Quote of the Week: Belonging and Not

I was standing in the basement of an auction house, feeling bad for trampling muck all over their expensive carpet. I'd eventually been admitted by the doorman, who was wearing a top hat in what seemed like a ludicrous commercial pretension, but only after he'd quizzed me for a not insignificant amount of time as to the nature of my visit. I couldn't help but notice he didn't stop the lady with the expensive jewelry from going inside, nor the busy-looking chap in a cravat. I think he took issue with my cardigan.

 - Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome, p.154

The Book of Atrix Wolfe: 30th Anniversary Edition by Patricia A. McKillip

I'm not sure why this particular Patricia A. McKillip book is getting a new edition - maybe just because it's the one hitting a round-number anniversary this year, since it's from 1995. (She didn't have a standalone novel in '75 or '85 that I can see, though Od Magic from '05 also has an anniversary this year.) But nice things don't need to have a reason, do they?

This edition of The Book of Atrix Wolfe was published a few weeks ago, on February 25th. It should be widely available at this point, in both electronic and print formats. The new stuff includes a cover by Kathleen Jennings, who also contributes an introduction, partially about creating that cover (Jennings works in cut-paper, so it's more complicated than a painter would be) and partially about McKillip.

But, mostly, this is the novel, as expected: the same novel, as far as I know, as was published in 1995 and has been available since in various other editions.

This is a set in a secondary world, the kind with a few important countries without much geography - there's no map, and the characters will not be forced to march all around anywhere. As the back cover puts it, the four important realms here are "warlike Kardeth, resilient Pelucir, idyllic Chaumenard, and the mysterious Elven realm." (The word "Elven," or any variation, is never used in the book itself, but it's an otherworldly place ruled by the long-lived Queen of the Wood, so it's a reasonable simplification for marketing copy to make.)

We begin with a prologue: the King of Kardeth is besieging Pelucir in the depths of winter, to break them and get through to Chaumenard, a rich land with a school of wizards but no clear government. Doing this will kill a whole lot of the people of Kardeth, Pelucir, and Chaumenard, but, like Lord Farquaad, that is a risk this guy is willing to take. (McKillip tries to make him noble, of the unbending type, but he has absolutely no grounds for war other than "I wanna take that stuff" and the whole novel could have been avoided if someone had quietly assassinated him in a convenient moment.)

The title wizard, possibly the greatest of the Chaumenard practitioners, has been wandering in that region, and stops to see that Kardeth King. Wizards generally don't interfere in squabbles between nations, because their powers tend to do unexpected things either in ways or at scales, but Wolfe hopes he can find a way to talk Kardeth down. He doesn't, but instead does something else - something magical. It's not clear what he's trying to do, but what he ends up doing is creating a monstrous Hunter - a horned figure on horseback that leads something  not unlike the traditional Wild Hunt and whom Atrix thinks (not entirely correctly) is an aspect of himself. The Hunter rampaged, killing the King and Queen of Pelucir but also somehow forcing Kardeth to retreat. (What actually happened, like a lot of things in Atrix Wolfe, is never quite made clear.)

The rest of the book is set twenty years later, and is about the next generation - and Atrix himself, still around, still mostly a hermit running around as a wolf on a mountain or otherwise avoiding human contact - fixing that magical thing he did.

I found this to be a book that talked around a lot of stuff more than I was entirely comfortable with - there were points towards the end when the dialogue was non-specific enough that I checked, more than once, to make sure a signature from an entirely different book hadn't been included.

The twenty-years-later cast is primarily two people: Talis, the prince of Pelucir born on the night of the siege, more recently training as a mage in Chaumenard, and Saro, the daughter of the Queen of the Wood, who was caught up in that magical working, left mute, and has been working as a pot-scrubber in the Pelucir kitchens ever since. (There's a lot of good kitchen-talk in this book; I wished I had been hungrier when reading it.)

The book of the title was written by Atrix at some unspecified time - I think after the siege but long before the present day, but maybe years even before that - and is in some kind of code where it claims to be a straightforward book of simple spells, and does dependably create magical workings when used by a practitioner, but the actual spells cast are vastly different, more powerful, and dangerous than what they claim to be.

