Saturday, February 15, 2025

Quote of the Week: No Aspersions Meant to My Fine Colleagues at Work

Miss Huskisson, like so many of the female denizens of the Middle West, was tall and blonde and constructed on substantial lines. She was a girl whose appearance suggested the old homestead and fried pancakes and pop coming home to dinner after the morning's ploughing. Even her bobbed hair did not altogether destroy this impression. She looked big and strong and healthy, and her lungs were obviously good. She attacked the verse of the song with something of the vigor and breadth of treatment which in other days she had reasoned with refractory mules. Her diction was the diction of one trained to call the cattle home in the teeth of Western hurricanes. Whether you wanted to or not, you heard every word.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 253

Friday, February 14, 2025

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 5: The Happy Prince by P. Craig Russell

This is the end of the series - Wilde wrote nine fairy tales and Russell adapted eight of them into comics format between 1992 and 2012, and it doesn't look like he's going to go back to do "The Fisherman and His Soul" at this point.

I made a little project of reading all of them this year (I'm writing this at the tail end of 2024) - The Selfish Giant/The Star Child, The Young King/The Remarkable Rocket, The Birthday of the Infanta, and The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose.

So now I've come to The Happy Prince, the fifth and final volume. The prose is just as deliberately didactic, as let-me-tell-you-a-story-young-lad, as the previous tales, with that jeweled Wilde prose that comes right up to the line of being too ornate but veers back at the last minute. And Russell still uses great wodges of Wilde prose, as he tends to do in all of his adaptations: Russell, I think, adapts things where he loves the words and not just the underlying story, so he wants to keep the words as much as possible.

The Happy Prince himself is a statue, on a tall column in the center of some unspecified town in Europe. It may be the "now" when Wilde wrote the story in the late 19th century, or a century or three earlier; in the usual fairy-tale fashion, a lot is vague. The Prince was once a living person, but he died young and now his soul inhabits the statue, for unspecified reasons but presumably so Wilde can have a plot.

The other main character is a swallow, a migratory bird that is tarrying in this city on the verge of winter for no good reason - he should be going on to Egypt to join his fellows, but was dallying with a reed in a river somewhere. (No, literally, he was flirting, over the course of weeks, with what seems to be one of the few non-sapient entities in a Wilde fairy tale, which is some kind of achievement, though not one speaking to his intelligence or discernment.) Anyway, the swallow swoops into town, perches on the statue, and meets the Prince.

The Prince is sad.

He is sad because some people are poor and other people are rich, mostly. So he induces the bird to take his valuables - first the ruby in the pommel of his sword, then his sapphire eyes, and finally the gilding covering the statue - and give those to specific, deserving poor people so that their lives can be better.

This delays the swallow long enough that he's killed by the frost, and makes the statue shabby enough that it's removed by the authorities and melted down. But both of them ascend to heaven immediately, on the direct orders of God. Yay!

It is just as didactic and middle-Church as the previous stories, as expected. These were improving stories for boys (and maybe girls, though Wilde didn't care much for girls) in the 1880s and 90s, and will always be that, no matter how many years later it now is. If you're in the mood for Victorian improving stories with Wildean prose and Russell art - both of which are gorgeous - there are five books available.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Trese, Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo

I think there's more to this story, that hasn't made it to my side of the Pacific yet. But that's nothing new for Trese - I said the same after the first three books, in 2010, when none of them had been published in the US yet. So I can wait, and maybe not expect, but anticipate and hope, to see an eventual seventh volume.

Trese, the series, is about a supernatural investigator: a young woman named Alexandra Trese, from a family intimately connected with the supernatural for generations. So far, so similar to a flood of contemporary fantasy starting in the '90s and plenty of "romantasy" today. But she lives in Manila, and the supernatural world she knows is particular and specific to the Philippines - and so strange and distinct and more fantastic to those of us from other places.

From the beginning, writer Budjette Tan used entirely local monsters and powers: these books, as published in the US by Ablaze, have short text features after each issue-length story to each explain one supernatural race or personage. He also made sure never to explain more than he had to, and kept a noir-ish tone to the proceedings, very appropriate for a place like Manila, a big city full of money and business and corruption and dark history.

And artist KaJo Baldisimo was also wonderful from the beginning, delivering gloriously inky pages of violence and terror and wonder and surprise, lovingly textured and filled with unique faces and (if I may use a cliché) even more unique monsters.

High Tide at Midnight is the sixth collection: there's a 2014 afterword from Tan, but this US edition was published in September of 2023. (Which is what makes me think there are more stories out there, from the past decade.) It picks up on major story threads from the fifth volume, Midnight Tribunal, [1] particularly the figure of The Madame - who is this fantasy world's version of a person many readers will recognize from the real world - and tells one long story in multiple parts, during a particularly devastating typhoon that hits and floods Manila.

In our world, a big storm is a force of nature. In Trese's world, there are powers that control storms - control water, control air, control fire, and so on. So a gigantic storm doesn't just happen: someone made it, for a purpose. And someone is taking advantage of it.

I shouldn't say much more than that. The Madame does get involved. There is a plot by supernatural entities to get more power. There's a new drug that effects supernatural beings in frightening, dangerous ways. Some of the supernatural creatures are very eager to kill humans, as often happens in stories like this. And Alexandra Trese can't handle this massive danger alone. Good thing she has four brothers and other allies - before this book is over, a larger group of Philippine supernatural protectors comes together, some people we've seen before in this series, some new, and go into a massive battle.

This is the biggest Trese story yet, and the series title is even more true: this is not just the story of Alexandra Trese, but of her family as a whole, all of them engaged in the family business, navigating the murky, turbulent waters between the human and supernatural worlds of the Philippines.

I wouldn't jump into the series here, but I do recommend getting here. Start with the first book, and know there's at least this much more waiting for you.


[1] Also see my posts on the earlier books: one, two, three, four.

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Schtick Figures by Drew Friedman

Drew Friedman might have run out of themes for his big books of warts-and-all portraits. I say that because this, his most recent book, declares itself to contain "over 150 comedians, writers, humorists, musicians, actors, journalists, cartoonists, illustrators, editors, publishers, one art gallery owner, one magician, one photographer, two wrestlers, and one movie memorabilia store owner."

If that sounds like a coherent theme, I'll eat my hat. And I don't own a hat.

On the other hand, "Drew Friedman portraits" is arguably enough of a theme in the first place, and this book has, as mentioned, over 150 of them. They are miscellaneous, they are arranged in (mostly) alphabetical order, and they are glorious in their fleshy magnificence.

Schtick Figures came out this past summer, from Friedman's long-time publisher Fantagraphics, and I suspect it is the book that collects everything else he's done over the past decade or so - that it wasn't a specific project like Heroes of the Comics or Maverix and Lunatix. The pictures are presented full-page, captioned only by the name of the person - or, in a few rare cases, the project - with a section of short potted biographies at the back for those of us who don't know who (picking a few pages at random) Imogene Coca, Pigmeat Markham or Frank Kelly Freas are. (Friedman puts "Kelly" in quotes for Freas, which is weird and I think wrong, but oh well. There's also at least one entry in the bio section that doesn't have a portrait in the book, and a couple of places where the bio section is in a slightly different order than the portraits.)

The bios also contain occasional notes about the source of the image - there are a few commissions, mostly for the people pictured (which explains some of the weirder ones in the list up top), some covers for Mineshaft (whatever that is), work for Mad and The Village Voice and probably some other publications I don't recall right this second, and a few other oddities. Most are uncredited, which could mean Friedman has forgotten or wants to forget where they came from, that he doesn't have to mention original publication for those, that he drew them for this book, or that they came to him in a vision from the Man in the Moon.

Whatever: 150 Drew Friedman pictures. Mostly of people you will recognize, if you know who Drew Friedman is and have a passing acquaintance with 20th century pop culture. (Especially the odder, horror- and humor-tinged sides of it.) This book is a good thing, and it's fun to poke through. I may wish Friedman was still doing comics rather than single images - as I lamented when I wrote about his book The Fun Never Stops! some years back - but it's better for his health and bank account and probably life in general, so I can't kick too hard.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse

I still have a dozen or so Wodehouse books on my shelf I haven't read - and intend to collect the thirtyish more in the Overlook series I don't own - so I think I'll keep reading them every three or four months from now until I run out. Some are surprisingly good - Piccadilly Jim, for example, was a fully-formed mature Wodehouse novel from 1917 with a great impostor plot.

Indiscretions of Archie, from the same era - originally published in 1921 - is somewhat lesser, but still amusing.

Reading it, I suspected it was originally a series of short stories, and I was right - this appeared as eleven stories in The Strand (and most of them also in Cosmopolitan - back in the days when the Atlantic was wider, writers could sell the same material on both sides of it) during 1920 and '21.

Wodehouse rewrote the whole thing somewhat to make it fit more into a novel form, but it's still exceptionally episodic. Our hero is Archie Moffam, a Great War veteran of good family and no money, who arrived in America to make his fortune and found it in Lucille Brewster, the usual beautiful young thing, who he met in Miami and married after a whirlwind courtship.

Lucille's father is Daniel Brewster, the millionaire owner and manager of the Cosmopolis hotel in New York - the self-proclaimed best hotel in town - and Daniel dislikes Archie intensely. (Archie is another one of Wodehouse's dim bulbs, unable to say anything clearly but not quite as prone to self-satisfaction and causing mayhem as Bertie Wooster.) Archie is supposedly looking for his life's work, but makes no effort at doing so at any point in the novel - the premise is not that he's trying his hand at different jobs, with humorous results, but just that he's supposed to be finding himself a career, and not just sponging off his rich father.

But he is: the stories are of Archie helping friends, getting involved in various odd Wodehousian events (there's a pie-eating contest he puts a ravenous teen boy up for, two different unsuitable theatre-connected fiancées for his brother-in-law, an old war acquaintance with amnesia, and a stint with Archie as an artist's model, among a couple of others), and usually annoying his father-in-law along the way. Most of them leave the situation at status quo ante, but, as the book gets into the back quarter, one gets a sense Wodehouse realized he needed to have something like an ending, so Archie wins the role of manager at the new hotel Daniel is building downtown.

Oh, that hotel isn't constructed before the novel is over: Archie never works a day in the book. But he has the promise of a job and a career, and, at the very end, there's also the only Wodehousian reference to a pregnancy I can remember. (It is an exceptionally circumloqutious reference - touching primarily on Daniel going to become a grandfather - and I'm not sure whether to attribute that to Wodehouse or to 1921 or both.)

So this has some amusing Wodehouse material, but it's a clump of short stories standing up in a trenchcoat and pretending to be a novel. If you know that going in, it can be quite entertaining, but don't expect anything like an overall plot.

Monday, February 10, 2025

Better Things: The Exploding People

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

When I write these posts, I need to turn off whatever music I have already playing, dig up a YouTube link for the song I'm featuring, and get myself into the right mindset.

This time, though, I already have some Cloud Cult playing - their 2022 record Metamorphosis - so I might let it run for a bit as I type here. It probably makes no difference on your end. It's not a thing you would even notice.

Cloud Cult is the most positive band I know. Even better, it's not the flabby usual American positivity, it's a tough, muscular positivity, the kind that fights through jungles to get to that point, the kind that insists that it is going to be positive, no matter what, because it has to. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

There are a few other songs I almost picked - When Water Comes To Life still strikes me as their essential song, the one about why that attitude matters and what the singer went through (and I hate to say it, but I'm slightly tearing up just thinking about that song), and 1x1x1 is compelling and stark and brilliant.

But most of my favorite songs of theirs are from their wonderful 2010 record Light Chasers, which is something like a SF concept record. (Not a whole lot like, I guess, but something like.) And, so, today, I want to feature The Exploding People.

Can't escape from yourself unless you don't run.

That's the Zen koan at the middle I keep coming back to, the triple negative. A lot of Cloud Cult is about that big question: how do you live your life? Again, it's not coming from a place of authority, but one of vulnerability, a voice saying "I keep doing this thing that hurts and I need to stop."

This is a song about death, I think.

You never see the present, cuz you're always looking back.
Or counting down the seconds to your heart attack.
Bottle it up, and the bottle goes crack.
Do what you do, cuz you can't come back.
And one by one, the people, they explode.

About death in the sense that we all will die, everyone will die, and every moment you have not dead is a moment to use, to live in, to be alive in.

All the best Cloud Cult songs are like that: muscular, energetic, complex tangles of emotion about the big things that are also the personal things, and about failure at those things more than success. About how the singer wants to live, wants to be: what he keeps telling himself in hopes he can actually get there. I appreciate that a hell of a lot. Some days I need it more than others.

Saturday, February 08, 2025

Quote of the Week: Rain in LA

Rain filled the gutters and splashed knee-high off the sidewalk. Big cops in slickers that shine like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying giggling girls across the bad places. The rain drummed hard on the roof of the car and the burbank top began to leak. A pool of water formed on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain. I struggled into a trench coat and made a dash for the nearest drugstore and bought myself a pint of whiskey. Back in the car I used enough of it to keep warm and interested. I was long overparked, but the cops were too busy carrying girls and blowing whistles to bother about that.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, p.610 in Stories & Early Novels

Friday, February 07, 2025

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard

I'm still not quite sure what the deal is with Freddy Lombard - the man himself or the series of bandes desinées he's the hero of - even as I'm starting to wonder if there is a deal to begin with. This is a five-book series, all album-format, that came out in the Franco-Belgian comics world in the '80s, all written and drawn by Yves Chaland. They were translated into English substantially later - this edition by Sasha Watson for publication in the US in 2015.

Freddy lives with his friends Dina and Sweep: all of them seem to be in their mid-twenties and have the kind of plot-convenient poverty where they complain about money a lot, live in lousy flats where they dodge the landlord because they don't have the rent money yet, and are willing to dive into just about any kind of adventure if there's a promise of a payday at the end. Maybe that is the deal: young, on the make, living on remittances from a vague relative in Australia, and otherwise mostly blank to be part of any possible story.

And my sense is that Freddy is the title character, rather than Dina or Sweep, because...well, he looks like the hero: blonde Belgian guy with a quiff, Tintin face, tan trenchcoat. Maybe because he's the most hot-headed and active, or maybe he has that personality because he is the hero - either way works.

The Elephant Graveyard is the second book of Freddy's adventures; it has two stories and came out in 1984. (It follows The Will of Godrey of Bouillon, from 1981.)  The two stories are untitled, but the first one is about a trip to Africa to retrieve a valuable photographic plate and the second - the one that gives the volume its title - is about a series of murders linked to Africa and to elephants.

(I say "Africa" rather than anything more specific because that's how the book puts it. The natives in the first story might also look visually a bit racist to some people - they don't talk or act like stereotypes, mostly, but they are designed in a very outdated, um, high-contrast style.)

Both have adventure-story plots, handled confidently and cleanly by Chaland, though there might be an undertone that he doesn't quite believe in it all - it's just a bit too frenetic, too quickly-paced. (Though that may be an artifact of cramming two stories with their own complications into one album. I may also be influenced by having read Chaland's more deliberately norm-breaking Young Albert.)

