Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater by Jean-Claude Forest

I like to center the positive, as much as I can, so I'll start out by saying: this book has a single, consistent plot throughout, and isn't a fix-up of disjointed stories like the first book. It still bounces around more than a little, since I think that's the way creator Jean-Claude Forest liked to work, but it's a roughly 80-page comics story from the early 1970s, which is earlier than I thought we'd see something consistent at that length.

So that is commendable, and interesting, and noteworthy.

Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater is still a Barbarella story: everything I mentioned about the first book is still here, to the same degree. It's very talky, and the talk is bafflegab most of the time. The world-building is a weird combination of overly baroque, quirkily uninformed, and entirely nonexistent. Characters are mostly ciphers who do things to make the plot advance another page or three - even Barbarella is, at best, a caricature mid-century "woman" subject to massive mood swings, from lust to anger to sadness, each one overwhelming at the time, in the standard pop-culture "Dames! What'ya gonna do?" laziness.

This time out, we begin with Barbarella as impresario of a circus - a sexy circus, in ways the narrative emphasizes but resolutely refuses to describe or show - in a milieu that seems to be just the solar system, though one filled with "worlds" (I assume habitats and terraformed moons, though I frankly doubt Forest thought that far). This is very different from the galactic scope of the first book's opening, but don't mind that, because a water-breathing man with a teleportation device has come to join the circus, for murky motives, and that will send the circus, for insufficient reasons, to "the obscure worlds," which "supposedly evolved in another space-time."

Like most of Barbarella, this is nonsense, but Forest commits to it: not just regular nonsense, but nonsense compounded and extended into a fantastic frothy edifice, by the time he's done.

Again, the bulk of the action takes place on one world: the spaceship Barbarella and her merry band of circus performers take to Spectra is important as both a method of travel and a plot token, but once they do the bafflegab aligning of time-streams and Barbarella is on Spectra, space-travel is off the menu for the rest of the book.

As in the first book, there are factions with silly names fighting over Maguffins with silly names and male leaders that Barbarella can fuck to get her way, as much as she wants anything in particular beside getting to fuck them. It probably all could make sense to the devoted mind, with enough study, several large sheets of graph paper, and gallons of strong coffee. But the point is that events happen, tables turn, Barbarella goes through all of her emotions (and the beds of most of the other main characters), and everything gets back to something like normal in the end.

Given the time-dilation effects, it should be several hundred years later in the normal universe at the end of the book, and there's a shrug in that direction, but who knows? As far as I can tell, this was the end of the Barbarella stories, and they stopped just as coherently as they began. (Which is: not a whole lot.)

Bottom line: there are very talky, confusing, goofy French comics, whose point was to be "sexy" in a way that will look quaint or pass unnoticed for most modern readers. Forest's art is dynamic and interesting; if you can see it large, and fight your way through the far-too-many captions covering it, that's probably the most intriguing aspect of Barbarella these days.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

I'm usually not one for the positive, heartwarming books, so I apologize if I start taking random unfair potshots at this one. It is positive; it's smoothly and engagingly written; I enjoyed reading it from beginning to end; and I only deduced the exact ending about 20% of the way into it.

But there are a lot of books where you know how they're going to end, aren't there? Every tragedy, most comedies, and a whole lot of drama, especially in genre fiction. Sometimes I think that's what makes a book popular: that the average reader is confident they already know the ending, and relaxes to let the author deliver that to them.

The Midnight Library is an afterlife fantasy; it's probably Matt Haig's best-known and most popular novel. It was a Good Morning America book-club pick, a #1 New York Times bestseller, and has three pages of laudatory quotes at the beginning of the copy I read. It was also published in 2020, a year when I think a lot of people were not just looking for an uplifting book with a predictable ending, but one that let them think about all the different ways their lives could have gone.

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, living in the provincial city of Bedford in England. She never became any of the things she at one point thought she might: not an Olympic-class swimmer, not the frontwoman of a famous rock band, not studying glaciers in Norway, not living with her best friend in sunny Australia, not married to the guy she practically left at the altar, not working in an animal shelter, not anything big, not anything impressive.

Instead, she has one weekly piano student (a teenage boy), she works in the local music shop, and that's about it.

One day, it all breaks. Her cat dies in the street. The music shop owner fires her. She forgets the lesson and loses her one student. Her never-husband sends pestering texts; her brother has stopped talking to her; her former best friend is living her best life in Australia. She decides she can't go on. She doesn't go on.

And she wakes up at the door of what seems to be an infinite library, where it is eternally midnight. Inside, she meets what seems to be Mrs. Elm, a librarian who was very kind to her as a child. And Mrs. Elm tells her the library is filled with books about Nora's life - one very heavy, very painful Book of Regrets, and an infinite number of green-covered stories of other lives. She can pick any one of the green books and fall into that life: if it's right for her, she'll settle in there and forget about the Midnight Library eventually. If it's not right, she'll bounce back and choose again.

Most of the book is made up of Nora going one by one through those major regrets and trying out the life where she did the thing: married Dan and helped run a rural pub, moved to Australia with her friend Izzy, kept swimming and entered the Olympics, stayed with the band and made it big, studied climatology and went to Svalbard with a research team, worked at the animal shelter instead of the music shop, agreed to a date with that nice surgeon who asked her once.

Of course, all of those lives have some good things about them. In a few, she's globally famous. In just about all of them, she's in a physically better place than her root life. But there's something wrong about all of them - her brother is dead, her relationship is sour, or she's just not that person after years of divergence. All of those lives are different because of a choice she made - but they're different in other ways, too. Her choices don't shape the whole world, just send her down different paths - she can't choose the perfect life, because it's not all down to her choices.

(You have probably figured out the ending by now, too. It is the obvious ending.)

She meets another jumper along the way, another person going through multiple lives. He's happy to have the infinite variety, and doesn't think he will ever pick one. Nora isn't happy with that idea, and also has been getting increasingly ominous warnings from Mrs. Elm when she bounces back: she probably can't keep going forever. In her root life, she's lying comatose in her grotty flat, suffering an overdose - time might not be moving in the Midnight Library, but it is moving somewhere, and eventually it will move enough that she will not be alive anymore.

The Book of Regrets gets smaller and lighter as she goes along and realizes she could have been unhappy in those other lives as well - maybe not as unhappy, maybe not unhappy in the same ways, but none of them are perfect.

And, eventually, Nora does need to choose the one life she will hold on to. And it is the one that it has to be.

I don't want to belabor the point: this is a very nice novel that ends nicely. Haig is positive and thoughtful, creating the kind of book that makes you feel happier when you're done - which is often denigrated in literary circles. It is maybe more than a little bit obvious, but many of the best lessons in life are obvious: we all know we're supposed to sit up straight, treat others as we want to be treated, and eat our vegetables. Midnight Library is like that.

Spy Superb by Matt Kindt

Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career - but he's found a new take this time.

Spy Superb has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers follow-up), and that is definitely intentional - but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than he was in his previous stories of spycraft.

This, instead, is a take on the James Bond idea: the suave, omnicompetent operative who can go anywhere, do anything, and always wins out for his side. (Which is, as it must be, our side, the side of freedom and democracy and English-speaking peoples.) Like so many other people doing James Bond takes over the past few decades - most obviously Austin Powers - Kindt makes that idea an obvious fake: no human being could actually do that, so what's the real story?

In Kindt's version - and this is explained in the first pages; no major spoilers here - the "spy superb" was constructed from the beginning in WWII as the perfect operative, by the fictional Half-Huit organization (co-run by the US OSS and their French equivalent). There was an original Spy Superb, but he died, stupidly, in his first mission, an immediate failure.

No matter: the organization realized they didn't need a Spy Superb: they needed the idea of a Spy Superb, and a series of patsies to do the actual work - each one handled by career spies, generally given one small task to do, usually not even aware they were doing spycraft, and often liquidated afterward for maximum secrecy. Then all of the successes of Half-Huit would be attributed to their immortal, unstoppable premier agent.

Fast forward several decades. The most recent Spy Superb has been killed by someone unknown. And a disk he had, containing details of all the previous Spies Superb and other damaging details of the program, is on the loose. So all of those other spy agencies could learn the secret: it was all a trick.

To respond, the masters of Half-Huit activate the most delusional patsy possible: Jay, a wannabe novelist who is the guy on the cover. And their adversaries, sensing something big, send their best operatives: a Russian codenamed "Roche Chambeaux" and a Chinese woman who turns out to be a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, to kill what they still assume is a deadly super-agent.

Jay, of course, believes he is the best at whatever he does: he's the kind of guy who mansplains absolutely anything at the drop of a hat, even though (no: entirely because) he knows nothing about it. He wanders through assassination attempts and globe-hopping adventure, surviving due to luck and his unassailable belief that he's actually good at all these things.

There's a good fight scene early where Jay accidentally kills three highly-trained Russian agents in his kitchen, just by trying to talk to them. After that, the random luck quiets down: I would have liked to see more of that, more of the clearly ludicrous silliness. Kindt instead mostly plays the action scenes straight, having Jay accompanied by a competent agent who wants him alive for most of the rest of the book, and so Jay mostly survives because of someone else's ability rather than his own stupid incompetence.

That's my overall take on Spy Superb: it's fun, but doesn't go quite as big or silly as it could. Jay is an idiot: that's very clear. But we only see his idiocy save him once or twice - it could have been a lot funnier if it happened more often, more obviously, more blatantly.

There's no reason there can't be a sequel, though: even if Kindt doesn't want to use Jay again, the concept means there will always be more Spies Superb, someone else even dumber and less connected to reality. And what we have here is funny - and having it in the same scratchy, rough art style that Kindt uses for his serious spy stories makes it that much funnier.

Portions for Foxes: Laura Stevenson and the Cans

"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.

One of the great tricks across all media is the tonal mismatch - the chipper fairy-tale tone telling stories of woe and despair, the bright smash-cut movie all about ennui. Done right, it throws the material into higher contrast - sometimes with irony, sometimes a blunt honesty.

This song does something very similar, with a tinkling, cheery opening and mostly conversational tone, as Laura Stevenson (and her backing band the Cans) talk directly to some specific listener, telling what I picture as a girl of ten or so that she needs to be brave and strong for her family.

The song is The Healthy One. That's who Stevenson is singing to. And the title gives away the story, just a bit - if there's only one "Healthy One," what does that mean for the others?

Stevenson doesn't say, exactly. We don't know the timeframe. She implies she may not be singing about today. But the repeated chorus at the end gives us a hint, as the music swells and she belts it out:

And you will live long
You will bury them all in the ground
And your body will grow
You will bury them all

This is a song from 2011. I don't think it had a vogue nine years later - it was too much on the nose for right then. But more time has passed, those of us left are living long. I guess we're the healthy ones, for what it's worth.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 26, 2024

I have one book this week: I bought it from That Internet Retailer soon after I hit the end of the previous Jack Vance omnibus I was working through. I suppose I'm now re-reading Vance semi-seriously, but I'll have to see how far I get. (He wrote a lot of books over a long time.)

Planet of Adventure collects four Vance novels from the late 1960s, a series all set on one planet during (I think) the Oikumene period of Vance's loose future history. A human ship crash-lands on a far alien world, and the sole survivor makes his way across that planet to escape, finding several strange and warlike alien races along the way.

This omnibus is from 1991, and it's a bit odd to see something from the very dawn of my career in the SF field still in print in the same edition all this time later. But, then again, what would you need to change? The series was long-complete even then. And it does look like the cover changed sometime in the past thirty years, from a somewhat blockier, 80s-look Tor font to the current thin lettering.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Character-Building

Even among the summer people there are tensions. When you put enough affluent white people into a closed system, they will turn on each other eventually. That same summer, my wife signed up both of our children for lessons at the nearby yacht club - sailing for our daughter, rowing for our son, She did this because she had taken sailing lessons there herself as a child, and she hated it. She felt out of place and under-rich and scared, and I guess she wanted our children to have similar trauma. It worked: my son got bullied.

 - John Hodgman, Vacationland, p. 165

Quote of the Week: Inevitabilities

Her second favorite game is Go. She loves the feel of the stones. Each time she picks one up, she lets her fingers tell her how much has worn away under Oscar's fingers, under her own,. They are making the smooth stones smoother. There is one black stone with a fracture point, a weakness invisible to the eye, nearly across the middle. She loses track of it sometimes, then finds it again by touch. Put enough pressure on it, and it would break in two.

It will break one day: no matter.

 - Kelly Link, "The Game of Smash and Recovery," p.148 in White Cat, Black Dog

Vacationland by John Hodgman

I have to start off this time by talking about book packaging. The point of a book's outsides - title, cover art, any descriptions or quotes - are to attract readers and tell them what kind of book it is. For some writers, particularly those who write the same thing in vast quantities, just putting that author's name large and using a standard look is enough - make sure the title is in the right vein, some glowing quotes and copy that says what the deal is this time, and you're done.

Most writers aren't at that level. For most writers - and I want to emphasize that this includes many, many writers who have already been bestsellers once or repeatedly - the packaging needs to work harder than that. Any writer who changes focus, or has more than one mode can be in particular peril of being stuck into the wrong bucket by random readers. For a very banal example: Isaac Asimov wrote hundreds of books. His publishers made it very clear when he had a new SF novel; those looked nothing like the many non-fiction books he also wrote.

John Hodgman wrote a weirdzoid trilogy to begin his literary career - three books full of fake facts, bizarre stories, and endless footnotes. They were like nothing else anyone did, and they had complex, wordy covers that presented their wacky nature well. They were bestsellers.

A few years later, Hodgman had a fourth book, in a different mode. So it had a different look - so far so good.

But let me ask a question. Take that cover above. You see the title and subtitle: Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches. The back cover has a long laudatory quote about what a great writer Hodgman is from Michael Chabon. The inside has three pages of quotes, all about how funny it is. At no point is there any other indication of what Hodgman is writing about.

Do you think this book is:

A. Another big complex collection of fake facts

B. A touching memoir of Hodgman's mother's death and how that changed his life

C. A collection of stories of Hodgman going to various odd places and probably not enjoying himself there

Pencils down. Which would you choose?

I thought it was C. I vaguely avoided this book for seven years because I thought it was another "I can't enjoy myself on vacation" book by a rich white guy. (It sort-of is, actually, but in a very different way.)

It's actually B, though I'm cheating a bit. If I were marketing this book, I'd call it something like "a memoir of family history, growing older, and summers spent in rural Massachusetts and coastal Maine."

The thing you absolutely need to know, and the marketers behind this book scandalously forgot to mention, is that "Vacationland" is the slogan on Maine's license plates. Hodgman means it ironically - we all figured it was ironic somehow, but the specifics of the irony are important.

Vacationland has a very handsome package that completely fails to explain what the book is or why someone would want to read it, other than "Hey, you know John Hodgman, right?" or "lots of people say this is really funny!" Those are two half-decent reasons, admittedly - but the family history bit is more central, and more resonant for more readers.

It physically pains me to see book-marketing bobbled like this, which is why I'm wasting all this time on the packaging.

Oh, sure, the book is funny and thoughtful - it's apparently the distilled version of a series of stand-up shows Hodgman did in the mid-Teens, which may explain the structure (lots of relatively short essays; two big sections about basically the summer house in Massachusetts and the summer house in Maine, plus interstitial material). That much is true. But unless you're the kind of reader who completely buys celebrity blurbs - and I would argue a John Hodgman reader is the opposite kind of reader to that - you will want more details to believe that.

Vacationland is inherently about being John Hodgman - he's always been his own best material, and he knows that. This is what he wrote when he ran out of fake facts and needed to dig into his own life for material. The title is not inappropriate, but it's about living in places, not just visiting them, and the connections Hodgman and his family have to specific places - the parts of Massachusetts where he spent his summers as a kid, the coast of Maine where his now-wife did the same.

And it really is as funny as the blurbs say. I don't know if you'll believe me any more than you believe George R.R. Martin or Neil Gaiman or Sarah Vowell or Jon Stewart (all of whom are quoted in the book), but I guess we all agree, which is nice.

But more importantly, it's not just funny, which a lot of the quotes try to get into. It's funny about real things, in an honest way. Oh, Hodgman will always have that wild-hair goofy streak - the fake-facts mines are always at his back - but this time, he's in a clearer emotional register and telling the truth as best he can. It's a shame his editor and book designer didn't actually try to say that.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy by Stan Sakai

The fourth collection of Stan Sakai's long-running Usagi Yojimbo series collects a long - some would say "epic" - storyline that started in 1989 and ran through six issues of the comic. It's largely the "gather all of the popular, previously separate, supporting characters" arc, and it has the same largely historical accurate but softened for tween readers tone as the rest of Usagi. [1]

In the interests of clarity, I should note that "Dragon" is a metaphor and "Conspiracy" is overblown: this is one feudal lord, conspiring with only his own lord and minions, planning in secret to launch a rebellion that could, potentially, maybe, topple the Shogun and would definitely knock off a couple of his local rivals and give him much more power and influence. "Dragon Bellow" is an artsy way of saying he's going to use guns to do that.

Thus Usagi Yojimbo Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy. There are basically two intersecting stories, neither one of which initially involves Usagi, our rabbit-samurai hero.

In the main plot, good-guy (super-literally: he is drawn as a baby panda) Lord Noriyuki thinks his neighbor Lord Tamikuro is up to something mischievous. Tamikuro is a supporter of Lord Hikiji, the big bad of the series, who is continually scheming to depose the shogun. (Everyone seems to know this - perhaps except for the shogun.)

So Noriyuki sends a delegation to visit Tamikuro, led by the female samurai Tomoe Ame, who Usagi met and almost had a romance with in a previous story. And of course Tamikuro is scheming, having gathered a large stockpile of guns, and will be attacking Noriyuki any day now. Tomoe attempts to get back to her lord with the big news, but is captured.

Meanwhile, the ronin Gen (a big, mostly honorable rhino) is chasing the blind swords-pig Ino for the bounty on the latter's head. Both of them had been occasional allies of Usagi in the past, and they're heading through this same territory right now.

Usagi gets pulled into the story as he's also traveling through this region on foot: he sees Tamikuro's forces riding off with a captured Tomoe and tries to follow. But a rabbit on foot is no match for multiple...cats?...on horseback, so he's quickly left behind. He did hear her call out something about warning Noriyuki, and is torn between saving the damsel from unknown peril or warning the lord "hey, your samurai damsel is in some kind of peril." While pondering, he wanders into what had been a secret ninja village - they're like carpenter ants, there's one behind every hillside in this region - to find all the inhabitants had been slaughtered.

Quick background note, to explain what readers learned in bwa-ha-ha style gloating dialogue among the villains: this particular group of ninjas is opposed to Hijiki, for whatever reason, and has been spying on Tamikuro, trying to figure out his plans. So Tamikuro had his men slaughter their village.

Anyway, Usagi is an honorable rabbit, so he drags all of the dead bodies into one hut, in hopes some kin will eventually bury them. He is witnessed leaving the village, with not a little blood on him, by Shingen, a leader of those ninja, who has the reasonable misapprehension that Usagi was responsible. So he starts following Usagi to take his vengeance.

After more than a little swordfighting and yelling at each other, the good guys not in Tamikuro's prison - to sum up: Usagi, Shingen, Gen, and Ino - meet, work out their differences at least temporarily, and band together to assault Tamikuro Fortress with a force of those handy ninja.

There are battles, there are deaths, there is a conspiracy foiled. But, in the middle-grade friendly standard for the series, no recurring characters are harmed in the melee. As usual, I'm finding Usagi Yojimbo to be well-constructed, beautifully drawn, and compellingly told - but inherently a watered-down story for young readers. It definitely has a niche, but I'm finding that niche increasingly restrictive as the story goes on.

[1] See my posts on books one, two, and three for more details on the series, if you're interested.

Fly By Night by Tara O'Connor

Do you ever find yourself complaining about the genre premises of a work? It's not helpful, I can tell you. And it can waste a bunch of mental energy while reading until you realize that's what you're doing.

For example, in a graphic novel mostly aimed at teen readers, with a mostly teen cast and a thriller/mystery plot, the reader needs to remember that the characters have to solve the dangerous problem themselves. Sure, they might be in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a preserve of ecological interest to at least a national if not international audience. And they might also be right in between two massive media markets full of reporters who would be happy to make a lot of noise about this particular issue. But adults sweeping in - even if the teens strategize and find those adults - is not what this kind of story is about. So I really shouldn't have spent so much time thinking about the ways these characters could have done any of that.

My foibles aside, Tara O'Connor's Fly By Night is a thrill ride with heart, a few good fakeouts, and an ending that goes big when it has to. I grabbed it randomly from the YA GN shelves at my library - it's set in New Jersey, where I live, and that sealed the deal - but I've never read any of O'Connor's work before.

Dee Ramirez's twin sister Beth has disappeared mysteriously, in the small Pine Barrens town where they both spent their childhood. After their parents divorced about six years ago - in middle school; the girls are high school seniors now - Dee went with her father to live in a new town, Westbury (and eventually with a new wife) while Beth stayed with their mother. O'Connor is a bit shaky on some details, both here and later - how exactly did Beth go missing? have the girls really not been in touch at all for six years? what actually is the name of this town? - but it works, psychologically. 

(I also initially thought that Dee was the older sister, and her talk about graduating meant she was nearly done with college - the twin thing isn't mentioned until a number of pages in. Fly By Night trips over its own feet a few times like that.)

Anyway, Dee is back in her childhood home, with her ex-cop (or maybe still currently cop, somewhere else?) dad and something-or-other mom, as they squabble with each other over everything. (They got divorced for a reason. Mom is a bit passive, but Dad comes across as a minor-league asshole a lot of the time.) Dee is going to snoop around at school to find out what happened to Beth, even as a police investigation continues. She meets back up with her old friend Tobi, and spends some time with Beth's boyfriend Lucas, who has a gigantic "Suspect Me!" sign on him but she still goes out into the Barrens with him alone.

At the same time, there's a big evil company - Redline Oil, recently taken over by your standard evil businessman, Marshall Monroe - intending to run a big pipeline through the Pine Barrens. It's not clear where this pipeline is going or why - I gather there is actually a similar pipeline proposal in the real world, so maybe it's a big natural gas feeder from Philly to Atlantic City or something, but O'Connor just focuses on Big Evil Scary Polluting Horrible Thing - and the local students, led by teacher Mrs. Ruby, are predictably organized against it. Monroe more-or-less admits that he's buying his way into this project, and we assume it must have some expected profit for him, but it's mostly "I'm rich and powerful, and I want to do this, so I will buy it, and the rest of you can go pound sand."

(Frankly, everyone seems to be against it, because it is cartoonishly evil. We have a couple of scenes of board meetings, and even the random adults don't seem to want any of this.)

The where-is-Beth plot and the stop-the-pipeline plot are never as connected as they feel like they should be. They intersect, sort-of, out in the Barrens, but they diverge in the end. Oh, and I probably should have mentioned this before, but the Jersey Devil is real - this is a supernatural story. There is a big confrontation in the woods at the end, which for dramatic purposes happens right in the middle of the prom - this is the kind of town so far away from anything that they have the prom in the high school gym, which I didn't think was a thing in NJ anymore - and there are dramatic revelations about the evil CEO and a big fight.

At this point, modern media actually becomes relevant, after I spent three hundred pages having the argument at the top of this post in my head. But there is a moderately happy ending.

Fly By Night looks gorgeous, has strong naturalistic dialogue, interesting and distinctive character designs, a strong sense of place, and a lot of ideas whirling around inside it. I didn't think it quite pulled all of those elements together as well as it should have, but it does a decent job, and it's a solid environmental thriller for teens, especially those with any connection to Jersey.

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Kelly Link is one of the best writers of our time: full stop. I can say more - I will say more - but I'll start with that bedrock. She's already one of the greats, from the work she's already produced. (And I say that knowing her first novel is fairly new in the world, and I haven't read it yet.)

White Cat, Black Dog was her new story collection last year, gathering seven stories from roughly the previous decade (including, as is traditional, one brand-new piece). Her previous collection was Get In Trouble, back in 2015; I know I read her earlier books but they were long enough ago that I might have read them for work, or just before this blog.

I'm tempted to write a bit about each story, but that urge drags me back to 1992, trying to capture every genre book I read on those fussy little pieces of paper for the SFBC (those who know, know) with a single log-line at the top for genre, a long plot description with all of the names clear and spelled correctly, and a short, separate editorial opinion at the end. It took me a long time to break the habit of writing about books like that, but short fiction always wants to drop me back into it:

Fantasy short-story collection, all based loosely on fairy tales, mostly reprint.

The White Cat's Divorce - A rich man's usual three unnamed sons are sent on various errands to win his fortune, over the course of several years. We follow the youngest son, who...

and so on drearily.

These are precise stories, told uncannily well. When I read these days, I keep an eye out for interesting passages to quote here on the blog - with this collection, I stopped and started dozens of times, wondering if I could quote some particularly devastating moment. Mostly, I couldn't - to explain the moment, it would have taken too much detail, too much explanation. The hallmark of a great short story is that it contains just the right words - no extras, no fluff, nothing extraneous. Link does that, over and over, here.

The collection does start with a white cat and ends with a black dog. Like so many other things, Link means that both literally and figuratively. A word or phrase will rarely have only one purpose in a Link story.

Look: just read it. It's a short book. It's been on multiple award shortlists and "best of" lists. Link has the narrative power of genre, the puzzling insight of fable, and the cuttingly pure prose of literature, all in one writer. You'll thank me afterward.

Portions for Foxes: Ellen Starski

"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.

Another song of romantic conflict - this time out, it's Honey I'm Not Him by Ellen Starski, from her 2018 record When the Peonies Played for the Ants.

It's one of those great songs, in one clear voice, spoken to another person - the wife talking to the other woman, what seems to be late one night, out in the darkness.

Hey I heard you've been hangin' round my home
girl you better find another man to adore
the stars shine brightly on my pistol and this whiskey sure tastes fine

I love the directness of it, with that quiet country "Cheatin' Banjo" (from the album's credits) behind her voice.

And the title - the whole chorus it's part of - is just perfect:

Find yourself a lily white church
And ask forgiveness from your sin
I'm sure God will forgive you
But Honey I'm not Him

Cheating songs are legion, but "I know you're cheating, and it's time to stop" songs less so - this one takes over that territory for itself and does a brilliant job of it. The country/folky sound is just perfect for the material, as is Starski's quiet, slightly affected singing tone here.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: I Must Be TOO SMART To Be a Novelist!

The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels. Of course some degree of intelligence and education and overall knowledge is necessary to turn one out. I myself am not entirely lacking in those areas. At least I think so. Probably. But if someone were to ask me point-blank "Do you think you're smart enough" I'd have a hard time sounding confident.

 - Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation, pp.9-10

Quote of the Week: Audience Support

Watching a fight on television has always seemed to me a poor substitute for being there. For one thing, you can't tell the fighters what to do. When I watch a fight, I like to study one boxer's problem, solve it, and then communicate my solution vocally. On occasion my advice is disregarded, as when I tell a man to stay away from the other fellow's left hand and he doesn't, but in such cases I assume that he hasn't heard my counsel, or that his opponent has, and has acted on it. Some fighters hear better and are more suggestible than others - for example, the pre-television Joe Louis. "Let him have it Joe!" I would yell whenever I saw him fight, and sooner or later he would let the other fellow have it.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science, p.15 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir

I've always liked surprises in my reading - picking up a book with very little idea of what will be in it, and seeing where it goes. That's hard to do a lot of the time, since books try very hard to explain themselves - that's how they attract readers, after all. But some of my best memories, especially of my time at the the book clubs, was picking up a book knowing little more than "this is a medium-future SF book coming from Tor in April, by a writer I'm not familiar with" - and then finding something wonderful.

Not to bury the lede, but: that just happened again.

I grabbed Secret Passages: 1985-1986 at a library, pulling it off the shelf for reasons I can't really explain fully. It was a standalone, it was tall so it stood out, and maybe the deep burgundy spine helped, too. But I'd never heard of the creator Axelle Lenoir, and the book itself was a bit vague - it's some kind of memoir, it says, of the author's life when she was a kid. Something about trees. Something about the death of a cosmic twin - I had a theory about that, which I suspect now is true, but it doesn't really come up in this this book, so I'll leave it there. Stories should be left to tell themselves in their own time.

Secret Passages might become a series: Lenoir covers barely a year here, and doesn't get to the central event she sets up at the beginning. I hope so: there's a lot of great material here, and a lot of room to go forward with it. I don't think this story is anywhere near done.

Lenoir, in the present day, is our narrator: she's going to tell the story of her childhood, all of her big secrets, to lead up to the moment she signposts on the first page: the death of her cosmic twin, her self in another universe, a man we barely see in this book, who died when they both were thirty. That's, I assume, going to be the central spine of the larger Secret Passages project, but this book is about her first year of school and about her fears.

That all sounds big and weighty and potentially dull. But Secret Passages is zippy and energetic and nutty, like a hyperactive six-year-old with more imagination than she knows what to do with. The weighty stuff is all background, or flavor, or moments - this is mostly the story of a very, very square peg finding herself in a round hole and what she does in that spot.

So she attempts to run away into the forest to hide from the first day of school. (That doesn't work; she's afraid of the forest.) She pays very little attention in class, being full of ideas in her own head, and keeps making wrong assumptions. (The first was that "school" would be just one day.) She thinks her parents are aliens - well, the adult Lenoir draws them as aliens, so let's leave that as a "maybe" to figure out later. Her brothers - older David, younger Antonio - are wacky and goofy in their own ways, with little Tonio seemingly haunted by a demon - or maybe that's just his imaginary friend...who is also actually a demon.

Little Axelle is central to all of the chaos, and her adult self is our narrator, but it's a wider world - as little Axelle sees it, of course, which means confused and subtly wrong in spots and full of frightening things. (Axelle was a very frightened child, she makes clear - the forest near her home was the biggest fear, but there were may more.)

This book covers that first school year, up through the summer afterward, culminating in telling a recurring nightmare that Axelle started having at that time - and had for years to come. Again, the book is mostly funny, but can drop into a more dramatic mode instantly, the way that kids' lives can switch from silly to dead-serious at any time. Lenoir has an amazing control of tone here, both in her captions and drawings - the book has a loose, I'm-just-telling-you-this-story-as-it-comes-to-me air, but it's clearly much more carefully constructed and arranged, the product of a comics creator with a bunch of projects behind her and a confidence in her own powers.

(This is even more impressive when you realize that Lenoir's previous works - most of them, at least; I'm not sure where the dividing line was - were in her native French; she's from Quebec and one of several unstated things in this book is that everyone is actually speaking French. This book doesn't credit a translator, but her previous books in English did - that doesn't prove anything, but I think it means this is Lenoir's first work created in English.)

I was hugely impressed with Secret Passages. I'm going to be looking to see what else Lenoir has done - but, even more so, what I want is Secret Passages 1987 or whatever comes next. This is a big, impressive work of comics memoir from a creator with a lot more to say, and we should be in for a few more books equally strong.

Novelist As a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Books by writers about how they work almost always turn into advice. I understand that: the audience for work about how novels get written is mostly people who desperately want to write novels themselves.

I'm not one of them, though - I sort-of was, thirty-some years ago, but working in the bookmines has a tendency to clear that condition right up. As my boss used to say, why spend a year writing a novel when buying one only costs a few bucks?

Haruki Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of linked essays - the first few appeared as a series in the Japanese magazine Monkey Business; then he finished up the set so this book could be published in Japan in 2015; the English-language edition, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, took another seven years to emerge - all about his life and work as a novelist, pitched explicitly to an audience of people who also want to write novels.

Murakami is refreshingly down-to-earth about his work: he sees writing as a long hard process, made up of many days all mostly the same, but he enjoys doing it and enjoys the end product. (Many writers hate one or the other or both.) He also focuses on the physical aspect of writing more than most writers-about-writing do; he's a marathoner, and clearly sees the processes of training for and running a marathon and of writing a long novel as roughly parallel. (See What I Talk About When I Talk About Running for the other side of the same coin, about a decade before.) So there's a lot about being healthy and strong - he doesn't say "mens sana in corpore sano" but he's very much in that tradition.

Murakami is Japanese, of course, so his references are the literary and publishing culture of that nation, which are (as far as I can tell) pretty different from what I'm used to in the US. The clubbiness and fitting-into-little-boxes aspects of Japanese culture and business are clearly dominant in that publishing milieu, and several of the essays see Murakami comment on or complain (mildly; he's had a good successful career and doesn't seem to be the type to rant anyway) on aspects of that world, particularly the literary prizes that affected his early career.

But, generally, this is the book to answer the questions "How does Haruki Murakami write his novels?" and "How does he think about his work, and what's in his mind about writing?" It is somewhat more pitched as advice-to-newcomers than I personally would prefer, but that's the subgenre and I should have expected it. It's all in quite Murakamian prose, in his non-fiction mode, pleasant and conversational and slightly quirky.

The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling

After some wandering, I've gotten to the place that was supposed to be the beginning. Well, in this particular omnibus: a dead writer's "beginning" is anywhere you want it to be.

I've been reading A.J. Liebling's work in the Library of America volume The Sweet Science & Other Writings - from the title, you can tell the editors (newspaperman Pete Hamill is credited in the book; I bet some functionaries at LoA hired him and kibitzed, at least) thought that was the top selling point and/or the most important book of Libeling's. 

Well, I'm ornery, I guess. I read The Jollity Building first; I liked the opening. And then I read Between Meals, maybe because I was hungry. But I suppose I was pugnacious enough now to read The Sweet Science, Libeling's most famous book and (according to Sports Illustrated, anyway) the best book of sports reportage ever written.

Sweet Science is a 1956 collection of reportage - I think all from The New Yorker, with which Liebling was associated from 1935 to his death - of boxing matches. There are eighteen pieces, and they're all - as they must be - the story of one fight, between two fighters. Libeling usually sets the scene a bit, explaining who the two guys are and how they fit into the current and historical scene for their weight class, then drops in some quotes from Pierce Egan's Boxiana (Liebling's lodestar in boxing writing, a comprehensive history of early 19th-century bouts in England) before preferably visiting both fighters' training camps and finally providing a fairly detailed round-by-round summary of the fight.

All of these fights were within the previous roughly five years; this is very much reportage - what the boxing world was like in the early TV era, soon after the War. Liebling wasn't fond of TV: he saw fewer places putting on bouts because the televised cards got all the attention, and the attendance in the hall dropped a lot for both televised (they can watch at home!) and blocked-out (it must not be worth seeing!) bouts. So that's one major theme here, reminiscent of Between Meals: everything is getting worse, in this specific area in this specific way. It's a middle-aged guy's pose, that grumpy backwards look, and I don't know if it's purely characteristic of Liebling or just his post-war work. (I'm starting to think what I really want to read of his is more of the low-life stories of his early New Yorker days, just before the war.)

In this book, we see the end of Joe Louis and the rise of Rocky Graziano (on the heavyweight side), some Sugar Ray Robinson in the middle tiers, and occasional lightweights as well. There's eighteen fights in all - a few are return bouts, so we see some of the same guys punching each other in the same or different permutations over the course of a few years.

Liebling turns a phrase well, and was always a lively, engaging writer. I am perhaps not as invested in the idea of two half-naked guys whacking each other for three minute intervals until one of them falls over as he was, but I can appreciate his knowledge and enthusiasm even as many of the technical details are lost on me. If you like boxing more than I do, this is unquestionably the most literarily famous book of the field ever written, and an important historical record as well.

Kids Are Still Weird by Jeffrey Brown

Some books are set in normal linear time; some try to hold it back. Anything in the rough territory of memoir has to be looking backwards, at least a bit, just by its very nature.

I'm pretty confident that Jeffrey Brown's two sons, Oscar and Simon, are probably at least tweens at this point, in the early fall of 2024. Brown's previous book about his family, Kids Are Weird, was published in 2014 - ten whole years ago; half the length of a childhood - and featured stories about Oscar in his preschool years and some appearances by a brand-new Simon. Say Brown made those stories mostly in 2013, about the years just before. His Wikipedia entry doesn't list the birthdates of his children - which is a good thing; I was half expecting it but happy to see privacy still exists in small pockets here and there - but let's guestimate Oscar was born around 2008-2010 and Simon two to four years later.

We can do the math ourselves. It's not impossible that Oscar already has a driver's license.

But, here in Kids Are Still Weird - which officially publishes today, from NBM - they're both much younger. These are stories of little kids: their enthusiasms and malapropisms, their attempts to take control of the world around them, and especially the quirky things they say and think.

This one is mostly a Simon book, as the first book was mostly Oscar. I wonder if Brown and his wife had saved up Simon stories from his younger years, and Brown realized getting them down on paper had a time limit: everything has a time limit, with kids; they don't stand still for one second.

However it came out, Still Weird is a clear sequel to the first book: the same family, the same situations, the same personalities (plus Simon, obviously; he didn't really have a personality as he appeared in Weird), the same slice-of-life cartooning and random small moments that Brown has always liked to focus on.

It is primarily a comics version of "funny things these kids said" - a subgenre that has never been large, but has been durable for several generations. Kids do say funny things as they work out the ways the world works; the point is to remember them and present them clearly. Brown has always been a cartoonist of the everyday, so his skills are well-tuned for that: these are all moments from a life, full of people sitting on couches and at the dining-room table, walking around the neighborhood, just existing in their house.

It's funny without being pushy about it: some funny-kids stuff goes big, but Brown is a quintessential cartoonist of the small. These books compare interestingly to Guy Delisle's similar work: Delisle focuses on himself as an imperfect parent; Brown focuses on the kids' enthusiasms and energy. Brown also works entirely on single pages - each page is a vignette, a moment, and there aren't any longer stories or narratives here. It makes the book a collection of things remembered, that-funny-thing-Simon-said-yesterday kind of thing.

Kids are weird; these kids are amusingly weird, and Brown is great at finding, remembering, and presenting the quirky little moments that showcase that weirdness. This book is amusing and real and lovely, for anyone who's ever dealt with small kids.

Portions for Foxes: Sleigh Bells

"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 posted this song here once, ten years ago, and said it felt like "the fight song for that high school on the bad side of town you do not want to mess with." (And that video, I see, is now a broken link.)

This week it's time for Infinity Guitars by Sleigh Bells, another punky, loud, guitar-driven (how could it be otherwise, with that title?) song from those days of the early 21st century.

The lyrics are obscure and vaguely ominous. The guitars are loud and jagged - with a perfect burst of pure noise right at the two-minute mark of this short song. 

straight wars straight men
cowboys indians
red souls red friends
infinity guitars

What does any of that mean? Conflict, I think - any particular kind of conflict, I don't know. Maybe just in general. Maybe all the conflict you can take. Maybe every conflict ever.

But, at its core, it's a song that brilliantly answers the question behind a lot of rock music. How many guitars do you need? Infinity Guitars. And away it goes.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 12, 2024

This is the third of three posts listing the books I got from hamiltonbook.com, a great mail-order remainder dealer that I've been buying from for (big gasp) at least thirty years now. (I recommend them highly, as always: good prices, wide selection of random stuff, quick shipping, well packed. As long as you don't hate the idea of remainders to begin with, they are awesome.) This is the miscellaneous cluster, two non-fiction books and a few graphic novels.

A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues is a 2021 book by British psychologist Peter Hughes, which is, roughly, what the title promises: the stories of twenty-one statues that were destroyed. They're all over the world, they were torn down for all sorts of reasons, and Hughes has turned them into some kind of overall statement about the world and humans. It seems to have the famous ones - those Buddhas the Taliban dynamited, some Saddam Hussein statues, and at least one Confederate monument in the US - along with a lot of others I'm not familiar with. The topic was quirky, and, as a boring middle-aged man, I do like random nonfiction these days.

My Best Mistake is susbtantially more business-inspirational than I expected, which is a massive disappointment, but I'm still going to put it on the shelf, and may even read it some day. It's by Terry O'Reilly, and I thought it was more generally about mistakes rather than "and after I lost the Ajax account, it motivated me to CRUSH IT and dominate the entire world, BOOH-YAH!!!!" There are twenty-four chapters, all of which seem to be about pretty famous business things that were at least vaguely mistakes, seen in some lights, at some time.

Is This Guy For Real? is Box Brown's 2018 comics-format biography of Andy Kaufman. It's a book I've vaguely had on my list to buy and/or read for a long time, but I don't think I ever ran into a copy of it in the wild. I did read other Brown books over the last few years: in reverse order, Cannabis, Tetris, and Andre the Giant. And...yeah, that's pretty much it. Kaufman was fascinating; Brown is good at narrative non-fiction. I don't need to complicate things.

The Master and Margarita is a comics adaptation of the Mikhail Bulgakov novel - I have the recent translation of it on my shelves; I keep thinking I'm going to read that one "soon" - by Andrej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, both of whom seem to be Polish/British. From a quick look, I think Klimowski and Schejbal both illustrated this - the former the black and white pages; the latter the color pages - and I assume that they scripted and laid out the book together. So this is a quirky version of a quirky famous book, and I am usually in favor of quirky.

And last is Two Dead, a graphic novel from 2019 by Van Jensen and Nate Powell. I've been vaguely looking for this one for a few years, too - I think mostly because I've been following Powell's work for a while, though I think I've also seen good reviews of this one.

Quote of the Week: Equivalencies

HIPPOGRIFF, n. An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one-quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises.

 - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, p.513 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2 by Jean-Christophe Deveney & PMGL

The book I have in front of me doesn't have a "2" on it anywhere I can see. There are several library stickers on the spine, though - maybe it's there.

But, as far as I can tell, the things that differentiate this Haruki Murakami Manga Stories from the Haruki Murakami Manga Stories I read a few months ago are the colors on the cover (pinks before, greens now), the illustration (frog before, monkeys now), and the list of stories adapted. Well, the insides are different, of course. 

This one adapts three stories, as the first volume adapted four. I see there's already a third volume, adapting two stories, which implies the fourth volume will adapt one long story and the fifth volume will have none. Such are the limits of three datapoints.

See my post on the first book for questions of manga-ness, as much as I know about the adaptors (not much), and some related thoughts. This book is the same project by the same creators, very much the continuation of the same sort of thing.

First up here is "The Second Bakery Attack," a 1985 Murakami story translated in 1992, first appearing in English in Playboy and then in his collection The Elephant Vanishes the next year. A youngish married couple wakes, ravenously hungry, in the middle of the night, and the husband explains it's due to a curse - he and a friend went to rob a bakery about a decade before, as young students, stealing enough bread to eat for two days but taking no money - and were stymied by the baker, who instead made them listen to Wagner for their bread. This made things in the husband's life subtly wrong - the curse - and now it extends to his new wife as well. The answer is clear to her: they must attack another bakery, that night, and do it right: stealing only food. They don't find any traditional bakeries open in the middle of the night, but there is a McDonald's - which they then proceed to attack.

"Samsa in Love" is a reversal of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, a 2013 story that appeared in English translation in The New Yorker the same year and in the Murakami themed collection Men Without Women a few years later. In it, a creature - we're never told what, or who, he was before the story began - wakes up as Gregor Samsa, in an otherwise uninhabited house, in a Prague with some kind of tumult going on outside. He knows nothing, and needs to learn to stand and walk and speak and dress himself and everything else. He meets a hunchbacked woman, who has come to fix a lock in the house, and decides in the end that being human is worth it.

Last here is "Thailand," a story from the (1999 in Japan, 2002 in English) after the quake collection, all the stories of which were somehow about the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Satsuki is a middle-aged Japanese woman, just starting menopause and starting to feel old. She's a doctor, specializing in thyroid research, and lived in the US for a long time with her now-ex-husband. She attends a conference in Bangkok, and spends most of the next week on a vacation at a Thai resort, where she is driven by a man named Nimit. He, and a fortune-teller he takes her to, tell her that her failure to forgive that ex-husband, and to move on, has created a rock within her that will be the only thing left after she is cremated unless she takes actions now to break it up. There is a specific prophetic dream she must wait for, which will destroy the stone.

Murkami's stories are quirky, elusive things, and Deveney again adapts those qualities well into comics - these feel like the same kind of stories, even with only minimal Murakamian prose for the captions and dialogue. As usual with Murakami, the plots don't seem to make much logical sense when detailed - they operate on emotional connections and various kinds of dream-logic. And the art - by something credited as PMGL, which could be a studio or a person or an alien living secretly among us - is subtly grotesque in just the right ways for the materials, with faces that are easy to look at but never pretty and lush, detailed backgrounds.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

There's a difference between formula and genre. I don't know if I can explain it, clearly enough, but it's real. A formula is a cheap shortcut, a template for a kind of story to make it easier to knock off, while a genre is a territory, with clear boundaries and sometimes required landmarks, which a story is free to navigate in its own way.

The Lone Wolf and Cub stories, written by Kazuo Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima (and translated by Dana Lewis with some production work to make them read left-to-right by Digital Chameleon for the English-language edition I'm reading), are deeply enmeshed in their genre, but they do not run to formula.

This third volume, The Flute of the Fallen Tiger, collects five more stories from the long-running series - there are twenty-eight books collecting Lone Wolf and Cub, each about three hundred pages long - and, as I often think happens with third volumes of long-running stories, is the point where a good work settles in, gets comfortable with its genre boundaries, and starts running some variations.

Lone Wolf and Cub is not just a genre work; it's a work that both defined a subgenre (the "Lone Wolf and Cub" story, in which a warrior travels with and protects a weaker, smaller person) and set the standard for its larger genre (the historical samurai tale). And, though there may be Americans who are deeply knowledgeable about that larger genre, I am definitely not one of them. (It's a very large genre, in a language I don't read, deeply connected with that nation's vision of itself and its history - I assume there are lots of subtleties and currents there.)

These are energetic but melancholy stories: our hero (Ogami Ittō) is declaredly on the road to hell, and just wants to get vengeance before the end. The stories all have that as background, though the central conflict only pops up here and there - in this volume, one of the stories is a flashback to the ambush and betrayal that killed his wife, while the other four are just things that happen to him on the road, times when he gets caught up in other people's troubles or one-off assassin jobs he's taking to make money.

The series is episodic by nature. I think the larger genre is largely episodic to begin with, but Lone Wolf and Cub leans strongly into the episode, with each story a separate bead on a long string, sitting next to the others and commenting each on each, in an ascending arc that will eventually culminate in that final battle.

I've rambled enough here, and I'm not going to detail the plots of the five stories collected in Flute. They're all good, all doom-laden, all full of sudden violence and intriguing details of a culture that is far removed from me (and that I think was at best a matter of historical interest even for contemporary Japanese readers in the 1970s), all full of gorgeous precise moments and psychological depth. If you have any interest in samurai stories at all, this is the series to read.

The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

This is one of the great minor classics of American literature, from the cynical division. I do mean both "great" and "minor," even if they seem to be in opposition - a book can be great on its own merits but not a major work, and a list of witty definitions of standard words is exactly the kind of thing that is both of those.

Ambrose Bierce is a half-forgotten writer these days. I have the sense he's semi-remembered in the academy, that a new batch of students discover him each year, as I did back in the day, and a subset of those appreciate his dark stories and journalistic screeds and, most of all, this book. (And I also have the sense that men are much more likely to appreciate Bierce than women are, which is only fair: Bierce never appreciated women himself, so they have no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.)

But he's deeply interesting for several reasons: he really was the writer a lot of people think Mark Twain was (cynical, doom-laden, a San Francisco newspaperman with a bushy mustache), he was the first important American writer to fight well in a war (the Civil War) and write well about it afterward, his supernatural stories are darkly wonderful, and his newspaper columns - voluminous and hard to access as they are - contain some gems as well.

But he's remembered, if at all, for this book and for "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," a nearly perfect short story that strikes a quintessential pessimistic, fatalistic Bierce tone. Of course, how many other writers of his day are remembered at all? Two points of reference is infinitely more than many 19th century writers have nowadays.

The Devil's Dictionary [1] was a long-running newspaper project, which Bierce worked at, off and on, for a couple of decades and only completed when working up his Complete Works in 1909-1911. One chunk was published in his lifetime as The Cynic's Word Book - the word "Devil," which is also quintessentially Bierce, caused him trouble with publishers and newspaper readers and others in those starchy late-19th century years, which didn't deter him but did bend the history of the work somewhat.

It is basically what you would assume: an alphabetical collection of definitions of words, from ABASEMENT to ZOOLOGY, in a cynical tone that will strike a lot of readers as more modern than they would expect for something written starting in 1881. Bierce provides verse to illustrate some of the definitions, which I do not find to be a highlight of the book but I suppose some people like them. (To my mind, Bierce is a fine prose writer who dabbled in verse; in his mind, I think, verse was much better than prose and he wanted to be seen as a versifier.)

Many of the entries in Devil's Dictionary have been quoted, sometimes even correctly. Here's a few you may have seen over the years:

BIGOT, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain. (p.453)

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. (p.465)

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. (p.513)

RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day. (p.591)

And one that seems particularly pertinent in the US in recent years, as one side of our political establishment openly yearns for the freedom of action provided by a late-19th-century legal apparatus:

PRECEDENT, n. In Law, a previous decision, rule or practice which, in the absence of a definite statute, has whatever force and authority a Judge may choose to give it, thereby greatly simplifying his task of doing as he pleases. As there are precedents for everything, he has only to ignore those that make against his interest and accentuate those in the line of his desire. Invention of the precedent elevates the trial-at-law from the low estate of a fortuitous ordeal to the noble attitude of a dirigible arbitrament. (p.585)

 This is a great book - if a minor one - and provides the closest thing to joy in all of Bierce's work. I wouldn't recommend reading it straight through; no dictionary works well that way, and Bierce's cynicism is best taken in smaller doses, interspersed with happier writers. But I do recommend reading it, at some point - it reinforces in a reader's mind that there were always scoundrels, and that their tricks have not changed all that much, but also that wit and cold anger can be a pretty good sword and shield for when those scoundrels are massing once again.

[1] I'm linking here to the best, most comprehensive single-volume edition of Devil's Dictionary, which incorporates every definition Bierce ever wrote for the project and removed a bunch of entries by other hands that had crept into other editions. Bierce is in the public domain, so there are a lot of other editions, now or recent enough in the past to be available used. If you want just the Dictionary, this is the preferable edition.

But what I read this time was the text in the Library of America The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs, which is based on the 1911 Collected Works volume, with only small editorial corrections, to reflect Bierce's intentions at the time. That's good, too, and is a solid one-volume Best of Bierce for anyone also interested in the stories.

Adrift on a Painted Sea by Tim Bird

Comics memoirs, like so many publishing categories, get pushed to be bigger, to tell "the whole story," to make statements. But a life isn't a statement, most of the time: it's just a life.

There are comics-makers who push back against that, who focus on small moments to tell quieter stories. John Porcellino comes to mind first, but I'm always looking for more. I think I just found one.

Tim Bird's new book is Adrift on a Painted Sea, published last week by the small UK house Avery Hill Publishing. The cover is not by Tim Bird, though - his comics don't look like that thumbnail image. Adrift is largely the story of Tim's mother Sue, a prolific and lifelong painter of mostly landscapes, and Tim uses Sue's art throughout. You can see, right from the cover, how she was a very textured artist, which I love to see in oil paint - ridges and bumps and clumps, a real tooth to the canvas.

Sue Bird never sold a painting - that wasn't the point - but a painting of hers was included in a national student show when she was twelve, and she kept painting for the rest of her life.

There's a minor mystery about that painting, which Tim explicates in the first section of the book: family lore is that it was a still life that hung in Sue's parents' house for years, and is still in the family. But the exhibition catalog gives the title "View from a Classroom Window," and an old school friend of Sue's tells Tim that was the class assignment: they all looked out the window and painted what they saw. Whatever that painting was, no one is quite sure, fifty-plus years later. It may be in the masses of paintings Sue did and kept all her life, or it may have gone somewhere else. The big-publisher version of this book would be about that one painting shown in a Sheffield art gallery, the before and after of that art exhibition - how she came to do it, where it went afterward, with probably a triumphant moment when Tim finally finds it. 

But Tim doesn't know where that painting is, or even which one it is. He doesn't find out. That's not the story here - this isn't a "one physical thing gave me a closer connection to a family member" story. Tim was already close to Sue - he doesn't say so, but the cartoonist son of a talented amateur painter clearly had a strong connection.

This is a book about those connections, about remembering a parent who is now gone - and, inevitably, in its quiet way, about that loss. Tim Bird organizes Adrift around a broadcast of the BBC shipping news, with sections named things like "Backing Southwest Six" and "Good, Occasionally Poor." It's an allusive organizational scheme rather than a constricting one - for Americans in particular, it will be mostly random words, evocative in tone but obscure in meaning. It sounded vaguely familiar to me, but I didn't make the connection until Tim listens to that broadcast late in the book, and it clicked - for a lot of British readers, I expect it will click much more quickly.

Tim Bird draws his pages with crisp lines and writes them with straightforward, declarative words. He's not making it simple, but he does make it clear and precise. I could throw out some stereotypes about British reticence and avoiding obvious emotion, but that would be facile: this is inherently an emotional story, and Tim Bird chose to tell it. He's just not wallowing in the emotion: he's presenting it, as clearly as he can, in all of its complexity.

Adrift is the kind of book that gets called "a meditation" - that quietness, the way it moves around, section by section, telling stories of small moments throughout a life, focused simply on Sue's life and the painting she loved - and, allusively, the landscapes and places, especially the sea, that she preferred to paint. Tim Bird is not here to tell you how to feel; he's not even going to bluntly say how he feels. But he will show you moments from their lives, what an interesting specific person his mother was, and give you at least a small sense of the loss he felt. It is a lovely gem of a book.

Portions for Foxes: Romeo Void

"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 this song. You knew what it was when you saw the post title.

(Well, maybe not - if you're substantially younger than me, maybe you've never heard it. If so, you are one of today's lucky ten thousand.)

If the band is Romeo Void, the song can only be Never Say Never.

Oh, they had other good songs. A Girl In Trouble. Myself to Myself - and so on. But Never Say Never is a force. If I had to name the hundred best singles ever, it would be on that list. Maybe even if I had to cut it down to the top twenty.

I put the video below, but that's a single edit. For the full experience, you really need the album version.

I might like you better
If we slept together
But there's somethin'
In your eyes that says
Maybe that's never
Never say never

The song has two powerhouses, over a pounding rhythm section, tight drumming and pulsing bass: first is the half-spoken, languid, almost dismissive lyrics from Debora Iyall, always in control, always on the edge of a sneer - the kind of rock & roll voice we heard a million times from men but rarely with this intensity, this purity, from a woman.

The other powerhouse is Benjamin Bossi's saxophone - this is a punky song and an '80s song, so it's a single instrument rather than the blast of brass you get in other kinds of music. The punk comes out as Bossi circles pure noise during parts of the verses, the '80s sax centrality is most obvious in his big mid-song solo and the bap-bap-bap riff that opens several of the verses and becomes a central motif of the song.

This is a song that punches, a song with places to get to, a song that will roll right over you if you get in its way. It is one of the greats.

Books Read: September 2024

Here I am again, with a list of what I read last month. This post is mostly an index, and only becomes useful later, when I add links after the posts go live. But here it is, in its corruptible, mortal state.

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy (digital, 9/1)

John Hodgman, Vacationland (9/1)

Matt Kindt, Spy Superb (digital, 9/2)

Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (9/2)

Michele Botton and Dorilys Giacchetto, Audrey Hepburn (digital, 9/7)

Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater (digital, 9/8)

Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (9/9)

Yves Challand, Freddy Lombard, Vol.1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon (digital, 9/14)

Patrick McDonnell, The Super Hero's Journey (digital, 9/15)

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman (in The Complete Novels, 9/15)

Box Brown, Is This Guy For Real? (9/21)

Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrej Klimowski, and Danusia Schejbal, The Master and Margarita: A Graphic Novel (9/22)

Jonathan Carroll, Sleeping in Flame (9/22)

Van Jensen and Nate Powell, Two Dead (9/27)

Tim Bird, Adrift on a Painted Sea (digital, 9/28)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol.4: The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose (digital, 9/29)

Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal (9/29)

In October, I expect to read more books. Keep tuned to this station for the latest updates.