Anyway, Talis find the book, tries to read it, causes problems. He's also dragged back home by his much older brother, the current king of Pelucir. (The heir to Kardeth is in the first chapter and seems like she will be important to the narrative, but she disappears entirely from that point, as does her entire nation.) From that point, we get Talis chapters and Saro chapters, and occasionally Atrix sections, too. The Hunter rampages around - he wants to kill Atrix, for good and sufficient reasons, but Atrix, being the greatest mage of his generation, can generally escape, though sometimes only through dreams.

Again, I found a lot of this book under-explained. We don't know precisely what Atrix did, what he was trying to do, how it happened that way, or, really, anything about how magic works in this world. How the realm of the Queen of the Woods relates to the normal human world is also pretty vague. There's a lot of talking, a lot of kitchen details of meals going up and coming back down, and the same few discussions between the same few characters happening repeatedly. McKillip was a supple, interesting fantasy writer, but I don't think this was one of her most fully-realized books. I may have missed something central, but it fell pretty flat for me.

Once Upon a Workday by Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz

This is not a War and Peas book. It's closer to the opposite, actually.

Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz - sometimes billed in the opposite order - create the War and Peas webcomic. It's usually four panels, usually standalone (with some recurring characters and occasional multi-strip "storylines"), and funny in an often abrasive, modern way.

Once Upon a Workday collects six pieces which are not comics: they're illustrated text, in the style most often seen in picture books. (The first story here has a very strong Dr. Seuss influence, though that tones down a bit in the later pieces.)

This is also much more earnest and positive than War and Peas - the strip tends to be cynical in its humor, but these stories are the kind of things that get called "self-care" or something vague about "mental health."

I tend to think books of positivity bombs like this are aimed at people substantially younger and more diffident than I am - and probably also those who are happier with fairly doggy verse as long as it mostly rhymes. So I did not perhaps engage deeply with this book, or think it is particularly inspiring or inspired.

But it does have six stories, with neat Pich/Kunz art, which give entirely positive lessons to readers, about common everyday (mostly work-life related) issues: disengaging, making the perfect sign-off to an email, creating work you don't hate, and just getting through every day. That has already been of use to a bunch of people, and likely will be to more - you may be one of them. And Pich and Kunz are not love-bombing here: they know modern life often sucks, and say so pretty clearly. This is about how to live through the suckiness.

I didn't personally need these lessons right this moment, but every book has a best time, place, and reader. This could be a really supportive one for the right situation.

Odin by George O'Connor

How do you follow up a decade-long, twelve-book series about the most famous group of gods on the planet?

If you're George O'Connor, you pick what's arguably the next most famous pantheon, and start a new four-book series. (The Olympians series was originally four books, then expanded quickly to twelve after early success, so some people might hope the same will happen to Asgardians - I hate to dash anyone's hopes, but I don't think there's that much underlying myth to work from. So four is what we should expect.)

The Olympians series ran from 2010 through 2022, and was a surprisingly robust, nuanced retelling of Greek myth in comics - a format and style that was not off-putting to middle-grade readers but only made a few allowances (like avoiding direct references to Zeus's tendency to turn himself into an animal and rape any woman who caught his eye) to their younger years. Those books were Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, and Dionysos.

The Norse pantheon is far more doom-laden than the Greek, with the whole Ragnarok thing baked into the story from the beginning, and the existing stories are more focused on blood and sex in ways that might make teachers and parents uneasy (may I mention what happened when Loki turns himself into a mare?) And, as I alluded to above, the corpus of Norse myth is tiny: two books, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, both of which were literary productions from a time when people had mostly stopped believing in these myths as being religiously true. The Greek equivalent would be if we had Hesiod, but nothing else - or maybe a four-century-later retelling of Hesiod, with random quotes from stories that aren't told in full.

But O'Connor is up to the challenge, and Odin - the first of this expected four-book Asgardians series - arrived almost a year ago, to tell the origin myths of the Nordic Nine Worlds and a bunch of myths about Odin. His art is moodier here, I think - not that there wasn't plenty of battle and mayhem in Olympians - and the coloring by Norm Grock subtly differentiates it from the mostly sunnier, Mediterranean feel of the Olympians books.

The framing story involves the Valkyries and Valhalla - the viewpoint is a person chosen on a battlefield and brought to the mead hall, where three mysterious figures tell him how the world came to be, what the nine worlds are, and some of the things Odin, chief of the gods of Valhalla, has done.

So we get the giant Ymir in the void, and the two races that appeared on him - the gods of the Aesir and the Jotnar, sometimes called giants. The Aesir go from Buri to Bor to Odin, Vili, and Ve, who kill Ymir and build their world from his corpse. The Aesir and Jotnar battle a bit, but Odin becomes blood-brothers with the Jotnar Loki. The Vanir appear, and the two pantheons of gods fight before making peace. And Odin seeks more knowledge, particularly of the future, hanging on the tree and learning the runes and losing his eye.

O'Connor drops back to the frame story multiple times, which helps smooth some of those inevitable transitions - Norse myth is a bunch of sometimes disconnected moments (What happened to Buri, Bor, Villi, and Ve? Where did the Vanir come from?), and O'Connor's detailed, interesting backmatter dives into the details of what we know and what we simply don't. The main story reads cleanly and flows well; it doesn't need the backmatter but having it is helpful for the nosy readers like me who want more details.

I find O'Connor's work more organic than what I've seen of the Gaiman/Russell Norse Mythology comics adaptation, which is more Marvel-inspired and tells each story as a separate tale on its own. O'Connor, I think, is trying to tell the whole story of Norse myth, as well as we know it, straight through from beginning to end, with the backmatter notes to explain the things that he has to leap over or guess at along the way. Both are valid approaches, but I appreciate O'Connor's ambition and enthusiasm more.

Sartre by Mathilde Ramadier and Anais Depommier

Most books like this have a subtitle, but not this one. It is just Sartre. Take him as he is, or walk away - those are your options with the book, as it is with all things Sartrean.

This is a French graphic novel, written by Mathilde Ramadier and drawn by Anais Depommier. And I immediately have to take back what I just said - maybe it's a subtle difference between how English-speakers view Sartre and how his countrymen do - because the 2015 Dargaud edition had the longer, more descriptive title Sartre, Une existence, des libertés. This 2017 US edition was translated by Peter Russella and published by NBM.

It is a biography in comics form of the writer and philosopher - straightforward and chronological, starting with his youth and ending the main story in 1964 when he refused the Nobel Prize. (Sartre consistently refused all prizes and awards in his life as part of his philosophy: he thought that a person could always change at any point, so judging anyone before they were dead was impossible. I am probably mangling his argument here.)

Actually, it nearly becomes a twinned biography - Simone de Beauvoir is almost as important to the book as Sartre is himself, as she was in his life. We even get her words in captions, as we do Sartre's, a few times throughout this book. (One minor production note: their captions are tinted to distinguish them from the white-background captions, which are the books' narrative. I found, reading this digitally, that those captions were scattered enough that the color difference wasn't clear - though they tend to be used for scenes of either Sartre or de Beauvoir away from the other, so they're always clear in context.)

For a man who lived through WWII in Paris and was at least nominally part of the Resistance to German occupation, Sartre led a quiet, sedentary, bookish life. The thrills of this graphic novel are primarily intellectual, the conflicts inter-personal and brought out in long complex conversations in drawing rooms over fine food and between cigarettes. It's a very wordy book, as I suppose it had to be - Sartre was a man of words, more so than even most writers.

Ramadier and Depommier don't focus on the many sexual adventures of Sartre and de Beauvoir, though they do have a few moments to indicate they are happening (continuously, all the time, in the background of the intellectual activity) and also show the beginning of their relationship with a frank in-bed conversation in which Sartre says (this is my blunt translation out of Sartre-speak) "I want to fuck a lot of people, and I think you do, too - but let's always come back to each other and tell each other about it, to stay the most important people to each other."

This is a book full of words, and I have to credit both Ramadier for making it all work in the first place and Russella for turning it into clear English that fits into the panels and tells (what I have to assume is) the same story. It is not an exciting book, and it will be deeper and more interesting the more a reader is familiar with Sartre's life, thought, and major works, but it's a solid introduction even to people who only vaguely know who Sartre was or why he matters. 

Better Things: Chainsaw (Denn Die Toten Reiten Schnell)

"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.

Power pop is great when it works well - fun and bouncy and energetic. It can sometimes tend to the synthetic or the saccharine, but the best power pop leans into both of those words, to find ways to be loud/brash while still being zippy/accessible. 

I was going to say that the Deathray Davies were really good at that, but, working on this post, I see they had a record as recently as 2021 (after a hiatus after 2005's The Kick and the Snare), so I should instead say they are really good at that. I haven't heard that new record, and I'm not sure I dug all the way back to the early indy end of their career, either, but the middle period is full of great songs like Is This On? and The Fall Fashions and Plan to Stay Awake.

The song I loved best - my kids, too; we played this a lot in the late Aughts and early teens when they were energetic ruffians - was Chainsaw (Denn Die Toten Reiten Schnell). It's from Kick and the Snare, which I thought at the time was the Davies' best record, so I was hoping they'd go on to do more in that vein over the next few years. (Life continually disappoints me; that's what makes it life.)

I don't quite get the subtitle - it's from Bram Stoker's Dracula, as a quote from the German poet Gottfried August Bürger, and means, more or less "For the dead travel fast" - but it's Germanic and forbidding and scary-sounding, which is just right for a song that's just a catalog of ways the singer could commit acts of mayhem on the listener.

I got a chainsaw at the pawn shop
It looks real nice, chop chop chop 

There's no deep meaning here: this is a song of threats. Probably half-joking, over-the-top, not-meant-to-be-taken-serious threats, sure. But threats none the same. And it's got a killer guitar drone and propulsive beat behind that.

This is yet another great song to have playing in the car as you head out to do whatever.

I'm coming for you.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 1, 2025

I ordered a bunch of used books, from various sellers, through ABE Books not that long ago, and they've ben dribbling in over the past week. I haven't checked my original order, but I think everything has now arrived. (If not, I'll have a happy surprise later; I like to leave room for happy surprises.)

Leave It to Psmith, a 1923 novel by P.G. Wodehouse, and, as I remember it, possibly his first really top-rank book. (Not that some of his earlier stuff isn't quite good; it is.) I'm pretty sure I've read this before, but I've never covered it on this blog, and any copy I had disappeared in my 2011 flood - so it's time to read it again, I think.

My Man Jeeves is also an early Wodehouse book, a 1919 collection that I read in 2008. It collects some Jeeves and some Reggie Pepper stories, and I'm pretty sure it's entirely separate from the much later collection Enter Jeeves, which also has some early Jeeves and Reggie Pepper stories. (My sense is that Enter was the stuff that wasn't published in book form at the time, and collected decades later once the copyrights had expired. But I will see.) 

The Mating Season - you may see a theme here - is a 1949 Wodehouse novel about Bertie Wooster. I know I read it, but I think that was in my first burst of Wodehouse-reading back in the '90s (when I read all of the Jeeves & Bertie books, most if not all of Blandings, and a few other things).

And the last of the Wodehouse books in this bunch - I'm trying to collect all of the Overlook series, and am now mostly buying ones I had copies of and lost in my 2011 flood - is Carry On, Jeeves, which is not a mildly racy '70s movie, though that would be an interesting collision of British humor. Instead, it's another early collection of stories, this one from 1925.

Then there's a Library of America Mark Twain book - the only one I didn't have, though again I think I did have it, before the flood - The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It. I've been thinking I want to re-read Roughing It for the past year or so, and realized I didn't have a copy in the house, which made that difficult. But now I do.

Lulu in Hollywood is, I think, one of the classic books old-time Hollywood, by the silent actress Louise Brooks. I've had it on lists of books to read someday, but I don't think I ever came across a copy in person, even in years of wandering through bookstores. So I finally just ordered a copy, in the fairly recent (2000, which is new for someone whose career was in the '20s and who died in 1985) University of Minnesota edition. Looking at it now, I see it is not a single narrative, but eight essays and an epilogue - puckishly titled "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs" - that originally appeared in film magazines in the '60s and '70s, with what looks like a long and bloviating introduction by Kenneth Tynan.

And last is the book that actually sparked this buying spree: The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, by the folks who made that show in the '90s. I had a copy of this Bantam trade paperback - once again, before the flood - and had half-forgotten that it came out in the hiatus between the Comedy Central and Sci-Fi Channel eras of the show, so it only covers the first six seasons in depth, with the movie teased (I think this was published as part of the run-up to the movie) and Season Seven covered quickly on one page at the end. The copy I got now is a bit battered, with a lot of spine roll and warping, so I'll probably have to shove it under some dictionaries and hope I can flatten it back out.

Quote of the Week: Winning Celebrations

The partisans at the Sheraton-Charles were predominantly scrubbed, well dressed and earnest, with the look of the dilettante in politics who feels he or she is doing a civic duty. Some of the women, steadying their nerves with whiskey, were already a trifle high. It was the kind of group that seldom has a winner, politics being what they are, and that is almost as astonished as pleased when it gets one.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, p.358 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings