Quote of the Week: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The Fountain Café (Proprietor Miss Gloria Adam) was all Tudor and horse brasses and local honey at sixpence more than anywhere else. Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as "My Friends." Miss Adam did not do business with friends, but simply robbed them, which somehow added to the illusion of genteel amateurism which Miss Adam was so anxious to preserve. Her origin was obscure, but she often spoke of her late father as "The Colonel." It was rumored among those of Miss Adam's friends who had paid dearly for their friendship that the colonelcy in question had been granted by the Salvation Army.

 - John Le Carré, Call for the Dead, p.27

Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron by Charles M. Schulz

I have to assume Charles Schulz would have approved of this book. He didn't rubber-stamp every bit of merchandise and brand extension - he had high standards, and kept a close eye on his licensors - but he liked to do different packages, and he clearly enjoyed putting more well-made Peanuts stuff out into the world.

He might have even had this idea, eventually - though, if he did, I bet he would have done some new work, at least a page or so, for the book.

Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron is a thematic Peanuts collection; this 2015 book collects what I think are all of the strips in which Snoopy appears as "the World War I flying ace." [1] I think the strips are more-or-less in chronological order from page to page, but there are several unexplained sections in the book - I think roughly "longer sequences," "one-off strips," and "Sundays." It's in the same format as the Complete Peanuts series, wider than it is tall, with generally three dailies or one Sunday per page.

And my mind immediately turns to my old publishing-hand track: I wonder "how did they do that?" This was towards the end of the two-plus-decade Complete Peanuts project (see a whole lot of my posts on the series over the years), so my assumption is that the folks at Fantagraphics were seeing that end in sight and brainstorming other ideas for books. Maybe they even had a big database of the strips, since I think they had to scan and clean up all of them as part of the project, and - here's where my flights of fancy take over - maybe they even tagged the strips, so they could run a search like "give me all the Rerun strips" or, if they were insane, "every Charlotte Braun appearance."

I belabor that point because, if I'm right and the Big Brains at Fanta do have a detailed tagging system, we could presumably get a near-infinite number of quirky, specific Peanuts books, from Schroeder Celebrates Beethoven's Birthday to Spike's Greatest Excursions. Sure: most of those would never sell, but that's what ebooks are for!

Anyway, this book is full of the sillier side of Peanuts, featuring a beagle sitting on his doghouse and pretending to dogfight (and lose, always - Peanuts is Peanuts to its core) with the Red Baron and then running around a suburban neighborhood pretending it's either behind enemy lines or wartime Paris. He drinks a lot of root beer, and curses the war. He even flies some commercial airplanes "after the war" to take other cast members various places.

I don't want to anatomize this: it's silly and fun, and silly fun things don't deserve to be dissected. But I'll just mention two things Schulz does that I saw several times and appreciated.

First is a tiny thing: when flying out, Snoopy faces right. When coming back to base, or running away from a flock of Fokkers, he turns and faces left. It's such a comics thing: funny, understated, unremarked.

Second is how Schulz weaves his different bits of business together. These are all Red Baron strips, but that doesn't mean they're only Red Baron strips. The World War I flying ace went on a POW train to a detention camp off with Charlie Brown to summer camp several times. He even shows up on the baseball field a couple of times. Peanuts was a tapestry, with different threads rising and falling in the weave over the years, but it was all of a piece, from the more serious sequences like "Mr. Sack" to the silliest Red Baron strip.

And this is the silliest stuff - there's a lot of fine Schulz wordplay and slapstick. (Snoopy pushes Peppermint Pattie "out of the plane" at least five times, always drawn the same way.) And I love the way he draws the doghouse/plane riddled with bullet holes: it's so good at selling the idea.

If you want to read one Peanuts book, and want it to be a frivolous one, this is a great choice. But I warn you: reading a bit of Peanuts will probably make you want to dive into the whole thing.

[1] Do not confuse it with Snoopy and the Red Baron, a 1966 book reformatting some of the early Red Baron stories into a small-format hardcover, part of the same loose series of Peanuts books as Happiness Is a Warm Puppy and Snoopy and "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night".

