestionable and bedrock?

Zerocalcare's graphic novels are set in a world - well, they're memoirs, officially, so it's the world inside his head, the real world as he sees it or the way he thinks it's more entertaining to pretend he sees it - based on that logic. It's a world full of internal voices - society, peer pressure, desires, the weight of kid opinion - demanding that the main character must do X or Y in this situation, and must never do P or Q, no matter what.

Most of us grow out of that kind of thinking, or at least build different obsessive-compulsive structures in our adulthood. But Michele Rech - the Italian cartoonist who works as Zerocalcare - is not most people.

Tentacles at My Throat was his second graphic novel, after The Armadillo Prophecy; it was published in Italy in 2014 and this edition, translated into English by Carla Roncalli di Montorio, came out in 2022. I've also seen Forget My Name, which I think was his third book. They're all that sort of thing: mining the mindset of an obsessive, inward-focused childhood and young adulthood, a life intensely examined.

Of course, Zerocalcare constructs each one of these books carefully and deliberately; this isn't just a rush of "how I really feel." One major clue to that construction is that the specific internal voices are very different in each book - the internal voice, the superego if you will, of Armadillo was, yes, an armadillo. But here basically the same role is played by "David the Gnome," the main character of the TV show based on the '80s illustrated books. And the internal voices are much less central this time - they pop up to stop Zero from doing things, but aren't the everyday companion the armadillo was.

So this one is a more typical memoir, made more dramatic and serious - in the way that kids do, when telling stories about their own lives - but mostly realistic and grounded. (There is what I think is a burst of fiction at the end, to tie off one loose end that I suppose Zero never learned the real history of, but nothing like the dive into pure fantasy at the end of Forget.)

Tentacles is a three-part story, centered on his school. The main characters are a group of kids, most centrally Zero himself, his friend Slim - who I suspect may be a composite; he's appeared in every book so far and has been central in all of them - and their friend Sarah. The three sections are of equal length, taking place when Zero is seven, sixteen, and twenty-seven. The first two center on sneaking out of the school to do something - both in that vaguely transgressive and somewhat ritualized way kids have: "prove you're brave by sneaking under the fence you're never supposed to cross, and doing this specific thing to prove you did it." And the third section is the usual reason former students come back to their old school: someone has died.

Of course Zero obsessed about what happened for years afterwards; that's what he does. The fact that he "betrayed" one of his friends at the age of seven - as always with Zero, his internal dialogue obsessively focuses on that, on how horrible and unreclaimable he is, how everyone would hate him forever if only they knew the truth, and on and on and on.

And, of course, it's never as bad as he assumes. That's the point of this spiraling: it can't possibly be as bad as the person spiraling worries. I do wonder if the "Zerocalcare" of his stories is going to move forward into that realization at any point, or if they'll stay stuck in that childhood/young adulthood nexus of fear, doubt, and shame. My understanding is that he's shifted formats over the past few years - moved from telling these stories in graphic novel form into telling them in animated TV-show form, so he can run through them all again and do the same thing over - but, eventually, the character of Zero will have to move out of the conflicted, neurotic twenty-something life, right?

As always with Zerocalcare, I find it's a bit too overwrought for me. I want to reach into the page, shake Zero, and tell him to just mellow out - nothing is as earth-shaking or as central as he's sure every last bit of it is.

(Or maybe he's right, because this is the world he constructed. As far as I can tell, his group of friends have already utterly ruined the lives of two of their schoolmates, and that's played for laughs. Ha ha! Lifelong trauma because they happened to be there, and aren't the heroes! It's funny!)

I guess I'm saying that I appreciate the skill and craft and energy of Zerocalcare's work, but I hope he's massively exaggerating a lot of this stuff, because otherwise he and his buddies come across, frankly, as a bunch of horrible little monsters. More than most kids, even.

One of Us Is Wrong by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

Writers are neurotic: we all know that, right? (OK, maybe all of us are neurotic, but let's stick with writers for now.) If they're not successful, they're sure they should be successful, and would be, if not for That One Thing.

If they are successful, they probably think they should be more successful, and think something is holding them back - and, maybe at the same time, wonder if it was inevitable that they became successful, and think about how they could possibly test that.

So they write new series, or try out new genres - or, in the extreme, make up a whole new pseudonym. The most famous example is Stephen King as Richard Bachman - but the famous examples are the ones we know; it's possible that there are long-running famous writers that are actually, secretly, other famous writers.

(Well, no. It really isn't. Publishing leaks like a sieve. These things always come out, usually when the first book is published and the sales force has to say something to bookstore reps to get them to buy it. Every secret in publishing has an expiration date.)

Donald Westlake was neurotic, back in the early '80s. He wanted to see if he could launch an entirely separate career, with a series of mostly straight mystery-thrillers about and supposedly by a former TV detective turned actual amateur detective. As it happened - Westlake has an introduction in this edition about how the secret was revealed before publication of the first book; see my parenthetical note above - it didn't work out the way he wanted, so there were only four books.

All four were reprinted about twenty years later, in the mid-Aughts, in a uniform series look with "Donald Westlake" very large and "writing as Samuel Holt" substantially smaller. I've got copies of all of them, and I hope to get through them all this year. (I'd previously read the first three, back about fifteen years ago, and had a post about the third one here.)

One of Us Is Wrong is a solid novel, along the lines of Westlake's straight thrillers of the period like Kahawa. "Holt" is the former star of a TV show called Packard; he's rich enough a few years after it ended not to have to work again, enough of a workhorse that he wants to do something, and typecast enough that he doesn't get any offers. So: rich, recognizable, and with a lot of free time. A decent mix for an amateur sleuth.

In this one, he gets caught up in international intrigue, which Westlake drops us into by starting with Holt nearly being killed on the freeway and then flashing back to how a writer-producer friend dragged him into it. There are plenty of plot twists along the way - though the violent folks are from exactly the part of the world you would expect, both in 1986 and 2024 - which I will not spoil.

Westlake gives Holt an engaging voice and a lot of to do; it's an interesting tight-rope because Holt is obviously hugely privileged (rich ex-TV star! homes in Hollywood and NYC's Village! an honest-to-God English butler!), even here at the beginning of the series, but he's down-to-earth, at least in his own head.

There is derring-do, there are fiendish plots, there are a few (mostly offstage) murders for spice, and Holt is instrumental in solving the crimes. But he does worry about not telling the cops, before he actually does tell the cops, in another nice two-step. It's a self-aware thriller, at least on a minor level - Westlake was always good at looking at all sides of a story - and another fine book from a fine career.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

Just to set expectations: I expect to read all twenty-eight volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, which will probably take more than two years at the current pace. (Not promising that, though: so much can derail plans over that stretch of time.) And I will write posts about them here as I read them, since I do that for everything I read and I am a creature of habit.

But I also expect those posts get shorter and more desultory as I go along, because I don't think I'm going to have a lot of say about "here's three hundred more pages of pulse-pounding samurai action in the '70s style, as you like it!" But I'm still in early days here, so we'll see how it actually goes.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier collects five more stories about the vengeance-driven former imperial executioner Ogami Ittō and his toddler son Daigorō, written by Kazuo Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima. At this point, Koike and Kojima are still exploring this world, still setting up.

The title story here is the most important: Ogami is hired to kill a "living Buddha," the elderly leader of a religious community, who is pushing the local samurai leadership to cut taxes for a few years to spare the people. The samurai, though, know that failing to pay their crushing debts - here, unlike many stories, mostly reasonable debts; this is a very poor community, not a mismanaged one - will ruin their reputations, and reputation is vastly more important than anyone's life...particularly the lives of peasants. Ogami can't just kill such a saintly man: all of his training is in meeting violence with violence. So, on the one hand, this is the story of how Ogami can transform his thinking, to turn himself into an almost inhuman spirit of destruction - very specifically in a Buddhist way, very particularly in the way the living Buddha tells him to - so that he can finish this job, and, by extension, continue on the road for his final revenge.

But the other side of the story is also central. Ogami is hired mostly by samurai to solve samurai problems throughout the series: he is a sword, and they are the users of swords; they have the money, and he is paid in money. His employers here are a complex mixture of high-minded and hide-bound, honorable and treacherous, understandable and foreign. At the core of Lone Wolf and Cub is a complex view of this society and the role of the ronin: not that any of this is "good" or "bad," but a deeper understanding of the religious and social underpinnings of the world, the places where those are weak or undermined or ignored or broken, and the ways that this world is an engine that systematically destroys people.

As all societies do, in their own ways. But Lone Wolf and Cub will focus on how this society works, by threading its hero through various situations in that world and seeing what's left when his sudden violence shattered them.

And, along the way, the storytelling will be measured and careful, in that seemingly-slow pace that was a revelation to so many Western readers when we first saw it. Lone Wolf and Cub has the luxury of space, and takes advantage of that at all times: not just in the length of the whole series, since no one knew at the time it would run that long. More important is the length of each story: they run around sixty pages here, and, as I recall, can get even longer than that later in the series. Each story has enough space not just for the action, but for a quiet frame around the action, a view of what else is going on in the world at the time, a wider experience of this world so that we can see what is shattered when Ogami Ittō comes to town.

Erased by Loo Hui Phang and Hughes Micol

This is not true - it's presented as if it were non-fiction, and, in a way, it's the distilled essence of the lives of dozens or hundreds of people in the glory days of the Hollywood studio system, but it is, at is core, a fable, a constructed parable to tell one very particular story.

It's the ambiguously ethnic Zelig in a way, with a main character who stands in for all of the peoples of America who are not white, not the default.

It's all too much, far too much of the time, to my taste, but it aims high and stakes out a a lot of ground: I can appreciate and encourage that even if I think it does try to do too much and makes itself a cartoon along the way.

Erased is the story of Maximus Wyld. You see: even the name is already too much. He was an orphan teenager in late-30s Hollywood, of mixed Black, Native, Asian, and Mexican heritage - literally made of all of the other kinds of people of the USA, in the kind of notes that Erased keeps returning to, to heavily underline its points.

He's discovered quickly - by Cary Grant, in a way that first hints Grant may have a sexual interest in the compelling young boxer he meets. But none of the actors have more than minor character flaws; all of the famous names are here to be famous, to be illuminating, to show how awesome Wyld was because these famous people thought he was even more wonderful and special than they were. Wyld quickly has a screen test, is seen as absolutely wonderful, and starts getting work immediately - his early years of struggle and hardship happen off the page; he is too good to be seen to struggle at all in the book.

Wyld can play any role as long as it's not white: Japanese in exotic melodramas, Indian in cowboy pictures, Black in race films. More oddly, as I read it, he always plays minor characters that are easily cut from movies - this will be a plot point at the end - which is an inherent, central contradiction. Wyld is both so compelling and special - it doesn't even seem to be his acting, just some pseudo-sexual visual power of his presence - that he's in every famous movie you've ever heard of for a stretch of about twenty years, and is the best thing in all of those movies, but he is also entirely extraneous to all of those movies, and was removed entirely, so that we learn about him only now, decades later.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense. Famous is well-known. Famous is influential. Famous means things change. The creators here - writer Loo Hui Phang and artist Hughes Micol - could have made up a fake filmography, threaded through the history of Hollywood, and then said it was all suppressed due to Wyld's unforgivable transgressions. They could have made him a leading man, a screenwriter or storyteller, a director or producer - someone who did more than show up and say other people's words in other people's stories. But, instead, they make him something that can be removed easily - and, by extension, everything he is supposed to represent is also removed easily.

Along the way, he fucks every famous actress and befriends every famous actor. Again, Wyld is wonderful and perfect: everyone loves him and wants him. None of them are close friends; he and they emote at each other, getting through the authors' historical material and attempting to build up the pseudo-mystical power of Wyld in every scene, full of portentous, roundabout dialogue that talks about gigantic social issues like a textbook rather than having people connect to each other as humans.

There are no non-famous characters. The closest thing we see to a friendship or long-term relationship with Wyld is Grant, who is mostly a mentor, giving advice on how to navigate this world. Wyld is so busy being mythic, being an icon, that he doesn't really become a person. I don't think that was the point - that he was that Hollywood cliché, the empty vessel that everyone else pours their dreams into - but Wyld comes across as ambitious in only very weird and circumscribed ways, and as deeply passive rather than kept in one specific small role by the system.

He only gets one lead role: the one that destroyed his career entirely and forever. He spends what seems to be twenty years - never getting much older, without much flow of the narrative to show time is changing in any way other than what kind of movies are currently popular - living the same way, doing the same things, saying the same kind of things, while around him the real-world famous people pop up to do the famous thing they did that year, note how they have changed in the ways we the audience are already familiar with, and then move on.

I wanted to believe in the mythic power of Maximus Wyld.

Well, I wanted to believe in the mythic power of a person named something slightly more realistic who was renamed "Maximus Wyld" by Hollywood. But I just couldn't. I haven't even gotten into the way that Wyld supposedly created "coded messages" - by wearing particular items of clothing in some big studio movie - that did something or other and transformed the world forever.

Again, in the scenes that no one can now see and which left no trace.

All in all, this feels like a fever dream caused by reading too much Hollywood Babylon too quickly and getting drunk on it. It is gorgeous and aims high and absolutely wants to have a mythic, overwhelming power, to tell the story of everyone cast out and pushed aside and not celebrated, all of the other people of America and how their stories could become Hollywood myth. Maybe that's enough.

Portions for Foxes: LP

"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.

We all have artists we love, and sometimes phases in careers we love. It can be disconcerting to look back and think that the phase you love best seems to be the one the artist likes least.

And I hate to say that here, but I think it's true: I think the musician who performs as LP was pushed in one specific direction in her early career. It didn't work, for whatever reason, she regrouped, went away, was mostly a songwriter for a decade, and finally came back to make music that's more of what she wanted to do.

I appreciate that - my wife likes the new stuff better, too! - but her first two records have a sound and an emotion in their best songs that she hasn't touched since. There's what I think is one album worth of absolutely killer material, from the two releases and a few oddities, interspersed with less-ambitious and successful songs.

I could have picked any of four songs for this - as I type this, I'm still wondering if I'm going to change my mind. But it's not the operatic, touching Suburban Sprawl & Alcohol. It's not the happier-than-you'd-expect Wasted.

No, I think it's going to be a song of need and longing: All I Have.

I had a dream last night and you were walking all alone
I couldn't reach you and you slipped away into the crowd
Now all I have is a photo of you smiling at me
All I want is you here with me and I'll be happy

I think one of the things that her handlers pushed LP into, in that first phase of her career, was burying the fact that she sings love songs to and about women - there's a couple of songs, some partially successful, that use "he" pronouns, but the most resonant ones stay as "you."

That's all undertone - by record-company fiat, it doesn't come out in any of the songs. But if you know it, it makes the good songs even better, the pain even clearer.

So this is a song, metafictionally, about a lost love, who LP can't even name - can't even talk about clearly. And I think that comes through in the singing, in the song itself - that emotion gets channeled into the performance. And it's a great song.

I don't wish LP had to keep making music that was wrong for her. But I wish, maybe, that she had wanted to explore more in this area, that she'd grabbed more control then - maybe that one of these songs broke out, was enough of a hit to let her do this style of music her way then. It didn't happen - most of the things I wish for never happen. But we do have a cluster of great songs out of it: I'll take that.

Quote of the Week: The Mad Poet Himself

His face was placid and guileless, as if all the racial wisdom had passed through leaving no perceptible traces. Like Earth, Navarth was old, irresponsible and melancholy, full of a dangerous mirth.

 - Jack Vance, The Palace of Love, p. 341 in The Demon Princes, Vol. 1

Batman: The Golden Age, Vol. 1 by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and others

This is the first two years or so of Batman stories, from that famous bit in Detective Comics #27 through the subsequent 17 issues, plus the Batman stories from New York World's Fair Comics #2 and the first three issues of the quickly-organized quarterly Batman series. This collection was published in 2016, and includes what looks like full credits for all of the stories - the cover doesn't use authors, but the book mostly defaults to saying Batman is by Bill Finger (writer) and Bob Kane (artist), while also noting all of the other hands - Gardner Fox, Shelly Moldoff, Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, a few others - that worked on some pieces.

It's well-presented, with crisp presentations of what looks like the original garish WWII-era coloring, all in a handsome (I think; I read it digitally) package. DC has been making archival books like this for a long time, and they're good at it: Batman: The Golden Age, Vol. 1 is a fine presentation of this material. 

It's just a shame that the stories are so repetitive, talky, and cluttered, with layouts that semi-regularly actively impede reading comprehension. (But I've already said this is a Golden Age collection once, so I shouldn't repeat myself.) It shouldn't be surprising: comics were still in their infancy, and artists in particular were still working out how to lay out full pages, while also creating undemanding disposable action stories at high speed for an audience generally assumed to be children.

But anyone coming to the earliest Batman stories these days - over eighty years later - is going to run right up into that wall: there's some imaginative power here and there, some concepts that are exciting, but the stories themselves are mostly simplistic and straightforward beat-up-the-crooks stuff. The colorful villains do start up here - The Joker makes several appearances - but they're mostly pulp-magazine mad scientists, and not particularly colorful.

There's about four hundred pages of comics here, and all of the stories feel the same by the end. Even the introduction of Robin is early enough that any lightness and energy he brings to the proceedings is baked in thoroughly well before we hit the end. Our heroes are also increasingly likely to speak directly to the audience, telling 1940's boys to stand up straight, comb their hair, eat their Wheatena (well, not that), and avoid criminal activity.

This is of historical interest, absolutely. But I'd be hard-pressed to find any other kind of interest in it. If you want Batman stories, they got better - or, in many cases, quirkier in more amusing ways - at various times in the last eight decades.

The Palace of Love by Jack Vance

We're in the exact middle here, the third book of a series planned and executed to be five books long. In The Palace of Love, Kirth Gersen finds and eliminates the third of the five Demon Princes, the uniquely horrible crimelords or pirates that destroyed his childhood home twenty-some years before.

Each of the Princes is distinct, each different, each driven by some monomania or quirk. They're all damaged men - how else would they have become Demon Princes? But the damage they do to those around them is vastly higher, and that's one reason why Gersen is killing them, one by one.

The main reason, though, is that he has to. Gersen was trained for revenge by his grandfather from immediately after the attack, and has no other purpose in life. The Demon Princes series is ostensibly about the five different mysterious figures Gersen must track down and remove, but it's really about monomania, Gersen's as much or more than that of the Princes. Gersen is as damaged a man as any of the five; he's just broken in a way that is useful to society, rather than the reverse.

Jack Vance was one of the more subtle writers of mid-century science fiction: his universes were vast and complex, his people carefully fit into those universes, each quirky and specific. The Oikumene of this era of his career is not a single thing - even his planets are rarely a single thing - and he used documents from his fictional worlds at the beginning of each chapter to extend and deepen his world, often in ways that don't even seem to relate to the action of the current novel at all.

(At this point, I should mention that the first two novels in the series were The Star King and The Killing Machine, and that all three are available in the convenient omnibus The Demon Princes, Vol. 1, which is how I read all three this time.)

This time, Gersen is seeking Viole Falushe, whose monomania manifests in sex - or so the wider universe believes. Gersen learns that Falushe was once the troubled adolescent Vogel Filschner, in a minor city on Old Earth, who kidnapped nearly an entire Choral Society (and sold them into slavery in the Beyond, starting his criminal career) in an attempt to get one girl, Jheral Tinzy, who was absent that day. Filschner and Tinzy both disappeared soon afterward, one without a trace, though Filschner has returned, here and there, mysteriously and unexpectedly as any of the Demon Princes, as Falushe.

Gersen, using the fabulous wealth he gathered in the previous book, buys the declining but prestigious Cosmopolis magazine and poses as a feature writer to investigate Falushe/Filschner, and to, eventually, get an invitation to Falushe's fabled Palace of Love, hidden somewhere in the Beyond. He does this by finding and manipulating the "mad poet" Navarth, a mentor of the young Filschner and still in touch with Falushe in the current day.

And, of course, once Gersen gets to the Palace of Love, he has to find Falushe - who hides among others as all the Demon Princes do, masking as normal human to conceal their true natures - and, in the end, remove him.

That's the plot, but The Palace of Love is a languid book, for all that it's barely a hundred and fifty pages long. It begins with Gersen in a relationship with Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay, the woman he rescued in the previous book - but his monomania drives them apart. And a young woman in this book is drawn to him as well, though he knows his need to finish his revenge will stymie any possible relationship there as well.

And, even more pointedly, the story of Falushe is very similar. He's been spending the past nearly thirty years trying to make Jheral Tinzy "love" him - in a demanding, monomaniacal, all-encompassing, impossible way - and creating facsimiles of her to keep trying and trying again.

Vance has been clear all along that Gersen is as broken as the men he chases, but Palace of Love sees that become central to the novel: Gersen and Falushe are two sides of the same coin. And, by extension, so are Gersen and all of the Princes: he had to be made like them in order to destroy them. Eventually, he'll come to the end of that string and have nothing left in his life. But, for now, there are still two Princes to go.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017 by Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey

I should have realized they were commercial illustrators - their work has all of the hallmarks. The polish, the construction, the architecture of the comics panels. It all shows a deep insight into design and a deep concern for design, for telling stories precisely and sharply.

I didn't quite realize that the first few times I read the work of siblings Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey - the full-length graphic novel The Bend of Luck and the connected themed collection Animal Stories. I said that their work reminded me of other kinds of art - advertising, Flash games, informative pamphlets, and so on - but didn't quite make the leap to say that's because they do that other kind of work as well. They live in that world; they think in those terms.

Successful illustrators who make comics are rare, if only because comics are so vastly less remunerative than illustration. There's a text appreciation in this book, by Monte Beauchamp, who "discovered" the Hoeys for comics as editor of Blab! in the '90s, pointing that out, and doing a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of just how much money they could have made with the same number of pictures for commercial clients.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017 collects the first twenty years of their short comics work, in a quirky reverse order. So it starts with Coin-Op magazine itself, which they self-publish. Issue five comes first, then four, and so on. Before that - it's unclear if it's all structured in reverse-chronological order, or otherwise structured for a particular reading experience - are the earlier stories from Blab!

(This is no longer the complete Coin-Op. Issue 9 came out last year; they seem to have a new issue about every other year, plus the regular stream of longer works.)

There are a lot of stories here, and I'm not going to try to list them all. Some are straightforward narratives, but many are more dreamlike, or design-driven. There's a series of illustrated "articles" about jazz musicians - all of them, I think, entirely fictional - and some pieces that seem to be mostly song lyrics (original, I think) turned into visual art. There's another series about two sad-sack characters, anthropomorphic dogs or dog-headed men, named Saltz and Pepz who get into various scrapes during what seems to be the Great Depression. They also have a few stories in a twelve-panel grid, showing the same wide scene each page, as big events crash or break across multiple panels and characters.

Many of the stories are set in the vague past, what I think of as the '30s or the '50s - not during The War, not during anything major or notable - with boxy cars and people in constructed suits and all the furniture of a world that's familiar and stable and entirely gone.

