Better Things: The Mermaid Parade

"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.

This week is something almost random. As always, it's a song I love, and think I might have something to say about. But it's not famous - it's just a song I found, and that spoke to me, and that I've kept listening to for years.

It's The Mermaid Parade by Phosphorescent, a 2010 song that, as is so common for this series, is yet another song about a breakup.

No, I wound up walking
out by the ocean today
and there were naked women
dancing in the Mermaid Parade.

It's a story-song, but the story is short and specific: the singer is in NYC, soon after a Mexican vacation with his wife Amanda. She's in LA - we don't know if that's where they both live, or she's there for some other reason, just that's where she is. And he buys a ticket to go see her, but ends up missing his flight, and we think giving up on the marriage, to instead watch the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.(Which is still going strong; this year's version just happened a week ago.)

Like so many of the best break-up songs, we don't know why. We don't know whose "fault" it is. We just get the emotion, the moment, the brokenness.

but god damn it, Amanda;
oh, god damn it all.

It's a song about how things can break, irrevocably, in a short time. It doesn't say why or how it broke...but I have to wonder if "those naked women dancing" had something to do with it....

Quote of the Hour: Late-Night Excursions

To find oneself locked out of a country-house at half-past two in the morning in lemon-colored pyjamas can never be an unmixedly agreeable experience, and Baxter was a man less fitted by nature to endure it with equanimity than most men. His was a fiery and an arrogant soul, and he seethed in furious rebellion against the intolerable position into which Fate had manoeuvred him. He even went so far as to give the front door a petulant kick. Finding, however, that this hurt his toes and accomplished no useful end, he addressed himself to the task of ascertaining whether there was any way of getting in - short of banging the knocker and rousing the house, a line of action which did not recommend itself to him.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith, pp.253-4

Quote of the Hour: Visitor's Seat

He leaned back again and brooded at me with pale eyes. He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.

 - Raymond Chandler, The High Window, pp.1005 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Succession

It was such a relief that they [her parents] were finally dead, dying within a few weeks of each other, minds and bodies long past their sell-by date. They had both reached ninety and Tracy had begun to think that they were trying to outlive her. They had always been competitive people.

 - Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog, p.12

Quote of the Hour: Courage!

Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.

 - Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, p.114

Quote of the Hour: Not Quite a Credo

 "....Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they're arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place."

 - The Continental Op, speaking in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, p.342 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: There Was Only One Catch

Corky was one of the artists. A portrait-painter, he called himself, but he hadn't painted any portraits. He was sitting on the side-lines with a blanket over his shoulders, waiting for a chance to get into the game. You see, the catch about portrait-painting - I've looked into the thing a bit - is that you can't start painting portraits trill people come along and ask you to, and they won't come along and ask you to until you've painted a lot first. That makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "Leave It to Jeeves," pp.11-12 in My Man Jeeves

Quote of the Hour: Gossip

In this rich African setting were jumbled together, for a few days, people of every race and temper, all involved in one way or another in that complex of hysteria and apathy, majesty and farce; a company shot through with every degree of animosity and suspicion. There were continual rumors born of the general uncertainty; rumors about the date and place of every ceremony; rumors of dissention in high places; rumors that, in the absence at Addis Ababa of all the responsible officials, the interior was seething with brigandage; rumors that Sir Percival Phillips had used the legation wireless; that the Ethiopian Minister to Paris had been refused admittance to Addis Ababa; that the royal coachman had not had his wages for two months and had given in his notice; that the airmen from Aden were secretly prospecting for a service between the capital and the coast; that one of the legations had refused to receive the empress's first lady-in-waiting; above all, there was the great Flea Sandal and the Indiscretion about the Duke of Gloucester's Cook.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Remote People, pp.228-229 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: In Which a Narrator Denies Being Scared

But it was very quiet in the house. I had never noticed all the noises when there were people. I was not scared, of course, but it was a little spooky. More spooky yet were the noises that interrupted the silence. House noises. The house itself made sounds. Some of them I could figure out, like the refrigerator, apparently there is a motor in refrigerators, and it goes on and off. I had never noticed it before. Then, there were sounds that the house itself seemed to make. Creaks, and thumps, and clicks. This did not scare me, but I could imagine a person not as brave as I am, a person around my age, someone who has never been alone in their house at night, possibly being a little nervous.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny & the Rooster, pp.74-75

Quote of the Hour: The Divide

It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn't see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.

 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, p.854 in Stories and Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Non-Conformists

Only two girls in my grade came from there - the Raybern sisters, twins - and though they were impeccably neat, they wore homemade calf-length skirts, pleated button-down blouses and belted cardigans as if they were already spinsters. If they had been smart we would have understood them, but they were C students, and therefore weird for no real reason.

 -Stewart O'Nan, Snow Angels, p.62

Quote of the Hour: A Flock of Newsmen

Reporters in large groups are ill at ease, and they try to make up for it by acting too easy. Each is preoccupied with his own time situation - his paper's deadlines and the accessibility of telephones. Each, before a public conference, shapes in his mind what would make a good story if the principal said it, and how he can trap him into saying it. If the principal delays his appearance, the reporter begins to wonder whether he will have time to write the story, Then, with further delay, he begins to wonder if he will have time to telephone. Next he gets angry, He resents his subjection to the whims of his inferiors, and he vents his resentment by a show of elaborate contempt.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, p.315 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Commercial Premises

My rubber heels slithered on the sidewalk as I turned into the narrow lobby of the Fulwider Building. A single drop light burned far back, beyond an open, once gilt elevator. There was a tarnished and well-missed spittoon on a gnawed rubber mat. A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch. I shook the rain off my hat and looked at the building directory beside the case of teeth. Numbers with names and numbers without names. Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous. Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician or a screen writer - if the postal inspectors didn't catch up with them first. A nasty building. A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, pp. 717-718 in Stories & Early Novels

Quote of the Hour: Leaks, Repairs of, Completely Useless

First, a complaint is made to the landlord, which grumbled up through the staff until it reaches some faceless creature in a faraway office block. A complaint made in this manner functions as a sort of invocation, which (after a waiting period somewhere between three days and forever) summons an extraordinarily unprepared-looking old man carrying a small tube of sealant. He doesn't tell anyone that he's arrived, but one can see him through the window staring at the street and whistling through his teeth in the way tradesmen do when they know they're about to disappoint you. Eventually, when he's exhausted the full length of time someone can stand on a street staring at the floor without looking suspicious, he sighs, and begins to plug up whatever cracks and gaps he can find with silicone. As soon as he has left,. the thumping and rumbling of subterranean London begins to dislodge his efforts, and a few days later the tiles are as permeable as ever.

 - Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome, p. 129

Quote of the Hour: Where You Belong, and Where You Don't

I paddled away thinking how I had once seen these islands as idyllic. I had been wrong. An island of traditional culture cannot be idyllic. It is, instead, completely itself: riddled with magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries, and its old routines. You had to take it as you found it. The key to its survival was that it laughed at outsiders and kept them at arm's length. And thought it seemed strange that they thought of themselves as human and me as subhuman, a dim-dim, I could now see the utter impossibility of my ever understanding the place.

 - Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, p.150

Quote of the Hour: Geniuses at Play

At different spots in the room stood the six resident geniuses whose presence in the home Mr Pett has such strong objection, and in addition to these she had collected so many more of a like breed from the environs of Washington Square that the air was clamorous with the hoarse cries of futurist painters, esoteric Buddhists, vers libre poets, interior decorators and stage reformers, sifted in among the more convention members of society who had come to listen to them. Men with new religions drank tea with women with new hats. Apostles of free love expounded their doctrines to persons who had been practising them for years without realizing it. All over the room throats were being trained and minds broadened.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim, pp.132-133

Quote of the Hour: Surprises

Our bedside vigil lasts all night. When you're waiting for death, instead of being surprised by it (as we usually are in our family), it can take a long time to come.

 - Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, pp.325

Quote of the Hour: Where You're Meant to Be

If you are very lucky, you're allowed to be in certain places during just the right season of your life: by the sea for the summer when you're seven or eight and full of the absolute need to swim until dark and exhaustion close their hands together, cupping you in between. Or in another country when there is both an exciting now and enough dust and scent of the past everywhere to give fall light a different, violent color, the air a mixed aroma of open flower markets, people named Zwitkovitz, a passing tram's dry electricity.

 - Jonathan Carroll, Sleeping in Flame, p.8

Quote of the Hour: Games for Purposes

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancour.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.233

Quote of the Hour: Unfortunately True

It is difficult to remain young when one's own children insist upon growing older.

 - Kelly Link, "The White Cat's Divorce," p.4 in White Cat, Black Dog

Quote of the Hour: Undercard Woes

When I walked into the Garden, a Berber from Morocco was in the ring, whacking away ineffectually at a long, stringy Negro from Cuba; it seemed unbelievable that two men could have come so far to fight so little.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science, p.110 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Things to Do

He checked his expensive watch again. He wished he still smoked. He wouldn't mind a drink. If you didn't smoke and you didn't drink, then standing by a waterfall for ten minutes with nothing to do was something that could really get to you because all you were left with were your thoughts.

 - Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, p.19

Quote of the Hour: Everybody's Got Problems

[A bit of paper] tumbled in air, plastered itself against a tree, and then continued on its way. It read:

This is the story of a werewolf in a great city in the present time. It is the story of the hopes and dreams of a boy whose future is limited to biting strangers and running through the streets. It is the story of a soul on fire, a youth of pure heart and low morals. It is the story of one who knows not what he does.

The page was the beginning of The Sorrows of Young Werewolf by K.E. Kelman, PH., a romantic account of the life of a werewolf. The book had been reviewed as a monstrosity, and was banned in most cities. Even that did not help its sales.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, p.451 in 4 Fantastic Novels

Quote of the Hour: What You Look For in a Drink

The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago by the then Estonian consul-general in New York, and it accounts perfectly for the drink's rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in conjunction with the reassuring tastes of infancy - tomato juice, orange juice, chicken broth. It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing.

 - A.J. Liebling, Between Meals, p. 596 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Historical Costumes

I collect too many quotes for this weekly "feature," and then run an hourly version twice a year, on a Sunday near a major holiday. It's that time again.

Most of his evening guests - their purchases are so infrequent that it would be misleading to call them customers - wear white felt hats and overcoats of a style known to them as English Drape. Short men peer up from between the wide-flung shoulders of these coats as if they had been lowered into the garments on a rope and were now trying to climb out.

 - A.J. Liebling, "Broadway Storekeeper," in The Jollity Building (p.414 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings)

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Reinstated, and It Feels So Good

"In the light of subsequent developments in this case, I am inclined to be lenient towards Detective Johnson," the commissioner said. "His compulsion to fire at the youth is understandable, if not justifiable, in view of his previous unfortunate experience with an acid thrower." The commissioner had come into office by way of a law practice and could handle those jawbreaking words with much greater ease than the cops who learned their trade pounding beats.

 - Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers, p.867 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s

Quote of the Week: Portrait of a Detective

"Yes," Breeze said. "Phillips. Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case. He thought he was a detective, but it looks as if he couldn't get anybody to agree with him. I talked to the sheriff at Ventura. He said George was a nice kind, maybe a little too nice to make a good cop, even if he had any brains. George did what they said and he would do it pretty well, provided they told him which foot to start on and how many steps to take which way and little things like that. But he didn't develop much, if you get what I mean. He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and then the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions. Well, it wore the sheriff down after a while and he let George go."

 - Raymond Chandler, The High Window, pp.1073-4 in Stories and Early Novels

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

Most noir tries to be cool. Maybe "cool" in the sense of wearing dark shades at night and smoking above eye level, but more often cool as in affect and mood. Cool as opposed to hot, as in jazz. Cool meaning it might come to a boil, but it's going to be a slow simmer for a while first. Cool as midnight, cool as a diner counter at 2 AM, cool as a proxy for cold - like the grave, like endless nothing, like the purpose of life.

Chester Himes, though, is not aiming for cool. (I say this having now read only two of his books, this one and A Rage in Harlem. I could be talking through my hat.) Oh, sure, The Real Cool Killers has the word "cool" right in the title. But it's a hot book, like a jazz combo following a horn riff off into the musical thickets, running quick and rat-a-tat with one damn thing after another.

This was the second novel in this loose series, published in 1959, two years after Rage. It all takes place one night in Harlem, and features Himes's series characters, the tough and violent detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In this series, they might be the only black cops in New York, or at least in Harlem. There's no sign that any of the beat cops are other than beefy white guys from other neighborhoods, and Gravedigger and Coffin Ed operate with more than threats of violence - Himes's Harlem is an anarchic place, barely under control at the best of times, full of pimps and gang kids and slumming white folks getting fleeced (but always, always left unmolested to go back to their own part of town) and teen girls willing to do whatever to make a buck or get some kicks.

It starts with a confrontation in a bar. Ulysses Galen, a well-off white businessman who spends a lot of time in Harlem, is drinking in the Dew Drop Inn. We don't know his business there when the action starts; we will learn a lot more by the end. A black guy takes offense to Galen, pulls a knife, attacks. The attacker is disarmed (literally) and Galen runs out into the street, chased by a different black guy, who seems to be angry about the same thing for a different reason.

There's a chase, drawing a huge crowd. As one character says later: seeing a black guy chase another black guy with a weapon is an everyday occurrence; even seeing a white guy chase a black guy with murderous intent is pretty common. But when a black man threatens to kill a white man, well, that's something new and surprising.

So this guy Sonny chases Galen, threatening him with a gun. He shoots, Galen falls. The cops arrive, scuffling with the Real Cool Moslems, a gang of local black teens who dress up as "Arabs" - half joking, half to obscure their identities. The gangers rile up the cops, and one of them throws perfume at Coffin Ed - who was badly scarred about a year before by an acid-thrower, and reacts really badly when anyone tries to throw any liquid at him. So he shoots that "Moslem," and Sonny escapes - with the other Moslems, in the ensuing confusion.