Hâsib and the Queen of Serpents by David B.

As far as I can tell, I've never read a book by David B. before - maybe some shorter pieces in Mome and other anthologies, but never a full book. And I have my doubts that this one is typical.

So I may be coming into this from a strange angle, or otherwise badly - that's always the danger. I also should say that I try to figure out what a book is trying to do, and then think about how well it does that. I do understand, technically, what Hâsib and the Queen of Serpents is doing - retelling a story from The Thousand and One Nights - but the why of it is vaguer to me, leaving me with theories about nested narratives and stylized art and maybe a bit of exoticizing.

David B. is French - I see from Wikipedia that his "real" name is Pierre-François Beauchard - and has been working for thirty-some years; he's best known for the big autobiographical book/series Epileptic. (It's one book in English translation; it was six volumes as it came out in France. It has a very different title in French, too: l'Ascension du Haut Mal.) This is a fairly recent work of his: published 2015-16 in France, translated by Montana Kane for this 2018 US edition. I get the sense that he is important and major, but his works haven't been translated much - yes Epileptic, yes this book, but his bibliography is a sea of French titles with few indications of English editions - probably because he's "difficult" in one way or another, too French or too stylized or too personal or too something else I'm not thinking of.

What I'm saying is: this is a gorgeous, interesting book. It retells a world-famous story in an engaging way, with that deliberately archaic "I am telling you a story" language. The pages are full of visual delights.

But I have no idea why David B., or anyone, would choose to make a version of this story now. It's distanced, slightly chilly, in that classical story-telling way. It tells three nested stories, and the transitions between levels are quick and sometimes confusing. These are originally moral fables, more or less, with that very traditional moral "do the things expected of your class and station, and obey your God and King." But they're not strongly moral fables; they're also very much "shit happens" stories, a series of complications unexpected and unpredictable.

The frame story - literally a frame; with two characters bordering the images several times as it drops back out to the storytelling level - is Scheherazade telling this story to the King, that core idea of the 1001 Nights. (There's no indication here Scheherazade is telling stories to save her life; we're four-hundred-plus days in and presumably the King is hooked at this point.) Her main story is about Hâsib, a young man in what we eventually learn is Greece, though places are really just names here. He is the son of a great sage who died - which seems like it should be important, and never is - and goes to work for lumberjacks, who betray him when he discovers a great treasure.

But that leads to his meeting the Queen of Serpents, who both helps him and tells him the second story. (And then someone in the second story tells the hero of that story the third story. Eventually, we finish stories two and three and get back to Hâsib.) The heroes of two of the three stories get happy endings; the third may have happiness later. All is wrapped up by Scheherazade on the last page...which is the opposite of how the 1001 Nights are supposed to work.

But a book has to end somehow, with some kind of closure, so it's entirely reasonable. And it does frame the whole thing up nicely.

I loved looking at Hâsib and was amused by the convolutions of the tales without really engaging deeply. This is a distanced story by its nature; the reader is not going to identify with Hâsib or anyone else here: they're story-book characters, from "long, long ago," in a colorful and unrealistic world. For readers up for that kind of book, this is a good choice: it's particularly visually inventive, for fans of ornate comics art and designed pages.

Olympia by Vivés, Ruppert + Mulot

Can you cook the same soufflé twice? You can certainly try - and the trio of Bastien Vivés, Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot do so here.

Olympia is a direct sequel to the stylish thriller The Grand Odalisque, by the same trio of cartoonists: Odalisque was a 2012 book translated in '21; Olympia was originally published in French in 2015 and came to the English-speaking world in this Montana Kane translation in '22.

Everything I said about Odalisque is still relevant here: the lack of clarity around credits for the trio of creators, the style, the energy, the sense, the substance, the way this is basically a "turn your brain off" action movie on paper.

We start in the aftermath of Odalisque, with the three art thieves Alex, Sam, and Carole having successfully stolen a major painting from the Louvre, but been separated in the mayhem. Carole is in hospital, and allows herself to be thought dead. Flashforward a year later, and Alex and Sam are being their typical selves: Alex is partying all night with Eurotrash, Sam trying to be serious and plan a new heist.

