Right now -- through the miracle of scheduled posting -- I am in the air with my family, on our way to a location I keep telling the boys I'm not going to tell them is Walt Disney World.
For the past three years of November vacations, I worked ahead, and had reviews and other posts scheduled to pop up the entire time I was away. This year, I'm busier at work, busier with trying to rebuild my basement, and just discombobulated from having my computer set up on the dining room table. This means that there's nothing in the hopper, and Antick Musings is about to go dark for about a week.
I trust you'll all be able to survive this horrible calamity, and I'll see you all on the other side.
(Oh, there will be a truncated "Reviewing the Mail" on Monday, and there's the slightest possibility that I'll blog something from vacation, but that's about it.)
Saturday, November 05, 2011
Friday, November 04, 2011
Realms of Fantasy is Dead Again
My only current paying freelance gig has been shot out from under me yet again; Realms of Fantasy magazine is being shut down for the third (I think) time in as many years.
SF Scope has the full story. Thanks to all of the owners of RoF for pouring money into it, even though that didn't work out the way any of us had hoped, and to everyone else who worked on the magazine. I came in very late in its life, but I'm pretty sure hiring me didn't directly lead to any of its many deaths.
And, if there's anyone out there looking for someone snarky to review books in that vast realm between comics and skiffy, I am your man.
SF Scope has the full story. Thanks to all of the owners of RoF for pouring money into it, even though that didn't work out the way any of us had hoped, and to everyone else who worked on the magazine. I came in very late in its life, but I'm pretty sure hiring me didn't directly lead to any of its many deaths.
And, if there's anyone out there looking for someone snarky to review books in that vast realm between comics and skiffy, I am your man.
Quote of the Week
"Some research has suggested that it is men, more than women, who yearn for marriage, but this may be merely a case of stated preference. Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them -- not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums."
- Nick Paumgarten, "Looking for Someone," p. 41 of the 7/4/11 New Yorker
- Nick Paumgarten, "Looking for Someone," p. 41 of the 7/4/11 New Yorker
Thursday, November 03, 2011
What We Lose, What We Save
My first real job, back in high school, was as a cashier for the discount department store Bradlees. It was a chain, but not a huge one; Bradlees stores covered the Northeast, but that was about it, and it wasn't growing when I worked there. Target and Walmart were still far off on the horizon -- though I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they were regional chains themselves at that point, growing bigger and claiming more territory -- but there were plenty of competitors in New Jersey, from the similarly regional -- and now equally-defunct -- Caldor and Jamesway to the then-major national leader, K-mart.
My default assumptions about retail were formed from working there: that stores are strong only as long as they're growing, and the stagnant ones are dying. Maybe dying slowly, but dying nonetheless. And, of course, the country -- even the world -- is finite, so every chain will hit stagnation before too long, and start dying. And so Jamesway died, which gave Bradlees a little boost. And then, a few years later -- in the late '90s, during that supposedly superheated economy full of dot-com money -- Bradlees ran out of gas itself, and shut down. I was long gone from them at that point -- working as a retail clerk in a low-end store is no way to feed a family -- but my wife managed a Bradlees shoe department almost to the bitter end. Luckily, the shoe department was outsourced, so she worked for a separate company that hadn't yet gone bankrupt -- though it would have it's time, soon enough -- and so she could go out on maternity leave with our first son in early 1998 and just never come back when the chain collapsed later that year.
I think about Bradlees, now and then. Not all that often. But sometimes I'm prompted -- I used to have a tin of box cutters from those days, with razor blades that were still useful, and so I often though of Bradlees when I had to cut up boxes. And, lately, I think about Bradlees when my train approaches Hoboken.
There's some kind of an industrial building, in what's probably Jersey City, up high above the train tracks and off on the other side of the next road. A line of trailers, each one snugged up to a gate in that building, aim their tails at the passing trains, as we slowly make our way through the junctions into the terminal. Some of those trailers move, I think. But the one on the end -- the farthest away from the way in; the one that's been there the longest -- never moves. And it has a big, faded Bradlees logo on its side.
That logo is doubly nostalgic, since it was outdated even when I started working for Bradlees back in 1986 -- the chain had rebranded with '80s colors, dark maroon and white, getting rid of the very '70s brown earth tones of their previous logo. But it's that '70s logo I see every day from my train: a trailer branded not just with a store that's been gone over a decade, but with a look that's been outdated for three.
I've been thinking a lot about unlikely survivals, since the flood that left my basement with six feet of mostly clean water at the end of August. As the waters were rising, I hauled things upstairs: two computers, a TV, the rocking chair I used for both of my infant sons, hundreds of books, videogames and movies from my now-older sons. But much more than that went under those waters; we never expected a flood that bad.
I cleared off the bottom shelf of every bookcase in the basement -- more than a dozen of them -- thinking that, at the very worst, we'd get a foot or so. I was wrong; when we think we can estimate how bad things can get, we're usually badly wrong.
Most of our Christmas ornaments were destroyed, and all of the softer and more electrical Christmas goods. The three totes that held them were up on a shelf about three feet high, but they either floated or were hit by something else floating, and the water got in.
I had about five thousand comics in that basement as well; mostly buried under other boxes and things. I hadn't been in those boxes for five years, at least. But when I got down into the basement, as the pumps were getting the water out and everything else settled into a three-foot deep mess, I saw "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" float by, and I couldn't look at it.
Two bicycles came out of that mess, were mostly cleaned and oiled, and are now in the shed. I think they're OK, or can be made OK. The bow saw we've used to cut Christmas trees for our two sons' entire lives was propped high up on a wall, and is now only as rusty as it was before the flood. Two different stacks of books, stashed up on top of bookshelves because I didn't really want them but also didn't exactly want to get rid of them, came through just fine, while a rare galley of Robert Jordan's last book -- also on top of a bookcase, right next to one of those piles -- fell into the water.
One shelf of one bookcase -- starting in the middle of Charles Stross hardcovers, and running about twenty-five books -- was the only thing entirely spared. Dozens of other shelves -- all of my graphic novels, manga, and whatever else you call books with juxtaposed words and pictures; all my hardcovers deeper in the alphabet than C.S. Lewis; all my trade paperbacks; my few mass-market paperbacks; two big bookcases of classics I kept adding to, and rarely read from, including a nearly-complete set of Anthony Trollope I was going to get back to any year now; and all of my unread books that weren't sent by publishers or bought in the last six months -- were either engulfed by the waters directly or dragged down by falling bookshelves.
When the waters drained, there was a rumpled surface of wet book-pulp, two feet above the ruined carpet, throughout that basement: it had all become dirty, wet, slippery trash, and had to be laboriously hauled out just to be thrown away. Not a single one of those books, or the shelves they sat on, had the slightest hope.
All of my recent CDs -- still in piles on the fronts of shelves on one of those bookcases -- scattered throughout that mess, and were mostly lost. I gathered what I could, but giant messes aren't conducive to careful excavating; they need to be shoveled out of the way before the smell and mold and rot get a foothold. Older CDs -- collected in plastic drawer-boxes, mostly stuck under a table -- were easier to find, and were stacked in the backyard. I spent two days shucking wet CD cases, throwing away the books and digipacks and plastic and washing the CDs in tubs of bleachy, soapy water. One of those drawer-boxes disappeared entirely, I think -- there were mounds of garbage in the front and back yards, giant masses of formerly useful stuff, and those could engulf anything -- but another survived entirely unscathed, having somehow floated free, and stayed above water the entire time. So I now have about 40 CDs that still have their cases -- the most miscellaneous of my boxes, of course -- and hundreds half-organized in a few hastily-bought binders.
Our tax returns and other financial stuff were in ziplocked bags in upper cabinets, five feet off the ground. The water got in; they were just more garbage.
I had a big metal desk -- had had it since the late '80s at my mother's house -- full of paper and trinkets, maps and cables, leather blank books that I'd probably never use and humorous bumper stickers I might one day put on a car. All of that was destroyed; the desk removed by the same trash-hauling firm that got our washer, dryer, and refrigerator. (They couldn't get the couch; that was on the other side of the basement, and a ton or so of wet books had to be removed to even get to it.)
And so on. There was a lot of stuff in that basement -- some of it things only used for a short time each year (like our fourth air conditioner, or snow pants), some of it warehoused and half-forgotten (like those comics, and the magazines in boxes next to them), some of it used every day (like the food in that fridge), some of it picked over and looked at and moved about now and then (like all of my books), and a lot of it was things that we only realize we lost bit by bit, day by day, as we look for it and realize.
We have this conversation every day: "Have you seen that thing?" "Oh, it was in the basement."
It was in the basement. That's all that needs to be said. There's hardly anything in the basement now. We know where it all went.
But my family is still here, and we're rebuilding. Eventually -- if my wife doesn't stop me bodily, or we don't move before then -- I'll probably have five thousand books in that basement again. And, if the waters come again, we should be better prepared. But things still get destroyed, all of the time. Everything has an end; every person or house or book or trinket, no matter how much anyone loves and cherishes it, will eventually be gone. But sometimes you can get a good run before that.
So I think about that Bradlees trailer, still serving someone all these years later. And I hope it can hold on, and keep being useful, for as long as possible. Because, if it can do that, maybe there's a chance for me as well.
My default assumptions about retail were formed from working there: that stores are strong only as long as they're growing, and the stagnant ones are dying. Maybe dying slowly, but dying nonetheless. And, of course, the country -- even the world -- is finite, so every chain will hit stagnation before too long, and start dying. And so Jamesway died, which gave Bradlees a little boost. And then, a few years later -- in the late '90s, during that supposedly superheated economy full of dot-com money -- Bradlees ran out of gas itself, and shut down. I was long gone from them at that point -- working as a retail clerk in a low-end store is no way to feed a family -- but my wife managed a Bradlees shoe department almost to the bitter end. Luckily, the shoe department was outsourced, so she worked for a separate company that hadn't yet gone bankrupt -- though it would have it's time, soon enough -- and so she could go out on maternity leave with our first son in early 1998 and just never come back when the chain collapsed later that year.
I think about Bradlees, now and then. Not all that often. But sometimes I'm prompted -- I used to have a tin of box cutters from those days, with razor blades that were still useful, and so I often though of Bradlees when I had to cut up boxes. And, lately, I think about Bradlees when my train approaches Hoboken.
There's some kind of an industrial building, in what's probably Jersey City, up high above the train tracks and off on the other side of the next road. A line of trailers, each one snugged up to a gate in that building, aim their tails at the passing trains, as we slowly make our way through the junctions into the terminal. Some of those trailers move, I think. But the one on the end -- the farthest away from the way in; the one that's been there the longest -- never moves. And it has a big, faded Bradlees logo on its side.
That logo is doubly nostalgic, since it was outdated even when I started working for Bradlees back in 1986 -- the chain had rebranded with '80s colors, dark maroon and white, getting rid of the very '70s brown earth tones of their previous logo. But it's that '70s logo I see every day from my train: a trailer branded not just with a store that's been gone over a decade, but with a look that's been outdated for three.
I've been thinking a lot about unlikely survivals, since the flood that left my basement with six feet of mostly clean water at the end of August. As the waters were rising, I hauled things upstairs: two computers, a TV, the rocking chair I used for both of my infant sons, hundreds of books, videogames and movies from my now-older sons. But much more than that went under those waters; we never expected a flood that bad.
I cleared off the bottom shelf of every bookcase in the basement -- more than a dozen of them -- thinking that, at the very worst, we'd get a foot or so. I was wrong; when we think we can estimate how bad things can get, we're usually badly wrong.
Most of our Christmas ornaments were destroyed, and all of the softer and more electrical Christmas goods. The three totes that held them were up on a shelf about three feet high, but they either floated or were hit by something else floating, and the water got in.
I had about five thousand comics in that basement as well; mostly buried under other boxes and things. I hadn't been in those boxes for five years, at least. But when I got down into the basement, as the pumps were getting the water out and everything else settled into a three-foot deep mess, I saw "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" float by, and I couldn't look at it.
Two bicycles came out of that mess, were mostly cleaned and oiled, and are now in the shed. I think they're OK, or can be made OK. The bow saw we've used to cut Christmas trees for our two sons' entire lives was propped high up on a wall, and is now only as rusty as it was before the flood. Two different stacks of books, stashed up on top of bookshelves because I didn't really want them but also didn't exactly want to get rid of them, came through just fine, while a rare galley of Robert Jordan's last book -- also on top of a bookcase, right next to one of those piles -- fell into the water.
One shelf of one bookcase -- starting in the middle of Charles Stross hardcovers, and running about twenty-five books -- was the only thing entirely spared. Dozens of other shelves -- all of my graphic novels, manga, and whatever else you call books with juxtaposed words and pictures; all my hardcovers deeper in the alphabet than C.S. Lewis; all my trade paperbacks; my few mass-market paperbacks; two big bookcases of classics I kept adding to, and rarely read from, including a nearly-complete set of Anthony Trollope I was going to get back to any year now; and all of my unread books that weren't sent by publishers or bought in the last six months -- were either engulfed by the waters directly or dragged down by falling bookshelves.
When the waters drained, there was a rumpled surface of wet book-pulp, two feet above the ruined carpet, throughout that basement: it had all become dirty, wet, slippery trash, and had to be laboriously hauled out just to be thrown away. Not a single one of those books, or the shelves they sat on, had the slightest hope.
All of my recent CDs -- still in piles on the fronts of shelves on one of those bookcases -- scattered throughout that mess, and were mostly lost. I gathered what I could, but giant messes aren't conducive to careful excavating; they need to be shoveled out of the way before the smell and mold and rot get a foothold. Older CDs -- collected in plastic drawer-boxes, mostly stuck under a table -- were easier to find, and were stacked in the backyard. I spent two days shucking wet CD cases, throwing away the books and digipacks and plastic and washing the CDs in tubs of bleachy, soapy water. One of those drawer-boxes disappeared entirely, I think -- there were mounds of garbage in the front and back yards, giant masses of formerly useful stuff, and those could engulf anything -- but another survived entirely unscathed, having somehow floated free, and stayed above water the entire time. So I now have about 40 CDs that still have their cases -- the most miscellaneous of my boxes, of course -- and hundreds half-organized in a few hastily-bought binders.
Our tax returns and other financial stuff were in ziplocked bags in upper cabinets, five feet off the ground. The water got in; they were just more garbage.
I had a big metal desk -- had had it since the late '80s at my mother's house -- full of paper and trinkets, maps and cables, leather blank books that I'd probably never use and humorous bumper stickers I might one day put on a car. All of that was destroyed; the desk removed by the same trash-hauling firm that got our washer, dryer, and refrigerator. (They couldn't get the couch; that was on the other side of the basement, and a ton or so of wet books had to be removed to even get to it.)
And so on. There was a lot of stuff in that basement -- some of it things only used for a short time each year (like our fourth air conditioner, or snow pants), some of it warehoused and half-forgotten (like those comics, and the magazines in boxes next to them), some of it used every day (like the food in that fridge), some of it picked over and looked at and moved about now and then (like all of my books), and a lot of it was things that we only realize we lost bit by bit, day by day, as we look for it and realize.
We have this conversation every day: "Have you seen that thing?" "Oh, it was in the basement."
It was in the basement. That's all that needs to be said. There's hardly anything in the basement now. We know where it all went.
But my family is still here, and we're rebuilding. Eventually -- if my wife doesn't stop me bodily, or we don't move before then -- I'll probably have five thousand books in that basement again. And, if the waters come again, we should be better prepared. But things still get destroyed, all of the time. Everything has an end; every person or house or book or trinket, no matter how much anyone loves and cherishes it, will eventually be gone. But sometimes you can get a good run before that.
So I think about that Bradlees trailer, still serving someone all these years later. And I hope it can hold on, and keep being useful, for as long as possible. Because, if it can do that, maybe there's a chance for me as well.
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
2011 World Fantasy Awards
They were announced this past weekend at the World Fantasy Convention (where else?), held this year in beautiful, sunny San Diego.
Since I've been a judge for this award (a few years back now; the scars have completely healed), I've got a higher regard for the winners, and now I really need to track down a copy of Who Fears Death.
Congratulations to all of the winners. And, to the judges: you can relax now, and read something you want to, for a change.
Novel: Who Fears Death?
by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Novella: "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales
)
Short Story: "Fossil-Figures" by Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)
Collection: What I Didn't See and Other Stories
by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award, Professional: Marc Gascoigne for Angry Robot
Special Award, Non-Professional: Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press
Life Achievement: Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer
Since I've been a judge for this award (a few years back now; the scars have completely healed), I've got a higher regard for the winners, and now I really need to track down a copy of Who Fears Death.
Congratulations to all of the winners. And, to the judges: you can relax now, and read something you want to, for a change.
Novel: Who Fears Death?
by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)Novella: "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales
)Short Story: "Fossil-Figures" by Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales
)Anthology: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)Collection: What I Didn't See and Other Stories
by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award, Professional: Marc Gascoigne for Angry Robot
Special Award, Non-Professional: Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press
Life Achievement: Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Read in October
Life got more-or-less back to normal in October -- we got a furnace in the middle of the month, and that was the last piece needed to get our house's systems back to basic functioning -- but I personally am still squatting (along with my computer) in the kitchen, as the renovations of the now-dry but still very empty basement grind forward slowly.
Along the way, of course, I read some books, and these are they:
Along the way, of course, I read some books, and these are they:
- George McManus's Bringing Up Father (10/1)
- Lawrence Block, Getting Off (10/6)
- Dan Wells, I Don't Want to Kill You (10/7)
- Bob Sehlinger & Liliane J. Opsomer with Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World with Kids 2011 (10/10) (link is to brand-new 2012 edition)
I've written about the "Unofficial Guides" at great length before -- this post here is probably the longest and most detailed -- and I've been a big fan of them even before I came to work at Wiley, the house that publishes them. So of course I dug through a few of those books this year to prepare for this year's big family trip -- even if that trip is to the same place as it's been for the past three years. This particular volume is a shortened and focused version of the "big book," aimed at families. I'd still recommend the big one first, but this has some useful original stuff, particularly for those with younger rugrats than mine.
- Editors of McSweeney's, The McSweeney Joke Book of Book Jokes (10/11)
- The Imagineers, The Imagineering Field Guide to Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World (10/11)
A slim little book written by the gestalt mind of everyone who had ever worked on building that particular park -- I joke slightly, since it did credit, in very small type hidden on the copyright page, the actual writer who did all of the work and tracked down the engineers, designers, and other folks who put the place together -- full of mostly-interesting information about the rides, designs, and other trivia of the Magic Kingdom. It was a bit too small and little, actually, since it had a lot of photos that weren't as clear and large as one might have wanted. As a pocket guide for things to look for in the park, though, it would be excellent. But it is primarily for either hardcore Disney geeks or folks who are really interested in industrial design.
- Steven M. Barrett, The Hassle-Free Walt Disney World Vacation 2011 (10/19)
I also read other guides to the places I'm vacationing, because reading travel guides is one of the great minor pleasures of life -- particularly to those of us who love to plan, and imagine, and mull over everything before we do any of it. (Last year I had five Book-A-Day posts about the books I read for that year's vacation -- one, two, three, four, five -- which is vaguely justifiable because I was reviewing a book a day.) This one was OK, but didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know -- difficult at this point, I'll admit -- and was made up in large part with touring plans that are not as well-laid out, nor as useful, nor (I suspect) as scientifically tested as those in the "Unofficial Guides." It's pretty good, but the things it does are things I find the Unofficial books do much better.
- George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons (10/27)
I doubt I'll do a serious review of this -- it's too damn big, and has been thoroughly chewed over by people much more devoted than me already -- but I'll be damned if I read one book for most of a month and not get a post out of it, so something will be forthcoming. Edit: No, it isn't.
- Richard Sala, The Hidden (10/31)
2011 (10/10) (link is to brand-new 2012 edition)
(10/11)
(10/19)
(10/27)Monday, October 31, 2011
Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/29
First up is the first in a new manga series from Vertical, No Longer Human, Part 1
. It's adapted from the influential bestselling novel (by Osamu Dazai) of the same name, by the popular manga-ka Usamaru Furuya. No Longer Human is the possibly-autobiographical story of a young man, an aspiring artist named Yozo Oba, who hides his true feelings of self-loathing behind a class-clown mask. It was officially published last week.
From the newish small press PM Press came two books from their "Outspoken Authors" series, which each pair a new novella with nonfiction by the same author:- Published back in August, The Wild Girls
by Ursula K. Le Guin, including essays on modesty and the place of reading in the modern world, plus an interview with series edition Terry Bisson.
- Coming in November, Cory Doctorow's The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
, along with an essay on copyright (in case we didn't already know his stance on it) and an interview with Bisson.
Also from PM Press -- from their Switchblade imprint, which looks to be focused on lefty crime fiction -- is the new anthology Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!
, edited by Gary Phillips and Andre Gibbons. The theme here is, more or less, stories about riots and revolution -- very timely in this season of Occupying everywhere in the world -- with reprints by Michael Moorcock and Cory Doctorow & Michael Skeet, plus sixteen original stories from writers including Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Sara Paretsky, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Luis Rodriguez. It will be published in trade paperback in mid-December.
EVE Online is one of the many massively multiplayer online games which I have not played (a category which includes all of them, to be honest; I don't like strangers enough to want to purposely spend time with them), and it has hatched a new novel, EVE: Templar One
. The author is Tony Gonzales, author of one of the two previous EVE novels, The Empyrean Age
, as well as a couple of novellas in the same world -- he's also the IP development manager for EVE's parent company, which may mean something like "head writer" in tech-company speak. In any case, he knows this world as well as anybody, and he's proved he can put together words into the shape of a novel once before, which is pretty darn good for a licensed book. Templar One will be published by Tor in December as a trade paperback.
And last for this week is Fenrir
, a big new novel by M.D. Lachlan which is also the sequel to his Wolfsangel
. It's a historical fantasy -- precisely how historical I'm not sure -- in which the Vikings are laying fiery siege to Paris in some year I can't find any reference to. It looks dark and doomy -- as often happens to books with Vikings in them -- including "the Count," who must decide whether to hand over his sister to the invaders or see his city destroyed. Fenrir was published by Pyr in trade paperback on October 18th.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
So What's the Problem?
From a New York Times article, this morning, about Republican-aligned "Super PACs" raising vast sums of money in preparation for the 2012 elections, a quote about outsourcing the GOP voter database:
“Every time we empower independent third-party groups to do what the party is supposed to be doing, it diminishes the value of the brand and what the party represents,” said Gary Emineth, a former chairman of the North Dakota Republican Party, who fought against the Data Trust agreement.I thought what the Republican party represents is giving control of everything to rich third parties?
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Comics Round-Up: No Connection Whatsoever
Mister Wonderful
is part of the endless repackaging of Daniel Clowes, though this piece (unlike most of his recent books) didn't first see life as a single issue of his old comics series, Eightball. No, this first appeared in the short-lived New York Times Magazine "Funny Papers" section, one of the few moments when the Grey Lady tried to emulate regular newspapers.The story has been reworked slightly -- each large NYT page has been broken into two shorter, wider pages, to pad the length up to something that can be called a book -- and there are some other changes as well, but it's still the same, just told in a slightly different form. (And it's also a story very similar to Clowes's last standalone graphic novel, Wilson, which I reviewed here last year.)
Marshall is a middle-aged sad sack, divorced, lonely, nearly broke and with no real hopes of getting any better. He narrates this story -- intensively narrates it, in a caption-filled style very out of fashion in most of mainstream comics, which shoves us directly into his head and holds us there, hostage perhaps, until the end of the book. Marshall isn't great company, unfortunately -- he's obsessive about his own shortcomings, and self-flagellation is only interesting for so long.
Mister Wonderful is the story of one day in Marshall's life -- one night, really -- starting with a blind date, and continuing on from there. Marshall's been set up with Natalie by mutual friends, and Natalie is probably just as damaged as Marshall is, in her own ways -- but we only see her through Marshall's eyes, and only see her when Marshall gets out of the way, which is hardly ever. So Mister Wonderful is primarily a tour through Marshall's psyche, with short stops along the way to take in some real-life events that illustrate that his poor self-image is well rooted in his actual competencies.
It doesn't have the satirical edge of Clowes's earlier work -- Clowes wants us to identify with Marshall and care about him. (Mister Wonderful is most like a work by a slightly more friendly, and less formalist, Chris Ware.) But Marshall is undeniably tedious and suffocating -- though he is nowhere near as horrible as the "hero" of Clowes's Wilson was, so he does have that to (very slightly) recommend him. Clowes can create characters that are damaged, self-obsessed, and fascinating -- recall Enid and Rebecca from Ghost World -- but, these days, he's tending to leave off "fascinating," which is unfortunate.
is much easier (and quicker) to describe: this 2009 book (edited by New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff) collects cartoons from the New Yorker's long history about finance, economics, and just money. As usual with the New Yorker, there's a decided tilt towards cartoons about either "big business" (a bunch of guys in suits around a table) or "the rich" (either two men sitting in club chairs, or some kind of swanky party). This particular New Yorker collection, I have to say, stints hugely in the guy-on-a-desert-island cartoon.So this is somewhat an updated and supersized new edition of the New Yorker Book of Money Cartoons (published in 1991, and reviewed here by me, which is why I remember it), organized by decade and substantially longer. If you're looking for the definitive collection of New Yorker-style "drawings" about bankers, conspicuous consumption, and the idle rich, this is it. If you can't stand New Yorker cartoons, this probably won't change your mind.
This year's entry in the series is The Lives of Sacco & Vanzetti
, an impeccably researched, carefully constructed, and utterly engrossing book about two anarchists convicted and executed for murder in the early 1920s, despite mixed evidence and world-wide outrage about the case. (It was one of the very first times that there really was world-wide coverage of a single event, in that first era in which news truly became global.)As usual, Geary doesn't pick a side -- he presents all of the evidence, as dispassionately as possible, and ends with a page detailing the best arguments on both sides. (He clearly prefers murder stories that are still mysteries, decades later -- the stories that are unfinished, and will never be fully closed.) And his linework is as precise and detailed -- just this side of finicky -- as ever. I find that the least-known cases make for the most fascinating Geary books, since all of the facts are completely new, but even this heavily picked-over piece of history gives him a lot of scope to retell the story.
were drawn and published; this book collects the first two years of that long-running strip, from 1913 and 1914. It's from the very dawn of the American newspaper strip, and many of these strips still have the stiffness of the 19th century to them at times, along with the lack of gutters between panels of an art form still figuring out its ground-rules.I have to admit that I don't find martial violence as side-splitting a running joke as McManus's contemporaries seemed to, but, at this early point, Bringing Up Father wasn't primarily about Maggie hitting Jiggs with the rolling pin -- though that did occur now and then. The core of the strip was Jiggs, that boisterous, glad-handing, common man, thrown against his will into the realms of the upper class, propelled by his social-climbing wife, Maggie. (The strip never did explain how Jiggs got suddenly rich -- never even hinted at it, which is probably for the best.) Jiggs, of course, would much rather prefer to sneak off to a bar, or a card game, to waste time with his old chums -- and practically every working man in New York seems to have been his chum!
Bringing Up Father was a limited strip, but it worked pretty well within those limitations. McManus became a much more interesting and intricate artist later on, but these early strips are still consistently entertaining, which is pretty good for throwaway entertainment nearly a hundred years old.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Today's Favorite Song
Anything I do more than once becomes a tradition, and so, here's the song I'm currently listening to too much (and too loudly) in my car -- "Welcome to Your Wedding Day" by The Airborne Toxic Event [1].
It's got a great opening, with almost random musical riffs bouncing off each other until the first verse starts -- and there's a wonderful '80s-style keyboard sound in it, too. Plus, of course, it's the kind of song that makes you want to turn it up loud in your car, which is one of the very best kinds of songs.
(It's from their new record, All At Once
.)
Edit: That player isn't working for me -- it's supposed to launch the MP3 from the band's (snicker!) MySpace page, but doesn't seem to be doing that. So, instead, have some random person's fan-made video for Assassin's Creed with this song as the soundtrack. (There's also an official live acoustic version on YouTube that's good in its own way, but it doesn't have the looming ominousness of the album version.)
[1] Who also have an eminently literary name, which I appreciate.
It's got a great opening, with almost random musical riffs bouncing off each other until the first verse starts -- and there's a wonderful '80s-style keyboard sound in it, too. Plus, of course, it's the kind of song that makes you want to turn it up loud in your car, which is one of the very best kinds of songs.
(It's from their new record, All At Once
.)Edit: That player isn't working for me -- it's supposed to launch the MP3 from the band's (snicker!) MySpace page, but doesn't seem to be doing that. So, instead, have some random person's fan-made video for Assassin's Creed with this song as the soundtrack. (There's also an official live acoustic version on YouTube that's good in its own way, but it doesn't have the looming ominousness of the album version.)
[1] Who also have an eminently literary name, which I appreciate.
Less Exciting Book Titles
Yesterday, the hashtag #lessexcitingbooktitles flashed like wildfire through the status boxes of Twitter -- or, at least, a couple of bookish people were doing it, as a takeoff on a much more popular and widespread meme about music.
These were my contributions; I hope that you find them suitably unexciting:
These were my contributions; I hope that you find them suitably unexciting:
- The Pretty Good Storm
- The Leaseholder of the Rings
- Fahrenheit 84
- Lord Valentine's Summer Cottage
- The Factory-Refurbished Man
- The Moon Is a Grumpy Friend
- Peace and Peace
- The Girl With the Dragon Temporary Tattoo
- The For-a-Little-While War
- Man Equals
- A Connecticut Yankee in Greenwich
- Darkness at Midnight
- I, Clarence
- Fluttering Slightly With the Wind
- To Have and Have Some More
- The Da Vinci Acrostic
- The Mediocre Gatsby
- A Town Not All That Much Like Alice
Quote of the Week: Eliot on Editors
"Yes, I suppose some editors are failed writers -- but so are most writers."
- T.S. Eliot
- T.S. Eliot
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Minority Tastes
I won't say that I'm not an elitist -- why wouldn't anyone want to consider themselves elite? -- but I still deeply believe that the books that I love are intrinsically wonderful, and that enjoying them is something that any half-smart and basically literate person should be able to do.
Unfortunately, the world does not want to agree with me; I've just seen that Harry Connolly -- whose novel Game of Cages was one of the best things I read last year, and whose Circle of Enemies I've been holding onto for an upcoming vacation -- has just been told that his current publisher will not be buying any more books in that series, for what seem like eminently sensible falling-sales reasons. (I'm in the business; I can access BookScan.)
This is not the first time, of course; one of my other favorite writers, Matt Hughes, had two "Big Six" publishers shot out from under him in three books -- three wonderful, amazing, lovely books, let me emphasize -- but has since gone on to write a number of excellent books for smaller houses.
And there are plenty of others -- Elizabeth Willey, the only writer I've ever found who can do pseudo-Zelazny Amber, and did it well, disappeared after three novels. Before that, there was a writer who had two screamingly funny Bertie-Wooster-as-a-ghost-hunter paperbacks (and whose name I can't remember), and she also disappeared without a trace.
I know you people -- the ones reading these words now -- must be the exceptions, but the world, more and more, seems to be filled with people whose tastes are just inexplicably horrible. Luckily, I still harbor hopes of becoming Emperor of the Literary World one day, and then I will make everything Right.
For right now, good luck to Connolly -- and, if you've been putting off grabbing his books, do it now, since low-selling books are the ones that it's murder to find later on -- and to all of those other absolutely amazing writers whom it seems that only I like.
Unfortunately, the world does not want to agree with me; I've just seen that Harry Connolly -- whose novel Game of Cages was one of the best things I read last year, and whose Circle of Enemies I've been holding onto for an upcoming vacation -- has just been told that his current publisher will not be buying any more books in that series, for what seem like eminently sensible falling-sales reasons. (I'm in the business; I can access BookScan.)
This is not the first time, of course; one of my other favorite writers, Matt Hughes, had two "Big Six" publishers shot out from under him in three books -- three wonderful, amazing, lovely books, let me emphasize -- but has since gone on to write a number of excellent books for smaller houses.
And there are plenty of others -- Elizabeth Willey, the only writer I've ever found who can do pseudo-Zelazny Amber, and did it well, disappeared after three novels. Before that, there was a writer who had two screamingly funny Bertie-Wooster-as-a-ghost-hunter paperbacks (and whose name I can't remember), and she also disappeared without a trace.
I know you people -- the ones reading these words now -- must be the exceptions, but the world, more and more, seems to be filled with people whose tastes are just inexplicably horrible. Luckily, I still harbor hopes of becoming Emperor of the Literary World one day, and then I will make everything Right.
For right now, good luck to Connolly -- and, if you've been putting off grabbing his books, do it now, since low-selling books are the ones that it's murder to find later on -- and to all of those other absolutely amazing writers whom it seems that only I like.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Comics Round-Up: More Random Books
I've devoted several thousand words over the past few years to the "Best American Comics" series -- see my posts on the 2006 and 2007 and 2008 and 2009 editions -- so perhaps I'll be forgiven for not diving as deeply into the Neil Gaiman-edited 2010
edition. (Particularly since the 2011
book is out now, all shiny and new, so this is terribly old news.) Each editor shifts the material somewhat -- Gaiman's volume leads off with a long excerpt from the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple/Gary Panter Omega the Unknown, the first Big Two story in the series, which feels significant -- but the core of each book is very similar, drawing from the same group of major mid-career "alternative" cartoonists, from Gilbert Hernandez (here represented by a story done with his vastly less-prolific brother Mario) to Ben Katchor to Chris Ware to Peter Bagge to Bryan Lee O'Malley to C. Tyler to Robert Crumb. As usual, the series editors, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, picked a hundred notable works from their year -- September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009 -- and sent those to Gaiman, who chose from them (and, possibly, from a few things he discovered on his own) to make this collection. Gaiman's introduction makes it clear that this isn't the "best" comics of the year -- nor even the best "American" comics of the year, whatever that may mean -- but it is a big collection of a lot of very good comics (and a few clunkers, though precisely which ones are clunkers may be a matter of personal taste) at a reasonable price. The whole series is a great way to discover what's going on over on the more interesting, less punchy side of the modern comics world, so I recommend this book, as I do its predecessors, for people who like stories told in comics form, though probably not for the kind of people who like the things that draw in the crowds of maladapted boy-men every Wednesday.
is the third in a series of graphic albums -- published to be appropriate for younger readers, but not dumbed down for them, in a neat sidestep that O'Connor has gracefully mastered -- retelling, very faithfully and well, the stories of the Olympian gods and goddesses. (The first two covered Athena and Zeus; they are both also excellent.) Hera is a bold choice for this early in the series; she's the goddess of marriage and childbirth, two very adult (and boring, to kids) things, as well as used in most mythological retellings purely as an antagonist, either the shrewish wife of Zeus who drove him to wander or the nasty cuckolded wife piling torments on her roving husband's blameless sons. O'Connor does get into that side of Hera's life -- much of this book is a retelling of the labors of Heracles -- but she's the heroine of her own story here, smart and poised and utterly in control, even when Zeus goes haring off after yet another pretty mortal princess. O'Connor's knack for telling his stories in ways that are appropriate for smart pre-teens but with buried hints of darker matters for older readers is just as keen as in the previous books, and his afterword -- which is as scholarly as it is enthusiastic -- dives deeper into the mythological underpinnings of his story and O'Connor's thoughts as he put it together. And his art is as evocative and moody as before; his monsters are truly monstrous and his world is full of wonders. This is an amazing series, absolutely perfect for those mythology-loving kids and just as enthralling for those of us who discovered Edith Hamilton much longer ago than we care to admit.
, the collected stories of a character who is very much a product of a very specific time -- and that time was before I was born. Mr. Natural is described on the back cover as a "bearded, robed, curmudgeonly guru," but, really, he was just one in a long line of Crumb stand-ins, embodying one particular part of Crumb's own psyche to make particular points about contemporary society. Natural was the hippie side of Crumb, I suppose, forever disdaining all kinds of restraints, seeking mystical guidance from supernatural forces of one kind or another, and, most centrally, nakedly questioning the point of life and what, if anything, we're supposed to do with ourselves while we're alive. He does this, most usually, in pseudo-Socratic dialogues with Flakey Foont -- yes, these characters were conceived in the late '60s, and that permeates everything about them -- who is just as stereotyped an "Establishment" "square" "straight man" as Natural is a stereotype old hippie. (Though Crumb did anticipate what the real hippies would turn into, a couple of decades ahead.) I find it all a bit sad and woolly-headed, forty years later, but I am a well-known grump with no soul; more spiritually-oriented folks are likely to get more out of Natural's antics than I do.
, the fifth treasury edition reprinting Stephan Pastis's morbid and pun-filled Pearls Before Swine comic strip. I've written about this strip a number of times before, and I've never had all that much to say about it -- it's a fun, occasionally dark, not-terribly-well-drawn, and usually very fun newspaper strip, and I greatly appreciate with without feeling the need to anatomize what makes it good. So: this was another one, with more Pastis annotations (which make any cartoon collection better), and it was just as enjoyable as the others.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Parallel Lines That Diverge Wildly
Anyone who thinks there's no difference between a billionaire who spends his money to promote social causes and politics he likes, on the one hand, and a billionaire who spends his money to specifically remove or lower regulation and government oversight on the industries he's still making millions from, on the other hand, is a person who just can't be reasoned with.
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