Quote of the Week: Landscapes

Gersen boarded the bus, which suddenly lurched into motion. The border station under the sprawling blue linglang was left behind. The landscape was now that of Maunish, different from that of Lelander, whether by reason of psychic shift or immanent character or altered references Gersen, who had experienced such shifts many times before, had no way of knowing. The country seemed bigger, the sky more open. In a new clarity of atmosphere the horizons seemed both far and near, in a curious visual paradox. Along the plain trees grew in private clusters and copses, each to its own kind: ginsaps, orpoons, linglangs, flamboys; the shadows below were a dense darkling black which seemed to glimmer with a strange rich color without a name. The farmhouses were both less frequent and older; high and narrow for no obvious reason and set far back from the road in jealous seclusion.... The country became softer. The bus rolled through orchards with black trunks and effulgent pink of yellow foliage, across brimming rivers, through hamlets, and at last into Cloutie, to halt in the central square. 

 - Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams, p.304 in The Demon Princes, Volume 2

What I Tell You Three Times Is False by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I'll try to keep this short: I covered this book the first time I read it, in 2008, and I've recently written at length about the first two books in this series, One Of Us Is Wrong and I Know a Trick Worth Two of That. 

In the mid-80s, Donald E. Westlake, a bestseller of humorous mysteries under his own name and a respected writer of dark thrillers as Richard Stark and an occasional screenwriter and a writer doing other mystery-adjacent books of varying levels of seriousness, like Kahawa and High Adventure, decided he wanted to see if he could be yet another successful writer. (His Wikipedia page has a long list of his pseudonyms - admittedly, a lot of them are because he came up in the soft-porn world of the late '50s and early '60s, where fake names ran like water, but Westlake had more pseudonyms in his mature career than any other three writers.)

So he invented "Samuel Holt" - the credited author and first-person narrator of what turned into a four-book series. Holt was a former cop turned TV detective, made rich enough not to have to work by five years as Jack Packard and completely typecast so that he can't get any other acting work afterward. Holt stumbles into various mysteries, and, of course, solves them. The series was supposed to be completely separate from Westlake, but, of course, his publisher's salesforce used the Westlake connection to get bookstores to buy the books, which ended up souring Westlake on the whole project.

This time around, I'm noticing that Westlake set up each book to be a somewhat different sub-genre in the larger mystery/thriller area. The first book was an thriller of international intrigue, the second a hardboiled mystery, and this third one is a locked-room cozy. Westlake was always an inventive and quirky writer, but I wonder if he really thought he'd be able to keep that up, and keep finding new sub-genres, if he'd kept it going.

What I Tell You Three Times Is False sees Holt travel to a remote Latin American island, to film a short film for the American Cancer Society, alongside other typecast actors playing Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, and Miss Marple. They arrive as a major storm is blowing up, and the roughly dozen people on the island - hosts/producers, the director, a few staffers, the actors and their significant others - are thrown into a panic when the deaths start.

The four "detectives" try to solve the case, more or less - one of them more than the others at first, and, no, it's not our hero - and it does all lead up to a scene with the surviving characters in a drawing room, as the dramatically-revealed evidence j'accuses the guilty party.

I'm not normally a reader of locked-room mysteries or cozies; they've always seemed artificial to me - or maybe I prefer different flavors of artificiality, I should say, since I do like funny-Westlake, which has nothing natural about it at all. This seems to be a solid example of the form, mostly played straight, by a deeply professional and always-entertaining writer - but it's also buried in a mostly-forgotten, very secondary series under an assumed name. So I think it's mostly for fanatic Westlake fans at this point, or maybe people who really like locked-room stories.

Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Heading into the back half of the series, Bryan Lee O'Malley is still adding complications. This time out, Ramona's repeated refrain of "exes" instead of "ex-boyfriends" pays off, and we finally get to see a level-up in this video game-inspired series.

In case you came in late: this is the fourth book in a six-book series (all originally published in the Aughts, and reissued a few years later in the current editions with colors by Nathan Fairbairn), all about a Toronto slacker (the Scott Pilgrim of the title) in a comics world with manga-inspired art and Street Fighter-inspired conflict-resolution methods. In the first book, he met cute, mysterious American deliverator Ramona Flowers, and fell for her. They're now dating, but she warned him, up front, that to keep dating her, he will have to fight and defeat her seven evil exes.

This is the premise of the series, so we don't want to question it. It also seems to be fairly reasonable to Scott and his friends - of course, you're going to have a few choreographed boss fights at the beginning of a new relationship; that's just understood.

So Scott defeated Matthew Patel in Precious Little Life, Lucas Lee in Vs. the World, and Todd Ingram in The Infinite Sadness. There has been some minor relationship turmoil along the way: Scott makes diffidence and distractedness into a lifestyle, and Ramona likes playing the Secretive Secret Woman With Many Secrets a bit too much.

And that brings us to Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, in which, yes, actually, he does.

Scott uses the "l-word" - no, not "lesbian," but I'll get to that. This leads to the aforementioned level-up, which he needs to fight Evil Ex #4, since this particular level-up - O'Malley wisely doesn't tell us what level Scott is, or his stats, just the changes - comes with The Power of Love, which is, as it must be, a sword with a handle that looks like either a heart or Scott's balls, depending.

Scott, even before that, gets an actual daytime job - and fights to keep it when his fighting-exes life spills into that workplace.

Scott's band is recording a record, after drummer Kim Pine moves to a new house with new roommates, including a guy with a home studio. This may not seem like "getting it together" as much, but it's clear Scott has at least vaguely formed ideas of where the band should go and a somewhat-surprising work ethic ("why aren't we practicing?" "why aren't we playing shows?") at least when it comes to the band. And that is mildly surprising; Scott previously had been defined mostly by not caring about things or noticing the world about him.

And, most importantly, this is the Lesbian Book. There's a minor background make-out session I won't spoil - I don't remember if it leads into anything in the last two books, so I might need to come back to it - and, more centrally, we learn that Ramona had a thing with her college roommate, Roxanne Richter. Which means that the "half-ninja" Roxie, and her sword, are Evil Ex #4, and Scott will need to fight a girl before the book can end.

(There's another person with a sword chasing Scott around earlier in the book, for a different reason. Scott may be conflict-avoidant and a world-class slacker, but he also generates drama around him almost without trying to.)

Also in the Getting It Together mix: Lisa Miller, a high school friend of Scott's who had a crush on him (then and now) is in town, hanging out with Scott and flirting so much he almost notices. This makes Ramona jealous. Meanwhile, Roxy is staying with Ramona on her own visit to Toronto, which makes Scott jealous. Scott and his roommate Wallace Wells are getting kicked out of their horrible basement apartment, and Wallace semi-secretly wants to move in with his new boyfriend but doesn't want to "dump" Scott.

That all comes together in Scott's l-word announcement at the climax of Gets It Together, after which Scott can battle Roxie and, of course, defeat her.

So he and Ramona have a slightly stronger relationship, and are mostly happy - although she does mention that her next ex is actually twins.

(I may as well throw this in here, since it's been rolling around my head: I kinda want O'Malley to do a middle-aged follow-up, with a different cast. I really want to see what a new relationship, and evil-ex-fighting, looks like for a fifty-ish person with, say, two failed marriages, four or five other major relationships, a few short-term fuck buddies, and who knows how many random hookups in their past. I think it would either be a forty-volume epic or a ten-page comedy piece.)

As before, O'Malley has a masterful control of tone and material here - he's pulling together quirky, disparate elements but has a clear overall vision of how his world works and how his people interact, which is always compelling and true. This whole series is one of the best comics of the new century, and is holding up well as it hits its twentieth anniversary.

The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance

I remembered the last line of this book for decades - maybe not quite exactly word-for-word, but pretty close.