They do manage to steal something major, and head off to Venice to meet with the buyer. Alex, as usual, sends things in a bad direction, but the trio is reunited and must now steal three paintings from the same Paris museum to get out from under a nasty gangster (who might well decide to kill them anyway).

Most of the book is the big three-painting heist, which is more complicated than the one in Odalisque - and I should say messy as well, in several ways - but not as exciting or iconic. You can bake the soufflé again, but it never comes out quite as fluffy or delicious. It's still a lot of big-screen fun, and ends well - in a way that could lead to a third book, or could be a real ending, depending on what the creators want - but it's clearly another run at the same thing, which here, as usual, leads to diminishing returns.

Call for the Dead by John Le Carré

I have nowhere to go from here but forward.

I've been reading Le Carré's early novels in a weird sequence - first (ten years ago), understandably, the famous one, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then the book before that, A Murder of Quality, and then the book after that, The Looking Glass War.

I seem to be keeping that pattern, since I've now read Le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead. So I suppose I'm now in for A Small Town in Germany and then moving forward like a normal reader.

And the first thing I realized from Call is that Murder was entirely a one-off. From things I'd read, I thought it and Call for the Dead were mysteries involving a spy (Le Carré's series character George Smiley), but Call is a novel of spycraft and working government departments. Only Murder is the outlier, as far as I've seen.

I still think a fair bit of Le Carré's initial motivation was to write against the mythologizing of Ian Fleming and his followers; he presents Smiley here as nearly a failure as a man and a professional, with a badly broken marriage behind him (as an introduction, in the first chapter) and a job where's he's at best stagnated. He's smart and incisive and good at what he does, but his world was tawdry to begin with and his piece of it is dwindling as he grows older and the glories of The War dwindle ever further in the background.

Early Le Carré is largely about The War, I'm coming to believe. I wouldn't think something fifteen years in the past would loom so large, but it does, doesn't it?

Smiley recently interviewed a Foreign Office functionary - Samuel Fennan, an up-and-comer with a high-level security clearance - about rumors he'd been in the Communist Party as a youth. Smiley liked Fennan, and told him this was routine, and that he saw no problems and would be saying so in his report. In the words of a later generation: a nothingburger.

Fennan is now dead, in what I'm afraid I have to signpost by calling an apparent suicide. (But all suicides are apparent in mystery novels, aren't they? And a fair number of apparent murders are actual suicides, too.) Smiley needs to rush to Feenan's place, in the middle of the night, and talk to his widow, who discovered the body.

I've already called this a novel of spycraft; so I've given that part away. There is spying going on, and Feenan was connected to it. Further than that, I'll leave to other readers to discover by reading - this is a short novel, but a twisty, thorny one, filled with Le Carré's wit and careful mid-century British phrasing. Smiley does end up chasing a spy ring, and, I suppose, solving a murder along the way - but the point is the spycraft; that's his job and he's good at his job.

If you want to read Le Carré, I coming to think you might as well start at the beginning. I read these first four novels out of order, but they're all strong, they're all in the same voice, and I expect they work better read in the correct sequence. So start here: even sixty-plus years later, it's tight and precise and icy, in ways I'm coming to think is characteristic of everything Le Carré did.

This Year: 2009

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

This may be the most obscure song in this series. [1] It's also the one I'm sure should have been a big crowd-pleasing moment in a gigantic Hollywood movie, the one that's used in all the trailers and defines that movie for a generation.

That could still happen. The wonderful thing about obscurity is that it can end at any time, and obscure things don't seem old, because they're unfamiliar. So let me have my dream.

For 2009, my favorite song is the apocalyptic We're All Gonna Die, by Mieka Pauley.

(She re-recorded it three years later for her record The Science of Making Choices - and that's a great record, don't get me wrong, with the devastating Never Fuck a Woman You Don't Love among several other killer tracks - but, as usual, I like the first, rawer version better. For me, Gonna Die is a generation-later avatar of the Psych Furs' Pretty in Pink: the second version is good, but the first version kills. So I'm specifying the version from the EP From the Mouth of Paris here.)

Gonna Die is a story-song - one of the reasons why I think it would translate to Hollywood so well. (The sound is another, of course.) The story is simple and straightforward: the title basically says it.

The part that would play over the giant expensive SFX is, of course, the chorus:

The scientists proved it: we’re all gonna die
They got charts & equations, the how when & why
You did not invite them, and neither did I
But they’re here—drink up, we’re all gonna die

This song rocks. I don't know how better to say it. It is big and imposing and just a great rock song, the kind that takes over a room and pushes everything else happening to the side. Again, it would be awesome over expensive Dolby speakers booming in the darkness on all sides in some multiplex, with CGI eye-kicks popping on a giant screen in front of you.

Until that happens, you'll just have to listen to the song, and imagine the apocalypse. That's pretty damn good, too.

[1] Since it is obscure, and I'm choosing the less-known version of an already obscure song, here's a link to it directly on Bandcamp. Really, you need this song in your life.

Books Read: September 2023

Another month; more books read. Here's the list:

Jordan Crane, Keeping Two (digital, 9/1)

Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King (in Novels 1944-1962, 9/1)

Jean "Moebius" Girard, Inside Moebius, Part 3 (digital, 9/2)

Malaka Gharib, I Was Their American Dream (9/3)

Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (9/3)

Kazu Kibuishi, Amulet, Book Eight: Supernova (9/4)

Josh Rountree, The Legend of Charlie Fish (9/4)

Rina Ayuyang, The Man in the Macintosh Suit (9/9)

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix, Vol. 1 (9/10)

Jim Benton, Attack of the Stuff (digital, 9/16)

William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation (9/16)

Katie Skelly, Maids (digital, 9/17)

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (in Novels and Stories 1963-1973, 9/17)

A.J. Dungo, In Waves (9/23)

Justin Madison, Tin Man (9/24)

Jean-David Morvan, Séverine Tréfouël, David Evrard, and Walter, Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto (9/29)

P.G. Wodehouse, Enter Jeeves (9/29)

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder: Five Crazy Women (in The Finder Library, Vol. 2, 9/30)

I'm writing this the morning of October 1st, so I have not yet read any books in the new month. But I'm pretty sure I will, and do another post like this in a month.

Quote of the Week: All Lost in the Supermarket

People who have never had a period of living with anxiety and panic don't understand that the realness of you is an actual feeling that you can lose. People take it for granted. You don't get up in the morning and think, as you spread peanut butter on your toast, "Ah, good, my sense of self is still intact, and the world is still real, I can now get on with my day." It's just there. Until it isn't. Until you are in the cereal aisle, feeling inexplicable terror.

 - Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet, p.197

Zero Girl by Sam Kieth

Some creators consistently deliver detailed plots and realistic worlds and naturalistic dialogue. They make the suspension of disbelief simple, building worlds that make sense and connect to consensus reality and read as real.

But I'm here to talk about Sam Kieth today, so forget all of that.

Zero Girl was a 5-issue series from 2001 that wasn't collected until 2017; I missed it both times around. It was one of Kieth's first stories after he wrapped up his best-known property, The Maxx (for the first time - no creator ever really finishes their most popular work; they just put it aside until pressure builds too high demanding more new stories), and was not at that point connected to that universe.

I say that, but there's a clear Maxx Easter Egg in dialogue late in this book, and Kieth's afterword makes it clear that all his stuff is connected, as he learned, or built, after this story was done.

But it basically stands alone - I think the point is that there are later things that connect both to this and to Maxx - and likely in other directions as well, being as Kieth is all about the deep Jungian connections.