The rest of the book alternates the two strands - the cops, mostly Gravedigger, looking for Sonny, and Sonny himself, in the hands of these teen gangbangers, trying to get out of the police cordon and escape the house-to-house search and also not get randomly killed by these teen lunatics.

Oh, one more thing. Sonny's gun couldn't have killed Galen, and didn't: it only shoots blanks.

As I said, this is hot rather than cool - big personalities, big actions, cops who are mostly competent and crooks who rarely reach that level. All of whom are ready for violence at any moment: that's just how Harlem is, in Himes's telling. It turns out Galen was a sadist, paying black girls quite a lot of money to let him whip them - which he did a lot harder than they expected, so they generally only did it once each.

(It strikes me that this might not have been actually illegal, despite some arrests the cops make of procurers and panderers as the night goes on. If Galen was just whipping the girls - and Himes seems to be pretty clear that he just whipped and not fucked - the fact that they were underage might not be as dispositive as they claim. On the other hand, it's also clear that these cops find "criminals" first and figure out what to charge them with later, in the best noir fashion.)

This is a short novel, full of action and dialogue and local color. As in Rage, the criminals are often idiots, which doesn't make them any less dangerous to themselves and others. The cops are tough and even more violent - I imagine much of the appeal of this series, early on, was that Coffin Ed and Gravedigger are just as tough and unyielding and competent as any white authority figures, and always come out in the end with their man. It's not quite a cartoon, but it tends in that direction: that big, that exaggerated, that quick. Himes's language keeps it all at that rolling boil, that hot jazz-combo riff, and keeps it from ever going over the top - but it's close, more than once.

War and Peas: Hi, Earth by Elizabeth Pich & Jonathan Kunz

I almost missed that this is a War and Peas book - the series title is small on the cover, discreet, like a barely-credited third co-author. But it is: this is a somewhat themed, somewhat shorter collection of War and Peas comics on vaguely ecological, or sometimes just natural, themes.

There are eighty-eight comics in Hi, Earth. All of them previously published on their website, all of them by the team of Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz. (As I understand it, they co-write and then mostly trade off drawing - I haven't been able to detect a difference in drawing styles, which could be a defect in my eye.) Mostly 4-panel, though there are a few large single panels, some that run to six or eight, and a few New Yorker-style captioned drawings.

When I say the theme is "somewhat," that's because I'm not sure if these strips were specifically chosen to be in a rough theme, or if this is just what Pich & Kunz make jokes about anyway, so they leaned into calling it a theme. Not everything in the book is about plants and animals and climate change and icebergs, though a lot is. There's also strips about God and aliens - not together, as far as I can remember, mind you - which I find difficult to fit into that overall theme.

So this is basically just a new War and Peas collection. It was published on April 1, so it's still very new. The humor is snarky and modern and the tone is often depressive and the assumption is that humanity is, if not entirely doomed, at least going to go through a lot of bad shit. That's the tone and sense of War and Peas anyway, of course. Oh, and a decent number of the jokes are about either fucking or feces (flinging, eating - you know, the stuff animals get up to if you let them), which may trouble some of you.

I think the first War and Peas book (Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers) is a bigger, fuller menu of the Pich/Kunz work, with some recurring characters that don't show up here. If you're not familiar with the strip, and you have some kind of psychological block against just clicking the website link and reading a bunch of comics there - if so, no judgments, man, we all got shit going on - I'd recommend that book first.

But if you're a dedicated eco-warrior, with a fixie bike and a bottomless pit of scorn for SUVs and more recipes for soy whatever than you can get to before the next coven meeting, than maybe Hi, Earth is the place for you to discover War and Peas. You have your choice of the dead-tree version, which kills forests, or the digital version, which is complicit in the massively colonialist rare-earth trade, so struggle with your conscience and pick one.

Bogart Creek, Vol. 3 by Derek Evernden

There's not a whole lot I can say about this 2022 collection of Derek Evernden's Bogart Creek strip that I didn't already say about the 2019 Vol. 1 or the 2020 Vol. 2. Evernden is a Canadian cartoonist and illustrator - he grew up near the eponymous creek in Ontario, and now lives out on the rolling prairies of Alberta - and his strip is a dark (very dark) and often morbid single-panel with jokes that aren't as Canadian as you might expect. 

(For one random example, near the front of the book, that I just flipped to: Booty Call of Cthulhu. I'll let you imagine the drawing - or, better yet, get this or one of his other books. You can even buy them direct from the author.)

So what distinguishes Bogart Creek, Vol. 3 from its two predecessors is mostly that it has 132 new and different single-panel gags. Evernden doesn't have continuing characters, or even common situations all that much - Bogart Creek is fairly pure single-panel, very much in the post-Far Side mode, so every gag stands all by itself. That makes for fine reading, since Evernden is possessed of an impressively capacious imagination for mayhem and irony.

But, unless I start quoting some of my favorite gags, it doesn't leave a reviewer a lot of room. This is funny, it's very dark most of the time, and Vol. 3 is consistently as good as the previous books. If you like dark humor and single-panel cartoons, check out one of the Bogart Creek collections.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler

This was the third of the eventual seven novels that Raymond Chandler wrote about his detective Philip Marlowe, published in 1942. It's the one about the Brasher Doubloon, though I tend to think of it as "one of those four in the middle." (Chandler started with The Big Sleep, and hit his peak with The Long Goodbye more than a decade later before petering out with the disappointing Playback. The four novels between Sleep and Goodbye are all strong, but I tend to mix them up, especially when I haven't read some of them in decades.)

The High Window is the only Chandler novel not to be based on previously-written material, if I can trust Wikipedia. It does show, actually: both Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely have a clear "two cases that intersect" structure, as Chandler stitched together elements from what were originally separate stories. High Window is all of a piece, without that bit of intersecting serendipity that so many later mystery writers, sometimes clumsily, picked up from Chandler.

In this case, Marlowe is hired by a rich widow, Mrs. Murdock, out in Pasadena. As usual, there's the ostensible reason - to find her despised daughter-in-law, Linda Conquest - and the underlying reason, that the widow assumes Linda took a valuable coin when she ran off, and that will provide leverage for her to force her son Leslie to divorce Linda.

That coin is the Brasher Doubloon, a colonial-era gold piece from New York State, old enough that it was pressed rather than minted...which will be important to the plot, eventually. A rare-coin dealer contacted Mrs. Murdock about it, asking if it was for sale - which, both Murdock and Marlowe agree, implies he's seen the stolen coin and knows who has it.

But first Marlowe has to poke around, looking for Linda and chasing her former roommate, who is now married to a gangster club owner, Alex Morny. Of course, Leslie, the wastrel rich son, is in debt to Morny for a large amount of money, and of course he still loves his runaway wife and wants her back.

And of course as Marlowe starts chasing clues and talking to people, some of them ending up dead soon afterward. Quite a number of them, and quite quickly, too - Marlowe stalls the police as best he can, but he keeps emphasizing, both in his internal dialogue and talking to Mrs. Murdock, that a man in his line of work can't just keep silent, that he'll need to explain and explicate and make connections his clients might not like.

Marlowe does solve the murders and retrieve the coin in the end - it's a mystery novel, that's how you know it is the end. More importantly for him, he saves Mrs. Murdock's neurotic and bullied secretary, Merle, from a complicated predicament and takes her back to her Midwestern parents, in what's probably the purest example of the white-knight impulse in this series.

And, throughout, the joys of reading Chandler are in the language and the observations - he had an amazing eye for understanding and presenting people with devastating clarity, and a facility for unique and telling descriptions of them and the places they lived and the stuff they surrounded themselves with. His plots are fine and generally inventive, but that's table-stakes in the mystery field. The writing and the insight is what makes Chandler Chandler, and it's still as true and precise eighty years later as it was in 1942.

(Note: I read this, like the first two Chandler novels, in the first of the two-volume Library of America Chandler collection, Stories and Early Novels. Given the absolutely horrible cover this book currently has in the US - you'll have to look for it yourself; I'm not posting it here - I strongly recommend not getting this book standalone right now.)

Better Things: Solsbury Hill

"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.

Last week's song was a big famous one I admitted I didn't really connect with until I was a father. This week I have a big famous song that I latched onto early, maybe for contrast.

I won't say that Solsbury Hill is inherently a teenager's song - it's bigger and more encompassing than that. But I bet I was only one of a legion of teens across several generations to take it to heart.

This is a song about transformation, about a transcendent experience - or about using such an experience as a metaphor for the changes you make in your life anyway. In real life, it was Gabriel's "why I left Genesis" song, but it doesn't actually explain that, or anything.

I was feeling part of the scenery
I walked right out of the machinery
My heart going boom boom boom

It's a song of vibes, but songs are all about vibes - you feel a song more than you logically explicate it, always.

So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
'Til I thought of what I'd say
Which connection I should cut

That vagueness, that mysticism - it means Solsbury Hill can mean whatever a listener needs it to mean, can be about whatever that listener is going through in their life as much as it was about Gabriel's life.

And it's yet another example of the song with a distinctive sound, a great riff, that starts quiet and gets louder and bigger as it goes along - I won't say that always works, but it works consistently when done well, and this is one of the best examples of doing it well.

"Grab your things, I've come to take you home"

Reviewing the Mail: Week of Jun 21, 2025

One book this week, which came from the library and which I'm rush-typing about right now to get this post ready for my usual 8:30 post-time today. (And, at this very moment, it is 8:08.)

The book is Who Is AC?, a graphic novel by Hope Larson and Tintin Pantoja. It's from 2013, and I missed it at the time. Larson is someone whose work I've vaguely followed, even though she's mostly done books for younger readers - though I do have to admit "followed" sometimes means (as it did, just recently) "Hey, hasn't it been several years since I read a Hope Larson book? What did I miss?" (There's also the finale of the trilogy that started with All Summer Long, and I think an even newer project than that.)

But, for today, I went as far back as I missed, since the fine library in Kearney, New Jersey could accommodate me, and grabbed this one. It's a superhero story for teens - maybe tweens, actually - and the superhero is a tech-powered young woman (I say that because I'm not sure how old she is, but I'm going to guess about twelve, so I reserve the right to adjust "young woman" to something more appropriate if necessary)

Here Larson is writing, with art by a creator I'm not familiar with - Tintin Pantoja - though it looks like she did a book for Wiley when I worked there, so I could have noticed her work if I paid attention. Anyway, I'm about to read the thing - probably today - so let me do that and see what I've got here. I'll report back.

Quote of the Week: A Striking Realization

Now that he was no longer subject to institutional rules governing brutality he felt free to hit people at will. He might have been around violence all his life but it was only recently that he was beginning to see the point of it. It used to be that his bark was worse than his bite, now it was the other way round.

 - Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog, p.38

What If We Were...2 by Axelle Lenoir

When I covered the first What If We Were... book a few months ago, I didn't mention that it had been nominated for an Eisner award. (Because I didn't know; I gather the edition still in print predates the nomination, which is pretty typical.)

Creator Axelle Lenoir has an afterword in this second volume - titled, unsurprisingly, What If We Were...2 - explaining something of the background and history of the series. And I think that nomination boosted her profile, at least down here in the States; she's from French-speaking Canada and was better-known there to begin with. So I may have the first What If We Were... to thank for the fact that I saw her magnificent semi-autobiographical book Secret Passages first, and discovered Lenoir at all. The world is complex and full of wheels within wheels.

Anyway: this series originally appeared in French, in the magazine Curium, under the title Si On Ētait, starting in 2016. The first collection, collecting the first fifty strips with thirty pages of new interstitial material, was published in French in 2019 and, translated into English, by Top Shelf about a year later. This second book is dated 2023, and was translated by Pablo Strauss. It also has about eighty pages, so my assumption - and we all know what happens when you assume, right? - is that this one is also about fifty strips from Curium and thirty pages of new material.

The concept is simple: Natalie and Marie are high-school students and best friends; they've known each other for what counts for teenagers as forever. They play a story-telling game together, in which one of them has a concept (Vikings, pirates, scientists) and the two each talk about how they would be that thing. There's a vague sense that one of them "wins" with the better story, but it's really a way to bullshit and waste time together, like all the best homegrown games. Lenoir tells these stories in an energetic style, with a lot of color in her pages and a lot of amusing, appropriate facial expressions from her whole cast - this time out, it's even more colorful, as the story heads beyond the high-school world for extended periods.

This book sees the concept expanding a bit; it's mostly more slice-of-life, showing how Natalie and Marie met, plus some other moments in their shared past, and a bit of a spotlight on Natalie's still-new girlfriend, Jane Doe. There's also a long sequence where they are accidentally transformed, during the game, into characters in a fairy tale, and need to work through that story and get back to the real world in the end. It gets frenzied, in that episodic-story way, so energy can ramp up very quickly in a short sequence of pages - but it all flows together into this larger collection.

This started off as a "you can be who and whatever you want to be" story for French-speaking teen girls, and that's still the core of it - but it works just fine, and is wonderfully entertaining, even to those who never were French-speaking, girls, or Canadian and who have been what they are for several decades now. Lenoir's characters are big and fun and specific, and the hijinks they get up to make great stories.

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie has appeared in six novels by Kate Atkinson so far; some people have called that a mystery series, since Brodie is a private investigator, of a sort. And the mystery audience has embraced those books, but they're not really mysteries. They're not really thrillers, either.

But they are definitely crime fiction, that larger and more encompassing category that works the way "speculative fiction" does on the other side of one genre divide: marks out a large territory of fiction that has smaller kingdoms within it, with vague but understandable overall boundaries.

Crime fiction includes mysteries, both cozy and hardboiled, and thrillers, and noir, and other, odder things - it's the whole set of stories about people who break the law, who do horribly transgressive things (usually but not always murder), and what happens to them and the people around them. Most of the pieces of crime fiction are renormative at their core, but it's not required in the whole territory.

Atkinson's Brodie books, at least up to this fourth one Started Early, Took My Dog, are told in multiple third-person perspective, mostly take place over a short period of time - usually divided into sections, each basically one day, with major flashbacks into important moments or periods in the decades past - and center around crimes. Brodie is generally not investigating the central crime or crimes, and he's not the motivating center of the book; I tend to think he's an important viewpoint, and is changed by each case, but they're not essentially his stories.

The first three were Case Histories, One Good Turn, and When Will There Be Good News?

This is the book about kidnapping, or maybe abduction. It has three major narrators, and a few secondary ones.

Jackson is in Yorkshire, where he was born, and where he hasn't been back for a while, and where he'd planned never to return. He's trying to trace the background of Hope McMaster, a New Zealand woman who was born there and adopted, somewhat illegally or secretly, in the mid-1970s. Early in this book, he "liberates" a small dog from its thuggish, abusive owner. That's the third of the three major abductions. 

Tracy Waterhouse is a retired police detective, never married, alone and mostly resigned to it, working as the head of security for a local mall. On that same day, she sees a horrible woman mistreating a small child - she knows the woman, a prostitute, from her years on the force, and is mildly surprised that any children are still in her care, since she's had a number taken away from her. She "buys" the child, Courtney, since she had an envelope full of money on her for a home-renovation job. She never got to be a mother, but she wants to take care of this child, and her motives are about as pure and positive as they can be.

That's the second abduction. The first happened back in 1975.

The third major narrator is Tilly, an elderly actress working on the soapy Collier TV show in the region - doing badly at it as she starts to sink under the weight of impending dementia, forgetting bits and pieces of today as her mind focuses on the past. [1] She doesn't abduct anyone, but is a witness of the horrible mother abusing Courtney in the mall. She seems to be an entirely separate thread for a lot of the novel, but she will be there in the end.

I won't spoil the minor narrators, who span the present day (about 2010) and 1975.

Jackson goes various places in Yorkshire, tracing leads to his client's past, and finding more missing people and slammed doors and implied threats of violence than seems plausible. Tracy upends her entire life to keep Courtney safe and give her the life she should have, running away from her job and trying to figure out how they can get away and find a safe, stable place for the two of them. Tilly tries to do her work on Collier, while her thoughts keep circling elements of her younger life in the '60s.

And the book keeps flashing back to 1975, when a prostitute was murdered and a small child found, emaciated, in her apartment with her dead body three weeks after her death. In the end, all of the abductions, all of the major and minor narrators, are linked, and we learn who Hope McMaster was, how she came to be "Hope McMaster" in New Zealand, and what will happen to Tracy and her new child. (And to Jackson and his dog, which is the least important of the strands.)

Atkinson is inherently a literary writer: she writes brilliantly and incisively, getting right into the heart of her character's heads and laying bare their thoughts and feelings and fears. She has a fascinating mastery of tone, here as in her other novels: she can be wryly funny and then show dark horrors within the same paragraph, back and forth again and again. This is a magnificent book in a magnificent sequence by one of the best writers working today.

[1] I started reading this novel on the day of the memorial service for my mother, who had progressive dementia over her last decade. I almost put the book down, and some parts of it were really difficult to read: I say that in case I skip over anything important to do with Tilly.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

This is the sixth collection of the 1970s Lone Wolf and Cub manga series, originally serialized in a magazine for adult men, or seinen - manga then, and (as I understand it) still now, have and had a mania for categorizing their audience as tightly as possible. There are five long stories here, like most of the volumes. Those stories are separate, with usually only minor elements flowing from one into the next (though this book has its last story based on the consequences for our hero from the previous story), and a larger overall plot that doesn't come up much at all in this volume but does occasionally surface in some of the stories.

I've been re-reading the series for about the past year: I thought I would be going through it more quickly, but a volume about every two months seems to be my pace. I warned up front that I thought what I had to say about individual volumes or stories could dwindle quickly; these stories are brilliantly told and masterpieces of their kind, but they are all very much of a kind.

So I'm afraid the thing that was most striking about Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead is that the title story's name was translated two different ways here. For the book title, and the table of contents, it's "Lanterns for the Dead." But the half-title for the story itself, which leads off this collection, is "Floating Spirits," which I suspect is a more precise translation of the original Japanese term. It's about floating lanterns, toro nagashi, which mark the end of the Obon festival, and, traditionally, light the way back to the otherworld for spirits that visit their families during that festival.

As I understand it, the lanterns are inscribed with the name of a specific dead person, usually a beloved ancestor (parents, grandparents, etc.). But the two lanterns in question here are the ones our hero, former executioner and current ronin Ogami Ittō, commissioned for himself and his young son Daigorō. That connects to one of the core ideas of the series: that Ittō and Daigorō are as good as dead already, on their path of vengeance - not "cursed" or "doomed," exactly, but on a path that leads inevitably to the otherworld.

The whole series is steeped in the mindset of Edo-period Japan like that, told from the point of view of characters who absolutely believe in the way of the samurai, who have lived their lives and will die following very specific precepts and enforcing the narrow boundaries of that world, for themselves and for everyone else, all of whom must fit into very tight boxes of allowed actions.

It's an alien world for American readers in the 21st century. But I think even for the original 1970s Japanese audience it was strange: hugely old-fashioned in every detail, and focused on the concerns of what was a small segment of society to begin with - for Americans, if the Founding Fathers were also a knightly order who believed intensely in chivalry, it might be something similar.

That's the central joy of Lone Wolf and Cub: being immersed in a long-ago, long-past world, dropping into the concerns and obsessions of those people, all organized into action-packed plots of violence and vengeance and treachery. This volume does that well; they all do.

Shakespeare Manga Theater by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka was a busy, popular, energetic creator for a long time - credited with over 700 books, plus animation projects and other things - and even the most expansive translation projects have only brought disconnected chunks of that oeuvre into English. I think I have a decent idea of the Tezuka work I've liked best, and has seemed strongest to me: his adult-aimed gekiga works, mostly from the early 1970s. Although, with several hundred other things I've never had a chance to read, that's a very tentative opinion.

But I keep reinforcing it when I find works from the mainstream of Tezuka's work - like Princess Knight a decade ago, or One Hundred Tales last year. They have mostly been in madcap-verging-on-goofy mode, with often-grotesque characters emoting at top volume and rampaging around the pages, seemingly to entertain an audience of easily-distractible hellions. On the positive side, his art is always clean and crisp and his stories move swiftly, though often in arbitrary directions, the better to keep the audience on board.

Shakespeare Manga Theater is a collection of stories, or chapters of stories, with Shakespeare connections, from about twenty-five years of Tezuka's career. Other than their inspiration, there's nothing to unify them. Well, they are all in that audience-pleasing Tezuka style: all big and flashy and in-your-face, like a three-card monte dealer laying down a line of patter for an easy mark.

I'll be blunt: I find Tezuka in this mode to be a purveyor of disposable entertainment for young boys. There's some glimpses of depth, or more nuanced thought, but the morals tend to be obvious and the action tends to be frenetic. I gather his iconic work in this mode - things like Astro Boy and Black Jack - were beloved by a couple of generations of Japanese boys, and slightly less so by their compatriots in other countries, but I didn't read Tezuka at that critical age, and that work has never struck me as more than adequate as an adult.

We start off with a fairly straight adaptation of Merchant of Venice from 1959 - entirely Tezuka-ized, but the same plot, and the whole play. Then a story called "Robio and Robiette" from Astro Boy a few years later - a looser adaptation but with the essential bones of the original still entirely visible.

There are two chapters from a project called Vampires, which the editors claim to be inspired by Macbeth. I will grant them that there are three witches who a major character consults, and their dialogue is Macbeth-adjacent, but none of the rest of the plot, as much of it as we see in this excerpt, seems to have anything to do with Shakespeare. We instead have a boy lycanthrope, a dastardly villain hiding as the trusted aide of the great man he's trying to ruin, and the gorgeously fragile girl love interest who just gets to cry and be kidnapped in these pages.

The back half of the book has three stories from an '80s series called Rainbow Parakeet, in which a master of disguise takes last-minute parts in plays so he can use that access to do major thefts of the rich people attending the opening nights of those plays. Well, that's the set-up in the first story - in the second he's on vacation and the third just randomly traveling. There's also a nemesis/potential love-interest female detective who is central in the first two stories and entirely missing in the third.

In the first Rainbow Parakeet story, the play he's dropping into - the star was just arrested by the FBI on drug-smuggling charges, and the understudy was humorously injured by the director at the last dress rehearsal - is Hamlet. I think this may actually be the actual first story about Rainbow Parakeet, since he explains his deal, and we get a lot of background on the female detective, too.

The second story is supposedly an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, but much more loosely. Parakeet and the detective (Senri) land at a horse farm out somewhere in rural Japan, and investigate the mysterious disappearance of a once-famous racehorse and his apparent reappearance every night to cheer up his "wife." (This story does not accord to anything I know about horse breeding, even granted that I know very little.) Senri is also dodging a potential suitor, who turns out to be the owner of the farm. It is a much vaguer adaptation of that play; I suspect every Rainbow Parakeet story was given the title of some other famous story, and used elements of that without directly adapting it as such.

And the last story sees Parakeet in another remote rural location, this time in Polynesia. There lives a world-famous dancer, Boroguirre, and Parakeet plans to "steal" his dancing style. But he instead gets caught up in a villain's plan to actually steal the secret mixture of forty plants that Boroguirre's tribe uses to create a unique mind-expanding potion. Boroguirre is black, and has a white wife, so this is all supposedly an adaptation of Othello, and as such, Boroguirre does get unreasonably jealous out of nowhere when the plot requires him to do so.

These are all sturdy, audience-pleasing manga stories, full of action and humor. None of them have anything you would hesitate to hand to a relatively bright seven-year-old, or a particularly dull twenty-year-old. They don't make particularly interesting use of their Shakespeare references, but it is true that all of them have Shakespeare references.

Better Things: Slip Slidin' Away

"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.

This song meant nothing to me before I was a father. Now, I start to mist up even thinking about it. Kids, man - they change you in ways you never see coming.

This is one of the big famous songs in the list - so big and so famous that I hesitated to include it; you all know this one already. But the point of a list like this isn't to showcase weird obscure stuff I happen to like, but to honestly list a whole bunch of songs that I care about. And this one qualifies - for the past two decades, if not when I was young and free and callow.

Paul Simon wrote Slip Slidin' Away in the mid-70s, releasing it as a new song on what was mostly a "greatest hits" record. We don't know if it's autobiographical. It probably is, to some degree, because that's where true emotion always comes from: the things that happen to you.

There are four verses - three about specific, unnamed people, and one about all of us. It's full of crisp, precise language that says true things in the ways only a great song can, and the music is quiet and soothing, as if to try to temper the bone-deep sadness in those words.

If you don't listen closely, it could sound happy, with its muted doo-wop background singers and quiet late-night vibe. If you don't think too closely about what Simon is singing, it could still. But once you've really heard it - even more once you've felt something like the people in those first three verses - you can never go back.

We work our jobs
Collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway
When in fact we're slip slidin' away

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 14, 2025

This is slightly a cheat; these four books were birthday presents that I got a week ago Saturday. So not "in the mail" and not "week of June 14," either. But the point of these posts is to list new books, and these are new books, and now is the time I have to make a post, so here I go.

The first two are ones I bought myself and had wrapped so I could open them. I've said it before: one of the great things about being an adult is you can buy the presents you want for your own events and no one will stop you. (The last two came from my brother, who knows me almost as well as I do.)

I bought Alastor, another mid-90s omnibus of Jack Vance novels from Tor; I've been running through Vance over the past few years, hitting the big obvious series that already exist in omnibus editions. (This might be the last one of those; I might have to dive into Lyonesse next.) The Alastor series, as I remember, is three loosely-related novels from the 1970s - but we'll see what I find when I read them this time.

Also from myself: The Worst We Can Find is a history of the MST3K TV show and it's various successors, by TV writer Dale Sherman. I've been watching MST3K episodes with my kids - first back when they were tweens/teens, and again recently as we re-started the tradition of watching a movie together once a week. So I guess, as I do, I'm over-intellectualizing again and want to know more about things that I could just take as they came. (I should really just relax.) This book looked to be the best of the serious/historical/explanatory ones about the show - I've seen one that's pretty solidly academic, and I'm sure there are others.

Speaking of which, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever is a memoir, of a kind, of the series by Frank Conniff, who was a writer and performer on the show for the first half of its original life and was also the one who did the initial choice of movies for the show. (Which means that he had to watch even more bad movies, including a whole bunch they never did on the show.) This is a slim book of, as it says, twenty-five essays about twenty-five movies.

And last is S. Petersen's Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, an omnibus of the two slim Petersen books from Chaosium from the '80s - as I recall, one was Cthulhu Mythos and the other was Dreamlands. At some point in the past twenty years or so, the two were combined into this one book and republished, which is nice for me since I lost my originals in my 2011 flood. This is probably officially a resource for the the Call of Cthulhu game, but it works just fine outside that context.

Quote of the Week: A Torturer's Musings

Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for; or perhaps it is only the chain  forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know.

 - Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, p.88

Naked City by Eric Drooker

Everyone has story elements that annoy them unreasonably. For me, it's often small factual things that undermine core themes of a book - the ones that make me think, "wait, well if she can do X, then Y can't be true."

So I spent a lot of time while reading Eric Drooker's 2024 graphic novel Naked City trying to square one very minor circle in my head, and failing. You see, the main character is Isabel, a young wannabe singer-songwriter who moves to New York to chase her art. Her mother was Mexican, and was deported when she was young; her father an American who has recently died. One thread of the book is Isabel's worry that she's undocumented - the book never makes it quite clear, but she apparently doesn't have any paperwork of any kind.

Leave aside the fact that she went to school, where the usual  functionaries would have demanded and received all kinds of proof of her existence and residence and medical history and whatnot. But Drooker has Isabel take a quick European tour right in the middle of the worry about her potentially-undocumented status. And I kept asking myself: does Drooker think, or want his audience to think, that anyone can fly off to another continent, and work there for an extended period of time, without a passport? That plot element - which is totally extraneous, by the way; Drooker could have made it a West Coast thing with no change to the narrative at all - proves that she must have documentation, or it couldn't have happened.

This is not important to the book at all. It didn't need to be that way. But it's the kind of element that makes me question every strength of the book, every moody blue panel and every allusive line of dialogue, wondering if they're as randomly rickety in their own ways.

Naked City is somewhat fabulistic, which could be the answer to that question - and the one of why Isabel never even tried to look for that lost mother, or know her mother's name. Fables are focused on telling their specific story, in a particular story-teller way, and details only come up as they support that work.

So Isabel goes to New York, looking to make music and share it with people. She gets a lousy McJob (literally) and busks on the corner, but needs to also do something more remunerative. So she answers an ad to work as an artist's model, for an unnamed painter who is another of our main characters - the fable here is about making art, and he's the other side of that equation.

Normally, in a fable, there would be a strong distinction between the two - one is lazy but successful, the other driven but a failure, that kind of thing. Drooker, though, isn't constructing this explicitly as a fable with a specific moral: both of our central artists are positive, and both become notably successful in their art as the book goes on...though both have to deal with one Business Person, the gatekeeper to success, who isn't as positive and artsy as they are. (Isabel's Business Person, as is typical for the music industry, is vastly worse: predatory and demanding and actively molding her into something she doesn't want to be.)

There are two other main characters. First is Alex, a flighty dancer who "dates" Isabel for a while and dips in and out of the narrative, mostly there (I think) to be the avatar of a certain type of young hedonic artist, living for sensation and totally in the moment. Turning up later in the book is another unnamed man, older, maimed, a former window-washer and probably currently homeless - he's the unexpectedly philosophical voice of experience, stoic and accepting. He's not an artist of any kind, but he used to be a craftsman of a sort, taking pride in doing his work well, and now is almost a nihilist, insisting that life is only about the pursuit of money but (maybe paradoxically) refusing to actually do that himself.

Naked City is the kind of book where characters suddenly launch into detailed explanations of their own motivations and desires; it's about Art and Life and features people who think in those capital-letter terms at great length. Isabel mostly pours it out in her songs, which makes her the most naturalistic character - and that's good, because she's central and gets the most page-time. The Painter engages in the most obvious why-art conversations, with just about every other character; I don't know if Drooker specifically thought of him as an author stand-in, but he tends in that direction. Alex, and the band of similar folks that follow along with him for a few scenes  - because it's no fun being a hedonist alone - are more shallow, entirely about the moment and sensation above all.

It's a fairly long book, over three hundred pages, but mostly leisurely - Isabel and The Painter rise in their respective creative worlds, in their different ways, and then things change, for both of them, and they make other artistic choices. It ends better for one of them than the other: I don't know if Drooker had a moral in mind, but if he did, it doesn't entirely become clear. To be fair, Drooker's comics have typically been more imagistic, and he ends this book in his old silent mode, with a forty-page wordless sequence largely framed by snow.

I tend to think Naked City gets too specific too much for its own good - the talky bits are more specific, and less successful, than the pure-image sections. Isabel's past and parents are a distraction: Drooker wants to show she launched from a specific place, but where she launched from isn't central to this story. The Painter is more iconic, because we know less about him: he's there, he's been painting for years. We know what he wants and cares about and loves: what's important.

But this is the kind of book that will be most loved and clutched to heart by other wanna-be artists, who will see themselves in all of the arguments about art and commerce, selling out and rising up, who will passionately agree with specific speeches - I wouldn't be surprised to see some panels or lines from Naked City turned into tattoos before too long; it's that kind of book. If you're in that bucket, you should take a look at it: it is deep and capacious, and will give you language to talk about things you care about and examples to frame your thinking.

All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

There's no right or wrong way to structure a memoir. But some are more distinctive or evocative than others - some make you think "that's interesting, that's different."

Powerpaola - the working name of a peripatetic South American cartoonist whose first name is indeed Paola - decided to tell stories around the bicycles she's had in her life. Where she was at that time, what she was doing, how each specific bicycle helped her get around the places she was living and what people it connected her to. (The edition I read was translated into English by Andrea Rosenberg,)

The book is All My Bicycles, and it doesn't go in chronological order, either. Powerpaola begins with three random bikes - she gives all of them quirky names throughout, or rather tells us the things she called each of them to differentiate them - that she had between 1996 and 2013, in three different cities on two different continents. She also begins the book by telling us she doesn't know how to end it, as if this first section is the last. From there, she moves backwards and forwards, with chapters on other bikes at other times, from her first as a young teen to a bike she used in Buenos Aires just a few years ago.

Her pages are busy, full of images that fill up their panels, all in a dark wash that's more brown than black, with occasional pops of contrasting colors. There's a lot of the natural world, dark and jungly, and even the cityscapes are busy and full of darkness, crammed with manholes and dark expanses of asphalt and barred windows.

There's no single story here: it's not that kind of memoir. Powerpaola sets up a possible overall narrative, about how she always runs away, in that first section, and that is one thread of the narrative throughout. But only one - she's more interested in specifics and moments and memories than in fitting all of her history into some tight schema to make a book out of it. Bicycles is a book of memories and thoughts, all "I remember that time" and "here's what this person meant to me then." It's not "what bicycles mean" - not to her, or to the world in general - but instead "here's my life, as seen through the lens of the bicycles I rode and the places I rode them through."

The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

I read Gene Wolfe's most successful series, The Book of the New Sun, what I think of as "recently" - though now I see it was six years ago. (The tempus, it do fugit, don't it?) I'd expected to get to this odd sequel "soon," and I guess this counts.

Book was a four-book series that told one continuous story; it was one work in multiple volumes, and has been reprinted in a single volume more than once since then. The Urth of the New Sun was a single novel, slightly longer than the constituent parts of Book, originally published about five years after the end of Book. But - and here I should point out that there's always something quirky about a Wolfe project, often multiple things - the quirky thing about Urth, or one of them, is that it too tends to fall into four distinct sections.

The narrator and hero of Book, Severian - once an apprentice torturer, now Autarch of the most extensive country on his very far-future Earth - spends Urth in a journey to save his planet, that very old-SF hero's journey. Urth starts on a vast starship - made of wood, with immense solar sails, for maximum Wolfean past-as-future frisson - then moves to the planet Yesod in another universe (or perhaps the universe is named Yesod; Wolfe is rarely interested in being clear) where Severian is tested, and then there's a voyage back on the same ship and a final section on Urth.

There's quite a lot of vaguely described time travel along the way: this unnamed ship voyages in both time and space, so the back half of the novel in particular bounces through multiple time periods of Earth/Urth - and, if you follow Wolfe, also Ushas, the new name of the planet once it is "saved."

To put what Wolfe says vaguely in fantasy-coded language into something more clearly science-fictional: it is very far in the future and the Sun is very old and dim. Other stars are visible during the day; winters get longer and colder almost year-by-year. The Sun's collapse is imminent enough to be plausible within a human timescale. Godlike beings - possibly AI, possibly a bio-engineered race - created by the human-like inhabitants of the previous universe (time-travel, remember, and a Penrosian cyclical universe model) are willing to drop a white hole into the Sun, which would rejuvenate it.

But they will only do so if the leader of Urth comes to their planet and goes through a test - at least one Autarch before Severian has taken that journey and failed. Testing leaders of planets seems to be their major industry; we see, from the air, a vast archipelago of islands, each one devoted to testing the leaders of one particular galaxy. And dropping the "white fountain" into the Sun will massively disrupt the current Urth, killing possibly a majority of the people living there. There's no hint of trying to warn them or create bulwarks against the rising seas, despite the fact that the journey of the white hole into the Sun takes at least centuries. Wolfe, as always, has a devout right-wing Catholic's disdain for mere individual human lives.

As usual in a Wolfe novel, the main character is confused and ill-informed, despite insisting repeatedly that he's super-competent and (in this particular case) that he never forgets anything. There are long conversations about the nature of reality and the SFnal underpinnings of this world, all very carefully phrased in such a way such that that none of it is clear to the reader in terms that reader already knows. That's how Wolfe works: if you're not willing to do most of the work yourself - if you don't think of a SF novel as a combination of a British crossword and an acrostic - Wolfe is not the writer for you.

In this novel in particular, most of the charms and interest are in getting additional details about characters and events from Book - but, again, all couched in Wolfean triple-reverse terms, at best allusive and often just gestures in the direction a solution might, possibly, be deduced if you think about everything in the world exactly the way Wolfe did circa 1986.

It's full of interesting moments and arresting images; for all my snark, this is actually on the accessible side of Wolfe's corpus. It would help if you had read, or even better intensely studied Book of the New Sun very soon before reading Urth, but it's not, strictly speaking, necessary. There is a novel here, with characters and events, and Wolfe, at this point in his career, would connect those events into a consistent plot that could be followed with only a normal amount of attention.

Urth is not the triumph Book was; there are multiple times when it threatens to become even more of a Christian allegory than it already is, and it's inherently a secondary, derivative work to begin with, a book explaining how something we knew would happen did happen. But it's a solid, deeply inventive book by one of the best and most distinctive SF writers of his era, and a return to his best-loved and most popular world.

Cult of the Ibis by Daria Tessler

I've only read one of Daria Tessler's works before - Salome's Last Dance, which I enjoyed a lot but had to admit I didn't entirely understand. So obviously I would next read a mostly wordless book of hers, about criminals and alchemy and set in a bizarre landscape.

The plot description of Cult of the Ibis does a great job of detailing the important points, so let me just quote it: this book "takes place in a fantasy cityscape loosely inspired by German Expressionist film. [... It] tells a story of an occultist getaway-driver who, after escaping with the loot from a bank robbery gone wrong, orders a build-your-own homunculus kit and goes on the lam."

Those sound like really random elements, but that's exactly what this book is: a collision of crime drama and hermetic mystery in a phantasmagorical city, in which our nameless, meek, yearning hero tries to transform himself, to double himself, through alchemy, perhaps because that kit costs exactly the take from the bank robbery of which he was the only survivor.

Tessler draws this in a busy, detailed, organic style, with imaginative panel layouts and film-inspired transitions. There is dialogue at important moments, but not a lot of it, and no captions. The reader has to imagine what any of these weird things might sound like. The main character, of course, never speaks. He's our Everyman, our viewpoint, our normal ordinary person - everyone and no one.

Oh, and there's a bunch of written text - alchemy explanations from magazines and advertisements - that our hero eagerly reads. We're not sure exactly what he's looking for in alchemy, what kind of transformation or power he wants, but we know he's small and weak: or sees himself that way, and so is that way. We don't know what he did before, how he became the one very different-looking member of this bank-robbery gang, any of the points on the arc of his life. All we see is this crime and the aftermath, along with his clear desire to learn the presumed secrets of the universe.

And that's what this book is about: bank robbery and the secrets of the universe. I doubt you can say that of any other book, so, really, you're now required to read this book someday, just for that. I'm sure you'll thank me for telling you about it.

Better Things: Family Tree

"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 don't think I'm ever deliberately obscure. There's stuff I like, and some of it I happened to randomly find - mostly back when I was paying more attention to popular music, or maybe when the ecosystem of popular music was more attuned to the kind of things I like. Some of the songs in this year's series are big and famous: we've already hit "I Don't Like Mondays" and the Dire Straits "Romeo and Juliet."

And some are the songs I loved the most on a record I bought because I heard a different single.

The Odds were an alternative band from western Canada in the '90s - I see from Wikipedia that they re-formed after an initial breakup at the millennium and are still around; good for them. I bought a couple of their records, and had that sense that I loved a couple of songs and didn't always connect with the rest.

But one good song is all you need - one good song is what each post in this series is all about.

So today is for Family Tree, from The Odds' 1991 first record Neopolitan.

I'll be gone before the things that I do now go wrong
Family tree is burning to heat my house a little longer

It's about someone burning down his life - it's all in metaphors, so we don't know what, exactly, he's doing. But we know he's doing it. (For my SFnal peeps: you could argue that "he" is humanity and the family is the Earth. Frankly, that could easily be the intended meaning. The more I come to think about it, the better I like that interpretation, to be honest.)

It's got a great rhythm, starting up with a rattling drum intro and transitioning into a jangly beat that continues throughout the song. The chorus - I just quoted it above - is strong, and gets bigger as the song goes on. It's yet another song that just sounds better the louder your turn it up, especially in your car with the windows open.

Books Read: May 2025

Here's what I read last month; I publish this mostly for myself. If you find it useful, too - hey, that's two of us!

Powerpaola, All My Bicycles (5/2, digital)

Eric Drooker, Naked City (digital, 5/4)

Osamu Tezuka, Shakespeare Manga Theater (digital, 5/9)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol. 6: Lanterns for the Dead (digital, 5/10)

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (5/10)

Axelle Lenoir, What If We Were...2 (digital, 5/11)

Raymond Chandler, The High Window (in Stories & Early Novels, 5/11)

Derek Evernden, Bogart Creek, Vol. 3 (digital, 5/17)

Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz, War and Peas: Hi, Earth (digital, 5/18)

Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, 5/18)

Noah Van Sciver, Beat It, Rufus (digital, 5/19)

P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It To Psmith (5/19)

Kris, Rob, Matt & Dave, Cyanide & Happiness: Punching Zoo (digital, 5/24)

William Kotzwinkle, The Midnight Examiner (5/24)

Laura Pérez, Ocultos (digital, 5/25)

Grant Snider, Thinking About Thinking (digital, 5/26)

Martin Millar, The Good Fairies of New York (5/26)

Mia Oberlӓnder, Anna (digital, 5/31)

Jack Vance, The Pnume (in Planet of Adventure, 5/31)

Next month I will read more books: that's my promise to you the home viewer.