I have been deserted by my enemies. Treesong is dead. The affair is over. I am done.

Where other authors would be triumphant, Vance instead shows us the deflation of his hero, a man who focused his entire adult life on one thing...and has now done that, so there's nothing left. I thought that was interesting when I first read The Book of Dreams as a teenager, and it's fascinating now as an older man.

That melancholy, that lurking worry behind the drive for revenge, was an undertone in the first four books on the Demon Princes series - The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, and The Face - and is still an undertone here, though closer and closer to the surface until that last sentence.

Kirth Gersen survived an assault and massacre in his youth: the settlement Mount Pleasant, on a remote bucolic planet a thousand or so years in the future, in a human-dominated galaxy, was attacked by a group of gang leaders calling themselves the Demon Princes. The five Princes each led large criminal organizations, trafficking in slaves and drugs and other illegal things in the wild stars Beyond the civilized worlds ruled by law, and they came together for this one massive operation. Gersen and his grandfather were among the very few to escape; his grandfather spirited the two away to old Earth, where the young Gersen was trained up to be an instrument of vengeance, to eventually find and kill all five of the Princes.

The series of books that bear their collective name starts when Gersen is about thirty, and cover a few years of time - how much isn't clear. Maybe two years, maybe five. Not much more than that.

And The Book of Dreams is the last. As it opens, there's only one Demon Prince left.

The Princes were never close associates, though. The reader gets the sense that Mount Pleasant was a quirky one-off. They didn't work together any other time, and they don't care - or possibly even notice; there's no sign in the series that Gersen's destruction of earlier Princes is known to them or society at large - that someone is hunting them.

The last one is Howard Alan Treesong, who organized the group to take Mount Pleasant. It would be a cliché to say he was the worst, the most megalomaniacal. And not really true: each Prince, as Vance made clear throughout the series, is uniquely horrible in a different way. Treesong is a schemer, who desires power. He's also - Vance doesn't underline this, but makes it clear - possessed of, or possessed by multiple personalities, who seem to mostly do what the core Treesong wants but with their own separate whims and manias. He's mercurial, changing, many men in one.

And, as this book goes on, Gersen learns Treesong had two major plots recently - one of which Gersen foils in the novel - to take over two of the political and social pillars of the human universe. If Treesong had succeeded, he would have been not just a Demon Prince, but something like emperor of all humanity.

As in the last two books, Gersen uses his pose as Henry Lucas, special writer for a major galactic magazine - which Gersen secretly owns - as a way to lure his quarry out of hiding. A picture supposedly showing Treesong in a group of people comes into his possession, almost randomly, from the magazine's archives. And Gersen-as-Lucas launches a massive contest to identify all of the people in the phot, which, as expected, attracts Treesong's attention.

As in the other books, there's a fair bit of cat-and-mouse, as Gersen tries to keep his interest secret and to ferret out Treesong, and Treesong uses agents to get closer to the contest and find out who is investigating him.

We know how it ends. We know how it must end. This is a five-book series about revenge, and that means Gersen will kill Treesong in the end, and be finally free.

Or "done," as he puts it. Whether that's done like a necessary task, or like a steak, is up to the reader to decide.

(Consumer Note: I read the whole series in the two-volume Tor omnibus editions - Volume 1 has the first three books and Volume 2 the last two. Above, I've linked the current single-volume edition, from the Vance-family-controlled Spatterlight Press. Either one would be a decent choice; these books are also available used fairly easily.)

Bigby Bear, Vol.2: For All Seasons by Philipe Coudray

This time out, the single-page stories and gags about Bigby Bear and his friend Rabbit - and occasional other dwellers of this forest or mountain or whatever - are organized into a loose four-part structure, corresponding to the seasons of the year.

And these are clearly still comics originally aimed at a younger audience: there are many indications, but one of the most subtle and telling is that the year begins in "Fall." For kids, that is when a year begins.

Bigby Bear, Vol. 2: For All Seasons has just about a hundred comics pages - say twenty-ish for each season, plus some half-titles - and the gags are along the same lines as the first book, which I read earlier this year.

Philippe Coudray's art is charming in that old reliable style, with backgrounds a bit more detailed than the relatively simple, straightforward figures, all held together by strong, confident lines. And his gags are a little smarter and quirkier, often relying on odd bits of cartoon physics or changes in perspective, than one might expect.

I did a little exploring, after reading this book, to see if Coudray had made comics for adults as well - when you enjoy one book by a creator, it could be a fluke, but two is a good basis for confidence - and I see that this fellow is named "Barnabé" in his homeland. Also, some of his stories were translated earlier as "Benjamin" Bear - looks like there were a couple of short volumes from Toon Books. So I wasn't successful in finding anything Coudray made for people my age translated into English - he seems to have mostly spent his career working for younger readers, and mostly had parts of this series translated - but if your knee-biters are looking for more Bigby, they might be pleased to find Benjamin.

And they probably will, if they have taste: these are fun little moments in an engaging style, pitched at the kind of smart, inquisitive elementary-schoolers who want to know the why of everything and delight in seeing problems solved in quirky cartoon ways.

Portions for Foxes: Tilly and the Wall

"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.

When does a gimmick start being just the way this band operates? Or is there really any difference?

Tilly and the Wall was a band with a gimmick: their rhythm section was a tap-dancer, Jamie Pressnall. (They eventually got a drummer, too, but Pressnall was still a major piece of the band's sound, giving a rat-a-tat, staccato rhythm to a lot of their best songs.)

They had a decent career for a decade or more, including this song, which I loved when it came out on their 2008 record O and still love now: Pot Kettle Black.

It is a snarky, mean song, calling out an unnamed person in a very catty way - whoever they're singing about clearly had an acid tongue:

Pot kettle, pot kettle black
Talk that, talk that smack

This is not a song with a deep meaning. You don't need to explicate it. It's Lyin' Ass Bitch - slightly slower, different rhythm, same energy - for a new generation. (And now I feel old, because both of those generations are solidly in the past.)

But it's stompy and it's gnarly and it's a hell of a lot of fun, with that great rat-a-tat rhythm that's like no other band's songs. And that's what great music is all about: songs that are purely themselves, giving you something you don't find anywhere else.

Quote of the Week: If It's White, Say Goodnight

You may have heard the ditty "If it's black, fight back, If it's brown, lie down." The idea being that brown bears, of which grizzlies are a subspecies, may lose interest in a person who appears to be dead. Right away, a problem: brown bears' fur can be black, and some black bears look brown. A more reliable way to distinguish the two is by the length and curvature of their claws, but by the time you're in a position to make that call, the knowledge will be of limited practical use.

 - Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal, p.16

All Tomorrow's Parties by Koren Shadmi

The Velvet Underground were famously the band who had only a very small fanbase while they were around - but, the joke went, every single one of those fans started bands of their own. So they were massively influential, which is nice, but not usually what people start rock bands to achieve.

Koren Shadmi's 2023 graphic novel All Tomorrow's Parties: The Velvet Underground Story tells the story of the band in comics format. It follows Shadmi's previous nonfiction books Lugosi and The Twilight Man, more traditional pop-culture bios of a single person, as well as a number of Shadmi's fictional works, like Bionic. He's been making book-length comics for more than a decade now, through a bunch of variations, and clearly has the chops to do a more complicated book like this one, with multiple main characters and a lot of faces to get right on the page.

Now, I am not one of those fabled Velvets fans - I've heard their music, here and there, and obviously heard a lot of people influenced by them, but it's never been my thing. I'm here partly out of vague interest in the famous story, partly for the mid-60s vibe around Andy Warhol's Factory, and partly because I'm just keeping up with Shadmi's career.

So I think Shadmi does this well, but I might not be the one you trust on that. He frames the main story with Andy Warhol's 1987 funeral, the first time former Velvet creative titans Lou Reed and John Cale had spoken in nearly two decades, and tells the main story conventionally, starting with quick glances at Reed and Cale as tormented teenagers in Long Island and Wales, respectively, before bringing all the threads together in New York's Lower East Side in the early 1960s.

The core of the book is the early days - say roughly 1963 to 1970 - when Reed and Cale first met and started making music together, then forming the band, connecting with Warhol and his whole weird entourage/machine, and finally recording their first two records. The book doesn't exactly end when Reed kicks Cale out of the band unilaterally in 1968, but there's only two short chapters after that point: one a vignette of the band's life in 1970, their last failing grasp at popularity; and the other returning to the frame story in 1987 to show how Cale and Reed reconciled, made a record together about Warhol, and eventually had a small Velvets reunion in the early '90s.

That's probably as much of the story as I'll bother to explain: the core audience for this book knows all of these details much better than I do.

Shadmi focuses on the band members in a rough scale of importance: primarily Reed, only slightly lesser Cale, and then a big drop down to guitarist Sterling Morrison (who's part of a lot of scenes, but not as active), and then even more down to drummer Mo Tucker (who seems to have been pretty quiet to begin with). Nico is there but oddly, not really fitting in - just as she was in real life. He's good at their faces, though at times the book is oddly a series of images of Reed's craggy face masked by sunglasses - just as it was at the time, of course.

There's a lot of material here, and Shadmi has good control of it. I did wonder about some threads that never quite get resolved - Reed probably kicked his drug habit somewhere between 1970 and 1987 (or possibly even before 1970), but it doesn't happen in the book. But this is a big, messy story about a bunch of messy, complex people who fought a lot, did a lot of weird things, and were never that consistent about what they did or how they explained it afterward.

I'm slightly surprised there was a comics biography of the Velvets in the first place. I'm happy to see it's this serious, comprehensive, and through.

Animal Vegetable Criminal by Mary Roach

Time can sneak by you when you're not paying attention: I think of Mary Roach as an interesting writer of vaguely science-based non-fiction books that I enjoy reading, but it turns out I read two books of hers - Bonk and Stiff - about fifteen years ago, and nothing since.

Well, until right now, since I just finished Animal Vegetable Criminal, her book from 2021. But she had four other books in between, which I vaguely knew existed and even put on my "keep an eye out for" lists, but clearly did not put enough effort into finding.

This one is framed as an investigation into the intersection of the natural and legal worlds, which is slightly misleading. It does start out in that territory, with chapters about forensics when animals kill humans, keeping large mammals (e.g., bears) away from unpleasant encounters with humans, and so on (elephants, leopards). But it fairly quickly moves out of the legal world, since there isn't that much recent case law with animal and vegetable defendants, and Roach seems to be more interested in how modern human society deals with the ways that it encroaches on natural habitats and how the natural world reacts.

So there are chapters, later in the book, about controlling invasive species in New Zealand, keeping birds from befouling various events in the Vatican, about the dangers of falling trees (cut by humans or felled by natural forces), and about managing animal populations in general.

I was vaguely disappointed in that bait-and-switch, since there are legal issues - the personhood of trees and rivers and baboons, to mention just one area - that Roach could have investigated but didn't. But I often find myself wishing books were different than they are, and it's not a useful wish.

Animal Vegetable Criminal somewhat disguises it, but it's organized around what seems to be four or five research trips Roach took in (I think) 2018-2019, starting with a swing through the Western US (for the law-enforcement material that leads off the book) and then what I think were later trips to the Vatican, several locations in India, New Zealand, and maybe another trip or two within the US. In each location, she talks to experts, gets good quotes and insights, and incorporates them into engaging chapters on generally discrete topics, though each chapter tends to lead into the next one, either geographically or thematically.

So this is not exactly a book about a single discrete thing, but also not really a book of separate essays on loosely related topics. It's somewhere in the middle, like a line of beads on a string, that starts one place (what happens when "animals break the law") and travels through other places where human rules and society conflict with the natural world. Roach is a lively, amusing writer, with a generally positive attitude, making it a fun read, even when she's writing about often-intractable problems (invasive species, for example). So I recommend it, with the mild caveat that there's less legal stuff than some readers (especially those as embedded in the legal world as I am these days) might want.

Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol.4: The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose by P. Craig Russell

This is the fourth of five books adapting most of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales - Wilde wrote nine; Russell adapted everything except "The Fisherman and His Soul" between 1992 and 2012.  So I might as well start by linking to my posts about the first three books: one, two, and three.

The Wilde stories were written in the late 19th century and were ostensibly for children: they have an inherently didactic function, even if that sometimes contrasts with Wilde's languid, wry tone. They're also old-fashioned fairy tales; they never say their morals, though their morals are entirely clear. Russell, as he usually do in his adaptations, uses a lot of the original prose, but lays it out as gorgeous pages - these are text-heavy stories, but ingeniously constructed and entirely comics.

This time out, Russell has two more stories, and their morals are, respectively, "relationships should be reciprocal" and "don't sacrifice yourself for someone who doesn't deserve it." I am resolutely not checking the timeline and making a comment about Bosie here.

The book is The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol.4: The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose, an awfully long title for a book only thirty-four pages long.

"The Devoted Friend" has yet another small innocent tormented and destroyed by the world, like the dwarf in "The Birthday of the Infanta." This time, he's not quite as small and not quite as innocent - a relatively normal man, on the smaller side, and one filled with the milk of human kindness possibly too much. He's Hans, who is poor but grows flowers in a lovely garden and could live on the proceeds. His "friend," never given a name, is the much richer, much more self-satisfied local miller, who imposes on Hans incessantly under the guise of their "friendship." Which is, blatantly, one-sided: the miller asks for favors and takes things; Hans gives. In particular, the miller promises to give Hans his old, broken wheelbarrow, and, using that as leverage, gets Hans to do a lot of free labor for him (worth vastly more than the wheelbarrow), which, of course, inevitably leads to Hans's tragic death. The miller takes the wrong lesson, as of course he must.

The whole thing is framed as a story told by a linnet to a water rat, adding some more humor - the water-rat is no more interested in the lesson or moral than the miller was, and for the same reasons.

"The Nightingale and the Rose" is mostly a conversation and relationship between the two title characters. They both live in the garden outside the window of a "young student," who is in love with the daughter of his professor, and wants to give her a perfect red rose to show his devotion. But, alas! there are other beautiful flowers in the garden, but no actual perfect red roses. The nightingale, besotted with the student's "true love," is willing to do anything to give him what he wants. And the rose tree says that's possible: if the nightingale spends the entire night singing beautifully, thrusting his body onto a thorn of the tree, until it dies at daybreak, one perfect rose will be stained red by his blood. The nightingale does so, which is sad and beautiful, and does produce the rose.

The student takes the rose, presents it to his love, and learns that she doesn't actually like red roses as much as jewels, which another suitor has already given her. So he discards the rose, and gives up love for philosophy.

So that's two tragic improving stories in one short book, for those looking for such things. Wilde makes them amusing, and doesn't telegraph his morals too much. And Russell's adaptation is, as always, lovely and true to the originals.

The British Invasion! by Hervé Bourhis

Pop culture is a thing, but it's not one thing. Even if you're talking about one specific year, different groups - even different people - have massively varied touchpoints. Is 1994 the year defined by Forrest Gump or Kurt Cobain's death, The Lion King or the introduction of the first PlayStation?

Hervé Bourhis's new book The British Invasion! - published last year in his native France, newly translated by James Hogan [1] for its English-language debut today - is an almanac of pop culture, which inevitably means it will be focused on the things Bourhis is most interested in and paid the most attention to.