And, as usual with a Kieth joint, the premise is bizarre, the details are quirky, and the actions of the main characters often the worst choices possible assuming this was our normal world. (Which, of course, it is not.) Even the names can be difficult to believe, which brings me to our main character:

Amy Smootster is in her teens, a high school student in a place and a school that I don't think ever gets a name. She is a moody loner, stylistically and by nature. She is bullied by three other girls, who are the only other students at this school we ever see - they're equally '90s grunge types, but I suppose the more popular ones. Amy has a superpower, I suppose, in a very Kiethian way: her feet secrete some kind of psychotropic (or maybe reality-tropic) goo when she's embarrassed.

No, wait. Ashamed. Kieth is all about deep emotional connections and trauma, so it can never be the ordinary or garden version of any emotion: only the most powerful and personal.

She also has some kind of synesthesia - or, again, since this is Kieth, a deeper understanding of the nature of reality - in which circles are her friends and allies, while squares are enemies attempting to destroy her. And I mean literally: growing jaws, chasing her down the street, all that kind of stuff.

As if that's not enough, Amy also has a deeply inappropriate crush on her hunky late-20s school counselor, Tim Foster. And I'm sorry to say that both of them are mostly focused on the "we can't do anything about this attraction now, since Amy is underage...but maybe, in a couple of years, we could conceivably fuck." (Note: Kieth does not use the word "fuck." He's squishier and vaguer than that, as always.)

Oh, and Amy is also homeless, in a plot point that feels completely disconnected. She hates school, isn't doing well there, but the aunt she used to live with recently died so she's sleeping under a bench and...Keith is not about the realistic plots, so asking what she eats and how she washes her clothes and where she does homework is a useless endeavor. But it certainly seems like Amy has no reason at all to hang around this place and every reason in the world to go anywhere else - which I suppose is why Kieth has her crushing so hard on Tim, to give her some reason not to run away.

Kieth books always feel lumpy to me, in intriguingly unique ways, lurching from heavy-dialogue scenes in which no one addresses issues in the ways that would happen in the real world into psychedelic action sequences in which a character is chased out a window by his newly-ravenous mattress. It's like he has two modes: too-crazy talking, and too-crazy action. It's all too crazy; that's what makes it a Sam Kieth book.

Amy and Tim fight the Power of the Squares - that, minus my snark, is roughly the central plot of the series - and agree to meet again, in three years, when Amy will be eighteen and legally fuckable by Tim. (I'm sorry: that aspect of the book makes me cringe every single time it comes up, and I will not stop pointing out how deeply, deeply inappropriate it is.)

Sam Kieth is unique, and Zero Girl has all of the strengths of his work. I wouldn't call the ways it fails to intersect with actual reality weaknesses, exactly, but they are things to note, particularly for straightforward readers. If you haven't read Kieth, though, I'd recommend starting with a book that isn't so centrally about wanting to fuck an underage girl.

The Lighthouse by Paco Roca

This is a 2004 graphic novel - should I say bande dessinée? Roca is Spanish, but my sense is the term is used generally across Europe - that the creator's afterword notes was tweaked a bit for subsequent publications, finalized (or abandoned, if we're being Da Vinci-esque about it) in 2009. This English translation - which Roca might have kibitzed on, as his afterword talks a lot about kibitzing on the French and Spanish and other editions in the first years - was done by Jeff Whitman for a 2017 American publication.

So it's older that it might look, but maybe not entirely so. The original work is about two decades ago now, but I'm not sure Roca didn't touch it, one last time, before this edition.

The Lighthouse is one of Paco Roca's earliest works, I think, but that picture is muddy. He's been translated out of sequence here in North America, with The House from 2005 only arriving in 2019 and Wrinkles from 2007 lapping it handily in 2008. But he was already, according to that afterword, deeply into the working life of a cartoonist, coming off a complex book called Hijos de la Alhambra and working intermittently on the series Los Viajes de Alexandre Ícaro (neither of which, from what I can tell, has been translated into English) before diving into El Faro (the original Spanish title for The Lighthouse).

It's a relatively simple story, as that afterword says: mostly in one place, two major characters, some action but a lot of talking. It wasn't something that would require a lot of research and page design, and not in color. That's one of the things that appealed to Roca, he says: it was a palate cleanser (and maybe, if I'm being puckish, also a palette cleanser, given it's not in color).

I'll also point out that the US-edition cover is a collage of panels from the book, maybe because the US audience needed the obvious weenie: a book called The Lighthouse must have a lighthouse prominently on the cover. Roca includes a much better-looking painterly cover in that afterword, but it includes the carved breasts of a mermaid figurehead, which may have killed it for an American audience. (I hate to say it, but my country is crazy in some ways that are very obvious and very well known globally.)

Francisco is a young soldier, fighting for the Republican side towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. He's fleeing a disastrous battle, hoping to get across the French border to survive, assuming he'll end up in a camp there but knowing the Fascists will kill him if he stays. He doesn't make it to the border, but he does meet and is taken in by Telmo, the aged keeper of a remote lighthouse.

The book is about the two of them: what Telmo tells Francisco during his recuperation, the boat they built, the way Telmo rekindles a love for life in the younger man. Telmo has plans and dreams and schemes, which he draws Francisco into wholesale, while the reader probably notices they may not be entirely based on reality.

The war must return in the end, of course. And the young man must move forward, while the old man, having given his lessons, is left behind. We know how this story has to go. It all does happen, and it happens well. Roca makes Telmo's lessons valuable, even if they are based on less than solid footings.

This is probably a minor book in Roca's career; I've only seen his The House before so I'm mostly guessing. But it's the BD equivalent of a bottle episode: solid, interesting, accomplished, working within a limited space and accomplishing what it can there.

Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

Matt Haig is a novelist; I read one of his books long ago - The Dead Fathers Club, a riff on Hamlet that I liked a lot, offered in the SFBC, and still remember fondly - and re-encountered his name a year or two ago. He's someone I think I should read more of: his books sound like they're mostly fantastika, of the not-in-a-commercial-genre type, maybe mostly Big Ideas that appeal to non-genre readers, but that can be just fine.

But, since I'm a middle-aged man, the next Matt Haig book I managed to run my eyeballs over was Notes on a Nervous Planet, a non-fiction book that is somewhere between a memoir of his panic attacks and a book of affirmations of how to live in the modern world. (Yes: the kind of book I reflexively make fun of and have avoided for decades - we saw metric fucktons of such books in my days in book publishing, along with similar yardgoods, and I got very cynical very young, and have never shaken that mindset.)

Look: Haig is positive and thoughtful and interesting. He has a personal perspective and history that gives him some weight to talk about the distracting affects of modern life in general and "our phones" in particular. [1] I think he's right. I think this book is a good thing, and it's both short and pleasant to read. It is uplifting. It probably will, or already has, helped a lot of people navigate their own lives.

But it's still in a genre I look on with scorn, for inadequate historical reasons, so I think all of my praise will sound faint and "yeah but."

This is from 2018, so things have only gotten worse: when Haig wrote, Twitter was a time-stealing nexus of smart, interesting people and not a hellscape of right-wing assholes, for one thing.

And it's very much Notes: Haig has clusters of short chapters - some of them just lists, or quick affirmations, or similar mediations - that are organized loosely into a sequence of larger meta-chapters. There's a through-line about mental health, there's a lot of research about health and the effects of the Internet, there's a fair bit about Haig's history with panic attacks and some other quick glimpses into his life. But it's a loose book on a big, expansive topic: the point is to be positive, to circle all sides of the issue, and to give readers positive vibes and some tools to handle the endless spewing pipe of modern life and a sense that they can and should set up sensible boundaries for themselves.

All of that is good, and Haig is an engaging writer. It's also a zippy book, shorter than it seems due to a slightly truncated page-size and all of those short chapters. It reads quickly, it goes down easily, it make the reader feel happier and more empowered.

And the cover is friendly, too. People probably won't judge you if you read it on mass transit. (Mass transit still exists, right? I got forcibly made permanent WFH a few years back and got out of that world entirely.)

Look: I can't think of a single negative thing to say about this book, and yet I feel like I'm being vaguely dismissive here. I liked it. I think it was helpful to me, and will be more helpful to others. How's that, sirs?

[1] I tend to think that the kind of people who carried a book everywhere before smartphones were a thing don't get addicted to phones; we knew what we wanted to spend our attention on, went out of our ways to keep that with us, and gave it our attention. But we were always a minority.

Enlightened by Sachi Ediriweera

I think I'm writing for people roughly in my position: respectful, interested, only slightly informed. People who might have unexpected or unhelpful resonances with a book about different lives and different traditions on the other side of the world. (Do those old-fashioned clothes from Southeast Asia look like epic fantasy garb to anyone but me?)

I say that up front. If this is your culture, your tradition...well, I hope not to be wrong, or infuriating. But I doubt I will be helpful or insightful; you know this better than I do. Reviewers don't say that often enough, I think: what you see always depends on where you stand, so I want to be clear about where I'm standing and the things I can see from there.

Enlightened is a graphic novel, published for middle grade readers, about the life of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha. It's by Sachi Ediriweera, a Sri Lankan cartoonist, designer, and filmmaker. It is subtitled "A Fictionalized Tale," and it's about Siddhartha's search, but it's not a work of religious proselytization.

Maybe I should say that again: if there is a Buddhist equivalent of Chick Tracts, this isn't it. This is a lightly fictionalized biography of a person of world-historical importance, the kind of book young readers will find, hopefully enjoy, and then probably write a report about. Siddhartha's core insights are presented here, and the path he followed to find them, but the point is to inform, not to convert. [1]

Edirirweera tells his story slowly and quietly, starting with Siddhartha as a young prince chafing under the restrictions of his over-protective father. Ediriweera drops us into this world without explaining it, but the outlines are quickly clear: medieval-level tech, vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, what seems to be many small kingdoms living together peacefully, a mature and self-contained civilization.

Siddhartha's is a story about suffering: despite his father's coddling, he learns that other people suffer, that life is often pain. His people believe that they are reincarnated over and over, living lives slightly better or slightly worse, depending on the choices they made previously.

So Siddhartha grows up, still coddled and kept in the palace, with almost no contact with the outside world. He marries the princess of a neighboring kingdom, Yashodara. And when their son is born, he realizes he must break out and see the real world, and that this is his chance. He does; he runs away from his palace and wife and son and father and luxurious life, to join a monastery and live as a poor monk.

Years pass. Siddhartha has no contact with his old life. He studies and meditates and thinks and talks to other monks. In the end, he comes to a revelation: life is suffering, suffering is caused by desire, and so the only way to end suffering is to not desire. He teaches his new Eightfold Path, he gathers students, he becomes famous.

That leads him back to his old family. In the way of religious stories, there's a bit of anger, but everyone is completely convinced, almost immediately, by the obvious truth of Siddhartha's path. And so everyone comes to follow his path, as they can. I may be making this sound like a radical philosophy - and it could be one, in a strict form, all leave-your-goods-behind and break-the-wheel - but there's a lot of nuance. There's a huge spectrum between desiring everything and desiring nothing, and Buddha's path is a positive, peaceful one, as Ediriweera presents it - perhaps even assuming nearly everyone will fail, that eliminating all desire is a project over multiple lives, multiple passes through the world. I don't see any sense of hurry here: it's all about letting go of things, and the more you can let go of, the better off you will be in the end.

Ediriweera tells this story quietly, as I said, in an unobtrusive style with a few, mostly light colors overlaid on his black (for figures) and cool blue (for backgrounds) lines. It is a peaceful, undemanding look for the art, and entirely appropriate.

What I know about the life of the Buddha is scattered and random; Enlightened told me that story again in a clear, organized way and explained things to me that I probably didn't realize I didn't understand. It's a fine, meditative, thoughtful journey through the thinking and life of a man we could all do well to emulate - and I hope its path into the hands of the younger readers of North America is simpler and easier than I fear it will be.

[1] I expect to see various astroturfed mothers pretending to support liberty demanding it be removed from school libraries, though. This is a county where yoga is feared as a gateway drug to Buddhism. And, no, I am not exaggerating.

This Year: 2008

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

I knew I'd have a song from The Indelicates on this list. I knew it would be a pretty song, filled with bile and spleen. I kept circling three songs - Savages, Mr. Punch, and this one.

In the end, I picked the song about being a song, the one from the very beginning of their career, the one that sums up all of that bile and spleen, the one that can stand in for all of the rest: We Hate the Kids.

Because Absolutely anyone can play the fucking guitar

It usually takes a band a while to get this cynical, to be this loud and negative about the industry they're in - somewhere later than the next-to-last song on their first record. But that's the secret weapon of The Indelicates: they're always disgusted.

Every generation gets fooled again
And every generation is the same
And its no good saying its not in your name
'cause it is in your name

Two great voices twine around that theme, cataloging this and that horrible thing about the music industry, throwing them out rapid-fire as if they could keep doing this for days.

Maybe they could.

It is a loud, demanding, driving song, making its case piece by inexorable piece about the horrors and crimes of popular music - the Indelicates have made a bunch of great songs in that mode over their career, and they're really good at it. (Let me also call out Mr. Punch (A Banishing) from the decade-later Juniverbrecher record, another rousing all-these-bastards-must-go song.)

Pop had a beginning, it grew and was tended
And now it is rotten. Let it be ended.

This is a song aiming to be the very last pop song, to sum up the entire rotten edifice, to make the case that it is all rotten and unsalvageable, and then end with the very last sound of pop music.

It didn't happen, of course. How could it? But that ambition, that sweep, is what great music is all about: demanding, insistent, unshakeable in its convictions. And it sounds marvelous: as it plays, you can believe that a song could end pop music.

No more music, thank you and goodnight.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 23, 2023

I have four books to mention this week - three that I found randomly on library shelves, while I was there for something else, and one that came in the mail. As always, I'll start with the mail.

The Corset and the Jellyfish is the new book from Nick Bantock, best known for the massively bestselling "Griffin & Sabine" books in the early '90s - those were clever and well-constructed, with physical letters nestled into envelopes in the books, using what I think of as pop-up book technology for different ends. My sense is that his career since then has been one part expanding upon that single massive success, with some subsequent Griffin & Sabine projects (a CD-ROM, a second trilogy, a stage play) and one part doing things that success enabled (lectures, painting, being part of the official committee selecting stamps for Canada).

This book may have vague links to the Griffin and Sabine series - the back cover mentions two loose touchpoints - but it's mostly its own thing, a self-declared "Conundrum of Drabbles." It contains one hundred very short stories with accompanying spot illustrations, in the style Bantock has used for Sabine's work. It looks like there is meant to be some kind of loose, or hidden, overall story or narrative. So quirky, but well within the space Bantock has worked before. It's a small hardcover from Tachyon Publications, publishing on November 7.

Now to the library books - I happened to be in the big library one two over last Sunday, grabbing a movie to watch with the family, and browsed the graphic novel stack while I was there. (Parenthetically: the libraries near me, and maybe those in the US somewhat consistently, shelve GNs in juvenile and YA sections, but not adult - I'm not sure why, but I was poking through the YA section.) These are books that looked vaguely interesting, but I know very little about any of them, obviously.

Tin Man was Justin Madison's debut; it came out in 2022 from Amulet, the books-for-new-people imprint of Abrams. It appears to be about two teens, sister and brother, who meet a Tin Woodsman - looking exactly like the one from The Wizard of Oz, though I think he has a different origin - and they affect each other's lives.

In Waves is a big book that attracted me with its cool green cover; it's by AJ Dungo and is something like a history of surfing and something like a personal story about how surfing has been part of his life. (Or probably both.) There also seems to be some kind of memoir of illness as part of it; I don't know whose illness.

And last is Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto, first in a series by a group of European creators (written by Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël, drawn by David Evrard, colored by Walter) translated by Dan Christensen for this 2019 US publication. It's about Irena Sendlerowa, who I just randomly heard about the other week myself: she was a young Polish woman during WWII and personally smuggled 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, saving their lives.

Quote of the Week: Je parle français?

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique in Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

 - the first line of The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse