Quote of the Week: Will You Still Need Me?

During that never-to-be-repeated summer, I had just turned sixty-three when I began the hesitant, sweet, shy courtship of my first real girlfriend. My wife was furious, of course. It's poignant to think that today I've even forgotten her name - and my girlfriend's, too. The summer I was sixty-three was also when I had my second real girlfriend, and my fifth, and my eleventh. Looking back, and remembering how much I paid them, I wonder if they weren't prostitutes. But what did I know? I was just your typical gawky, self-conscious sixty-three-year-old, hormones going crazy.

 - Ian Frazier, "Of Younger Days," in Cranial Fracking, pp.108-109

Gisele & Beatrice by Feroumont

I came into this book with entirely the wrong expectations - I saw a "Rated M" book tagged Romance, looked at the cover of two women actively sucking face, and figured it was the relatively straightforward story of two women in love.

Reader, that is not the case at all. Explaining the difference would be a massive spoiler, but I can note that I tagged this book "Fantasy," and stipulate that I don't mean the sex kind of fantasy. (Or not entirely; that's not inappropriate for this book.)

Let me start from the beginning, and see how far I can get before spoilers pop up.

Gisèle & Bèatrice [1] is by the Belgian [2] creator Feroumont; I've seen the given name Benoit attached to Feroumont elsewhere, but the book uses the single-name standard for French-language comics. I believe this is the same Benoit Feroumont who has worked extensively as an animator. It was originally published in 2013; the English translation is by Alison M. Charette and came out in 2017.

Bèatrice is a hard-working young woman in some kind of office, surrounded by men - we don't see any other women there, though it seems to be the present day. Her boss, George, is about to give a big promotion - which we believe, and Bèatrice insists, is rightfully hers - to a ratlike suck-up named Jones, and Beatrice complains. George, who is a massive caricature, says he'll fire her unless she sleeps with him, and points out that none of the men in the office will ever support her (entirely true) story of sexual harassment, so she has no other options.

She agrees to a date with George; George comes back to her apartment afterward. And then a fantasy element emerges suddenly, and the book changes direction entirely: it is now about Bèatrice and her new live-in maid Gisèle, and follows something like the path I might have expected at first.

But...how should I put this? Bèatrice is not substantially nicer in her pursuit of love than George was. This book does aim to be the love story of Gisèle and Bèatrice, but I found it much more like the Stockholm Syndrome story of those two: Bèatrice is demanding and controlling, ruthlessly turning Gisèle into the woman she wants.

Gisèle & Bèatrice is amusing and entertaining, even as this reader decided he didn't like any of the characters or their world. It goes a long, long way to make a fairly obvious point: so far, in fact, that it destroys that point along the way. Feroumont has an energetic, cartoony line, and may be too good at drama for this story: it gets heavier than it probably should.

In its favor, this is a deeply weird, particular book. It commits to telling this particular story, and it races forward from its premises. I said it went too far, but that could be seen as a plus as well: books that fearlessly go as far as they possibly can are rare, but this is definitely one. As I said up top, it is rated 'M' for Mature, and for the reasons the cover implies.

In the end, I'm not sure I can actually recommend Gisèle & Bèatrice, but it is definitely an interesting book that grapples with big issues, even if it does so in massively over-the-top, cartoony ways.

[1] Between the time I read this book and the time this post went live, the English-language edition has disappeared from the usual online mega-retailer. So this link does not work; I leave it in in case it starts working again in the future. There is a Spanish-language edition available there, and obviously the original French version can be found various places. Here is the publisher's page, and the GoodReads page. I'm seeing broken links to the English-language edition on other retailers as well, which could mean all kinds of things: maybe Europe Comics has licensed it for print publication (which is their goal) and we're in the between-times, maybe the rights term just expired (suddenly?), maybe some claim that it's pornographic (it isn't) is working its way through some system.

[2] I have made the executive decision to use the tag "246 Different Kinds of Cheese" for the entire Belgian/French comics industry. It's not entirely accurate, and I apologize to any Belgian people who may be offended at being seen as an appendage of France, but I do have to stop adding further tags at some point, and this is that point.

Number One Is Walking by Steve Martin & Harry Bliss

We generally don't expect much of show-biz memoirs. It's usually superficial and light, in which the Famous Person gushes about all the famous things they did, usually focusing on how wonderful and special and talented everyone else was and how it was a joy to do the things you remember them for.

There is the other side, of course - the memoir in which someone settles scores, and sometimes even names names. Those are more fun, but less typical.

In manner and substance, Steve Martin's Number One Is Walking is absolutely a standard Hollywood memoir. Everything was always for the best in this best of all possible worlds, only very slightly marred by some occasional self-doubt, which was always proved wrong. He was smart and funny and beloved! And we liked him, we really liked him!

What makes Number One interesting - to the extent that it is interesting, and I'm not claiming a whole lot there - is that cartoonist Harry Bliss turned Martin's standard, somewhat bland stories into comics, which means it doesn't look like anyone else's memoirs. Bliss is a better caricaturist than I realized, and that's absolutely critical for the book - he has to draw dozens of famous people from the last fifty years, including obvious ones like Lily Tomlin and John Candy but also randos like Dean Jones and Jaqueline Onassis.

But, mostly, what he draws is himself, present-day Martin, and Bliss's dog Penny, as Martin tells these stories to Bliss. Now, the book is credited as "by" Martin with "drawings by" Bliss, but the working relationship as they present it seems to be that Martin told stories, Bliss took notes, and then Bliss assembled it into comics pages. In my book, that's roughly "story by Martin, script by Bliss" or maybe a quirky version of Marvel Method.

I don't want to say the best parts of the book are the Steve-and-Harry-and-Penny bits, but...no, wait, I do want to say that. And it's entirely true. The "my movie career" material is potted and bland, saying obvious things Martin has probably said dozens of times in interviews and magazine profiles. The interplay of two men and their talking dog is funnier and more distinctive. (I should say that Penny isn't really a talking dog; like Garfield, she has thought balloons that comment on the action but there's no indication that the Steve and Harry characters understand her.)

But wait! Number One is less than it seems! The Hollywood material [1] peters out less than halfway through: there's 92 pages of "Movies" and then 154 pages of "and Other Diversions." Most of that back half is single panel cartoons, each placed on a right-hand page with the facing page blank, but there are a few longer comics sequences with Steve and Harry and Penny, too.

Now, all of Number One is amusing. And Bliss's drawings are great, whether he's doing gag cartoons from Martin's captions or illustrating the two of them walking through the Guggenheim. But Martin has proved he can do great, deep work - he's written several good novels, an excellent memoir of his early stand-up days, award-winning plays and screenplays, and whatever the heck you call Cruel Shoes. This feels a lot like slumming, like telling lazy stories and letting someone else do all the hard work. I enjoyed reading it, but I did not come out with a more positive image of Martin than I went in with.

[1] Also to note: these are not full comics pages. There's some pages of mostly hand-lettering, set like introductions or text features. Some pages are blank, or have a spot illustration, or a movie title, or something similarly minor like that. And some of the pages of actual comics are full pages, while others are more like a single daily-strip, with a few panels in one tier. There is much less comics-format material in this book than it would appear.

Cranial Fracking by Ian Frazier

This will probably be short, since I want to avoid any semblance of frog-dissection.

Cranial Fracking was a new collection of short pieces by Ian Frazier, published in 2021. It collected forty-four humorous works, all but a couple of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. (As "Shouts & Murmurs," is my guess - the book doesn't say that specifically, but it's the traditional place for short humor in that magazine, and if anything in American culture is more bound by tradition than the New Yorker, I'd like to see it.)

Frazier's had three previous similar books, Dating Your Mom, Coyote V. Acme and Lamentations of the Father. And I think there was some humor in the more general Gone to New York. And The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days was definitely humor, and did grow out of New Yorker pieces, but it was billed as, and mostly worked as, a novel. 

I wrote about Frazier's take on that standard New Yorker humorous piece when I read Coyote a decade ago, and I still agree with what I said then. Basically: it descends from S.J. Perelman, particularly from the Perelmanian habit of taking one or two news cuttings and then running changes on particular quirky phrasing or ideas. Sometimes, in the advanced form, the news cuttings are not included; the reader is meant to recognize the cultural thing being commented on without aids. This, obviously, is somewhat easier in a weekly magazine than in a collection issued ten to fifteen years later.

Humor is subjective, so what I can say is that Frazier is good at the Perelman-derived form without being a verbal follower of Perelman most of the time. His work is more straightforward, and usually takes a crisp journalistic tone, sometimes shading into marketing copy and occasionally something more baroque. I haven't read The New Yorker regularly for probably a decade, but I found all of this understandable and all of it funny and some of it hilarious.

Your mileage will vary; that's how humor works. But Frazier is one of our best working today, so you should check him out if you like verbal inventiveness, wit, and ingenious ideas worked out in quick, engaging ways. This is a short book with a lot of variety in it; I'd hope most people would find some things they found really funny.

Danger and Other Unknown Risks by Ryan North and Erica Henderson

I have no idea why this very specific and distinctive book has such a generic-sounding title. I could make up stories of epic battles behind the scenes, with different factions jockeying for utterly different titles (How Daisy Saved the World! My Y2K Story - Really! The Second-Worst Journey in the World! What I Did on My Summer Vacation World-Saving Trip! My Story, by Marguerite de Pruitt!), and only able to agree, after months of internecine warfare, on this one. But that would be entirely fictional, if amusing.

What we have is Danger and Other Unknown Risks, a title which could apply to practically any adventure story ever told. This one is written by Ryan North and drawn by Erica Henderson, the team that did the Squirrel Girl comic for several years to vast acclaim and strong sales and the adoration of a huge number of fans, more of them small and/or female than was typical for a Marvel comic.

The cynical side of me assumes that they did Danger so they could have something similar that they would own; the sunnier side of me assumes that they liked working together so much that they just had to do it again. Either way, this is very much the same kind of story: spunky, young, optimistic heroine in quirky adventures across a world that needs to be saved. Marguerite, though, does not have the plot armor Doreen Green did, does not have any superpowers - she has one spell, which has different effects in every realm and borderline useless everywhere - and, even though she is a well-trained Chosen One, her failure is very much possible.

Our world has been transformed. Y2K happened - several hundred years ago, we think, while being a bit vague on how many hundreds - but was instead a magical transformation. The world is now radically balkanized, with obvious borders between different magical zones where physical laws can work entirely differently. (Our heroine, Marguerite, tosses a toad across borders as a testing mechanism, which implies some places don't support biological life at all...but we don't see any of those potentially fatal realms in this book.)

Marguerite has been sent by her uncle Bernard - this is the kind of "uncle" like Donald and Mickey and Scrooge, where the actual parents, if there ever were any, are never even mentioned - on this world-saving mission, along with her companion, the talking dog Daisy. The two need to find three specific artifacts and bring them back to Bernard, who will use them in a massive spell that will Save the World. The world needs saving, Bernard says, because the magical realms are diverging more and more every day, and that will eventually Destroy the World if it is not Saved.

Readers of books for younger people may guess that Not All Is As It Seems. Marguerite and Daisy discover Shocking Revelations and The Real Truth and have to Change Their Mission. But they're always going to Save the World. Along the way, they steal those three artifacts of the Before Times, run away from and/or confront various nasty or otherwise opposed forces, meet some friends and helpers, and, as always with North/Henderson stories, model positive friendship at all times.

Reader, they do Save The World. How could they do otherwise? And if you've been looking for something to scratch that phantom Squirrel Girl itch, this is exactly the thing for it.

This Year: 1983

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more. 

We're now getting into my teen years, when I can definitely say what I was listening to at the time. The next few posts might be filled with drama, because the favorite songs of any teenager will be highly dramatic.

I think this one is pretty high-drama, but I'm too close to it, even forty years later. It meant a lot to me: it was practically a mantra for several years.

My song for 1983 is Oingo Boingo's Good for Your Soul.

I know I'm not the only one who agreed with the opening lines:

Have you ever felt that somehow

You were not yourself

That your body was the same

But everything around you wasn't right

Good for Your Soul presents a series of moments like that - moments that I found intensely true, maybe things that are inherently teenager-y. But it's not a self-indulgent song. It's not there to tell the listener to wallow in those strong emotions, to insist on being special and sensitive and damaged.

Just once or twice is good for your soul

That's the refrain. For a song with such strong emotional hooks - feeling like another person, unrequited love, artistic creation - the answer is muted and almost dismissive. It's not saying not to let this happen. It's not saying to do more of it. It's saying that, yes, you will have moments like this - but don't let them overwhelm you.

And the music is bouncy and filled with hooks, energetic and pulsing, as always for Oingo Boingo. Nothing they ever did was quiet or understated - it all demanded attention, insisted on capturing your ears. 

I had this song running in the back of my head, off and on, for several years. It worked, for me, to keep that focus: to allow myself to feel things, in that demanding, indulgent way a teenager has to feel them, and then to step back and say to myself, Just once or twice is good for the soul; if you don't stop you'll lose control and move on.

Songs about moving on and mental balance are rare; they are to be treasured. This one will always be important to me for that.

Books Read: March 2023

Here's what I read this past month. Links will follow once the posts go live, assuming I'm not hit by a bus.

Brian Fies, The Last Mechanical Monster (digital, 3/4)

Jeff Lemire, Caitlin Varsky, and Dave Stewart, Black Hammer Reborn, Part I (digital, 3/5)

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male (3/5)

Sammy Harkham, Blood of the Virgin (digital, 3/11)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes (3/12)

Manu Larcenet, Ordinary Victories, Vol. 3: Precious Things (digital, 3/18)

Zoe Thorogood, It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (digital, 3/19)

Stewart O'Nan, City of Secrets (3/19)

Will Henry, Wicked Epic Adventures (digital, 3/24)

Debbie Tung, Quiet Girl in a Noisy World (digital, 3/25)

Phyllis Rose, The Shelf (3/25)

Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier, Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 2 (digital, 3/26)

This month, I think I will read more books, though it's only 10 AM on the first, so I can't say for sure.

Quote of the Week: An Awfully Big Adventure

Perhaps this was meant to be my adventure, though I had not known it at the outset. The whole point of adventure is that it is unplanned; a leap in the dark, verging on the unfortunate, offering glimpses of danger; and what separates adventure from disaster is that you live to tell the tale.

 - Paul Theroux, "My Drug Tour: Searching for Ayahuasca," in Figures in a Landscape, p.11

Figures in a Landscape by Paul Theroux

This is a book of miscellaneous short nonfiction; the double-barreled subtitle is "People & Places: Essays 2001-2016." And it is very miscellaneous, the collected work of more than a decade of occasional writings - introductions and magazine profiles and think pieces and "what does noted expert Theroux think about this thing" articles. For those who like variety, that's all good. For those trying to wrangle it into a single narrative and make grand statements, it's not so good.

Luckily, I'm much more of the former than the latter.

Figures in a Landscape follows Sunrise with Seamonsters and Fresh Air Fiend - presumably, if Theroux stays healthy and active, a fourth similar book will emerge around 2034, though he'd be in his early nineties at that point.

My sense - I've read in Fresh Air Fiend but not finished it, and I don't think I've found a copy of Seamonsters yet - is that this one is more literary and less travel-oriented than the previous books. The pieces here were written in Theroux's sixties and early seventies, the era when a notable writer is deluged with requests to write pieces introducing new editions, in this case of Simenon, Thoreau, Conrad, Maugham, and Bowles. He also does more rock-star journalism than I expected, with substantial profiles of Liz Taylor [1], Robin Williams and Oliver Sacks, plus a similar piece about a top Manhattan dominatrix (whom, characteristically, Theroux met on a trip in Africa).

There are some travel pieces, mostly about Africa, since this was the decade between Dark Star Safari and The Last Train to Zona Verde. There are also travel-esque pieces about places he's lived, particularly Hawaii, but also looking back to his times in Africa or commenting on the humanitarian-industrial complex (which he is not, as you might imagine, in favor of).

As always, I come to Theroux for his voice and viewpoint, which at its best feels like a smarter, better-informed and more authoritative version of the way I think myself:

Even my closest friends have seldom succeeded in exerting a malign influence on me. I am by nature pitch-averse, resistant to the selling mechanism. A persuasive sales pitch is no pitch at all, but rather something like a tremor that causes in me a distinct throb of aversion. Praise a product or a person to me, boost something or someone in my estimation, urge me to care deeply about a cause or a campaign, and my shit detector emits a high-pitched negative squeal that blorts in my head and sends me in the opposite direction.

("My Drug Tour: Searching for Ayahuasca," p.2)

I appreciate the way Theroux can be grumpy and clear-eyed simultaneously, deeply pessimistic (without ever being cynical) and yet admitting that there's always reason for optimism. The end of his introduction, about the work he has collected in this book, is characteristic:

As I write, magazines are closing, few television programs interview serious writers, and (apart from NPR) radio is mainly music and sports talk. The writing profession that I have always known is changing, old media is ossified, and what I know of new media is that it is casual, opinionated, improvisational, largely unedited, full of whoppers, often plagiarized, and poorly paid. But as I set this down, I feel I am probably wrong, confusing (as my son once wrote of old men) the end of my life with the end of civilization, and that it is fogeyish to disparage innovation, or to suggest in tones of astonishment that the barbarians are a the gate, because they have always been there, giving writers a reason to be vigilant, and unsparing, and fully employed.

(p. xvii)

I read Theroux for moments like that, for the way he can flow out at full force and immediately turn around and question his own premises. He's an unsparing writer in the best sense, in that the one he's least likely to spare is himself. Figures has several dozen examples of his work; I can't think of a better way to recommend it.

[1] Also including Michael Jackson, whom I never would have expected to see Theroux meet or write about.

It Won't Always Be Like This by Malaka Gharib

If I wanted to be reductive, I could say that the comics memoir comes in two main flavors: childhood and trauma. They're a bit like chocolate and peanut butter, in that they can - and often do - mix, but they can be found separately as well.

It Won't Always Be Like This is a comics memoir, entirely on the childhood side. It's the second book by Malaka Gharib, whose I Was Their American Dream was, I understand, a different memoir of the same childhood.

And what I like about it are the ways it fits comfortably into a clearly-defined genre, telling its story in a lively, accessible style and with a quietly confident and reflective tone. I like that it's a good book of its genre, that it understands what a "comics memoir of childhood" includes, and does all of that in an engaging and open-hearted way.

Genres aren't bad: they tell us important things about the books we might read, not least whether we do want to read them. Won't Always Be is a memoir in comics form of a childhood in the late '90s and early '00s, by a woman of mixed Egyptian/Filipino heritage, focused on her summer visits to her father's new family in Egypt - and it tells that story strongly, in the ways that readers of comics memoirs expect and enjoy, with real insight and depth of meaning.

It opens with Gharib at the age of nine, just arriving in Cairo and being surprised to meet her father's new young wife Hala. Over the next few years, Hala has three children, and Gharib also spends time with cousins closer to her own age. Won't Always Be is a very episodic book, as it has to be - it covers more than a decade, and she's only part of this Egyptian family for a couple of months a year, as a break from her "regular" life back in Los Angeles.

It's more about her relationship with Hala than about her relationship with her father, though, as someone who once spent a summer visiting a workaholic father in a strange hot climate, I sympathized with her attempts to both connect to her father and define herself separately from him. It's a bit about how she fits in with the larger family, but more in the sense of a general growing-up memoir: I'm even more different over here than in my everyday life, so what does that mean about me?

Gharib is the primary focus of her book - it's not quite a "how I grew into the adult I am now," since this is only a small slice of her childhood, but maybe it's a "how this distinctive aspect of my life molded me, without me realizing at the time." The secondary focus, particularly towards the end, is Hala - as Gharib grows up enough to empathize with her, to think about what Hala is doing and feeling, what her life is like.

Gharib draws her story in an energetic, somewhat loose style - I feel like a lot of comics memoirs do something similar, settling into an art style with large open faces and minimally-depicted backgrounds to symbolize childhood. Her lettering is similarly loose and lively, giving the whole thing a personal, conversational tone - the pages don't look rushed, but they look quick, like Gharib is telling this story to us immediately, without filters.

Again, this is a strong example of the comics memoir of childhood, "I lived in this foreign place" subcategory. I think these are often marketed first to younger readers, as models for their own lives or just parallax, but this is an adult book by an adult looking back, so there's no reason to limit it to that audience.

Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley

I have children, but I didn't carry them: I'm the other parent. I have children, but their birth was a long time ago: my younger son was born in 2000.

Which is to say I inevitably read a book like Kid Gloves, Lucy Knisley's comics-format memoir of her pregnancy and the things that came before it, with interest and some knowledge but a definite detachment.

Another way to put it, inspired by a restaurant my family likes in a nearby town: when you have bacon and eggs, you know the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.

Lucy Knisley, like my wife, was committed. All pregnant people are, and this is a book slightly more for them than it is for their non-pregnant partners (and for adoptive parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and so on). If I wander into criticism anywhere below, remember it's likely that Knisley, having lived it, is right and I am mistaken.

Knisley, up to this 2019 book, had a comics-making career entirely focused on memoir, in ways that may have made a lot of people jealous. My life is absolutely nothing like Knisley's, starting from the basic not-able-to-get-pregnant thing, and she made me jealous a few times - she told the stories she had to tell with grace and insight, making them deeply moving and resonant. There were two books of extended European travel, French Milk and An Age of License. A book about family and learning to cook, Relish. A book about traveling with older relatives, Displacement. And, immediately before Kid Gloves and most relevant to it, the memoir of her wedding and all of the planning and events before that, Something New.

Now that I've scared away the people upset by pregnancy cooties - which more men than you'd expect, and not a few women, have serious cases of - I can get into the Trigger Warning. Knisley had two miscarriages before her healthy baby, and there were some medical complications when she did give birth. For some people, that will mean you want to steer clear of this book, and maybe even have already stopped reading.

But miscarriages are vastly more common than many people (me, certainly) realize: one in four pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. Knisley explains what that means while also telling her own story: the strengths of Kid Gloves, like all her previous work, is that combination of personal perspective with deeply researched expertise.

Kid Gloves semi-alternates between chapters about Knisley's own pregnancy journey, starting with her troubles with birth control in earlier years, and with somewhat humorously-titled sections on "pregnancy research," which dive into history, demography, social expectations, sexism, and a lot of biology to give a more factual look at what pregnancy is like or can be like. That makes it deeper and more useful than a "here's some stories about when I was pregnant," and I think of that as characteristic of Knisley's work: she's dependably focused on telling the truth, as deeply and thoughtfully as she can, and not just on telling her own stories.

She's also not shy about talking about the physical side of pregnancy, which may also scare off some of those without uteruses. There's a lot of vomit, a fair bit of breastfeeding, and the whole panoply of other body changes that come when several pounds of growing, moving new person start shoving one's abdomen off in all directions.

Let me expand that: Lucy Knisley is not shy in her work. Her greatest strength is that desire to see clearly, to explain precisely, to guide carefully, to narrate fully - all the things she experienced, all the things she learned, all the things she wants to make sure the world knows. Her art is precise, just a bit cartoony, with soft colors and thin lines, and she's really good at the page that diagrams a pregnant body, or explodes into multiple text boxes to cover multiple aspects of a single thing, or just shows how she felt when something happened. 

Kid Gloves is not for everyone - there's more body stuff in here than will be comfortable for a lot of people - but it's a strong book and one that I hope will find a lot of people who might become pregnant in the future and give them a lot to think about and plan for their own lives. And, along the way, tell them the story of this woman and her family and eventual healthy, happy baby - and that's why people will want to read it.

The Fatal Bullet by Rick Geary

Rick Geary's most obvious oeuvre consists of a sequence of small-format books about historical murders, spanning three decades from Jack the Ripper in 1995 to The Black Dahlia in 2016. [1] Each one is meticulously crafted and deeply researched before drawn with Geary's complex illustrative line, and they usually feature maps and diagrams of murder scenes alongside traditional comics panels.

The Fatal Bullet was fairly early in that sequence; it was published in 1999. Unlike most of Geary's choices, there's no mystery in this one, nothing central still unknown today. Geary here tells the story of Charles J. Guiteau's 1891 assassination of President James A. Garfield, which was done in public and has nothing mysterious about it at all.

Well, other than why Guiteau did it. And that's what Geary looks to explain here: he explicitly sets a 19th-century moralizing tone - somewhat tongue-in-cheek - in the front matter, with a chart depicting "The Two Roads" - the "happy, prosperous life" of Garfield and the "downward path" of Guiteau. And the book follows in that mode: pitched somewhere between penny-dreadful and serious-newspaper, sounding largely like an account from the time period, Geary outlines the lives of both men to show how they came to their fatal encounter.

The one thing this doesn't allow him to do is diagnose Guiteau, who clearly had some kind of mental disorder - he was found sane and guilty at trial, of course, but he was driven to the murder by a monomania about factions in the Republican Party and and vastly inflated sense of his own importance. Any serious modern psychological profiling of Guiteau would break that historical model, and that may be why Geary avoids it. Or maybe no one knows what Guiteau's problem was. 

In any case: he was a nut. A "frustrated office seeker" - he had no qualifications besides a stump speech he wrote supporting Garfield that was never actually used and his own boundless faith in himself - who wanted to be made ambassador to a major, cushy European capital and had been bugging Garfield and his Secretary of State for months. With no luck in that direction, he got it into his head that killing the president would miraculously make everything better and get him the job he wanted.

It didn't work, obviously. Guiteau was immediately arrested, held until Garfield died, then speedily tried and executed. But murders are about people doing extreme things for extreme reasons; that's what this whole long series of books by Geary are about, in the end. And this is somewhat atypical in its lack of mystery, but otherwise right down the middle of the style. Geary's art is lush and immersive as ever, the words are energetic and carefully researched, and the whole thing told excellently. What more could you want out of a murder tale?

[1] And he's self-published a small shelf of similar books since then, actually.

This Year: 1982b

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more. 

1981 is a scratch, since I have two songs from 1982 that I can't choose between, and nothing from 1981 is even near that level. Last week was 1982a; here is 1982b.

I love songs that tell stories; I love songs that set a mood. I love long songs; I love songs that command attention. I like punk - the impulse always, the outcome often - but even more I like ambition, where a band is trying to cram a whole world into one track.

Sometimes they succeed.

Wall of Voodoo's Call of the West is one of the successes. A few weeks ago I wrote about The Eagles' The Last Resort, a song about the lure of California - Call of the West is in the same general territory, but much further out, in the wilder badlands.

Call of the West is not about the appeal of any civilized land, any safe place, any monument or society or group. It's about that old nagging desire to get out there, as far as possible, as fast as possible, as separated as possible. To see who you really are in a landscape that throws everything into high relief.

The dream of the American West, and of other frontiers all around the world: the semi-lawless place where everything is possible, and all of the old controls of the civilized lands fall away.

Of course, it also immediately denies that catharsis is possible, now, if it ever was:

Sometimes the only thing a western savage understands
Are whiskey and rifles and an unarmed man
Like you
So you got to keep on the move
Don't let that fancy paintjob fool you

The sound is almost apocalyptic, right on the verge of violence or transformation. A droning, demanding beat that never slacks. And it doesn't sound like any traditional depiction of the American West - this isn't a cowboy song.

You're a long way off from yippie-ki-yay

One of my first "Quotes of the Week" here was the long spoken section near the end of this song, and it's still pure, still the perfect distillation of that endless American desire for something else:

"There's a conflict, " he said. "There's a conflict between land and people. The people have to go. They've come all the way out here to make mining claims, to do automobile body  work, to gamble, to take pictures, to not have to do laundry, to own a mini-bike, to have  their own CB radios and air conditioning, good plumbing for sure, and to sell Time-Life books and to work in a deli, to have some chili every morning and maybe, maybe to own their own gas stations again and to take drugs and have some crazy sex, but above all, above all to have a fair shake, to get a piece of the rock and a slice of the pie and to spit out the window of your car and not have the wind blow it back in your face."

Is there anything more American than that desire "to spit out the window of your car and not have the wind blow it back in your face"? I think not. 

Quote of the Week: Fully Assimilated

Thom hunched his shoulders as he told his self-deprecating jokes. He is a friendly and cheerful man, with an amiable demeanor. Had he not been the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, I'd have described him as having the humorous demeanor of a Manhattan nebbish. The door was open for me, many times, to say to him, "Oh, Thom! You're such a nebbish!" But that would have been a mistake. Still, it was surprising to find myself in a situation where I was toning down my Jewish character traits so as not to alienate a Ku Klux Klan leader who reminded me of Woody Allen.

 - Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures with Extremists, p. 180

Back to Basics, Vol. 5: Revolutions by Jean-Yves Ferri and Manu Larcenet

I'm still croggled by the idea that someone would have the idea "hey, this aspect of my life would make a great, fun, light-hearted comics series" and then have the idea "this other guy should write it so I can draw myself doing the things he writes about!"

But that's what happened in the Back to Basics series, which I am now at the end of. Round about the turn of the century, Manu Larcenet moved to the French countryside and decided to make a series about that. He teamed up with Jean-Yves Ferri to write those stories - I have to assume Larcenet told Ferri about incidents in his life and gave him some vague plot outlines, otherwise the whole thing becomes too silly and fictional for me even to imagine - and then Larcenet drew what Ferri wrote about fictionalized Larcenet. Since the series is semi-autobiographical, Ferri is also an occasional character, and the creation of the very stories we're reading (and their promotion, in one of the books) is an element of the humor and the plot.

There were five books in the series: Real Life, Making Plans, The Great World and The Flood all came before this final book, Revolutions. The whole thing wrapped up by 2008, with translations into English only coming a decade later - Revolutions, in this edition, was published by Europe Comics digitally in 2017, with a translation by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

There are definitely elements that repeat: Manu and his partner, Mariette, moved to the sleepy rural Ravenelles to begin the series, and the various rustic types there - especially a local old lady and hermit - are recurring characters. But each book tends to have a different plot structure, and a new complication, which are not necessarily picked up in later books.

The Flood, for example, was largely the "we now have a baby" book. That baby is now a toddler, and she's not quite as central this time, though Manu and Mariette do know that you can never ignore a small child. This book, on the other hand, is one part "Mariette is going back to school" (for something the book never makes clear) and one part "there is a contentious election in this sleepy town" (which is oddly more serious and political than anything else in the series).

The current mayor, who has been a minor and mostly pleasant character throughout the series, is still mostly a bumbling rustic but now is also a secret schemer with shadowy allies, who wants to get rich by building a Krashdiscount "megamarket" in town. Manu-the-character gets caught up in the political campaign, though we don't see anything positive about the other candidates - and only realize there are more than two very late in the book - mostly as a way to ramp up his anxiety and confusion, which admittedly are central elements of the whole series.

The jokes about Mariette changing and growing (subtext: away from Manu) also seem more important and less frivolous than the stories in previous books. The tone of Revolutions is roughly the same as previous books, but the things Ferri and Larcenet are making jokes about are much weightier and less goofy than before, which makes the book more than a little uneasy. I know nothing about Manu Larcenet's personal life, but Revolutions implies a whole lot about why it's the last book in the series - whatever in his life transformed into these stories, it was contentious and problematic and messy.

So Back to Basics doesn't end quite as well, or as pleasantly, as it started. But even this last volume is funny, and mostly light-hearted. Maybe I should say that it always strives to be light-hearted, as darker thoughts poke in, intrusively, here and there.