For Bourhis, the core of pop culture is pop music. That's reasonable to me: it's defensible, and if you're creating a list of the most exciting, interesting, and important contributions of the UK to global culture, starting in 1962 with the Beatles and the first James Bond soundtrack makes a lot of sense.

As the title implies, Bourhis is focused on the culture of the UK. And, as his name implies, he's seeing it from a perspective in France. So his experience of British culture is from continental Europe - he mentions Eurovision a lot more than an American making a similar book would, for example - as well as being his own choices. That said, Bourhis does seem to have gone out of his way to be as comprehensive as possible: he's most interested in music, but he's delivered a reasonably complete and deeply browsable almanac of sixty years of British popular culture here.

British Invasion! goes year-by-year from 1962 through 2022. Each year leads off with a piece of music - sometimes a single, mostly an album, occasionally something a bit odder - as the big cultural touchpoint for that year, on its own page. Then Bourhis has a two-page spread of smaller boxes of many of the other interesting things going on that year, music and movies and art and culture and a little bit of politics (each Prime Minister is mentioned) under the heading "British Patchwork." The fourth and last page for each year is one small drawing in the middle of the page, of another iconic moment: the introduction of Dr. Who, Mary Quant's miniskirt, the rediscovery of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, the introduction of the Eurostar train.

I wouldn't recommend reading British Invasion! straight through - it's a book of tidbits, for snacking on at odd moments. Maybe read a year or two at a time, maybe pick it up and look up your birth year, maybe leave it on a coffee table and poke into it randomly as the mood takes you. However you read it, it's a fun book, and Bourhis has an astonishing reach here: I doubt there's anyone who won't learn about bits of popular culture they didn't previous know about. (For me, I was with him on music up to about 1990, when apparently I went full American Grunge and the UK went its own way.)

[1] Not the one most of my readers are thinking of: that's James P. Hogan, and he died more than a decade ago.

Portions for Foxes: Throwing Muses

"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 how sometimes, your favorite song by a band is different from everyone else's in the world, but you just don't care?

That's where I am today.

My favorite Throwing Muses song is the obscure Sinkhole, and I just don't care who knows it. I find myself running the chorus in my head randomly, a decade-plus after I first heard it.

This is the version from the In a Doghouse rarities collection; I think it was originally a cassette release back in the '90s.

And it's the story of a sinkhole, as the title implies. It's being narrated in a florid, hyper-religious way by someone - I suspect a nut of some description - and sung in an exaggerated drawl at speed over a loose, jangling arrangement.

It's sundown in the sinkhole,
It's sunrise up on the hill.
The thieves are sleeping in Hades' palm,
And they're keeping very still.
It's summer in Winterhaven,
And the earth, she's caving in.
There's no water on the land,
And it's all because of sin.

I don't take it seriously. I don't think singer/bandleader/songwriter Kristin Hersh ever took it seriously. It's a kinda silly song. But it's got a vibe, and a propulsive energy, and it's the best damn song about a sinkhole ever written. I will die on that "hill."

Quote of the Week: Choices

I didn't like children very much but I didn't feel guilty about it. Maris said she couldn't believe that, and attributed the feeling to my own strange beginnings. But that was too simple. Children are a world in themselves, and as an adult you either want to live in that world or not.

 - Jonathan Carroll, Sleeping in Flame, p.68

Two Dead by Van Jensen and Nate Powell

I'll probably be short here - my time is limited this morning and my old instincts in writing about mysteries (from doing reader's reports for a decade and a half for bookclubs) is to explain everything in order, using every character's name prominently. And that is, frankly, a lousy model for writing about mystery stories, as anyone can see.

Two Dead is a mystery, or maybe a thriller, since we know most of the details from the beginning. It was written by Van Jensen and drawn by Nate Powell, telling a story of cops and criminals in 1946 Little Rock - a city they both know well, though maybe not in that era. (They're both somewhat too young to have been around then - frankly, nearly everyone in the world at this point is too young to have been around eighty years ago.) It's a graphic novel, in an oversized format, which presents Powell's characteristic ominous chiaroscuro art well.

Like many stories about crime and criminals, it's a book of dualities - there are four main characters, in groups of two. Gideon Kemp is a young WWII veteran, who just joined the police force as a detective and is secretly working for the mayor to root out the organized crime that at least partially runs this city. He's mentored by Abraham Bailey, the haunted middle-aged Chief of Detectives, who is teetering on the edge of some kind of mental breakdown. (He sees visions of his original, long-dead partner all the time, for the most obvious manifestation.)

On the other side of one line in town - the color barrier - are brothers Jacob and Esau Davis. (Jensen may be just a bit too obvious with the names here.) Jacob is another WWII veteran, and head of the unpaid, volunteer Black police force that patrols their neighborhoods: it's a bit more than a neighborhood watch, since there's some backing from the government, but they are not cops and they are not equal to the White population and they seem to mostly try to keep things from exploding. Esau works for the criminal gangs that run Little Rock, and, as the book begins, has just attracted the attention of one of the leaders, Big Mike.

The story of Two Dead is what those four characters do - how Gideon and Abe try to stop organized crime, in their own ways (and what they find along the way, how that crime has infiltrated local government), and how Jacob and Esau are caught in the middle of it, pulled to one side or the other. And how Big Mike and his compatriots fight back, in the typically violent ways of organized criminals in an era when they could do nearly anything.

It's not a happy story: both Gideon and Abe are suffering PTSD for different reasons, the Davis brothers are Black in a deeply racist town a decade before the Civil Rights era could give them any serious hope. And the title is Two Dead. It's not quite noir, but it's in the same broad territory - crime fiction set in a world with only shades of grey, where everyone has an agenda and most of them are at least slightly unbalanced.

An afterword explains that it's all based on a true story - how closely isn't clear, but it sounds fairly close. So the ending was baked in from the beginning: this all happened, more or less, eighty years ago. Jensen and Powell turn it into fiction - into a story, with structure and weight and solidity, not just a series of things that happen - and do it compellingly.

Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll

There are writers you read avidly for a decade or more and then just stop, suddenly. Sometimes you can define a reason - but no one ever needs a reason not to read a book. We all are not reading millions of books, every second of every day. It's the default state of humanity.

I read Jonathan Carroll's books, up to about Glass Soup, I think. I discovered him probably in high school, read backwards and forwards from there, and he was SFF-adjacent enough that keeping up with his work in my SFBC days was simple. But at some point I started saying things in public like "All Carroll novels are basically the same," which indicates a certain weariness.

I think he stopped getting published in as-large ways about the same time I stopped being as plugged-in to publishing, so it's possible I never even noticed he had any new work, these last twenty years. The literary world is vast, and you need to go out of your way to explore it.

I came back to Carroll for a re-read - his 1988 novel Sleeping in Flames was reprinted in the Vintage Contemporaries series, and I still have a shelf of those books for a semi-broken reading project I originally planned to run about a decade ago. (Super-short explanation: read the books in rough Vintage-publication order, basically thirty years after publication. I started just fine, but then fell afoul of the kind of literary novel that kneecaps your entire reading life.)

Carroll writes magic realism - assuming anyone born in North America and mostly resident in Europe can do so, which may be a point of contention - lightly-plotted books, floating along on amiable narrative voices and slice-of-(privileged)-life, in which fantastic elements accumulate slowly but come to be central before the (usually fairly muted, smaller-scale) endings. His first couple of books were published in the fantasy genre, but he's never been solidly at home there: his strengths are much more on the literary side of the divide.

This is the one about screenwriter Walker Easterling, who is not quite an author-insert but is an expatriate American working as a writer and living in Vienna, so he certainly has a lot of points of similarity with his creator. It's partly about his meeting and falling in love with Maris York, but even more so about learning his true origins and dealing with the consequences of that. But, again, Carroll is a discursive writer rather than a plotty one - we learn that Walker was raised by adoptive parents early, but what that means doesn't become clear until nearly the end.

To say much more would be to explain the entire plot, but Walker does have a fantasy background, to be vague about it, and real magic does exist in this fictional world, usable both by Walker and by one other very important character. And the ending sees all of the important questions, including Walker's origins and that magic, resolved neatly.

Carroll is a pleasant writer: enjoyable and discursive, a novelist of books with more depth than they appear and more connections than is immediately evident. He can turn a bit same-y in large doses - as I discovered twenty years ago - but most people don't read in large doses, and that's easy to avoid. This would be a good one to start with, and the fact that it was published on the literary side probably means there are a lot of copies floating around to be found.

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, Klimowski, and Schejbal

Some books are deliberately obscure, as protective coloration. Some are obscure because time has passed. Some are obscure because they're from foreign countries, where they do things differently.

In the English language, in the year 2024, Mikhail Bulgakov's thorny, fascinating novel The Master and Margarita is all three of those things: a book written almost in code, to foil Stalinist censors in 1930s Russia. (It didn't quite work: the novel wasn't published until 1966, a quarter-century after Bulgakov died.) And this graphic adaptation, by the Polish-British team of Andrej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, inevitably adds another layer of obscurity, turning Bulgakov's prose into pictures, ready to be interpreted in wildly different ways based on the reader's knowledge and experience.

I'm no expert on Bulgakov, or Soviet Moscow. I can point out that the religious material here was clearly to tweak the noses of the dogmatically atheist Communist establishment, but not how much Bulgakov meant any of it - I have a sense the overwhelming power of the devil in this book, and his mercurial moods, is at least partly meant as a metaphor for Stalin. But is Bulgakov's Jesus then equally a metaphor, or is he to be taken more literally? (I'm pretty sure entire dissertations have been written on better-thought-out versions of that question.)

If you know anything about The Master and Margarita, you know it's about the devil coming to Moscow, and the mischief he causes there. But the novel doesn't begin there. The main characters - an unnamed lottery winner engrossed in writing a long novel about Pontius Pilate and his new girlfriend - are clearly central, with their names in the title, but are pushed aside to sidebars repeatedly over the course of the rambling, discursive novel.

The Master writes his novel; the literary establishment scoffs at him, largely because he's not already a novelist. So the inherent power and qualities of the book - this is an axiom of Bulgakov's novel; the novel-in-a-novel is hugely important and powerful - are ignored, and The Master shuffled off to an asylum.

Flashforward a year, and the devil arrives under the name Professor Woland, tormenting and toying with the grandees of the local literary establishment. There are random deaths. Even worse, important men are turned out of their jealously-hoarded fancy Moscow apartments to accommodate Woland and his henchmen. Woland takes to the stage of a major theater to perform magic - which of course is not the illusions his audience expects.

Chaos surges, events spiral, and The Master is freed from his asylum. It all leads to a climax I really don't understand - I'm probably not Russian enough. And, all along the way, the scenes in Moscow are juxtaposed with scenes from The Master's novel, retelling the crucifixion story from Pilate's point of view.

As I said before: I admit I don't know what it all means. Much of this is symbolic, or coded. I think it's slightly clearer for modern English-language readers in the full novel - a graphic adaptation is inevitably for people who know the quirks and idiosyncrasies, and can read closely into the work.

I can say that Klimowski and Schejbal create interesting pages - separately; Klimowski works in black and white, mostly for the main story, and Schejbal in color, taking all of the Pilate story and occasional other pages - in blocky, usually dark, painterly panels of these strange people doing their strange things.

This is not a good substitute for the original novel, though. I read it once, long ago, in one translation, and have another copy in a newer translation waiting on my shelf. And I think I probably should have read the full book first - so let me leave that as my recommendation here. This is a fine adaptation, but it's the kind of adaptation that (I think) requires a solid knoweldge of the original to work best.

Is This Guy For Real? by Box Brown

Non-fiction comics are a lot more common, this past decade or two, then they were earlier - usually book-format, roughly divided into memoirs (my life!) and biographies and histories (this other guy's life! or this other thing!). I tend to think they've taken over a few existing niches in the publishing ecosystem, especially the kind of  vaguely interesting book that was the basis for thousands of middle-grade book reports.

I don't think Box Brown entirely works in that mode; his books are pitched at a slightly older crowd. But I think his career has come along with that wave - maybe sometimes helping, maybe sometimes being tossed by a market moving in a slightly different direction.

Is This Guy for Real? was his new book in 2018, subtitled The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman and being a comics-format biography of the titular weirdo comedian. But, more centrally, it was Brown's second book about a pro-wrestling figure (after Andre the Giant) - he's most interested in Kaufman's touring show where he wrestled women, with his feud with Jerry Lawler, and, more generally, how being a wrestling fan and later a wrestling performer formed his style of comedy and performance.

As a book, it's sometimes a meditation on "kayfabe"  - about not breaking character, about the side of comedy that hates corpsing and needs everything to be real, every second, to sell the gag from beginning to end. Kayfabe, for those who don't know, is a wrestling term that comes from a Pig Latin-esque mangling of "be fake," and refers to always maintaining the cover story: that wrestling is real, that the stories are not made up, that the performers really do hate each other, that everything the fan sees is just as competitive and definitive as any other sport.

That is not true of pro wrestling, of course. And the secret of kayfabe is widely understood now - but it was still secret in the '60s and '70s, when a young Kaufman first watched wrestling as a spectator, and into the '80s, when he participated in that world and the first cracks in the public display of kayfabe started happening.

Brown tells this story in order, as usual - he's a thoughtful interesting cartoonist, but he always seems to tell his stories in a straightforward way, with crisp cartoony art and narrative consistency. He starts with a young Kaufman, and his love of wrestling and Elvis and cartoons - and then continues those themes, showing how Kaufman kept those things central in his early comedy act.

Taxi is mentioned, but Brown doesn't give us much about that work - and mostly skims over the rest of Kaufman's acting career. The focus is on wrestling - Lawler is the character who gets the second-most page time, given his own sections to show the growth of his career and presented explicitly as parallel with Kaufman.

It's a perfectly reasonable take for a Kaufman bio, but it did make me think: there could be multiple plausible takes on a Kaufman bio, which seems unusual for a guy who died of lung cancer at thirty-five. I could see other creators doing a Taxi-oriented book, or one centered on his talk-show appearances (especially Letterman), or his comedy act. Kaufman was weird and particular, and his deal was that he never broke character during a bit - and that can be brought out in various ways.

But that's exactly what kayfabe is, so Brown's choice is inspired. It explains Kaufman in a way that another direction wouldn't have, and shows him in the world where his style and madcap crazy act worked the best, the places where he could be the most purely Andy Kaufman.

I can wish Brown had more space to get into the rest of Kaufman's work, but I think I agree with Brown: this is most important. This is what you need to know to "get" Andy Kaufman. It's a great bio of a really weird, hard-to-understand figure, that provides not just insight, but understanding and sympathy for what he was trying to do and the ways he felt he had to do it.

Portions for Foxes: Those Darlins

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

This week, something fun and zippy and happy for a change: Red Light Love by Those Darlins, a country-tinged rock song from 2009 that was later used in a car commercial.

There's some winking going on here, and each listener gets to decide for herself just how far this particular Red Light Love is going.

Red light love
Makes my heart stop
Drives me so crazy
I can’t even walk

On the surface, it's just about driving around aimlessly, having fun with someone you love and not being worried about anything in the world.

We don’t worry about getting lost because he knows his way around

Singer Jessi Zazu sings that with a smirk and a subtle emphasis at the end, just in case you thought this song was entirely serious and straightforward. 

This is a purely happy, peppy song that makes you want to jump into a car and drive away aimlessly with that special someone to make some Red Light Love of your own. Go for it.

Quote of the Week: Is It About a Bicycle?

'You told me what the first rule of wisdom is,' I said. 'What is the second rule?'

'That can be answered,' he said. 'There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.'

 - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, p.272-273 in The Complete Novels

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

The mill of time grinds everything, but it doesn't grind equally. You might think that a more-or-less conventional metafictional guy-writing-a-novel book would date more gracefully than a bizarre unexplained fantasia that eventually comes into focus as an afterlife fantasy. You might think that especially when the first was mildly successful for the author on its publication, and the second, despite his best efforts, was not published until the year after his death.

You might think that. But, in this case, the conventional wisdom is against you, and you would actually be wrong.

"Flann O'Brien" was one of a number of pseudonyms - I gather vaguely transparent, at least to the literary establishment he was part of - used by Dublin writer Brian O'Nolan for a little more than a quarter of a century, starting just before WWII. O'Brien was the novelist; "Myles na gCopaleen" wrote a daily slice-of-life column for the Irish Times; O'Nolan in his regular life was a civil servant. I'll just use the O'Brien name from here on for simplicity.

O'Brien's work, in newspapers and novels and plays, seems to have always been mildly satirical - he first gained fame by shoving his way into a literary feud in a "let's you and him fight" way that seems very characteristic. I think he had the born newspaperman's love for celebrating "regular people" and of lampooning the powers of the day, wedded to a fairly radical sense of what writing could be and do. The two novels of his I've read are both the kind of thing that could be called "experimental," even eighty years later.

I'm no expert on the period and the milieu, but I think I see a tension between a generally conservative moral outlook and view of the world - it was Dublin in the mid-20th century, which was a pretty conservative place to begin with - and a more radical impulse in creating stories.

So O'Brien's first novel was At-Swim-Two-Birds, a metafiction about a novelist writing a novel about a (radical, modern) novelist whose characters revolt at all of the horrible things they are made to do and take over Novel #2, while the top-level Novel #1 is mostly about the main character not writing. It's been called one of the funniest ever written, but - and this is the part I'd emphasize - primarily by men from Dublin who lived roughly contemporaneously to O'Brien. It is still funny, but it's also deeply obscure to those born and raised elsewhere and elsewhen.

O'Brien's second novel, finished in 1940 but not published until 1967, after he died on the previous April Fool's Day, is the even weirder The Third Policeman. It's narrated in the first person, by a man just as nameless as Swim's narrator (though they couldn't be the same person). It was also meant to be funny, and I found - perhaps because it was so odd and quirky and of-itself to begin with - it's still funny in the same ways, even for radically different audiences. It starts out in crime-fiction mode, with the narrator explaining admitting that he murdered the miser Philip Mathers, but first wanting to explain his life up to that point.

He was the son of a farmer and a tavern-owner who both died when he was young, and, was then sent away to school, where he developed an interest in the famous writer and thinker de Selby. As a young adult, he returned to his home, which was being managed and run by the tenant farmer John Divney. And then he spent some number of years just living there, with Divney still running the operation - and, clearly, sponging off whatever money was generated - while the narrator mostly just sat in a room, working on a massive concordance to the commentaries on de Selby.

That point is characteristic of O'Brien, so let me underline it: our hero's massive project is not original work, or even commentary on the famous work of another, but a third-level reference work that organizes other people's thoughts and writings to make them easier to navigate.

Anyway, this all gets covered very quickly, and the narrator grows into middle age. He and Divney - mostly Divney - concoct a scheme to kill and rob Mathers, which they then do. Divney runs off with the cash-box and hides it somewhere, leading to several more years of the narrator never letting Divney out of his sight. Finally, Divney tells the narrator where to retrieve the cash-box - under a specific floorboard of Mather's old house - and Chapter Two begins with the narrator having grabbed the thing he found under that floorboard.

The novel really starts there: the narrator has an odd conversation with the claims-not-to-be-dead Mathers, and emerges into a surreal landscape that is similar to his homeland, but somehow different. He travels down roads unfamiliar to him and meets the bicycle-obsessed policemen in charge there, eventually being charged with the murder of Mathers - who, again, he last saw alive, and who has supposedly been murdered in a different way.

Surreal events pile up, a gallows is built to execute the narrator, but he manages to escape with the aid of a band of one-legged men led by the bandit Martin Finnucane and makes his way back to the house where he lived with Divney.

And, yes, after Divney is shocked by the narrator's return, the reader is told that the narrator is dead: the "cash-box" hidden in Mathers' house was a bomb, and the narrator was blown up there. The policemen, their bicycles and station-houses, and the whole surreal world of most of Third Policeman, is actually Hell and the narrator is being tormented eternally for his sin.

To be clearer: the "this-is-Hell" is implied, but the edition I read - and, I gather, editions of Third Policeman generally - include letters from O'Brien explaining that, since the fact that the narrator is dead is entirely clear, but the rest of it has to be implied. (Though, I suppose, if you're Irish in 1940, a dead murderer could only be one place.)

This is a deeply weird - in most of the literary senses of that word - and amusing novel. Let me quote one bit, from pp.324-5 of the edition I read (an Everyman's Library omnibus of The Complete Novels) as an example. If this amuses you, you'll like The Third Policeman:

I opened the bed fastidiously, lay into the middle of it, closed it up again carefully and let out a sigh of happiness and rest. I felt as if all my weariness and perplexities of the day had descended on me pleasurably like a great heavy quilt which would keep me warm and sleepy. My knees opened up like rosebuds in rich sunlight, pushing my shins two inches further to the bottom of the bed. Every joint became loose and foolish and devoid of true utility. Every inch of my person gained weight with every second until the total burden on the bed was approximately five hundred thousand tons. This was evenly distributed on the four wooden legs of the bed, which had by now become an integral part of the universe. My eyelids, each weighing no less than four tons, slewed ponderously across my eyeballs. My narrow shins, itchier and more remote in their agony of relaxation, moved further away from me til my happy toes pressed closely on the bars. My position was completely horizontal, ponderous, absolute, and incontrovertible. United with the bed I became momentous and planetary

The Super Hero's Journey by Patrick McDonnell

This book was not published for children. But it is the kind of uncritical, deliberatively primitivist, quintessentially American "can't people just be nice" story that has no surprises or messages for anyone engaging it at a mental age anywhere above about ten, so...I'm recommending it only on that basis.

If you're the kind of reader where the glimpse of a vaguely Vince Colletta-ish drawing turns off all of your critical facilities, The Super Hero's Journey is for you: this is a book by and for the audience of (almost entirely) men who imprinted on Marvel comics in their (now seen as idyllic) youths in the 1960s. It's by Patrick McDonnell, best known for his long-running Mutts daily strip, working in a schoolboy-collage style, grabbing his favorite Kirby and Ditko panels to incorporate into a graphic story drawn in an approximation of how the young McDonnell copied those stories back in his youth.

The characters are the Marvel universe top-line as of about 1966 - the roughly original Avengers (pre-Hulk) on one side and the Fantastic Four on the other, with Spider-Man kibitzing somewhere in the middle. McDonnell explains in an afterword that his siblings identified heavily with the FF - he was one of four; no word on whether his lone sister actually wanted to pretend to be Sue Storm - and he got to be Reed Richards, so therefore Reed is the hero and problem-solver here. 

It's all utterly transparent: the adult McDonnell got a chance to play with the same toys he loved as a kid. McDonnell is so open and happy about it that it's charming, but there is a definite element of watching some obsessed elementary-schooler mashing his action figures into each other and throwing them off the arm of the couch.

Our narrator is the Watcher, of course. He introduces all of the main characters, who are all in their normal '60s Marvel conflicts - squabbling within the FF, mourning Uncle Ben, bemoaning the plot-driving problems they had at that early date (as opposed to all of other plot-driving problems that later creative teams created and solved and reinstated), and all vaguely unhappy - not just in the way that all Marvel '60s heroes were unhappy, but also in a more general "everyone is grumpy all the time" way.

This is because Doctor Doom has a new scheme to conquer the world, by making everyone angry and create "divisiveness." He has turned on the obligatory Kirby Machine, radiated the weird whatevers into the ether, and now everyone on Earth is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

McDonnell does not explicitly make this a political metaphor. But this is a 2023 book by an American. It comes down, in the end, very hard on the "everybody should just get along" side, and the anger is driven clearly and entirely by the villain figure who stands outside of society. It is sourceless, and pointless, and can be removed entirely without issue.

Anyway, there's not a whole lot of plot. The Watcher sees, deplores, and insists he can't do anything while dragging Reed around and aggressively nudging him in specific directions. Doom cackles and gloats. Everyone else punches each other. After about a hundred pages of that, Reed uses a machine to unleash an even more powerful set of Kirby Krackles, which are the Power of Love.

(I don't know if McDonnell means it that way, but there's a strong homoerotic undertone to this section, as if Reed and Doom should just kiss already and stop bothering the rest of the world.)

The philosophy is something like homeopathic Buddhism - the general idea is apparent, but so diluted that there's nothing specific, just the vague drive to be nicer.

This clearly means something to McDonnell: it is very much a labor of love. But that love is one part very vague and one part entirely nostalgia. I think you had to imprint on the '60s Marvel universe young - and have never gotten over that - to really love this book.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon by Yves Challand

When you discover a creator, there's always that question: is this work typical? If and when I come back for more, is it going to be the same sort of thing?

It's why genres exist, and why artists tend to stay within genres at least semi-consistently. It's why going electric - or country, or not country, or whatever - is a big deal: those are moments when big chunks of the audience can say "Hey, wait, this isn't what I was looking for" and walk away, possibly forever.

Of course, once the creator is dead, it's only of academic interest: no one's reaction is going to change anything ever again.

Yves Chaland was a Belgian comics creator who died young: his career spanned about fifteen years and he died in 1990 in his early thirties. I read his Young Albert a few months back: that was a half-page strip that ran in Metal Hurlant for about the first half of his career, and turned out to be more radical and political than I expected (in a good, committed, energetic way).

Chaland's most famous series is Freddy Lombard: the hero looks a lot like a grown-up version of "young Albert." (Though that may just be Chaland's style, or even how Belgian cartoonists tended to make their heroes blond young men.) So, going back to Chaland, Freddy was the next step - as far as I can tell, nothing else he did has even been translated into English, so it was an easy choice.

The Freddy Lombard series includes five albums: they've been published both as omnibuses and separately in English, but the current editions, from Humanoids, are individual and digital-only (for anyone else looking). And the first one is Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, originally published in 1981.

Our heroes are Freddy himself and his two friends, Dina and Sweep. They are young, they are poor, and I gather every book sees them wander into some new adventurous situation mostly for those young/poor reasons. Here, they're driving a clunker through the rain on a deserted highway, trying to get to Sedan for some unstated reason. But the car breaks down, and they trudge to the nearest town, Bouillon, and stop at the local inn for dinner and lodging.

Of course, they're broke, and can't pay. The innkeeper threatens to call the cops, but the local Duke, George Bouillon, is also eating dinner there, and overhears the commotion. He offers both to pay for the three and to give them jobs. His famous ancestor, Godfrey of the title, liquidated his holdings in 1096 to fund a Crusade - but the persistent rumor for the last millennium is that he only spent half the money, and left the rest stashed somewhere, with a coded message for his son to say where. George has only just now reunited the two halves of the coded message, and plans to find and retrieve the treasure - but he needs diggers to get into the secret underground cavern he expects.

Freddy and friends agree - this is the kind of series, I think, where they agree to do whatever, because that's how the plots go - and head off to bed in the inn, ready to dig up treasure first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, both the innkeeper and another diner at the inn each separately wring their hands in fiendish glee (well, not quite literally, but close) at the thought of stealing away this famous treasure from the Duke and his new friends.

But Freddy has a dream of Godfrey's era in the night, and that takes up more than half the album - pages 6 to 22 out of 29 - which has a vaguely parallel but separate plot, in which Freddy, Dina, and Sweep help save Godfrey from bandits, become part of his household, and are involved in planning for the Crusade. The two expected villains from the frame story, the innkeeper and the unnamed other diner, also appear here in similar villainous roles.

Freddy is awoken, leaving the historical story/dream unfinished, by a commotion in the morning: the bible with the secret map has been stolen! Oh, wait, no, it hasn't. Great! So they're off to find the treasure.

They do, and it's not what they expected. One of the villains then traps them in the underground cavern, planning to come back much later after they are dead. But there's another way out of the cavern, and a mysterious figure shows it to them before disappearing. So they get out - without a treasure, but free and alive.

Yay! And bang the album ends.

It's a fun adventure story on every page, maybe a bit juvenile but in that vaguely Tintin/Spirou style. The overall plot, though, is the kind that turns out to be pointless in the end: not only is there no treasure in the frame story, but the majority of the book is about the dream, with no plot resolution for that at all. I guess it could be seen as a cynical, dying-fall ending - and maybe that's what Chaland intended - but it's an oddly structured book that sets up a bunch of expectations and then deliberately fails to live up to them.

Weirdly, that makes me more interested in reading more of Freddy's adventures. Chaland was an excellent artist, in his own variation on that Belgian ligne clair style, and he's clearly structuring this story deliberately to confound expectations. Standard adventure stories are a dime-a-dozen, quirky broken ones are rarer and more interesting. Now I want to see if Chaland did that for the later Freddy stories as well.

Audrey Hepburn by Michele Botton and Dorilys Giacchetto

There are a lot of biographies in comics forms coming out these days - the ones I'm seeing tend to be from European creators, mostly French, so my assumption is that it's just a normal part of the larger comics universe there. And, of course, regular prose biographies are common, in the US like everywhere else, so it only makes sense that they would exist in comics form, too.

Except that the comics form in the US has been shoehorned into a genre box for most of its existence - assumed to be only for superheroes and other visually splashy adventure stories, typically at least appropriate for children if not entirely aimed at them.

So I'm both happy to see them, and wonder, just a bit, about what that Euro market for nonfiction bande desinée actually looks like when it's at home. I'm sure that what makes it over to the US is only a subset - most obviously, the books about Americans and people who had major careers in America. So I wonder what those shelves look like, in a random store somewhere in Europe. But I don't know, and probably never will.

All that random thought was sparked by this new book: a solid, if a bit high-level, look at the film career of Audrey Hepburn, written by Michel Botton and drawn by Dorilys Giacchetto - two clearly accomplished, mid-career professionals from Italy whose work I've never seen before. It's a fairly new book: published last year in Europe and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this NBM English-language edition, which is out today.

Giacchetto has a bright, crisp style and an impressive focus on Hepburn's face throughout - she's good with depicting clothing design, too, and draws cartoony versions of all of the main characters while still keeping Hepburn obviously herself throughout. There's a lot of dynamics in her art, a lot of acting on the page in her figures, especially Hepburn. She doesn't slavishly mimic real faces for the other famous people in the book - her costars are often turned half-away or just show up briefly, though we do see a lot of her first husband Mel Ferrer - which also helps keep Hepburn central throughout.

Botton has perhaps a harder job, as he admits in a short afterword. The book is about 160 pages of comics, which is a lot - but still not much for a long, busy career in the movies, and even less for a full bio covering Hepburn's childhood and later UNICEF years. Botton does provide glimpses of both of those ends of her life, but not in depth: his core is that film career, which is what the audience really wants to see.

So we open with Hepburn at twenty, just about to get the life-changing part in Gigi, and there are only brief flashbacks amid the generally straightforward flow of successive chapters. Botton doesn't use captions or otherwise anchor the scenes in years or places, so - particularly for those of us who are not Hepburn fanatics - it may be opaque at times exactly what year a particular page takes place on, or whether we're in London or Hollywood.

But, of course, a more heavily written, caption-filled book would have less space for Giacchetto's art, which would be a great loss. So let me say, like most visual biographies, that this one is mostly for the people who know the general outlines already, who are Audrey Hepburn fans at least in a small way, and who don't need to be told the details.

For example, we never learn when or where she was born, and I don't think her third husband's name - he's an important thematic figure, supporting her in her late work with UNICEF - is mentioned, either. We do get at least a few panels about each major movie, usually with the name of the director and a sense of how it affected Hepburn.

Readers who love Hepburn's movies should jump on this book. Giacchetto isn't aiming to draw Hepburn slavishly, but her panels have Hepburn's energy and verve and style and enthusiasm and boundless smile. And the story is just the pieces those fans most want to see, arrayed well and told clearly. This is a model of the kind of book that knows what it needs to do and does it precisely.

Portions for Foxes: Swansea

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

This week: a quirky-sounding song of unrequited longing - something new and different!

OK, so I do have a clear style of music I like. So sue me.

This one is Red Mittens, from the Portland (Oregon) band Swansea, off their 2017 record Flaws. It's a semi-electronic dive into what feels like high school drama, as the singer stares and and sings to this one guy that she'd never actually say any of these things to in person. I say "sings," but it's mostly spoken, except for the refrain and a few other moments.

It's another song obscure enough that I can't find lyrics online, so anything later is my transcription, and errors entirely my fault.

I want to tell you I love Frannie and Zoey
I want to tell you I'm making a skirt out of neckties
I want to tell you I love....your...nose
But all I do is sit way back in the bleachers 
And watch your body
And I'm away from you by rows and rows

It's all on that level - specific, grounded, trivial-sounding. It's full of telling details of this one girl watching this one guy, who we're pretty sure has no idea, and never saying or doing anything about it.

Yeah yeah...yeah yeah

Take it as an object lesson of what not to do, or take it in remembrance of when you were also young and callow. (Which might be thirty years ago or yesterday, depending.)

Random Quote of No Relevance to Any Major National Figures Whatsoever

Mrs Pett, like most other people, subconsciously held the view that the ruder a person is the more efficient he must be. It is but rarely that anyone is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim, p.220

Books Read: October 2024

As always, this is an index, it's mostly for me, and it's not even useful until I update it after the posts go live. If you happen to be reading this on the Sunday it posted, I hope your life is otherwise rewarding and interesting, because this isn't gonna help there.

Here's what I read this month:

Philippe Coudray, Bigby Bear, Vol. 2: For all Seasons (10/5, digital)

Hervé Bourhis, The British Invasion! (10/6, digital)

Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams (10/6, in The Demon Princes, Vol. 2)

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (10/11, digital)

Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, What I Tell You Three Times Is False (10/11)

Howard Chaykin, Hey Kids! Comics! (10/12, digital)

Mike Mignola and Jesse Lonergan, Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea (10/13, digital)

Xavier Betaurcort and Yannick Marchat, New Life (10/19, digital)

Julia Gfrӧrer, Laid Waste (10/20, digital)

Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Library (10/20)

Reza Farazmand, Hope It All Works Out! (10/25, digital)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 4: The Bell Warden (10/26, digital)

John Banville, Snow (10/26)

Juni Ba and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber (10/27, digital)

Charles Willeford, Pick-Up (10/27, in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s)

Rick Parker, Drafted (10/28, digital)

I plan to read more books in November, in case you're wondering.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Sects Can Lead to Breeding

The girls thought the altar and the candles and the Mass very cute; one of them had been sometimes to that kind of service in Cambridge, Mass., at a place she called the Monastery, which Father Chantry-Pigg said was where the Cowley Fathers in America lived, but the other girl and her parents were not Episcopalian, they belong to one of those sects that Americans have, and that are difficult for English people to grasp, though probably they got over from Britain in the Mayflower originally, and when sects arrive in America they multiply, like rabbits in Australia, so that America has about a hundred to each one in Britain, and this is said to be on account of the encouraging climate, which is different in each of the states, and most encouraging of all in the deep south and in California, where sects breed best.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.52

Quote of the Week: Whether You Want Hope or Not

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you, as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

 - Matt Haig, The Midnight Library, p.134

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

It's always a surprise, reading the supposedly-funny books of the past. Some of them still work - for at least some modern readers, and remembering they weren't ever funny for everyone anyway - and some of them can fall into that weird netherworld where the reader can't even figure out what was supposed to be funny.

The Towers of Trebizond is a 1956 novel by Rose Macaulay - the last-published book of a writer born in 1881, a voice-driven book largely about varieties of Christianity and the problems of faith, taking the form of a travel book and mildly satirizing the contemporary world of the travel writer along the way. That's the kind of thing that could easily feel very old-fashioned and fall flat today.

I don't know that I took all of the religious convolutions as seriously as I might have, but the comic material still worked for me, and the narrator's voice - the long run-on sentences piling up like logjams, circling every side of a question endlessly - was lovely, amusing, and deeply engaging in a way I really didn't expect such long sentences and paragraphs could be.

The voice is what makes it work, I think: the characters are mostly driven by manias, from the formidable feminist and Anglican would-be missionary Aunt Dot to her traveling partner, the far-too-High Church Father Chantry-Pigg, to all of the various oddball secondary characters this small group of English people meet in their travels across Turkey, supposedly trying to see if there's scope for a major missionary outreach to bring the locals to the Anglican Church. Laurie, the narrator, is a generation younger than Dot, just as tangled up in doctrinal questions but in a funnier way, and is presenting all of this in her long-winded, show-all-sides-of-the-question narrative to an unknown audience.

(Laurie and Dot are supposedly writing a book about their trip, but Towers of Trebizond is nothing like that book - Laurie's contributions were largely to be illustrations, which the novel doesn't include at all. It could, perhaps, be seen as an expanded, standalone version of the additional prose Laurie was expecting to contribute, the more travel-related material, if the reader is prepared to be very generous.)

"Group of obsessives go somewhere and bounce off the locals" is a time-tested comic plot, and Macaulay gets some good material out of it here. Though, again, this book is so heavily narrated that the bouncing is somewhat muted - this is a book that's funnier about how Laurie tells the reader what happened than about what actually happened. There are amusing moments, and lots of quirky characters, but this is a lightly plotted book - just a succession of day-to-day events, mostly small, that happen to a small cast.

Macaulay does manage to have unexpected emotional depth in her ending, which is mostly unrelated to the rest of the book plot-wise, but deeply connected to her thematic material. And I should also probably mention that Laurie - though in this book at least thirty or forty years younger than her creator - is very much an author insert, and the material of Laurie's life and background is drawn closely from Macaulay's. So this is the kind of comic novel with unexpected depths, the kind that is, at its core, serious about its religious questions without needing to keep them free from ridicule.

Is it still funny, almost seventy years later? I thought so: that's all I can tell you. This sat on my shelf for a decade, as a weird thing I thought I might want to read. Now it's a weird thing I did read, and I'm happy I did so. It's funny but not just funny, and the religious material is handled skillfully and is less parochial than I was worried it would be. You may feel the same.