Portions for Foxes: Elis Paprika

"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've said before I'm no expert here - I'm highlighting songs I like a lot, not things I'm deeply knowledgeable about. Here's another example: I think this singer has had a serious career almost entirely in places I have very little visibility. But this one song popped out, and it's quick and punchy and loud and awesome.

This week, my song is No Me Vas A Callar, a 2007 single by the Mexican singer/songwriter Elis Paprika.

It is mostly in Spanish, so I'm not going to quote it much. (I found this lyrics site with a translation, but make no promises about its accuracy.) 

The one thing I absolutely do know is what the title means: you are not going to shut me up.

The lyrics, from what I can tell, are mostly repeating that: this is a song that wants to say one thing, and to say it loud and clear.

And it does that brilliantly, with a keening guitar line under the singer's just slightly harsh singing tone - she's serious, and committed, and she is going to say this so that no one will misunderstand. 

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 14, 2024

This is actually the third weekly post listing things I got in various ways the last week of August; I was on vacation then and did a lot of book-accumulating. (And I'm stretching out the telling of it, because I can and to make it slightly more interesting.)

These are books I got from a local library, mostly because it was right after a trip to a used bookstore. I love used bookstores, and nearly always find interesting things in them - but I never find just what I'm looking for. That's pretty much the deal with used bookstores, of course: you find what you find, and it is surprising and interesting. But, sometimes, you then need to go find the thing you just realized you really want to read next - or just do some more poking around serendipitously - and that was the reason for the library run.

Here's what I grabbed while I was there:

White Cat, Black Dog was Kelly Link's new short-story collection last year, her first in quite a while. (I want to say around a decade, but I think it's not quite that long; I read Get in Trouble in 2017, I think fairly soon after publication.) I wanted to get to it "soon" - like so many other things - but thought she was a slow, careful enough writer that I had some time...and then she dropped a long novel earlier this year. I'm thrilled to have more to read, but starting to get worried I'm falling behind - so it's time to read more Kelly Link stories.

Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of non-fictional writings about writing by the novelist Haruki Murakami; it's about two years old now. I've been reading his books since the mid-80s, and have mostly kept up - I still have his last big novel, Killing Commendatore, on the to-be-read shelf, since I haven't been up to a book that length for a while - and I've also mentioned many times that I, for whatever odd reason, really enjoy reading the random nonfiction of fiction writers.

Fly By Night is a standalone graphic novel set in New Jersey by Tara O'Connor, whose work I've never seen before. I found it randomly browsing the YA graphic novel shelves, another big benefit of poking your head into a library now and then. This seems to have monsters in it - real monsters, the kind that live in Pine Barrens - but I bet it also has some of the human kind as well.

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories is, I think, the second book with that title - there might be a discrete "2" on the spine, covered with library stickers, but I'm not seeing any other indication in the book that there was a previous Haruki Murakami Manga Stories (but there was). This one has three adaptations, by the same crew as last time (writer Jean-Christophe Deveney and artist PMGL), of Murakami short stories of various vintage.

And last was another random find: Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir, the book that makes me say "if your name has an unusual spelling, it would behoove you to make sure it's clear and easily readable on your book cover." (No one listens to me.) I think this might have been a webcomic or something, but I found it on the shelf as a book, noticed Top Shelf published it, and figured that was good enough to give it a whirl. It seems to be some kind of semi-autobio thing, but that's about all I know.

Quote of the Week, Bonus: Shoemaker's Children

Bridget had once been a fashion buyer for a department-store chain, although you would never have guessed it to look at her. She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.

 - Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, pp.159-160

Quote of the Week: The Day or the Hour

Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a raffle) where God picked out your chosen method of going - "Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let's see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?" Not that Reggie believed in God, but it was interesting sometimes to imagine. Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, "A drowning in a hotel swimming pool today, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while."

 - Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, p.99

The Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys

I have to admit I read this book almost entirely because it was in an omnibus with two other books I'd already read. I bought the omnibus to have a copy of Hard Landing - still, I think, one of the great under-appreciated SF books of the '90s - and then read Michaelmas because I'd been hearing good things about it for decades.

The Iron Thorn is the third book in the omnibus - actually physically first in the book, since it was a 1967 novel, earlier in Algis Budrys's career. I came into it with no preconceptions or expectations: Budrys wasn't particularly prolific, and his career never had any central theme or even periods that I could discern.

It's an iris-out novel, that traditional SF form that starts in a tight, specific situation - as seen from the people in it, with no spoilers or outside explanations - and focuses on a character who is smart enough and travels enough to go further than any previous members of his group and learns the true secrets of his world.

I'll spoil some of those secrets, inevitably, in writing about it. If you care, I'll keep the spoilers in one discrete paragraph below. Our main character is first called Honor White Jackson - his people, we later learn, have a complex naming scheme that embeds their social rank and specific achievements, so that name changes somewhat as he goes along. We join him during his first hunt in a dangerous desert landscape, out beyond the perimeter of his people's settlement, protected by a "cap" from the hostile environment there and seeking to kill an Amsir, a member of another humanoid intelligent race. The title Iron Thorn is the central spire of his people's settlement, which sits in a deep depression - some readers may realize a crater - and clearly is some kind of technological artifact, probably not entirely understood by these now quite primitive, subsistence-level people.

Jackson is smart, in the way of classic-SF protagonists, and restless as well. His hunt is a success, but he learns things during that hunt that surprise him. His interview with the head of the Honors - the top-caste of his people, the hunters he has just joined - is not as fruitful as he hoped. And so he runs away, with a vague plan the reader is not told, and ends up captured, deliberately, by the Amsirs, who live in another crater with another Iron Thorn.

This is still only about a third of the way into this short novel, and Jackson has one more, massively longer, journey to take and yet another society to be surprised by.

So here's the spoiler: all of this takes place on Mars, possibly slightly terraformed, at least a thousand years in the future. Jackson's people are unaltered humans; the Amsirs were bioengineered from human stock; the whole thing was some kind of experiment that has overrun its protocols and not delivered any solid results to the American Midwestern research institution that originally set it up, so long ago. Jackson accesses a spaceship, and flies off to Earth - his people's fabled paradise - along with a crippled, mentally-damaged Amsir. Since he's of original human stock, the ship's computer makes him its new captain and gives him the usual classic-SF implanted education, giving him the memories and knowledge of an undergraduate career at Ohio State and various post-graduate specializations suitable to spaceship-captaining. On Earth, he finds the usual diminished population of decadents, playing at interpersonal relationships and casually cruel to each other - Budrys never says they're immortal, but they otherwise tick all of the boxes for "decadent far-future immortals" - and they are fascinated by his novelty and primitive vigor. They live under the control - not quite smothering, but tending in that direction - of an omnipresent Computer. In the end, Jackson's even less happy with this world than with his own, and lights out for the territory. But this world is entirely tamed and controlled by that Computer, so we know it's just getting away from the decadent maybe-immortals.

All of Budrys's books that I've read are quick and taut and sparse: they don't waste time or words, and imply a lot more than they ever say. This one possibly even more so, since it's more of a genre exercise to begin with. The ending is a bit unsatisfying, though I think that's on purpose: Jackson wanted to learn the truths of his world, and did - but ended up in a situation where he fits even less well than he did at the beginning of his journey.

Poetry Comics by Grant Snider

Grant Snider is a thoughtful, positive, lovely cartoonist. And I think I've now come to the end of his work, and have to wait for him to generate some new books so I can read them.

That's as close to sad or negative as you get with Snider's work, and in our current hellscape world - gestures vaguely all around - that kind of honest positivity and care and creativity is hugely welcome.

Poetry Comics was his new book this year. It's not as tightly themed as some of his other collections - I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelves, for example, was entirely about books, and The Shape of Ideas was supposedly creativity-inducing - but there are clusters of comics here specifically about poetry, and the whole thing has that standard sweet Snider vibe. The central character, most of the time, is the dark-haired kid character; I tend to think of her as a tween Black girl, but Snider works in Everypeople, so that's mostly my (not entirely warranted) assumption.

I don't think this is pitched specifically at younger readers: Snider has done picture books as well, so he's made books for that audience. The characters are mostly kids - or at least, small and inquisitive and energetic and playful, which is nearly the same thing - and Snider's work is generally in a tone of cheerleading for its activities, which is very appropriate for a younger, inexperienced audience. I think, though, that most of his stuff is the sort of all-ages that works for tweens on up without being limited to the younger set.

Most, or maybe even all of Snider's work appears first as individual strips, typically at his website Incidental Comics, and this book is the same. It contains not quite a hundred pages of comics, mostly single-pagers, with loose running themes of creativity (especially making, or thinking about making, poems), play, and exploring the world. It's organized into four big sections by the seasons of the year, in the way that his books are generally loosely organized with some general schema.

Snider draws like R.O. Blechman (at least to my eye - no idea if anyone else agrees). He writes like no one but himself: down-to-earth, quietly honest, positive without being Pollyanna-ish, and just supportive at all times. His work is the kind of thing that gives you hope that humanity isn't doomed, and that, just maybe, at least some of us are actually good people.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

I'm still amused and fascinated at the ways that the Jackson Brodie books aren't a mystery series, but function as one well enough for a large chunk of the mystery audience to grab onto them. I don't think anything similar would ever happen in SFF; we're too insular, too fond of our shibboleths, too ready to denounce outsiders and shun them.

But mystery readers - or thriller readers, or crime-fiction readers, however you want to characterize them - aren't a community the same way the SFF readership is. They haven't been patronized by the literary world (more than in a minor, barely-noticeable way) for two or three generations - you have to stretch back to the 1920s to get anything really juicy and nasty - and sometimes I think the self-image of the field is "regular novels, only with a death or two in them to keep from being boring."

I'm reading these books slowly and tardily - 2004's Case Histories in 2012, 2006's One Good Turn in 2013, and now, a whole decade later, 2008's When Will There Be Good News? There are three more already; one just came out this year. I'm getting further behind.

Jackson Brodie is a central character in all of the books, but they're - so far, at least - multi-viewpoint novels (Good News has four) in which Brodie is just one of the viewpoints, and not the most important or central one. He's ex-army, ex-police, working, at this point, intermittently as a private detective. The first three books are all set in and around Edinburgh; the second and third both take place in a short, compressed period of time - three to four days.

Brodie is nothing like the cliché of a fictional detective. He's not trying to solve murders, and he generally doesn't. He's neither the coldly ratiocinative expert who connects strands unexpectedly or the bull-headed wrecking machine who forces his way through events to shape them the way he wants them. He's just a guy, stuck in his own head like all Atkinson's characters, trying to do what he can where he is and unsure of what he should be doing a lot of the time.

One of the other viewpoints of Good News also returns from previous books, and looks like the kind of person you'd find in a genre mystery, if you squint enough: Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, of the local police, who almost had a relationship with Brodie in the previous book. (But both of them have since married quickly - and we know what happens afterwards at leisure when you do something in haste.)

The other two viewpoints are a doctor with a nearly year-old baby and her "mother's helper" - Dr. Joanna Hunter and Regina "Reggie" Chase. Hunter was the sole survivor of a shocking crime in her childhood; Reggie is a smart, inquisitive teen burdened with a criminal older brother and a life full of tragic deaths.

Central to this book are two events: a disappearance and a train crash. Dr. Hunter is the one that disappears; Brodie is one of the victims of the train crash, and his life is saved afterward by Reggie. But both of those things happen a solid third of the way into the book - Good News, again, is not structured at all like a standard mystery. It's a literary novel about people's lives, in a moment of tension and danger and destruction, and it starts by setting the scenes for all four, including a lot of background and details - psychological and environmental - that I don't have the space or time (or, frankly, ability) to detail clearly here.

It is brilliant and gripping and amazing. I read it much faster than I expected, dog-earing nearly half-a-dozen pages with particularly incisive bits of writing. (I could have done that a dozen more times: Atkinson is a wondrous writer, both in her specific sentences and her larger construction.) 

The best thing I can say to recommend this book is that it made me look at my shelves (where I have three other unread Atkinson books) and then look at Atkinson's website, to add everything else she's written to my "look for these books" list. I haven't done that for any author for ages. But Atkinson is fantastic, and I'm ready to read anything she writes - everything, I hope, if I can.

The Incredible Story of Cooking by Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay

The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking.

But I don't want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that's hugely important for everybody - we all gotta eat, and the vast majority of us enjoy it and want to maximize that enjoyment. It may be too much for some readers, true. But there have been books like this in prose for decades - centuries, actually - and there's no reason the graphic format should be less useful.

The opposite, in fact - in a prose book, you have to add pictures on individual pages or a photo insert to show what food looks like - in a graphic novel, that's built in on every page automatically. You have to deliberately avoid showing what things look like in a graphic novel.

So I'm happy to see more books like The Incredible Story of Cooking: serious non-fiction in comics form, for people who want the details and also want to see what it all looks like, or maybe don't want to read walls of text, or just like the organization of a comics page. (I'm all three of those things, myself, at least intermittently.)

Cooking was written by Benoist Simmat, a journalist and comics writer - he previously did a big book on wine, which has also been translated into English - and drawn by Stéphane Douay, who's been drawing comics for twenty years but doesn't seem to have been translated into English before. (Well, he draws the pictures, so his part of it doesn't need to be "translated," but you know what I mean.) It was originally published in Paris by Les Arénes in 2021; the US English-language edition (translated by Montana Kane) is from NBM and officially publishes today.

It stakes out a lot of ground: the subtitle starts with prehistory and claims to cover half a million years. The book delivers on that: the first page lists a number of hominids active in Africa between four and one million years ago, and the first chapter tells us as much as modern science knows about what those early humans ate and how they found, prepared, and kept food. I'm not sure that counts as cooking, but I don't have a solid mental definition of what's required to "count" as cooking, either. The book only claims 500,000 years of history, anyway, so these additional millions up front are purely lagniappe, to set the stage.

Eight more chapters bring the story, in successive stages, up to the modern world. We start with the great civilizations of antiquity - Sumer and Egypt and China and India - then Greece and Rome, trade routes and the Far East, medieval Europe, the Columbian exchange and food in the New World in general, the rise of first restaurants and gastronomy in the 19th century and then (soon afterward) the industrialization of the food business, before ending with a look at the world today, anchored by the Slow Food movement and related localization trends. Each chapter is dense with detail - there are lots of footnotes, which can send the reader back to an extensive bibliography in the back - livened up by Douay's crisp and occasionally amusing art.

In the back, besides that long bibliography, Simmat also provides nearly two dozen recipes from representative cultures around the world - the US gets a Chicago Hot Dog, for example - which can probably be cooked from with only a small effort. (Measurements are all in metric, which may confuse some American cooks.) In case the foregoing wasn't French enough, Simmat also gives a complexity/difficulty level for each recipe in graphic form: one soufflé for simple, up to three for difficult.

I doubt I will cook from this book, but the recipes are a nice addition. And the bulk of the book is the main comics narrative, which is detailed, backed up by all those footnotes, and includes all sorts of quirky details - starting with all of those pre-sapiens hominids up front - that I wasn't expecting at all. It's a book that's both entertaining and informative: what more could you ask for?

Portions for Foxes: Marykate O'Neil

"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.

Here's another obscure one, another song that spoke to me really strongly at the time and that holds up all these years later. I don't know what else this singer/songwriter did - I have this one 2008 EP, and nothing else by her.

(One quick Google later: she's still out there, making both music and paintings. I'm so happy to see that.)

This week, the song I want to champion is Happy by Marykate O'Neil.

The title is ironic.

I used to have dreams to accomplish great things
Now all I wanna be is happy
I used to dig deep, never get any sleep
Now all I wanna be is happy

The lyrics could be sarcastic, with a different presentation. (It was co-written by Jill Sobule and Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger, two people who know sarcastic well.) But it doesn't come across that way at all: it's stark and honest, from the point of view of a person who used to have dreams and hopes and goals...and lost all that, for reasons she won't or can't say.

All I wanna be is happy is the repeated line - basically every other line, the whole song. It comes across as a plea, the singer running through all the things she's changed, all the ways her life has contracted. It doesn't come across as saying she is happy now- just that's all that matters now, the only thing she can still aim for.

You can take that as a lesson, however you want. And decide how much you want to be - or can be - happy, yourself.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 7, 2024

This is actually a belated sequel; I got these books in a used bookstore the last week of  August, when I was on vacation. But I had something else already in the "Reviewing the Mail" slot for that Sunday, so these books got bumped.

Used bookstores are always random and serendipitous, but I find I'm grabbing fewer things each visit as I get older - there are so many books that I'm pretty sure I already read, or have a copy of, and so I skip over them if they're not on my list (which is probably not as accurate as I'd like). But I did find a few book-shaped objects, and I'll read them eventually. This is what jumped out at me:

Behind the Scenes at the Museum was Kate Atkinson's first novel; it won the Whitbread Prize back in the mid-90s. I've read three of her Jackson Brodie novels - they're not really mysteries, though Brodie is a private detective, and the the mystery audience has embraced them- one of them very recently (so recently, in fact, the post about it going live later this week), and found she has a great novelist's power and vision. When a writer hits you like that, it's time to go back to the beginning and make a project of it - so here I am, at the beginning.

The Midnight Library is, I think, Matt Haig's most famous and/or popular book. I read his Dead Father's Club (a contemporary riff on Hamlet) way back in my SFBC days, and liked it a lot...and then didn't think of his work for a decade or more. I thought about Haig again, for reasons I can't now recall, a couple of years ago, and found his nonfiction book Notes on a Nervous Planet. But Haig is mostly a novelist, and seems to be usually somewhere in the hinterlands of fantastika, so I both feel like I should read his books and that I'll like them. So now I can at least read this one when the mood takes me.

Vacationland is what I still think of as "that new John Hodgman book." But it was published in 2017, and what I now have is a decent condition but still clearly used trade paperback. As far as I can tell, Hodgman hasn't published a book since, so I'm still technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. This purports to be a book of stories about travel; I don't know if it's really that or if it gets more Hodgmanian, in the ways of his very quirky earlier books. (Either way, I'm interested.)

Barking is a random Tom Holt book I found on the shelves; it was his new novel in 2007. I recently read his When It's a Jar, and enjoyed that book - and it looks like his books are mostly all the same sort of thing, with a few very vague, very loose "series" recently - so I figured I might as well grab another, to have it on hand. I gather this one has werewolves in it, from the title.

And last is Snow Angels, a Stewart O'Nan novel I didn't have. I've been reading O'Nan's books - more slowly than he writes them, I think - for years, and have always been impressed. He's a fine novelist who does something different each time out, while still keeping a core psychological focus and knack for precisely true phrasing. What I found, randomly, was a 2007 movie tie-in edition (I had no idea there was a movie, nor do I really care) of this 1994 novel.

Quote of the Week: Because He Can

From Life, Volume I, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey:

The evil man is a source of fascination; ordinary persons wonder what impels such extremes of conduct. A lust for wealth? A common motive, undoubtedly. A craving for power? Revenge against society? Let us grant these as well. But when wealth has been gained, power achieved and society brought down to a state of groveling submission, what then? Why does he continue?

The response must be: the love of evil for its own sake.

 - Jack Vance, The Face (p.46 in The Demon Princes, Vol. 2)

Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder

I'm pretty sure I read this book; I'm pretty sure I owned it. Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder is a 1996 Tor collection of Wilson's single-panel gags, mostly from Playboy (his best-paid and most prestigious venue for most of his career), and I was paying a lot of attention to everything Tor published in those days for the day-job.

(And was then, as now, a big Wilson fan too.)

Since then, I had a major flood at my house in 2011 that destroyed what I said at the time was 10,000 books - I may have overestimated a bit, but it was somewhere in that ballpark - plus all my records of that old day-job. So I have vague memories of this book, and I can't see how I could possibly have missed it, but the only thing I can point to is an entry in my reading notebook to say that I did read it on Halloween of 1996, a few weeks before publication.

That was a long time ago, and a book of single-panel cartoons isn't the kind of thing that sticks in the mind tightly to begin with. So I was able to read Even Weirder as if it were new to me this time.

By my count, there are 232 cartoons here, all presented in black and white, each on their own page. It's full of the usual Wilson material - nervous kids in nice clothes, monsters of all sorts with oversized features and appendages, various aliens and talking animals, more fiendish Santa Clauses than you would expect, sinister cultists and mad scientists, devils and Satan both in Hell and out of it, and two different gags about a wife bricking her husband up, Cast of Amontillado-style. There's also a whole lot of slightly more conventional setups: dinner tables, office desks, diner counters, jury boxes, streetscapes, men and their dogs, analyst couches and doctor's offices.

Wilson was one of the great gag cartoonists of his time - of all time, I'd go further - with a uniquely creepy, horror-infused style and a facility with all of the random wellsprings of humor and a point of view uniquely his own: jauntily, often shockingly and unexpectedly positive in the face of disaster and apocalypse, cynical at its core but not dwelling on that, and full of a whistling-past-the-graveyard jeu d'esprit.

This is a fine collection of his work - but I should also say that he was pretty consistent, and had a long career. The best Wilson collection is the gigantic magisterial Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons (which I also owned, pre-flood; I had it for about a year), but any of his collections are worth picking up if you see them. If you ever liked Gross or Addams, Wilson is right up your alley. (And vice versa, if you're already a Wilson fan.)

Planet Paradise by Jesse Lonergan

This is not a sequel to Hedra. There's no way it could be set in the same universe. But they're from the same creator, from the same year, in the same genre, with a similar feel and with SFnal technology that works roughly the same way.

So maybe it's a companion piece, or another element in an era in Jesse Lonergan's career. I liked both books a lot, so I'm hoping something like the latter: I'd be happy to see him do SF books like this for a while, if he and the market agree.

(Although...they're both from four years ago, and I suspect the market has not agreed, since the comics market has been deeply disagreeable for close to a decade now.)

But let me get more specific about Planet Paradise, a roughly hundred-page standalone SF graphic novel. It's the story of a vacation that goes wrong.

Eunice and Peter live in some medium-future multi-system society, seemingly a pretty rich and healthy and happy one. They're off for a vacation on Rydra-17, billed as "the Paradise Planet." The book opens with them individually settling into their hibernation pods, which will then be slotted into bays in the ship.

This isn't a fast-FTL universe; it takes more than eleven days in transit to go from wherever-we-started to Rydra-17. The two crewmembers of this unnamed ship are the only ones awake for the journey.

There's a cliché that says a story is about what happens when something goes wrong: that's the case here. There's some kind of malfunction. The ship ends up crash-landing on some unknown world. One of the crewmembers is killed; the pods are scattered across the landscape and some of them have failed or broken, killing their inhabitants.

Eunice's pod is intact, but it pops open. We don't know why. But there she is: unexpectedly on an alien world, in the middle of a disaster scene, the only human on the surface.

Well, not quite the only one. The captain of the ship, Wanda, also survived: she's got a broken leg and is deep in the wreckage. Wanda yells for help, and Eunice saves her. So then the two of them can work to save the rest and call for rescue.

It's not that simple: Wanda is demanding and injured and obnoxious and treats Eunice as just the hands to do the things she wants done. Eunice is overwhelmed and untrained and unsure. And there are unexpected large carnivores on this planet.

They do manage to find a distress beacon and set it up. An emergency service agent arrives a few days later - again, travel between planets in this universe is at least several days. That does not go exactly as planned, either.

But Eunice and Wanda do get off this planet. Eunice does finally get to Rydra-17, and her vacation with Peter. But, as we see in the last scene, her experience has changed her - unexpectedly, making her more confident and able in another dangerous situation.

Lonergan's panels here aren't quite as visually inventive as the wordless Hedra, but he plays with size and sequence and format a lot - there are some excellent big vertical panels near the beginning to emphasize the solidity of the ship and the old-fashioned lying-back take-off position, among other fun sequences - and his art is dynamic, great at both quiet storytelling and the more energetic action moments.

He also makes his world lived-in and specific; his characters consume soap-opera-ish media and grumble to each other about corporate budget cuts. This seems to be a pretty nice universe, all-in-all, but it's not perfect, and the imperfections led to this story - we can imagine those same budget cuts caused a little slacking off of maintenance that caused the original malfunction.

This is not a big story: it has a small cast, a short time-frame, and a modest scope. But it's strongly focused, has a great relatable main character in Eunice, looks lovely, and does everything it needs to do smartly, quickly, and with great style. It is a neat SF graphic novel, totally enjoyable and self-contained, and I would be happy if the world had many more books like that.

The Face by Jack Vance

I don't want to say that Kirth Gersen has fallen into a groove - or that the novels about him have - but there are similarities to all of his pursuits of Demon Princes to this point. His targets are all monomaniacs, not just criminals and ganglords but obsessives about specific things, cruel and mercurial in their temperaments and demanding that things be done their way all the time. They also all hide as other people, concealing their true identities behind masks when traveling through the civilized galaxy, only revealing themselves fully in their lawless homes of the Beyond.

Also common in multiple books: Gersen tracks them, one by one, partially by using the fortune he made in the second book, The Killing Machine. He worries both that he's losing the edge that gives him a chance to find and kill these monsters, and that he's forever unable to have a normal human life because of that edge. He meets women he's attracted to - in this book, as in the last two - which brings that contrast more strongly to his attention. He wants to find love, to live like a normal person...but he can't let himself do that.

Not while any of the Demon Princes still live. He was made into a weapon by his grandfather, and that weapon needs to be used fully before it can be put away.

The Face is the fourth of the novels: it followed The Star King, The Killing Machine, and The Palace of Love. The novel itself takes place what we think is soon after the previous books: it's never quite clear how much time is passing in this series, but it's not very long: maybe a few years, beginning to end. But the book came twelve years after its predecessor - readers in the real world at the time might have wondered if Vance would ever come back to the Demon Princes and finish the series.

(He did, obviously. My memory is that personally I only started reading Vance around the time of the last book, in 1981, so for my entire relevant reading life, the Demon Princes was a series complete.)

The fourth Demon Prince is Lens Larque, a sadist fond of tricks and schemes, a man from the cruel mostly-desert world Dar Sai and whose way of viewing the world - Vance does not emphasize this, but makes it clear as the novel goes on - is that of his people, only in exaggerated, hair-trigger form, just like them only more so.

Gersen spends the novel tracking the purpose and history of a now-worthless mining company that Larque controls through intermediaries, as always looking for a way to find the man he's chasing, to get close enough to kill his target. Along the way, he spends time on Dar Sai, gaining control of that mining company and learning more about the Darsh people, and then on Dar Sai's sister planet Methel, a richer, more comfortable world that hates and is hated by the Darsh in the way of neighboring nations everywhere.

Of course, Gersen does find Larque, and does kill him. That's the plot of the series. But the hunt is the point - both how Gersen has to figure out the aim of that seemingly useless mining company, how he gathers the supposedly worthless shares of that company to take it over, and all the things he learns about Larque and the Darsh along the way.

And now there is only one left: just one Demon Prince, the leader and organizer of them all. And Vance would get to his story much more quickly than he did to The Face, just a couple of years later. 

(Consumer Note: I linked The Face to the current standalone edition, a hardcover published by the Vance-family-controlled Spatterlight Press. That's certainly a solid choice, but the book is also available in a cheaper omnibus edition, The Demon Princes, Vol. 2, which is how I read it.)

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces by Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati

The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition.

And this is all true, as far as I can see. This all happened, to the real Valérie Villieu, and she's telling that story to us, with the aid of artist Raphaël Sarfati. It was a little while ago - Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces covers a few years in the mid-Aughts, with the 2007 French presidential election somewhere in the middle - and the French edition came out in 2012, to be eventually translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2020 English-language edition from Humanoids.

Josephine was a woman in her mid-eighties, living alone in a small Paris apartment, as she had for nearly sixty years. She'd recently been found wandering disoriented in the street, and, after a brief hospitalization, was back in her apartment with daily visits from caregivers and an official legal conservatorship to manage her affairs. Villieu was working as a visiting nurse, with a roster of patients like Josephine, who she would see several times a week, to evaluate and support, administering medications and keeping track of their conditions. Villieu seems to have been part of a nursing team; she uses "we" somewhat regularly to talk about the work done, and occasionally shows what I think is a colleague also visiting Josephine.

But it's mostly Villieu's personal experience: how she met this woman, how they interacted, what happened over those years, how Josephine affected Valérie.

A lot of the book is the day-to-day: complaining about the often-lackadaisical work of the caregivers, battling to get the conservator to actually do something and not just complain about how many cases he was handling, and slowly gaining Josephine's trust. Villieu writes at length about the work she does, and how she interacted with Josephine, and what Josephine was like as a person - this is a graphic novel with extensive captions, a very narrated story.

Villieu cared for Josephine for years - and I mean "cared" in both the professional and the personal sense. And she makes their relationship real here, without sugarcoating it. Josephine had a serious, unreversable, progressive mental illness, that confused her and made her forget thousands of things, that changed her moods and made her combative at times. Dementia is one of those horrible diseases we don't like to think about - for ourselves or for ones we care for - since it turns the sufferer into a different person, bit by bit stripping away important pieces of who they were and replacing those with a pseudo-childish shell, smaller and diminished and occasionally realizing that.

(I may be biased: a very close family member is going through something similar right now, so this is more real to me than another health problem would be.)

Josephine was still a quirky, interesting person: dementia had stolen a lot from her, but a lot of her was still there, the woman who had lived in that Paris apartment for decades and still had stories of the '50s and '60s to tell when she could remember them.

That's who Villieu wants to celebrate: the woman she met, behind the disease, the woman she supported and helped for a few years, giving her some more happy life at a point when she could easily have been shoved into an institution and left to decline quickly. Little Josephine is a more serious, deeper book than the cover would make a reader expect, but it's well worth the journey.

Portions for Foxes: Kate Miller-Heidke

"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 think I'm behind on this week's performer's career. She's talented and quirky and from the opposite side of the world from me - Australia - and despite how global we're all supposedly these days, some things travel farther than others, for no reasons I can articulate.

So I have a ten-year old song from her, and I bet she's done a bunch of things since then that I would love as well. I may have to do some digging, and see what else is out there.

But, right now, for today, I have Jimmy, a 2014 song from Kate Miller-Heidke, an opera-trained singer/songwriter/bandleader from Queensland.

It's about that one friend you have who's kind of a jerk but, somehow, you stay friends. In this song, his name is Jimmy.

I said "Jimmy, don't embarrass me
I don't want a display
Everybody's staring, see
I'm just not in the mood today,"

But Jimmy is a force unto himself and just isn't having that. I'd quote the refrain, but - like a lot of music - it doesn't make much sense as flat words on a page. It all depends on hearing it, hearing the chugging, surging music, and feeling it in the moment.

OK, maybe I do need to say it: Jimmy has a soul full of guns.

I don't know what that means. I don't even know if it means anything: if it's an actual Aussie expression, or random slang Miller-Heidke and her friends picked up for a while or what. But it's striking and specific and absolutely fits this character.

The Jimmies of this world will always be with us. And, sometimes, they're worth it. This is a song about that.

Books Read: August 2024

This is the monthly index post for the blog; if you find it useful, yay for you but it's really something I do for myself. Here's what I read this past month; I will add links eventually:

Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay, The Incredible Story of Cooking (digital, 8/3)

Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 8/3)

Nancy Peña, The Cat from the Kimono (digital, 8/4)

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, 8/4)

David Prudhomme, Cruising Through the Louvre (digital, 8/10)

Julia Gfrörer, Black Is the Color (digital, 8/11)

P.G. Wodehouse, Big Money (8/11)

Charles Burns, Final Cut (digital, 8/16)

John Allison and Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off (digital, 8/17)

Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog (8/17)

Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Matt Smith, Hellboy in Love (digital, 8/18)

Peter and Maria Hoey, In Perpetuity (digital, 8/24)

Jimmy Bemon and Emilie Boudet, Superman Isn't Jewish (But I Am...Kinda) (digital, 8/25)

Lisa Goldstein, Ivory Apples (bound galleys, 8/25)

Koren Shadmi, All Tomorrow's Parties: The Velvet Underground Story (digital, 8/26)

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, 8/26)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger (digital, 8/27)

Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL, Haruki Murakami Manga Stories, Vol. 2 (8/28)

A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (in The Sweet Science & Other Writings, 8/28)

Jeffrey Brown, Kids Are Still Weird (digital, 8/29)

Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation (8/29)

Axelle Lenoir, Secret Passages: 1985-1986 (8/30)

Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog (8/30)

Tara O'Connor, Fly By Night (8/31)

More books next month - I assume.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 31, 2024

One book came in the mail this week, so I'm going to tell you about it here. (I also got books other ways, since I was on vacation, but I'm bumping those to later weeks, for mostly not-wanting-to-spend-all-my-vacation-time-typing reasons.)

Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror is a new reprint anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, gathering twenty-one stories, mostly from the last five or so years. There's also a cluster stories from the Aughts - a Stewart O'Nan from 2000, Margo Lanagan's "Singing My Sister Down" from 2004, other stories from Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Graham Jones, and Tim Nickels - and one real oldie, Charles Birkin's "A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" from 1964. Other authors included here are Laird Barron, Livia Llewellyn, and Simon Bestwick - and about a dozen others; if you squint you might be able to read all the names on the cover.

I think the subtitle explains it pretty well; these are stories of psychological horror. Datlow is the premier editor of short horror fiction of our time, so I trust her judgement. (I mean, I might not read the book, because I'm not fond of horror, but I have a vast and undying respect for her, and firmly believe she picks the best stories of the kind that I don't like.)

This is a trade paperback from Tachyon, officially publishing a week from Tuesday. Though...I have a real book in my hands right now, so your favorite bookseller might just be able to get you your own copy slightly before that date, if you ask them nicely.