In any case, Freddy (with Sweep and Dina) get pulled into these two adventure stories - hearing screams from a house as they pass and from the flat upstairs from where they live - and dive into them. In the first case, a rich collector is willing to pay them to go to Africa, so they do without any fuss, and run an expedition out to find a remote tribe and get the photographic plate before the agent of a rival (British, of course) collector gets there first. In the second case, they find a dead body and get caught up in the investigation - while Freddy also speculates that there's a vast treasure (the fabled elephant graveyard, full of ivory) behind it all.

He's wrong about that - about their getting a fortune, at least - but he's always wrong about that, since the premise of the series is that they're poor. He's right, or at least confidently sure, most of the time.

This volume has somewhat more conventional plots than Godfrey did - the stories go more or less as expected and end well, with a lot of action and tense dialogue along the way. Chaland's art is expressive as usual, very good at story-telling. I might even go so far as to recommend new readers start here; it introduces Freddy and his world better than Godfrey.

Thursday, February 06, 2025

Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch by Guy Colwell

I find myself staring at this blank page, either unsure of what to say or not actually having anything to say. (I'm also writing this one on Christmas morning, which is its own issue.) So I'll try being short and factual, and see if that gives me a way in.

Delights was Guy Colwell's new graphic novel this year - his first work created as a single book, as well. I knew his name from Doll (which I saw once or twice, I think, but never read seriously), but he was an underground cartoonist (both as a creator of comics and as a colorist/editorial worker on other people's comics) for a few decades and a painter as well. He's in his seventies now; he was part of the main wave of the undergrounds, which means he's a Boomer, born in 1945.

This is a historical story, fictionalized since the details aren't known but aiming to be realistic or plausible - this is how Colwell thinks things probably happened, mostly, or that it's most interesting for him to postulate how it happened.

The main character is the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (real name Jheronimus van Aken), and it's about the year or so when he was working on his most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

In Colwell's telling, Bosch was a visionary painter - literally, in that he saw visions of the strange creatures that populated especially his paintings of Hell - and that he was somewhat concerned about being pious and true to his religion, but even more concerned about propriety and not being seen by his neighbors as heretical or transgressive. This painting was commissioned by a local duke and his heir, and their agent (another painter) continually pushed Bosch during the preparation to be more fleshy and earthly in the painting - more nudes, more varied nudes, more activity, more titillation for the noble audience that would enjoy it.

Bosch worried about scandal as he sketched various permutations of naked people in his studio for months on end, and tried to keep them quiet form the local town - the models were mostly sent by his patron, being retainers or servants or whatever.

That's what the book is about: Bosch doing the work, and worrying about the work as he does it. Being pushed by his patrons in one direction, and then - in a major scene Colwell admits is entirely invented, but based on concerns that arose much later, when the painting was in Madrid and Bosch was dead - being pushed in the opposite direction by a representative of the much diminished but still potentially dangerous Inquisition.

It's a story about making art, on a scale and with a scope that clearly appeals to a maker of comics. A big painting - Garden is a tryptch, six feet tall and almost twice that wide - that takes a year to paint is not a million miles away from a graphic novel, say one of about 160 pages like Delights. Making something like that is not a single action, but sustained work over a long period of time - and art about painters often struggles with depicting the length of time it takes to make a painting, preferring to assume major works can be done in a day from a live model.

Colwell doesn't overdramatize the conflicts; they're mostly internal to Bosch himself, or worked out in conversations with his wife and models and patrons and neighbors and assistant. (Or, a couple of times, with the visions he sees, which talk back to him.) So Delights is mostly a quiet book, about a long period of sustained work. Colwell's art reinforces that: his lines are precise and fine, his faces and especially gestures feel more medieval than modern - a major benefit for this work - and his tone quiet and contemplative throughout.

Delights is not really a book to love; it's one to think about, to let simmer, to enjoy quietly and then go look at the painting it's about. It's a book to make you look at another work of art, to stare at it in depth, and think hard about what you see and what it all means. In a very real sense, it's a guide to appreciating The Garden of Earthly Delights, in an unexpected format.

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

You have to go back to the big books every so often. If you're a middle-aged man - and I am, these days - you may find that's what you mostly do.

So I re-read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, his 1939 debut novel, for probably the first time since...maybe when I was a teenager? I remember reading Chandler, in whatever paperback editions were current at the time - maybe Vintage, but I think my first were mass-markets from someone like Berkley. I remember reading at least one by the side of a pool in Florida, while visiting my father for the summer in 1985 - the closest I could come to the gestalt of Chandler's LA, I suppose.

That was a long time ago. 1939 was even longer ago.

Chandler's hero, Philip Marlowe, had appeared in a number of stories before this first novel, and his character was already set: all the things that would be clichés later, the man of the mean streets but not himself mean, the tarnished angel, the rumpled knight, incorruptible because there's nothing he wants enough to be used to corrupt him with.

This is the Chandler novel with one death that's not quite solved - all of the others are clearly explained, and the mysterious one is closed by the police with a plausible story, which is better than real life and not bad for fiction. But I gather some mystery readers were snooty about it at the time, and ever afterward. You'd think they'd be mollified by the fact that the book has a butler in it, but they're never satisfied, of course.

I'm not going to detail the whole plot, at this point. Marlowe is hired by a dying millionaire to investigate a possible blackmail attempt, and absolutely not hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the old man's son-in-law, whom he'd quite liked. The millionaire has two daughters, both in their twenties: the older one is a bit wild, having married several times already and gambling much more than is good for her. The younger one is practically feral, vastly worse and more dangerous to herself and others.

Marlowe does what he needs to do, and what he can do, and bodies start to pile up as others react to what he does, and he sometimes hides evidence of those bodies and sometimes calls in the authorities. In the end, he does find out what happened to the missing son-in-law, which is the core of the book.

And, throughout, Chandler writes magnificently. We read Chandler for the writing - his plots were fine and thoughtful, his characters vivid and specific, but his turns of phrase and random observations were unique and striking over and over again. The best Chandler books - this one, The Long Goodbye - don't just tell a good detective story, but let us see the world in different ways, give us unexpected insights and viewpoints as they roll out a compelling story, too. We read Chandler to see the world through his eyes, and be surprised and excited by what we find there.

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury by John McPherson

Most cartoonists try to make their characters look attractive. Oh, sure, you get a Basil Wolverton now and then, but they're rare.

John McPherson is another one of those exceptions: his characters are lumpy, malformed, with underslung jaws and bulbous noses, frizzy tufts of unruly hair, spindly limbs, and round little coke-bottle glasses a lot of the time. He's not trying to make them look pretty and falling short; he's making a world of funny-looking people doing funny things. (The scenery and props in that world are amusingly malformed a lot of the time, as well.)

McPherson's been drawing like that for a while. His syndicated strip Close To Home has been running since 1992.

Actually, looking at this book, his characters have gotten slightly less lumpy and rumpled over the years - they have eyeballs a lot of the time now, and look more like Muppets than like the products of a particularly demented clay-molding class most days. His newer style is more supple, but I have a fondness for the crazy goofballs of his early work. 

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury is a new book this year, and does exactly what it says it does: collect 750 or so Close to Home strips from the entire life of the strip. Nothing is dated, but it seems to be mostly in chronological order. (Close to Home is a single panel, one of the many followers of The Far Side that launched in the late '80s and early '90s when Gary Larson rejuvenated that form and showed there was room for "weird" or "sick" humor on the comics page. So there are no continuing characters or stories to date it.)

McPherson has an introduction where he notes that the strips were chosen by mostly him, with input from friends, family members, and his Andrews McMeel editors. I do wonder if any of those people read the book all the way through, since there's a couple times where McPherson reused a gag and they chose to include both versions in the book. (Everyone who does this many cartoons reuses gags - or does variations - but when you're assembling a book, you want to avoid pointing that out to the paying customers.)

There's not a lot to say about a very miscellaneous collections of comics from thirty years of a strip. McPherson's strip was always in the Far Side mold, which gave it latitude to be closer to the line of sick or offensive than a continuity strip. He has a lot more jokes about illness than most newspaper cartoonists, and the Grim Reaper shows up quite a bit as well. He's not quite as edgy as a modern online cartoonist, but it's closer to that end of the comics spectrum than to Garfield, for example. (This is a good thing. The Garfield end is dull and bland and tedious.)

This is a big book with lots of random strips, full of lumpy people being tormented by the terrors of everyday life. I liked the lumpiness, I liked the randomness, I liked the torments McPherson puts his characters through, and I think he's pretty funny the vast majority of the time. And I do really like seeing a cartoonist unafraid to draw like this for so long so prominently.

Monday, February 03, 2025

Better Things: Lost in the Supermarket

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

If there was anyone out there who cared enough to think it through, this one would have been obvious.

Yes, The Clash, of course - given my age and my musical tastes, I of course had a Clash phase.

And Lost in the Supermarket as well, because I'm also clearly a fan of the emotional song over the agitprop. Sure, I really like London's Burning and I Fought the Law and Something About England and Safe European Home and London Calling, but the song that almost edged this out was Somebody Got Murdered.

This is that cliched thing, the song of suburban ennui - but that's what's neat about music, clichés in songs can work a lot of the time if done well. A song often is a cliché, since it needs to be simplified and focused.

I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see

It's full of specifics, not vagueness. This room, these neighbors, this hedge. A kettle, a bottle. The furniture of one normal life, and the gnawing feeling that it's not enough, that there must be more than this.

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

I'll fully admit the time I loved this song most was my teenage years: that time when all of us are at our most cliched and disheartened and alienated. But it still strikes a chord, forty years later, as I live out my own suburban life. There are many days I still feel lost in the supermarket; maybe you do as well.

Saturday, February 01, 2025

Quote of the Week: Not Just Foxed, But Absolutely Badgered

The hardest part, though, lies in recording precisely in what ways a book has survived the ravages of time. An entire lexicon of book-related terminology has evolved over hundreds of years for exactly this purpose - terminology that means absolutely nothing to the average observer. It's traditional to adopt this baroque language when describing your books, for two reasons. The first is that the specific language of the book trade allows you to be exceedingly accurate and precise without using hundreds of words, and the second is that the elegance of it serves to dull the blow a little. Most rare books come with some minor defects, but that doesn't mean one has to be rude about it. It's much more charming to describe a book as "foxed" than to tell someone that the pages have developed an unsightly mottling, and that if this were a zombie movie we'd already have taken it out back and put it out of its misery.

 - Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome, pp.25-26

Friday, January 31, 2025

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks

Sometimes working titles survive everything the book-production process can throw at them. The new project comes in with a title everyone assumes will be replaced, eventually, by something better, but then the whole team gets used to it, every new option is shot down for various reasons, and the placeholder title seems OK by comparison.

Maybe not just OK - it's the way everyone is thinking about the book.

And, eventually, the cover has to be designed and the placeholder title is put in type, and, gosh! it looks just fine there, so whaddayaknow: that's the actual title.

I don't know that happened with Faith Erin Hicks' 2023 graphic novel Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy. But it's the style of title that makes me very suspicious.

This is a teen romance drama, heavier on the teen drama than the romance, which is mostly light and casual. Our central character, as implied in the title, is Alix, the star player on her teen hockey team on Vancouver Island.

Alix is a loner and not good at social interactions. She also seems to be about six feet tall and pretty muscular; we think that has a lot to do with it. (She's big even on her hockey team.) But probably more pertinently, she's been bullied by her team captain Lindsay, for what seems like years - and the other players quietly let it happen, so Lindsay doesn't focus on them.

(The unwritten story here is how horrible their coach is: she sees and allows this behavior from the team captain because, apparently, the team wins consistently. I don't know about legal requirements in Canada, but, where I live, the coach would be a mandated reporter and could - wait, I mean should - lose her job for turning a blind eye to such toxic behavior.)

Anyway, after one game at the very beginning of this book, Lindsay goes off on a tirade against Alix - how she's no good at anything except hockey, will never have a boyfriend, is the worst person ever, that kind of thing - and Alix just hauls off and socks her.

Now, I have never been a teenage girl. But in my years as a teenage boy, when similar things happened, - and they happened quite a lot - both participants would be disciplined, for slightly different reasons, and told nothing like that could ever happen again.

But in Canada, in the year 2023, among young women, in this book at least, it's all Alix's fault, and the coach pulls her into an office to ask seriously why this happened and "where this violence came from." Um, one - hockey, and two - sustained endemic bullying from an authority figure! This is not actually difficult for a coach who has any idea what she is doing...which this one clearly does not.

This is our plot. Alix, who had one completely understandable and long-overdue moment of rage, needs to learn to control her anger. And her coach, having no professional skills in this as in everything else in her purview, leaves Alix to figure out something on her own as a seventeen-year-old, instead of referring her to a counselor or booking her into the league anger-management group or anything else serious and constructive that a coach with actual resources would have done.

Alix instead goes to school the next day, where she sees a classmate, Ezra, facing down his own bully, Greg - who, in the overdetermined world of high-school drama, is also Lindsay's boyfriend, though this plot point doesn't really become important - through words. So she, in her clumsy-galoot way, asks Ezra to teach her not to hit people when they bully her, which, again, she apparently has only done once in her life in the first place.

Ezra, one of the Drama People who are eternally at war with the Jocks, as told in legends and '80s movies since time immemorial, agrees to this random weird request from a gigantic girl he's never really interacted with. And they start hanging out, since Ezra doesn't have an anger-management course or specific lessons he can just tell her to begin with.

Ezra's friends run the gamut of mildly supportive to strongly opposed: how dare he spend any time with someone who is regularly in physical vicinity to bullies like Lindsay and Greg?

Oh! And also, everyone at school thinks Ezra is gay, since he's only dated boys in high school. (He's actually one of these modern "I don't want to put labels on it" kind of person who is not "bisexual" even though he admits he's attracted to both boys and girls - and, we the readers think, any other kind of person he meets, probably.)

Alix starts developing a crush on Ezra, thinking it's impossible. Ezra is the kind of bisexual totally unique unlabel-able teenage sex-god-thing who wants everyone to like and/or love him. They are both dramatic in their own ways, because they are teenagers and it comes with the territory.

There's also an undercurrent of "what do you want to do with your life, and do your parents approve?" Both Alix and Ezra have been raised by single mothers with dramatic backstories - Alix's mom is a "Canadian-famous" sculptor who went strongly against her own parents' wishes to go into the arts and whose husband ran away sometime after Alix's birth to play hockey in the States and apparently has had no contact since; Ezra's mom was abused by his father until ten-year-old Ezra stood up to him with a knife and drove him out of the house.

Consequently, Alix's mom is strongly anti-hockey, and doesn't see the flashing, direct, incredibly obvious parallels between her parents' "it would be crazy for my teen daughter to work so hard on this thing with a very low chance of career success!" arguments and hers. And Ezra is cold to his mother's boyfriend, a perfectly nice guy who seems to have been around for a while and plans to stick around permanently.

Like I said: more drama than romance. Alix and Ezra do eventually work out the "he'd be more than happy to kiss her, too" thing, and they do kiss and hold hands. But the plot-driven Dramatic Stuff takes up most of the book.

I found it a bit overstuffed: there's too many bits of drama, which proliferate as the book goes on, and there's not quite enough space to let it all breathe naturally. A number of things are suspiciously convenient - such as Alix's father's location and the ease of contacting him - when they need to be, and adult reactions also seem to be carefully calibrated to keep the drama running on the right track to the ending Hicks wants.

So my sense is that Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy wanted to be bigger than it was - maybe two books, one mostly Hockey Girl to start and a concluding volume mostly Drama Boy. It all works as it is - Hicks is an old hand at this, and tells stories well - but there's more material here than quite fits comfortably into the package.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

This book has a clever title that makes it difficult to search for; engines will assume you have made a typo and offer confidently incorrect results. Luckily, the author's last name is much less common, and less likely (in my searching) to be turned into something else.

Oliver Darkshire came into the august London antiquarian bookseller Sotheran's (founded 1761) as an apprentice about a decade ago. A few years later, he took over their Twitter feed - it sounds like he generally took responsibility for the company's social media and maybe website, in the way that very old and very settled companies tend to dump such things on the youngest and most junior employees - and made a notable success of it.

Because of that, he got a book deal. Some Twitter book deals were "the Twitter feed, in book form," but the Sotheran's feed was one part "here's a weird thing we have for sale in the store," one part "here's a weird interaction with a customer" and several parts sparking conversation among other bookstore people and readers - and a lot of that isn't book-able easily. So, instead, Darkshire wrote a memoir.

Once Upon a Tome is the story of his time at Sotheran's - I see from taking a quick peek at the account today that the shop recently moved locations after about eighty years in one place, and that Darkshire is leaving Sotheran's as well, so it's clearly the story of this one chapter in his life, beginning to almost end.

Darkshire is one of those bookish but not university-educated people that seem to be more common in the British Isles than on my side of the Atlantic, for reasons I always assume are class-related most of the time. (Darkshire, though, talks about his narcolepsy in this book, and blames that for his academic failures.) He's witty, and good with a turn of phrase, which is exactly what a reader is looking for in a book about working in a bookshop that sells old random books.

We have an image of such places, I mean. And of the people that work there. Darkshire doesn't make himself a caricature, but he clearly fits into this milieu, and gives us an entertaining and informative tour through the world of antiquarian bookselling, or at least how he experienced it for the past ten years or so.

Look, you probably knew if you wanted to read this book several paragraphs ago. If "witty memoir by a antiquarian bookseller in London" appeals to you, know that Darkshire hits every note of that well. If not, you've probably already moved on anyway.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, & various artists

Comics artists of a certain age always want to draw Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns. I know why, they know why - we all know why. But reminding readers of bombastic comics for kids, hacked out monthly and printed on the cheapest paper available, might not be the mental connection you want to make in your classy hardcover collection of retold myths. I'm just saying.

Norse Mythology, Volume 1 is the latest in the long line of floppies and sturdier-formatted objects intending to, as far as I can tell, create sequential pictures for every last word Neil Gaiman has ever written in his long career. (Look out for Duran Duran by Neil Gaiman: The Graphic Novel!)

As is usual for this project, Gaiman wrote the original thing (in this case, the 2017 book Norse Mythology, a novel-shaped retelling of what bits of Norse mythology survived Christianity, which ain't much) and is not credited with anything at all related to this book. P. Craig Russell adapted the original thing into comics, and drew some of it - here the first two (of seven) sections. And various other people - Jill Thompson, Mike Mignola, David Rubín, Jerry Ordway, Piotr Kowalski - drew the other bits, sometimes coloring it themselves and sometimes letting others (mostly Lovern Kindzierski) do the colors.

The stories were originally published in twelve floppy issues, with multiple covers because it's the modern world and we can't have anything nice anymore, and then those were collected into three hardcovers. I'll let you figure out which of the two this one was.

(So it's exactly the same model as The Graveyard Book, for those still confused.)

Using multiple artists works a bit better here than in Graveyard, which was basically one story - this is more miscellaneous to begin with, since the stories are only vaguely in chronological order for the usual mythological reasons. And the styles work well together - they're individual, but all are working here mostly in an adventure-comics look with quite a lot of Stan-and-Jack in its DNA.

As usual with Russell's adaptations, it's very faithful, with lots of captions to use as much of the original prose as possible. As always, I find that is just fine, and probably what the paying audience wants, but it makes the whole thing just slightly plodding and obvious.

But, let me be honest: you get this book because you want more Neil Gaiman stuff, and you want it to be as Neil Gaiman-y as possible. You probably already read the underlying book, and want something as much like "exactly that, but with pictures of Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns" as possible. This book delivers on that promise.

(Note: I read this book on December 15, and wrote this post on December 21. It is entirely possible that you do not want any more Neil Gaiman stuff ever again in your life. That's entirely valid, too.)

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 by Mike Birchall

This is much more of a Volume One than I expected, so I hope to set your expectations more accurately than mine were.

Everything Is Fine is a psychological horror webcomic by Mike Birchall, appearing weekly (during "seasons," three so far) on Webtoon. There have been ninety episodes since the series began in spring of 2021.

Everything Is Fine, Volume One collects the first sixteen episodes, gathered and possibly somewhat updated or rearranged into nine parts and a very brief comics Prologue. 

It's set in suburbia, somewhere - "neighborhood one-four-seven-D." Sam and Maggie are a married couple, living in a house. He goes off to work, she stays at home. They have gigantic cat heads that may be masks. They have a dog named Winston, or so they say to each other. The men in the neighborhood, we learn a bit later, have jobs with boxes - Sam handles paperwork, single neighbor Charlie moves boxes from point four to point five (of at least ten), and Bob works at the box incinerator.

Everything is totally normal, they say to each other in chipper voices. 

But we see surveillance all over, and the local policeman, Officer Tom, is oddly insistent in his questions. And there are clearly teeth in this world, as we see hints as these chapters go on - everything is only fine for those who can follow the rules, of action and demeanor and correct thinking. If you fall out of that, you might as well not exist at all.

This is clearly a constructed society of some kind, but we don't know how or why. Are they being tested, or pitted against each other to see who comes out on top? Is this meant to be permanent - a "perfect life" constructed according to some plan - or is it something that will end?

Most importantly: what happened in the past that they shouldn't think about? The telling line of dialogue is "We need to forget - you know as well as I do." Birchall doesn't explain all of the things they need to forget in these chapters, but it's clear there's a lot: other people, other ways of living, any other possibilities.

Birchall's art is all thin lines, instantly clear, almost generic-looking, like some Flash game. It looks fine, like a world you've seen a million times before, a world that wants to slide away from your eyeballs and hide in the background. It looks like the suburbs of a million other stories, in comics and animation and film. And his dialogue is subtly creepy, full of those insistences that everything is completely normal, that nothing is at all strange ever.

There's no answers here. There are probably something like answers, or at least next steps, in the seventy-plus episodes Birchall has made since these. But there's no end in sight yet. Every reader will have to decide if they're interested in creepy psychological horror with no end in sight - I have to admit it makes me less interested in continuing. But this is really good at the building-horror phase, and people who like that should check it out.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Better Things: All Her Favorite Fruit

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

And here's where the series makes its first left-turn into the very idiosyncratic. (At least I think so: the first three songs strike me as solidly reasonable choices, big famous songs by fairly famous bands. But this is all my taste, so you may disagree.)

Camper Van Beethoven had a lot of great songs in a lot of modes - more awesome covers than most bands, with Pictures of Matchstick Men and One of These Days and Interstellar Overdrive, silly songs like Take the Skinheads Bowling and stark powerful late songs like Civil Disobedience, great instrumentals like Skinhead Stomp - but the song of theirs I come back to is a slow, loping, string-drenched monologue of longing.

It's All Her Favorite Fruit, from the 1989 record Key Lime Pie, which for a long time looked like the end of their work as a band. (It wasn't; everyone has a reunion, eventually, if there's any money at all to be had.)

The narrator is thinking about a woman - he's not named, she's not named, the "he" she's currently with isn't named, either. We don't know why they're not together, but the song is this man's vision of what their lives together could be. We don't know if she agrees. We don't know much of anything, frankly: it's all his viewpoint, this one line of thought.

I can see her squeeze the phone between her chin and shoulder
I can almost smell her breath faint with a sweet scent of decay

The song has a languid pace that matches the vision this man has of his potential life with this woman - somewhere "in the colonies," far away from the metropolis they live in. And everything is allusive, fleeting - nothing is said clearly or concretely. There's probably danger of some kind - even in the vision of their life together there's a hint of that:

We'd play croquet behind white-washed walls and drink our tea at four
Within intervention's distance of the embassy

This is a song of mood and emotion and feeling, I can believe the whole thing takes place in this man's head as he drives home from work, as he says in the first lines. It's a song of nuance and deep emotion, which I love about it.

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: The Difference Between a Mook and a Palooka

Matty Pierce, the acting student who'd had the fistfight with Dale Wormley, had that indefinable look of the actor who plays tough guys. It's all layers of pose and posture, veneer over veneer, with no apparent reality beneath it all. These guys, with thick gleaming black hair, chunky bodies, overly bright eyes as though they'd had a plastic surgery eye-tuck at the age of ten, cocky smile, slightly lumpy "rugged" good looks, are palpably different from actual street toughs. There's no anger in them, for one thing (though there is arrogance), and none of the defensiveness of the real punk. These are guys who've never had their bluff called. They get a lot of work in teen movies, riding motorcycles.

 - Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, The Fourth Dimension Is Death, p.217

Quote of the Week: The Turtle Manifesto

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind, and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a deadweight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest: Thoreau was right.

 - Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, p.27 

Friday, January 24, 2025

The Fourth Dimension Is Death by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I didn't expect to re-read the whole "Sam Holt" series in 2024, but I guess I just did. (I am writing this the morning of December 14th, though you are reading it in the future. Hello, future!) It's a four-book series, written by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym in the mid-80s: Westlake wanted to see if he could have a successful new launch that wasn't tied to his existing career, but "Holt" was revealed to be Westlake pretty much immediately, which soured him on the project. He'd already written the first three books - Westlake was always prolific and productive - and cranked out this fourth one to finish up the contract. He'd originally hoped to write more, but the reveal put him off that idea, and so that was it.

The first three are One Of Us Is Wrong, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, and What I Tell You Three Times Is False. Sam Holt himself, the character supposedly writing and narrating these mysteries, is the former star of a TV action/mystery, Packard, which I like to describe as "what if Magnum, P.I. was Quincy, M.E.?" Holt got rich from the show, which ran five years and is still syndicated now, a few years later. He has semi-palatial houses in New York and LA, with supporting casts in both places, and no worries in life...except that he'd really like to keep acting, for busyness and doing-things-with-his-life reasons, but the entertainment world has comprehensively typecast him as Packard, and he can't get any jobs to save his life. Meanwhile, in the way of the amateur sleuth, murders happen around him now and then.

The Fourth Dimension Is Death has the title least connected with the story of the entire series; perhaps Westlake was already sour at this point. (Westlake was good at souring on things; check out his kiss-off to the SF field from the late '60s for an earlier, even sourer, example - it's available in the fanzine collection The Best of Xero.) This is also the most amateur-sleuth of the four books, though it takes a while to get going.

You see, a regional supermarket chain ran a series of ads featuring a "parody" of Packard, which Holt and the owners and syndicators of the actual show took objection to, and some unpleasant litigation ensued. The actor who played the parody, Dale Wormley, was a hothead who was offended by what he saw as an attack on him and his ability to work, and ran into Holt twice in New York threatening violence but was quickly shut down by ex-cop Holt.

And then Wormley turns up dead, stuffed into a doorway down the street from Holt's New York home. Holt is an obvious suspect...except that he doesn't really have a motive, and has a decent alibi, and we the readers know he didn't do it. Soon after, there's a second, oddly related murder, which doesn't help but doesn't really put Holt in more jeopardy, either.

It all looks like the whole thing will just move to the back burner and never be actually solved - until Wormley's mother hits Holt with a civil-rights lawsuit for depriving her of her son by killing him. (I don't know the legislative or litigation history, though I am dubious about this plot: I suspect there wasn't generally a private cause of action for civil rights lawsuits - it was always something the federal government could bring on a prosecutorial level.) Anyway, the burden of proof for a civil suit is lower than that for criminal, so Holt faces the possibility he might have to settle, or could even lose the case and be tarred in the public's mind as the famous TV actor who got away with murder. (This is about fifteen years before Robert Blake, to be clear.)

So Holt decides he has to investigate the case himself, and dresses up in a goofy disguise to do so. Does he find the real killer? Is this a series mystery? Yes and yes. There's a rushed ending that leaves Holt battered but alive, and the series could have continued, but, obviously, didn't. This is also probably the least successful of the four books, for all the obvious reasons. If Westlake had stayed energized, it could have been better, and he could have written more, but those are solidly counterfactual at this point. So "Samuel Holt" is a short, mostly fun, clearly minor series by Westlake, most interesting for a look at the entertainment biz of the '80s by a writer who did a fair bit of scriptwriting in the '70s and '80s and was writing under a pseudonym to use some of his unkinder ideas and not be tied to them.

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Why Are You Like This? by Meg Adams

One of the oddest things, for me, about the contemporary cartooning world is that everybody has to be an entrepreneur now. (I mean, yeah, I know, late-stage capitalism hits all of us and all that jazz, sure, but even more so for cartoonists.) It used to be that cartoonists who did lots of different things - single-panels, mostly disconnected from each other - sold them individually to magazines or other outlets, but cartoonists all wanted to come up with a concept they could turn into a strip: a concept that supported a stream of stories, with new entries regularly, probably multi-panel. And some larger organization would back that strip, push it out into the world, gather the money, and keep the whole engine running for decades.

But, these days, even the most successful recent new strips of the 21st century - aside from a very few newspaper launches like Crabgrass - are all webcomics. On the positive side, that means the creator owns it all. On the negative side, the creator has to do it all: build a website, design and source merchandise and reprint books, run fundraisers, set up advertising, and everything else that actually brings in revenue on top of just creating the work.

And it may be a cliché, but cartoonists are not generally known for their organizational skill, entrepreneurial zeal, and eagerness to sell their work to other people. On the other hand, we have been getting a lot of interesting strips from good cartoonists, so the system seems to be working...but I suspect there's an element of "young cartoonist has enough energy and gumption to set it up and run it for a few years, then gets ground down by the lack of stable cash flow and aforementioned late-stage capitalism."

Because I want to see cartoonist have long, complex, interesting careers. If they can do that in high-profile ways, so I don't have to take a lot of time and effort to chase their work down, that would be even better, because I am lazy.

These thoughts are brought to you today by What Are You Like This?, the first collection of the ArtbyMoga online strip by Meg Adams, a talented younger cartoonist from the Pacific Northwest. The book is from Andrews McMeel, the book-publishing arm of one of the surviving major comics syndicators, so she's somewhat plugged into what used to be the big engine of comics success. But ArtbyMoga strips originally appear on Adams's social media, cast out for free into the world in hopes that will lead to engagement and clicks and eyeballs and merch sales and Ko-Fi tips and so forth. (There is something inherently Underpants Gnomes-esque about modern webcomics, particularly those that live on Instagram. To editorialize briefly, it's what happens when you let your economy be dominated by techbros who are really good at making sure most of the potential money in any system comes to them and them alone.)

But I'm supposed to be writing here about Meg Adams comics! She's got a energetic, expressive cartoony style, with big fat confident lines and great faces. Her work is in the roughly autobio area - I won't assume how much the "Meg" and "Carson" in her strips really map to her real self and husband; comic exaggeration is a thing that exists - and her strips are pretty domestic, grounded in the lives of this couple and their various animals (I think two dogs and three cats).

I particularly like how Adams draws herself. She has a conventionally pretty version of her face she does some of the time, for quieter, more normal moments. But she also has a more distorted, cartoony self that pops up a lot - see the cover, with that weird thin nose, distorted eyes, and unsettling mouth. I'm always impressed by humorists (in comics or out of it) who are confident enough to throw a Gookie and make themselves the butt of the joke, and Adams does that really well.

So I want you to support Meg Adams, and cartoonists like her. Read their comics, buy and read their books, buy T-shirts if you can, buy sketches or whatever if it strikes your fancy. Click like and subscribe, as they say. You can start with this book: it's out now, it's very funny, and it's pretty cheap, too. Thank me later.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Seoul Before Sunrise by Samir Dahmani

It's a bit quirky for a book about a young Korean woman to be by a Frenchman and translated into English, but we live in a big, quirky world. And creator Samir Dahmani lived in South Korea for several years, so this is a world he knows - well, he clearly didn't grow up as a girl there and move to Seoul for university, but you know what I mean. (The translator is Nanette McGuinness, for the record.)

Seoul Before Sunrise is a moody, quiet story - told in what looks like watercolors, mostly soft and muted, with lots of deep blues and blacks for this mostly-nighttime story. It's Seong-ji's story: she came from a provincial city, did well enough on her standard tests to get into a good accounting program in a Seoul university. But her best friend, Ji-won, got into a slightly better university, and now the two of them will not be as inseparable as they were before.

This is a big deal for Seong-ji. The reader realizes, fairly quickly, that it's not that way for Ji-won: she's fine with moving on, going on to the next thing in her life, while Seong-ji is mourning her past, unsure and tentative and at sea in the new big impersonal city.

Seong-ji works overnight at a convenience store to help pay for her school: it's quiet and slow, with just a few random customers over the course of a shift. One customer in particular, a woman in her thirties, forms a weird friendship with Seong-ji - the older woman is quirkily bohemian, not concerned with any of the things Seong-ji has been taught are most important (looks, popularity, career), and spends her nights breaking into random people's apartments just to be there and experience their lives.

(She talks in vague generalities, I'm afraid: like a lot of similar characters in a lot of media, she's meant to be the voice of passion and art and mystery, so her creator keeps everything muddy and nonspecific and applicable to everything in the world even when that's not as useful as more specificity would be.)

Her new friend drags Seong-ji along on various break-ins - which are totally fine, since she works for a property-management company, so she has keys and codes to get in anywhere she wants, and, anyway, she never takes or breaks anything. Seong-ji is too much of a mouse to argue against this, and, besides, is intrigued with this new world she discovers - the world of strangers' lives at night.

There are experiences which don't seem to be in normal default reality, but Dahmani doesn't want to pin these down to being a real intrusion of fantasy into the night world, or an altered psychological state, or anything else - again, he's keeping things vague to cover all of the possibilities.

Well, there's one possibility a close reader will have realized really early: Seong-ji likes girls. She really liked her friend Ji-won, and finally realizes that. She catches up with her old friend to let her know, which does not go well at all.

And then the book ends confusingly, with Seong-ji disappearing for the last section, even though this is entirely her story. Dahmani leaves it vague - yes, again - about what actually happened - and lets the reader guess or speculate what happens next for Seong-ji. It's a frustrating ending, but in character with the earlier vagueness.

Seoul After Sunrise is a book of mood and vibes and feelings, carried by strong art that makes that mood live and true. I would have preferred if the words were a bit more pointed, but that's not the book this creator wanted to make.

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

The Happy Isles of Oceana by Paul Theroux

There's something comforting about seeing books you fully intend to read sitting on your shelves year after year. It's an odd sort of comfort, certainly, and it only works if some of them actually do get read and newer books also land on those shelves for seasoning, but people who like to read also like to have lots of choices, for all of the moods that they think they might have someday.

I've been reading Paul Theroux's travel books for probably thirty years - I think I started with The Kingdom by the Sea or The Great Railway Bazaar in the 90s, when I was reading for a living and hadn't yet developed children to steal my time and the Internet barely existed. I've covered a lot of his books here, and every time I read another one of his travel books I have to shamefully note that, even after thirty years, I still haven't touched a single one of his novels. (I intend to, absolutely. One of these days. They're on the shelf...)

The Happy Isles of Oceania is a big book from 1992, covering a series of journeys over what seems to have been at least all of 1991 - starting in late 1990 during the build-up to the first Gulf War - in which Theroux and his collapsible kayak paddled around and through something like fifty different islands across the Pacific.

Theroux's nonfiction books usually touch only lightly on his regular life, but this one is the divorce book - his marriage is breaking up in London in the first chapter, and he notes in the last that he didn't have the usual end-of-travel-book experience with this project, since he didn't return to his old life like he did with prior books because that old life was gone. (Speaking of how he comments on things archly, there is a reference to what might be his second wife in the very last line of this book: "I kissed the woman next to me, happy to be with her. Being happy was like being home.") I've noted before that his books focus on the specific journey - the places he's writing about - and usually not about how he got there, or what he was doing in-between. This time, he might actually have been bumming around the Pacific for a whole year or longer.

It started with a book-publicity tour in New Zealand and Australia. Theroux doesn't anatomize his motives in great detail, but clearly there was a sense of "Yes, let's get as far away as possible. And let's do as much as I can while I'm on the other side of the world. I wonder how many islands I could get to?" So this one is even more episodic than many of Theroux's books - there's no thread of a railway to connect these very separated places, each of them sitting in warm waters far from sight of any other land.

It's broken into four large sections - first Meganesia, covering New Zealand and Australia; then Melanesia, with a bunch of smaller islands to the east: the Trobriands, the Solomons, Vanuatu, and Fiji. The longest section, on Polynesia, covers another big group of small islands: Tonga, the Samoas Western and American, Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, and Easter Island. And finally, there's a short section at the end about Hawaii, where Theroux has spent part of the year every year since.

Theroux has always been happiest and most positive about the poorest, most primitive people, and that theme comes out here, as he compares and contrasts a whole lot of different small island societies and sees how they have been affected by colonizers and missionaries and the modern world in general. (I don't want to say he's against all of that - there are small aspects here and there he is not quite as negative about - but it's a reasonable assumption.)

But every travel book is mostly about the traveler, and this one even more so than most of Theroux's work: he was going through a crisis at the time, and paddling around the biggest ocean on Earth was how he wanted to deal with that and find his way forward. He's still reticent, still protective of his privacy and that of his family - he doesn't even mention the name of the wife he's breaking up with, or give any details of their conflicts - but maybe more open emotionally, because this was such a huge transition in his life.

There's a good summing-up of his idea of travel - maybe explaining, sideways, why he does this, near the end of the book, on p.446:

A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "The American" or "The Foreigner" - the palangil, the popaa, as they said here in Rapa Nui. But there was no power in that.

A traveler was conspicuous for being a stranger, and consequently was vulnerable. But, traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. Generally I felt safer in a place like Anakena than I would have in an American city - or an American campsite, for that matter (mass murderers were known to lurk around campsites). I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. That was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.

So he went to a lot of gorgeous, exotic, interesting places and wrote well and engagingly about the people and things he saw there. For all of us who will never have a year free to bum around the Pacific, The Happy Isles of Oceania is the next best thing.

Monday, January 20, 2025

Better Things: I Don't Like Mondays

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I didn't include this song in This Year, but it was close. One reason it dropped out is that posting it on a Monday seemed just a little too on-the-nose. But, two years later, why not?

This is the Boomtown Rats, with their most famous song, from the 1979 record The Fine Art of Surfacing.

I Don't Like Mondays is about a school shooting - it was shocking at the time, but there have been so many, more shocking or differently shocking, since then, that I doubt anyone not directly involved remembers this particular event, back in early 1979 in San Diego.

(Oh, of course it was in the US, for all that the Boomtown Rats are an Irish band. ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens, as The Onion has put it, over and over again.)

The song is still shocking, I think, still that complex combination of anger and fear and surprise and sorrow. And it only alludes to the shooting until the third verse - I do wonder if someone, hearing the song for the first time now, would get the point before that point. I think so. I think the song itself, the sound of it, the ominous power of it, makes it clear. But we'd have to hear from new listeners to know.

Tell me why: I don't like Mondays,
I want to shoot the whole day down.

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Quote of the Week: Not in My Name

Father Chantry-Pigg thought it would be wrong to go to Russia, because of condoning the government, which was persecuting Christians. But Aunt Dot said if one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.14

Friday, January 17, 2025

Hanami: You, Me, & 200 Sq Ft in Japan by Julia Cejas

I've always been a fan of complication - especially if it's complicated mostly in my own head. So a book about a Spanish couple moving to live in Japan for an extended period, originally published in France and translated into English for American publication by a mostly French company headquartered in Hollywood...well, that's the kind of complication I love. I figured it probably wouldn't even affect the book itself much, and I was right.

Julia Cejas is a Spanish illustrator and maker of comics; her partner (I think they're married now; I also think they got married in large part because it would make the bureaucracy of this trip to Japan easier) Marc was an engineer and is now trying to work as a composer, primarily for video games. They realized that they had a moment in their lives - no strong ties, children or animals; work that could be done anywhere; funding from Marc's severance from the job he didn't want and Julia's recent grant - where they could actually live their dream. They could move to Japan and live there for at least months - maybe indefinitely, if things worked out.

Hanami is Cejas's first graphic novel, the story of that time, wrapped up in a little context to show their lives before and after. (Holly Atchison translated it for this US edition.) Cejas has a designer's eye: her panels are each precise and specific, often zooming in closer than the reader expects to This One Particular Thing. She uses a two-color palette, with various intensities of a red and a blue that are both fairly quiet, earthy, and grounded.

They possibly did not do as much planning as they might have - Cejas was a vegetarian and Marc had a gluten intolerance, which made finding food to eat somewhat difficult to begin with. (Not just figuring out what foods they can eat, but reading labels in a foreign language, in a foreign alphabet, and looking for all the words that could mean "meat" or "bread.")

But it was an experience, the kind of thing most of us can only dream of - and that we can live, vicariously, though a well-observed and thoughtfully executed book like this one. They did have a life in Japan for a while, doing many of the things they wanted to do - and they also found some things surprises, or did other things they didn't expect. That's a life, and the joy in reading about other people's lives is seeing those moments depicted clearly and honestly. Hanami has a lot of those joys, made up of Cejas's careful choices in picking moments to depict and her designer's eye in turning those moments into vibrant, interesting pages filled with compelling images.

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Space Junk by Julian Hanshaw

I suspected Julian Hanshaw was British - even in a SF story, there's details of phrasing and character interactions that are culturally distinct - and I see now I was right. I also see Hanshaw has been making graphic novels for more than a decade, and I've somehow completely failed to notice his work, so perhaps I shouldn't be lauding my amazing powers of perception here.

Space Junk was Hanshaw's new book this year; it came out a few months ago, from the excellent Top Shelf line (which is why I noticed it to begin with, actually). It follows about half a dozen solo books and some collaborative and shorter work, none of which (see above) I'm going to be able to contextualize or compare.

But this book is an interesting thing: the kind of soft SF that's more about the vibe than the world-building, with some frankly woo-woo fantastic elements and a world that doesn't actually make sense if you sit down and think about it in any detail.

We don't see anything like a government, just the Mondo Corp, which runs an extensive mining operation on this unnamed planet, sometime in the medium future. Mondo's operating plan is to hit a world, build what looks like a pretty extensive city, extract a bunch of minerals for a decade or so, and then pack the whole thing off to another planet. Even quirkier, the corporation seems to be organized generationally, with children explicitly part of the workforce but working under their own parents - and operations seem to leave from the top down, so we're now at the point where the population here is mostly unsupervised teenagers, with a few adults left.

This obviously doesn't make much sense in SFnal terms: to make only the first complaint, planets are big and one city-sized operation can no more exhaust the useful mineral wealth of an entire planet in a few years than a mosquito can drain the blood of an elephant. But of course, this is more of a metaphor than an actual world to be taken literally: Hanshaw wants all of that waste and pointlessness, alongside the forced conformity and infantilizing happy-talk of Mondo. This is late capitalism, as seen by alienated, troubled teens: stupid, pointless, broken, something to be ignored or escaped.

There are two main characters: Faith, who has a piece of metal in her head after a childhood accident that her gambling-obsessed parents were too cheap to fix correctly with something flesh-toned, and Hoshi, who has an anger-management problem and an obsession with chickens. Both of them are seeing their required counselor, Pieter Uzmaki, who seems to be trying his best to help them and to actually be decently good at his job and committed to it. There's also a horrible kid, Steve, leader of a group of bullies, who torments both of our heroes and generally causes trouble.

(For a satire of capitalism, Space Junk is surprisingly low-key and easy-going. Mondo is wasteful, but never seems evil, and even middle-management is entirely missing here. There's no company-town shenanigans to keep everyone indebted, invasive surveillance, obviously dangerous cost-cutting, or destruction of native life. The villainy comes from one person, another one of the kids.)

Everyone is obviously supposed to leave. They all have specific shuttles they're booked onto: Faith, Hoshi, and Pieter are all scheduled for the very last one. And, as these last few days are going on, more and more of their surroundings - movie theaters, convenience stores, and so on - are bodily picked up and shoved onto other ships to be sent off to the next planet.

(Again: super-wasteful and ridiculous from a cost-benefit perspective. But metaphorically resonant.)

Faith and Hoshi both don't want to leave, for slightly different reasons. Pieter, we think, is a solid company man, and will leave - he does seem to be trying to help them both come to terms with leaving, and accept the next steps in their lives.

But the reader knows they won't leave: that's the story. They'll meet each other, find common ground, evade the schemes of Steve, and stay behind in the ruins of their childhoods. The fantastic elements come into that, and I won't spoil them, but they are goofy and very soft-SF, while also amping up that central metaphor Hanshaw wants.

This is a thoughtful, interesting book, good at showing character and nuance and self-assured of its metaphorical material. As an old SF hand, I found parts of it difficult to take seriously, but that's on me: this is the kind of book where you grant the premises. And, if you can do that, it has a lot of depth and leaves you with a fine experience in the end.