And even the pieces I call straightforward are very Hoey-esque: designed, often to the point of being schematic, telling stories as much in the ways the panels are laid out on the page as in the things that happen in those panels. None of it is obvious; none of their work is ever obvious, I'm coming to believe.

There's a lot of depth and interest in Coin-Op: a lot of time and thought when into every panel here. Even the wordless, imagistic stories - which, as a Word Person, I had to admit I didn't really "get" - are full of wonders and surprises. The Hoeys are as interested in how they tell stories, how they present moments visually , how those visually feel, as they are in the story being told.

They're illustrators. It's what they do. And they do it really well.

(I've hit the end here, and neglected to note that some pieces here - I think mostly older work, but not necessarily - were co-written by Charles Paul Freund. The song lyrics in particular seem to be mostly from Freund. It's not really clear how the Hoeys work together - other than they both write and both draw, from opposite ends of the American continent, on what I assume are the same digital pages somewhat simultaneously - so Freund adds another layer of "how does this fit in" to the mix. That's all unimportant, frankly: the work is the work, however it got made or whoever did what.)

The Shape of Ideas by Grant Snider

Grant Snider is the rare cartoonist who makes me want to be a better person. Not in a "sit up straight!" kind of way, either - his work is gentle and thoughtful and ruminative, so it's mostly inspiration or providing an example.

I don't think it actually works on me- I don't feel myself turning into someone kinder or more caring, even after reading several of his books - but just wanting to be better is still pretty good, isn't it?

The Shape of Ideas came out in 2017; it's along the same lines as 2022's The Art of Living. The difference, I suppose, is that Ideas is about mindfulness and inspiration and the examined life as it pertains to creation - of any kind of art; Snider is, as always, broad-minded and welcoming  - while Living was, as the title implies, about similar lessons applied to just living in the world every day.

I don't create art. There were times in my life that I tried to write fiction - mostly very long ago and very poorly - but nowadays, whatever we call this kind of writing here is as close to art as I get. (And that's not close: I'm at the other side of the table from it, looking at it and trying not to dissect the frog as I do.)

Snider is talking to other creative types here: painters and novelists and cartoonists and probably dancers and actors and comedians as well - anyone who is creating a thing from scratch and presenting it in public, doing that complicated two-step of attempting to say something real and represent something true. Anyone who looks at a blank something (page or stage) and is looking to fill it up with meaning.

So it's largely about the hunt for ideas - getting them in the first place, nurturing them, evaluating them, turning them into a final product. Like Snider's other books, it's largely made up of strips that originally appeared on his site Incidental Comics, with a few that were commissioned by others. Also like his other books, it's broken into shorter thematic chapters: starting with Inspiration and running through things like Improvisation and Contemplation before ending at Pure Elation.

And it's in Snider's usual evocative, friendly style, mostly soft colors and usually small, energetic figures wandering through symbolic landscapes or wresting (literally) with their problems or standing there with brush or pen as they try to do the thing. It is lovely and mostly quiet, warm and inviting and friendly the way a book like this should be.

I'm not in the market for a book to inspire me to create stuff, so my opinion should be discounted appropriately. But I do think this is a good one, and if you are in that market, you should check it out. Snider is positive and helpful in a way that never feels Pollyanna-ish; he's mostly focused on the struggle and doubt.

Portions for Foxes: The Long Blondes

"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 don't want to be a broken record. I've said a lot here that I like songs that start with a bang, and songs about bad love. Well, here's a great song that does both, from the early-century British band The Long Blondes: You Could Have Both.

I don't kid myself about happy endings
I'm too old for that now

If I could sum the whole song up in two lines, those are the ones: this is a song about what you get when you can't get what you want. A song about what you settle for - no, what you plead to get, so you can get something.

It's a song about need, about want. The singer is the other woman - with seemingly no hope of getting rid of the first one. She's willing to give up nearly everything she has for nearly nothing from this man, just to have a piece of him, just to not be left out alone:

But you don't have to worry that much about the future
And it's not as if you ever did before
Because you'll always have everything just as you want it
And there'll always be a phone to ring at three in the morning
And you'll always have someone who'll drive you home

That's from the extraordinarily powerful spoken-word section towards the end. It's still all need, all what she can give, what she'll sacrifice to make this happen.

Remember: the song is You Could Have Both. And she's the both - she's trying to convince him that he can cheat, to get that little bit of him for herself, some of the time. And it's a barn-burner of a song as she makes that case.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 6, 2024

One book this week, which actually did come in the mail and actually is of SFF interest - not that this blog is SFF-focused at all these days, but I get the sense the couple of actual readers I do have prefer that end of the literary world.

That book is:

New Adventures in Space Opera, a reprint anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan covering the last decade or so - so it's pretty much the wave after the "New Space Opera" of the beginning of this century. It has fourteen stories in its three-hundred-ish pages, from writers including Alastair Reynolds, T. Kingfisher. Yoon Ha Lee, Ailette de Bodard, Charlie Jane Anders, and Arkady Martine.

It's from Tachyon, and I have a finished book in my hands, though I see the official publication date is August 13. So it is already a real thing and is making its way out into the world as we speak.

Books Read: June 2024

For no good reason, I'm typing this initial list right after catching up on the April and May lists, in late June. This means I may forget this post and leave it to molder in Drafts; if you're reading it, that didn't happen.

Anyway, here's what I read recently:

Elizabeth Pich, Fungirl: Vulva Viking (digital, 6/1)

John Sladek, The Reproductive System (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 6/1)

Grant Snider, The Shape of Ideas (digital, 6/2)

Sophie Adriansen and Mathou, Proxy Mom: My Experience With Postpartum Depression (digital, 6/8)

Jack Vance, The Palace of Love (in The Demon Princes, Vol. 1, 6/8)

Bill Finger and Bob Kane, Batman: The Golden Age, Vol. 1 (digital, 6/9)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier (digital, 6/15)

Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, One Of Us Is Wrong (6/15)

Loo Hui Pang and Hughes Micol, Erased: An Actor of Color's Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood (digital, 6/16)

Zerocalcare, Tentacles at My Throat (digital, 6/19)

Steven Brust, Lyorn (6/19)

Daria Tessler, Salome's Last Dance (digital, 6/20)

Jeff Lemire, Mazebook (digital, 6/21)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Old Reliable (6/21)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 3: The Wanderer's Road (digital, 6/22)

A.J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (in The Sweet Science & Other Writings, 6/22)

Alexandro Jodorowsky & Moebius, The Eyes of the Cat (digital, 6/23)

Daniel Pinkwater, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (in 4 Fantastic Novels, 6/23)

Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Book 1 (digital, 6/29)

Yves Chaland, Young Albert (digital, 6/30)

Lack London, John Barleycorn (in Novels and Social Writings, 6/30)

I'm pretty sure I will keep reading books, and slightly less sure I will remember to make lists like this, in the future.

Quote of the Week: Is Your Name Not Bruce? That's Going to Cause a Little Confusion

The young man at the end of the bar was not wearing Western clothes. Had he worn no clothes at all he could not have appeared more conspicuous, at least in The El Cantina Bar in Goodtime, Nevada. The El, as the regulars called it, catered to the brightly-clad guests of three dude ranches. There were the ovoid, unhappy women of the Merry Widow Ranch (awaiting divorces); the unhappy, ovoid men of the Triple-Tumblebug Ranch (awaiting divorces); and the querulous, dozing old people, of no particular sex, from the Golden Sunset Retirement Ranch (awaiting death). Amid their orchids, turquoises and clarets, all the hues of a painted sunset, Cal's rumpled grey suit and dirty-white lab coat stood out like a bird-dropping.

 - John Sladek, The Reproductive System, p.51 in SF Gateway Omnibus

The Reproductive System by John Sladek

I don't know if this is the first grey goo novel. (Probably not.) But it's an early one - so early that the "grey goo" is actual physical objects, boxy automatons on little legs scurrying across the Nevada landscape. All of the main elements are there: self-replicating human-created critters, runaway growth, an invention totally out of control, widespread destruction, conventional authorities powerless to respond, an ending that's transformative and nearly apocalyptic.

Of course, John Sladek didn't write that straight: he never wrote anything straight. He was one of the great satirists of the SF field, a writer with a deeply cynical view of humanity, very little sympathy for any of his characters, and deep influences from the Surrealists and other mid-century literary movements.

So his 1968 novel The Reproductive System is short - around the typical length for its era, fifty or sixty thousand words - but it ranges widely, it has a large cast, and it's not aiming to make us like or root for the vast majority of them.

(I wrote about my favorite Sladek novel - Tik-Tok, which I also think is his best single book - last year.)

In Millford, Nevada, a failing company - Wompler's Walking Babies - decides to jump on the government gravy train, to start researching something likely impossible to get hold of a new and hopefully unending revenue stream. Between chapters, they get that funding, a visionary (and, it turns out, completely crazy) scientist to run the program - and, pow! the Reproductive System is born.

It's explained mostly in bafflegab, but it's the usual self-replicating, self-organizing, everything-overrunning constellation of automatons - controlled by a central intelligence, but mostly distributed, able to deconstruct and incorporate practically any metallic or manufactured item it encounters, able to learn and change and adapt to circumstances. It's running in a test mode in the Wompler labs when a military envoy comes to review progress.

And it gets free, of course. That's how grey goo stories go. What happens ends up being more complicated than that - the scientist I mentioned before has a Frankenstein complex, among several others - but the Reproductive System gets out, and it starts assimilating whatever it can find in the Nevada desert, hitting Las Vegas quickly.

There are a lot of people - including a group of spies in Paris and Morocco, related to a French moon-shot program which for a long time doesn't seem particularly closely tied to the hegemonizing-automatons main plot - that run around, doing various things, mostly futilely, mostly badly, mostly at cross-purposes.

It's a Sladek novel, so it's full of crazy, misguided, neurotic and just plain confused people doing things. Many of them die along the way. A few make it to the end, more-or-less confront that mad scientist, and seize control of the Reproductive System for themselves:

After that, they had no more paperwork to do - ever. The System had taken care of that.

In fact it had taken over all the jobs no one wanted to do. The System collected garbage and turned it into valuable chemicals like pearls and perfume and maple sugar and finger-paints.

It did all the dishes in all the homes of the world. It filed all the papers no one wanted to read, and it read them, too. It took care of other distasteful jobs like typing, and like preventing war. (p.154)

It's a happy ending, but a quick, whirlwind, kaleidoscopic one. The world has been transformed; the genie is not going back into the lamp. And, the reader thinks - if she spends a moment or two instead of just letting the ending run in her head as Sladek steamrolls it forward - there is no reason the Reproductive System will stay tame and settled and controlled; it has huge capabilities and vast appetites, time is long and humans are transitory and contradictory.

Grey goo never quite goes all the way back into the vat - even this far back. Once it exists, everything is changed.

(Consumer note: I read this in a SF Gateway omnibus, which also includes The Muller-Fokker Effect and Tik-Tok. I think that's the best, easiest-to-find edition of this novel currently.)

Fungirl: Vulva Viking by Elizabeth Pich

One unexpected consequence of the combination of a bisexual main character and a minimalist art style: I thought the love interest in this book was female for a few pages, until our main character calls him "this guy." (Though, quirkily, she uses a "they" pronoun at first, as if the wavefront of her crush's gender has not yet been collapsed, but switches to "he" after someone else says "Boys want to be wooed.")

Hey, love all the people, right? And Fungirl is just the person to do it, with her nutty ball-of-manic-energy neediness.

But, as you may guess from the title, all does not go well for Fungirl in Fungirl: Vulva Viking, the most recent one-shot by Elizabeth Pich about her continuing character, who I still think is a great attempt to stake out wider realms of cringe comedy from a female perspective. It was published about a year and a half ago, and followed the big collection Fungirl and the similar one-shot Fungirl: You Are Revolting.

Fungirl is a twenty-something slacker in a pullover sweater, living with premed roommate Becky (and, unofficially, Becky's sensitive boyfriend Peter) and working a string of small-time jobs that she always manages to screw up. There have been male characters fitting that rough description for decades - comedy thrives on them - but Fungirl is a specifically female version of that loser, and Pich delights in making her femininity a shambling, violent, needy, destructive engine of chaos in these books.

This time, Fungirl is working at a corndog stand, and barely holding onto that job. But she meets a cute influencer, a skateboarding dude who seems to be into her, and they set up a date.

It does not go well. I don't want to spoil how or why it doesn't go well, but it goes horrifically not-well, in a way that leads to a more realistic version of the cover scene and is directly responsible for the title. It goes wrong in a solidly adult way: that's as far as I should go.

That's the story of Fungirl's life, though: she screws things up, hugely and humorously. She wants love - I should probably say "sex" there, but "love" is close enough, since she wants that, too, only slightly less vigorously - and she is no good at getting it. She's no good at holding a job, either, or at being a good roommate, or at a dozen other standard adult things.

That's why we love comedy characters like Fungirl. Well, I don't know if there are other comedy characters like Fungirl. But why we've liked her male counterparts for so many years. And why her adventures are so much fun in their demented splendor. And why we maybe wish we lived in a world where women were freer to screw up this badly, to be this funny this much. But we do have Fungirl, even if she - as far as I know - stands alone in her field.

A Difficult Song To Google

Just a random song that I like a lot recently - this is Moment from the band Holy Fuck, from their 2020 record Deleter.

They're an electronica - well, kinda, they do a somewhat similar sound with somewhat different techniques - band out of Toronto. And I've been a fan long enough that I had to avoid listening to their music when my kids were smaller, because you don't want the "Daddy, what song is that?" "Oh, it's by Holy Fuck."

This song has been playing for me a lot recently in a specific way that I'm not going to explain - it's weirdly complicated, and not really relevant - so I'll just say it's welcome whenever it pops up, and it's been popping up a lot.

And, yes, if you do google "holy fuck moment" you will get a lot of videos by young men not overly endowed with intelligence describing ways they probably should have died. But also this song: