The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque by Jeffrey Ford

My tags are inadequate today: this is a novel of historical fiction, without anything I'd call a fantasy element (there is some background that could be fantastic, if the reader wants to take it that way). I guess I could call it "Literature:" Ford is a fine writer, and always a thoughtful one. But I think his big-house novels - this one came from Morrow, in 2002 - tended to use thriller plots and settle in more to what we used to call the "smart commercial" end of the market.

Anyway, I've had this book on the shelf for a long time, and I've read less of Ford than I think I should. (I know I read The Girl in the Glass way back when, but can't recall if I read either or both of The Drowned Life or The Shadow Year, though I'm pretty sure I had copies of both of them before The Flood [1].)

The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque is told by Piero Piambo, a popular society portraitist in 1893 New York. He's skilled and experienced, in the middle of a career both financially lucrative and artistically satisfying - though, in the way of things, it's been tipping more to the former than the latter recently, in ways that worry Piambo.

He is hired by a mysterious woman, the Mrs. Charbuque of the title, to paint her portrait, under strange conditions. She will sit behind a screen and he will ask her questions, one hour a day for several weeks, and then he will paint her without ever having seen her. His commission will be immense, but if he captures her true likeness, she will double even that.

Piambo learns that Mrs. Charbuque sees, and has been seen by, no one at all. She has one servant, a blind man, and is a complete recluse. She tells him stories of a strange childhood spent with a father obsessed with a divination method using snowflakes - one of many such seers and forecasters then employed, at great expense, by one of the great, famous industrialists of the prior generation. Piambo intends to ask her probing questions, to get a sense of her essence to inform his painting, but she instead keeps telling these long, unlikely stories of snowflake-scrying and her slightly later life as the Sybil, giving fortunes to groups of the rich and connected across two continents from behind her ubiquitous screen.

The rest of Piambo's life is unsettled by this commission: his relationship with the actress Samantha suffers from his near-obsession with Mrs. Charbuque's unseen face, and some other events that seem to be unrelated begin to pile up in odd ways. And then Mr. Charbuque - whom his wife has said is definitively dead in a shipwreck - starts to threaten Piambo, with a frantic jealousy and a facility to get secretly close to him.

It all crashes together at the end, and there is a shocking secret, as there must be. It's more of a thriller or a mystery than a fantasy, as I said, though elements are near-fantastic. It's in the genteel historical mode of The Alienist and its followers: I don't think Mrs. Charbuque was as successful as the big books of that sub-genre, but there's no reason it shouldn't have been. It's smart, and moves well, with finely-drawn people and an interesting narrator, and the plot moves in a lovely natural way to form a "thriller" that isn't just about stringing thrills together.

[1] An actual, physical flood of my house, back in 2011. Destroyed the basement, including what I keep saying was 10,000 books - though, as time passes, I've been questioning my memory of that number. 

This Year: 2020

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

I've been really serious a lot in this series, but pop music isn't supposed to be serious all the time. So, for 2020, I have a great song that's no more serious than it has to be, a great, almost bubblegummy, bouncy song that I hope can get your toe tapping and your mouth smiling.

It's Nervous Wreck by Jeremy and the Harlequins.

I first heard them with the equally poppy and even slyer Cam Girl, a '60s-sounding song about a '20s relationship. And I think they often work in that vein: not "60s style," exactly, but modern pop deeply influenced by that era, using a lot of the familiar sounds and styles to say new things.

Nervous Wreck is a first-person song: the singer is a mess, and he's telling us about it. There's a driving beat behind it all, and a chime-like guitar sound that comes in and out. But it's mostly that voice: this is a song driven by lyrics, almost chanted, just a little fast, from beginning to end.

There's also one of those slight deliberate stammers in the chorus, which works wonderfully: it's a great sound, and it sells the story.

I don't want to analyze this one too much, so I'll leave it at that: this is a great jukebox song, the kind that pops up and makes your life just that bit sunnier for three minutes.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/9/2023

Two weeks in a row! I haven't had new physical books coming in two weeks in a row for quite a while - and this week, like last, it's entirely because of the library. Here are two things I put on hold and just picked up:

I Must Be Dreaming is Roz Chast's new book for this year, a non-fiction narrative about dreams (literal, while-sleeping, not metaphoric) - I think both her own and in general. Chast is a national treasure of cartooning, so I'd be reading her new book if it was about her collection of bread-bag closers.

Bea Wolf is a retelling of Beowulf for kids, featuring kids, by Zach (the daily webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) Weinersmith, with art by the French cartoonist Boulet (no second name, more credits than I could list, current artist for the Dungeon: Zenith series). That's a bizarre idea, and I am all in on the bizarre ideas, particularly at this point in my reading life. (After you've read ~7,000 books as an adult, you start to yearn for the new and different.)

Quote of the Week: Time-Binding

It would be a while before I realized that "me" is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now; who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.

 - Joan Didion, Where I Was From (p.1090 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)

Wrinkles by Paco Roca

Emilio used to be a bank manager. He knows that. In his early seventies, in the early stages of Alzheimer's, sometimes that's the biggest thing he knows, the one he can cling on to - even if the "used to be" slips out of memory all the time.

As Wrinkles opens, his condition has gotten to a crisis: his family (two grown children and their spouses) can't take care of him anymore. And so Emilio moves into a home, an institution - the book never gives the name of the place, and Emilio probably wouldn't remember it anyway.

Emilio is central to Wrinkles, but he doesn't really drive the plot - that's more the function of his new roommate, Miguel, one of the highest-functioning of the inmates of this house, who uses that freedom to con and steal and play tricks and amuse himself. He comes across as a fun, amusing guy, but you can tell he'd be deeply annoying in real life. Even if you couldn't remember enough day-to-day to be clear why he's so annoying.

Wrinkles is largely about what Emilio is losing - bits of memory, words, independence, abilities to do things - and, for a while, it feels like it might be the story of how he "escapes" that process. There is an escape, about mid-way through the book: the usual "old people have one last fling" scene, required in any story like this. That's not what I mean. That's not the way a story about someone like Emilio can ever end.

But Wrinkles is more amiable than I thought it might turn out to be. It's a book about old people by a young person - Paco Roca published it in 2007, in his late thirties, though this edition, translated by Erica Mena, came out in 2016 - with an a afterword about how he talked to a bunch of folks who'd had experience with Alzheimer patients and they gave him some amusing stories.

That's mostly the level we settle into here: amusing stories. Aside from a few moments, Roca doesn't focus on the existential horror of being trapped in a decaying, collapsing mind, unable to trust your speech or actions or memories. But those moments are there, and anyone inclined to be worried about dementia - someone my age, for example, someone who lives in his head and fears losing that home, someone with an older mother having her own memory issues - might find it a bit thin and facile.

Emilio only gets worse as the book goes on: he will never get better. Like all of us, he will eventually die, and, on this path, he very likely won't be Emilio when he dies. I wished that was more important. I wished that was the story Roca was telling. But it isn't: this is a lighter, happier story, one more skewed to the children dropping their parents off at the home than the people living and dying there.

Roca has been more serious than this: I liked his The House, from almost exactly the same time in his career. But Wrinkles is probably a better introduction: it's positive and open and friendly and happy, with a cast of amusing oddballs and an uplifting message.

Lunarbaboon: The Daily Life of Parenthood by Christopher Grady

I fight with my tags, here on the blog. They tend to proliferate, with a core that I use a lot and a loose penumbra of things that I thought I'd use more often (Circles of Hell! Class War Follies! High Finance! Kids Today! Pedantry!) but just have a few random posts.

And there are areas where I keep thinking my one tag is too big and not entirely useful, but going back to re-tag would be insane. Such as Comics, a tag used on a full quarter of all the posts here. Clearly, that's not doing its job. Breaking it into Webcomics and Masked Punching and The Smell of Newsprint and who knows what else would be more useful, but I know I will never, ever find the tens of hours that would take.

So, today, I have yet another comic. This one is a webcomic, and, as I seem to be saying a lot lately, I'm not sure if it's still active. (That site throws the scary "not secure" warning in modern browsers, and the last comic was posted about a year and a half ago.) But there was at least one book, in 2017, which I just read, so it will live for the ages in at least that form.

The book is Lunarbaboon: The Daily Life of Parenthood, and, as is pretty typical for a general strip collected, it's a somewhat thematic collection of the first two years or so of the strip. Now, I'm pretty sure Lunarbaboon - from what I've seen of it, here and there, over the last roughly a decade - was mostly about the main character's relationship with his kids, but not entirely. This collection, as I think is the standard for a major-company series-launching comics collection (this is an Andrews McMeel book), wants to be easily categorized and grabbable, so it's pitched as a companion to Fowl Language and Baby Blues and so forth.

Cartoonist Christopher Grady is more webcomicy than that, though: this isn't a gag-a-day strip, but closer to a work of therapy. I get the sense Grady cartoons to make sense of existence, to understand his life and the world. So he has humor, but it's not about getting to a joke - his strips are more ruminative, even mildly depressive, about fighting with sadness and feelings of unworthiness.

It can get a bit pop-psych for me sometimes, but it's always honest, and I get the sense that it's been useful for Grady - not just professionally, since he did it online for a decade and got a book out of it, but personally, as a way to contextualize the world and find an audience that sympathizes with his concerns and thoughts.

I guess I'm saying that Lunarbaboon is fun, and often humorous, but don't go into it looking for Big Laffs. Go into it looking for the story of a guy who often feels overwhelmed by life - like so many of us, so much of the time - and how he copes with that, with the help of his family. And, of course, some of the crazy things his kids do, to either kick him out of depression or send him chasing after them to stop that crazy thing before something worse happens.

The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist

First of all: this volume contains two things, which it does say pretty clearly: the title is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist, after all. There's one new book - Campbell dislikes the term "graphic novel," so I'm going to see if I can consistently avoid it here - and one old book, with somewhat convergent concerns.

The old one is The Fate of the Artist, originally published in 2006, in which "Eddie Campbell" disappears, or maybe is replaced by the actor playing him in this comic. I'm shocked to realize that came out more than a decade and a half ago; time refuses to stand still until I can catch up with it.

The new one is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell, and that comes first here.

Well, let me back up: I read this digitally, so the two books were run together, with Second Fake first and Fate second, each with their own covers and titles and other accoutrements. As I understand it, the physical book is in flip-book format, with the two titles bound back-to-back. (Should I drag out a random half-remembered bit of publishing slang and call that a dos-á-dos? Sounds super-pretentious when I do so.)

I read Fate when it came out, but that was so long ago that it was just before the Days of This Blog, so I have no record of my opinions to which to link you. (How did we live in the Before Times, when opinions disappeared like puffs of smoke and we had to try to reconstruct them in memory, instead of keeping them perfectly still and fixed forevermore?)

Fate is mildly mixed-media, with photos standing in for comics panels and pages of type sitting alongside conventional comics pages - and, as you might guess from the title and subject, pretty post-modern and self-referential. This is a book about itself, about being a book by Eddie Campbell about Eddie Campbell in which Eddie Campbell is missing and so, logically, it is not actually by Eddie Campbell after all. It's also the kind of book that comments on itself - Campbell also includes throughout a pseudo-gag-a-day comic called "The Empty Nesters," looking like it's from the early 1900s, which is not exactly about his and his wife's life, but clearly was at least a jokey version of that life.

One reason I enjoy Fate - and this is pretty idiosyncratic - is that it's clearly the last of the Campbell autobiographical comics of the Australia period. He'd been telling stories about himself, both as comics and in the text features and interstices of his monthly Bacchus comics throughout the '90s and the beginning of the Aughts, showcasing his life as a Scottish guy living Down Under, giving glimpses of his three children growing up, and presenting his life as a guy who drank wine and "ran a business (the Bacchus comics) out of the front room." The kids are nearly grown in Fate, and I don't think we see them again in Campbell's work: they moved out, got their own lives. (And, as Second Life mentions in passing, that wife divorced Campbell somewhere in the meantime, so Second Life sees Campbell and his now-wife, the novelist Audrey Niffenegger, living in the USA, which feels like the wrong milieu after so long elsewhere.)

Second Fake is just as post-modern, but slightly less collage-y - it has lots of pieces, but the pieces are all more centrally comics. There's the autobio narrative, with a be-masked Campbell and Niffenegger navigating the weird world of late lockdown - that odd era when we all thought we couldn't get haircuts and maybe would never interact with other people ever again. Interspersed are single panels of "Life in Lockdown," repurposed hundred-year-old gag comics that Campbell is mostly retextualizing rather than reworking. There's also a private detective, Royler Boom, who is hired by Niffenegger to find the missing Campbell, in a plotline that deliberately fizzes, as the "real" Niffenegger complains that she wouldn't do any of that.

There are also "strips" titled "Life's Too Complicated" and "Dreams of the <foo> Fiend," to tease out other themes of the story, and some ideas for books (the supervillain group/heist caper Covid's Nineteen! the screaming adventures of Karen!) that Campbell abandoned either before or while working on this. Second Fake is partially a record of a time of uncertainty and confusion - both societal and personal, as Campbell started and gave up on multiple ideas before pulling together...well, the book we have now.

Both pieces of this book are kaleidoscopic, both try to center Campbell as a creator and manipulator while (inconsistently) shoving him as a person away from the center of the story. Fate is cleaner and better organized; Second Fake is one of those pandemic creations where just the act of making something new out of chaos was a big win. They work well together, but I'd recommend reading them in chronological order, which isn't what I did.

Where I Was From by Joan Didion

California. That's the first answer to the implied question of the title - as we all knew. But America is as important: the dream of America, that westward march for more land and more opportunity and more possibility that found its culmination in California.

Where I Was From is not as personal as a reader might suspect it would be - at least, not at first. Joan Didion was a reporter, and, more than that, an inherently reticent writer, one who sat in the corner quietly and took notes, who asked pointed questions in an offhand way, who saw and thought rather than did. This book is about her family, or about family in general, but not just about them: it's not a memoir, or the "how I got here" book the title might imply.

It's more a book about "why California is the way it is" (as of about 2000, in the depths of that recession) or "why Californians are the way they are" (and have been, pretty consistently, for a century or more, even as "Californians" were hugely self-selected from people from other places).

It starts with personal history, the great-great-greats who did interesting things or left behind letters and other writings. The ones who did that westward march, who were part of the Donner Party but went a different way, who got over the high passes of the western mountains before the snow flew and so found their ways to the assumed paradise on the west coast, where anything was possible and riches were available to all.

It wanders from there, but keeps coming back: that family is the lens through which Didion sees all of California, all of America. The stories, the keepsakes, the attitude, the ways it molded her. As she often does, there's that thread of self-denigration, talking about how she didn't notice something for years but now will tentatively write about it. But what she didn't notice is that central concern - or, rather, what it means and how it has shaped everything. What she didn't notice was the shape of the entire world, the way her thinking was bent by everything and everyone around her, all her life.

The middle of Where I Was From comes close to being a survey of the literature - Faulkner's one California story, historical records, a Jack London novel, and on until Didion gets to her own first novel, Run River, and loops back to the personal. It's all loops with Didion, though: that's the way her books always go - first outward, and then coming back.

This was a major book by a major writer, and is now about twenty years old. I'm not going to be the one to make it or break it. But I do like to read books that matter - especially at this point in my life, when frivolous books seem even more frivolous - and this is one that does. Some of the concerns are more of their time than others - the slow crash of the military-industrial complex in California, as plants moved to states with more capital-friendly economies (and, probably, to more reliably Republican districts as well, which is close to the same thing), and the "Spur Posse" kerfuffle of 1993, which I had utterly forgotten. But its core concerns are those of California and by extension America: is the dream real? Can we go on like this, and what does "this" mean? Where did we come from...and where are we going?

This Year: 2019

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

A few times in this list - most recently last week - I've said something like "I knew this band would come up, and here they are, later than I expected." I'd like to think that's because I'm still listening to new things, still ready to be impressed by both entirely new people and by the new work of people I've been following for a while.

That's probably not true, in that the comforting myths we have about ourselves are inevitably untrue. But I still like to believe it.

But this is another case: my favorite song, right now, by one of my favorite bands is from their most recent record. I could have picked a bunch of earlier songs - What Do the People Want or Wave Backwards to Massachusetts or their title song or Hassle Magnet or We Are What We Say We Are - but I didn't.

Hallelujah the Hills' 2019 I'm You is a transcendently great record. I firmly believe that. I've gone back and forth on what's the "best" song on it. But the song that's the most personal, the one I want to celebrate for 2019 is Transparent Chart of the Heavens.

It's another song that starts out quietly and gets bigger: I love those, I love the power and majesty of a band that can do that slow-burn right, that can build up the heat as they go. 

It's a catalog song: each short verse is about a specific thing. We think the singer is looking at them in turn, or thinking about them - has a question about each of them, a deep and existential question. Most of them are physical, with some personal importance, we think: first the title, then "index map of New England" and "anthology of American folk songs."

But then it changes. Next is "nostalgic dream of an old love," with the music keying up another notch higher, and what sounds like a chorus of other voices, down in the mix, behind the speaker, following along.

And then we get

Venn diagram of two people
The overlap expanding now
Venn diagram of two people
Can you be sure that I’m me, you're you, and not the other way around?

And it gets quiet again, briefly - to finally hit the chorus: Once you're born that's where it starts.

And it all comes back around to the beginning, in a lovely, overwhelming crescendo that ends the song beautifully.

What I want to leave you with is one of those questions:

How can you access feelings once felt without getting caught in its net?

I don't know. I don't know the answers to most of the questions in Transparent Chart of the Heavens. That's one of the things that makes them good questions. 

Books Read: November 2023

I do this every month, and here it is again. As always, it's an index, mostly for my own use, but if it points you to something interesting, I'm happy. This is what I read this past month:

Paco Roca, Wrinkles (digital, 11/4)

Jeffrey Ford, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (11/4)

Jim Benton, Quite a Mountain (digital, 11/5)

Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Oda, and J.R. Doyle, Pixels of You (digital, 11/10)

Peter Bagge, Reset (digital, 11/11)

Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (11/11)

Ben Zaehringer, Sorry I Ruined Your Childhood (digital, 11/12)

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder: Voice (12/18)

Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich, War and Peas: Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers (digital, 11/19)

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (in 1999 Everyman's Ripley omnibus, 11/19)

Bill Griffith, Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy (digital, 11/23)

Will Henry, The Great Pencil Quest (digital, 11/24)

Mike Lowery, One-Star Wonders (digital, 11/25)

Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (11/25)

Edgar Camacho, Super Trash Clash (digital, 11/26)

Ian McDonald, The Menace from Farside (11/26)

In December, I will probably also read books. Watch this space for more details.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/2/2023

I happened to be at a library grabbing a movie, and, somehow, just by wandering by some shelves, I found three books to read. I have no idea how that happened....

The Secret Life of John Le Carré is an extension to the major biography Adam Sisman wrote about Le Carré a few years back. I haven't read the big book, but this one is short, and seems to be partly about the push-pull between an eminent writer who demands privacy in all things and the biographer whose job is to find out things and write about them, and partly about the multiple affairs Le Carré had over the past several decades and kept secret until his recent death. So it's scandalous and thoughtful/literary, which sounds right up my alley. I've been reading Le Carré's novels, slowly, the past few years, so I may even dive into the big biography at some point, too.

Hidden Systems is a graphic novel by Dan Nott, about infrastructure - water, electricity, the Internet, things like that. I'm not sure if it's more about how those things were (or are) built, or about how they are maintained, but my guess is that it's a bit of both. It's got a glowing quote from David Macaulay, author of The Way Things Work, which is the grandfather of this genre - so that's a good sign.

And then there's The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, a biographical GN by Koren Shadmi, who also (I don't know the sequence) did a similar bio of Lugosi (as well as fiction GNs like Bionic). Again, don't know all that much about it, but I'd had it flagged in my library's digital app to read eventually, so, when I saw it in person, I figured "eventually" might as well be "now."

Quote of the Week: Under Observation

He was a scientist, which translated into a Peeping Tom. Living things were meant to be observed. They were meant to attract attention. Not always, but sooner or later. Being noticed at the wrong time was potentially a death sentence. But at the right time: voilà! Connection. Mutual interest. If the stars lined up, a compatible, coordinated, and, who knew, concupiscent future.

 - Michael Blumlein, Longer, p. 48-49

Success Is 90% Spite by Jane Zei

I admit this is a weird thing I do: I read full books from webcomics that I don't follow. But I want to argue that it isn't weird.

First, why would I want to read a book of a comic where I've read all of the comics already? Well, OK, yes: if you like a thing, you like it, and often want to do it again. And I used to do this a lot in the years when print comics were powerful and dominant over the land: Doonesbury and Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side and plenty of others. All right, maybe that's not the convincing side of the argument. But, still: you can see not wanting to do the same thing again, right?

So, then: why not read a whole book of something that you think you'll like? Sure, you could find wherever it lives on-line, navigate back to the beginning of time (assuming you can figure out how to do that) and then one-day forward through it. But isn't the whole point of a book that it's just easier?

I always thought so. And that's why I read the first (and maybe only) collection of Jane Zei's "The Pigeon Gazette" (which seems to live in multiple places equally: Tumblr, Instagram, and Webtoon), Success Is 90% Spite.

Now, I do have to complain about the book format, too. At least in my library app, it's a reflowable "book" (I'm going to guess ePub; the system hides that) rather than a "comic" (in PDF, so each page displays as a page and can be pinched to expand/shrink). So each strip is a specific size, and if I want to view them slightly larger on my tablet, I have to turn the thing sideways, which has the knock-on affect of adding a blank page after each cartoon.

(The part of me that works with UX people is hanging his head, muttering darkly, and cursing the world.)

But enough blather about formatting!

Zei has a funny, cartoony style, which was solid right from the beginning of this strip, and a strong central character in the version of herself that she presents. You've probably seen her strips somewhere; they're the kind of thing that gets shared socially, usually with no attribution. Luckily, most of Zei's strips feature her avatar centrally, so random readers have a decent chance of realizing all these separate funny things are part of the same big funny thing, and finding it. (That's more or less how I did it.)

Of course, in the way of all good things, The Pigeon Gazette seems to have quietly ended last summer - like so many webcomics, it seems to have been tooling along at a comfortable pace and then just stopped. We may be at the point where we get a random "sorry it's been so long! I promise to get back to a regular pace!" strip every three months, or a flurry of things before another final silence, or that all the web presences just quietly disappear one fateful day.

But the book exists, which loops back to my original main point (and I do have one). It was published in 2020, by Andrews McMeel, a big name in the funny book biz, and Success will survive and be findable for a long time, no matter what happens online. And that's why I prefer books. This one is funny and zippy and - that horrible webcomics word - relatable, and I suspect a lot of you would like it roughly as much as I did.

Jim by Jim Woodring

So I had the thought that perhaps Jim Woodring's comics were opaque to me because I was reading his wordless "Frank" stories, which depend heavily on a personal mythology that I suspect is difficult to explicate through pictures alone. [1] Maybe, I hoped, if I read Woodring comics where he could also use words to explain himself, everything would be clearer and I could finally understand the essential Jim-ness of his work.

Reader, my hopes were dashed.

The comics in the 2014 collection Jim do have words - often a lot of words; there are a number of basically illustrated prose pieces, lettered by Woodring, that run for multiple pages - but I didn't find that those words actually helped me comprehend what was going on. Rather the opposite a lot of the time, in fact.

The Frank stories often operate on dream-logic, full of transformations and sudden reversals, random cruelty and beauty, with recurring images and characters that the reader has to assume have very specific meanings, even if that reader can't figure out what the meanings are. The "Jim" stories have all of that, plus confusing dialogue, and feature the author himself as the main character a lot of the time. (Hence, as they say, the title.)

Now, it doesn't actually say anywhere in this book that these comics are the records of Woodring's dreams, not in so many words. But he does talk about having recurring dreams repeatedly, and the stories featuring Woodring as a character often have him in pajamas, and they very much run on dream logic, so...I think that's a fair assumption.

I hope so, because the alternative is that this is how Woodring's waking mind operates, and these stories were assembled deliberately this way, that Woodring thinks these are the clearest and most precise ways to say the things he wants to say. And, since he seems to have a normal life, with marriage, job and at least one child - or did, in the years he made these stories, mostly the '80s and '90s - I find that hard to imagine.

In the end, I'm left as I usually am with Woodring stories: pointing and gesturing, making strangled mouth noises, unable to come up with anything coherent. But this time there are those long text pieces - prose poems? also dream descriptions? stories meant to be understood? - which are generally overly wordy in a "storyteller" manner, include lots of seeming extraneous detail, and tend to start from odd premises, wander for a while, and then stop without anything that seemed to me like a point.

Oh! And there also is a sequence of stories about a young couple - yuppies, I guess? - who are self-centered and live in a fine house, but also talk like all the other Woodring characters, and who I can't tell if we're supposed to laugh at or sympathize with. Especially when one of them kills the other. (There's a lot of random death in Woodring comics - again, I hope and assume that's because of dream-logic rules.)

That's where I am. I like looking at Woodring's drawings. I enjoy the ways his stories move. I find them compelling. But I don't think I've come close to understanding any of them. And words clearly don't help.

[1] See, most recently, The Frank Book, Woodring's earliest "Frank" comics. And, before that: Poochytown, Fran, and Weathercraft.

Longer by Michael Blumlein

Some writers are distinctive, even if they don't write all that much: they have a style and a set of concerns all their own. Michael Blumlein was one of those, a doctor by training (and career: writing was, as far as I know, always a side-job) whose work was always about fleshy concerns, often uncomfortably so.

His first story was “Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report” in Interzone in 1984. I will not try to describe that story - everyone should read it once - but it is a very chilly and dark story that manages to out-Ballard J.G. Ballard. Blumlein went on from there to write horror-tinged SF, and less commonly fantasy - though some readers might argue about which was the tinge and which was the main genre. You could call it body horror most of the time, though that's hugely reductive of the work of a man who knew the human body much much better than most writers ever could, or would want to.

His last novel was Longer, published around the time of his death in 2019. It's relatively tame for Blumlein - maybe I should say "accessible for non-Blumlein fans" instead - about researchers a hundred or two years in the future (it's the twenty-second century, but Blumlein is quiet about which end), working in a space habitat and arguing about the point of life.

Gunjita and Cav are married, both successful in their fields - he was mostly a surgeon for a long time, and has moved into research as the role for surgery has declined as less intrusive, more bio-targeted solutions have become more and more common.

The biggest one of those solutions is the one implied in the title: life extension. Blumlein doesn't get into a lot of details in this short novel - about life extension, or about a lot of things - but there is a standard, safe, commercially-available rejuvenation procedure, cheap enough, it seems, that most middle-class people can expect to afford it. We don't know how long it has been available, but it's known that it only works twice - so it's been around at least sixty years, and probably longer. The current target is to rejuvenate at the age of eighty-two - Blumlein does a bit of sleight-of-hand around second rejuvenations and the ages of his people, citing what seem to be apparent ages rather than calendar ages, so that people who have juved once or twice aren't called out as being, for example, a hundred and fifty. The vague timeline means we're not clear how many people have come up against the end of their second rejuvenated life - we are told that a few people tried to juve a third time, with horrific results, but not how long ago, and we do know that people like Gunjita and Cav (well, including them) are actively working to make a third juve safe.

The characters note, in what seems to be honesty, that it's mostly a nice world (albeit warmer than ours) without a lot of upheaval and with still-increasing and spreading prosperity. Not a utopia - it's somewhat dominated by corporations, and the profit motive is still deeply important - but a good place to live, especially if you are smart and skilled, experienced and knowledgeable. And, if you are all those things, you can expect three lives at this point. (No one notes that these people possibly were born when no juves were available, and that a third, and so on, may actually become available in their lifetimes, but that seems entirely reasonable to me, given the premises. They're at the edge of that transition, maybe, and could be the first generation not to have to die. No guarantees, of course, but it's entirely plausible from what Blumlein presents.)

Longer is about two things: first, Cav is physically in his mid-eighties, and has been putting off juving. (I think this would be his second, but the text is a bit vague, in this as in so many other things. He may be a lifetime younger than Gunjita.) Gunjita recently juved; she's physically in her twenties. Over the course of the novel, Cav goes from vaguely procrastinating his next rejuvenation to actively thinking about when the end of his life should be.

The other thing Longer is about is called the Ooi. Gunjita and Cav, as a sidebar to other projects, sent out a space probe called Eurydice, about to return with a rocky sample from an asteroid. And, on that asteroid, is...well, something else. Not a piece of the asteroid rock, clearly separate but stuck to that rock. Cav immediately believes it's organic in origin - and not organic-from-Earth, of course. Gunjita is far more reticent about this thing that looks like puke.

So they observe the Ooi. Uninvasively at first, then, tentatively, with the most gentle spectra they can. Finally, they decide to slice at it. To do so, they call in the third character of the novel: Dashaud. Once a protégé of Gunjita, now a follower of Cav, another surgeon with younger, rejuvenated, augmented hands.

It's not a novel of plot: it's mostly Gunjita, Cav, and to a lesser extend Dash thinking, talking to each other, looking at the Ooi, making theories and puncturing each other's theories, making plans and critiquing each other's plans. The Ooi remains enigmatic throughout, but Cav gets more and more convinced of what he always had in the back of his mind.

I find it hard to ignore that this is a novel written by a man who was dying of lung cancer at the time. It is quieter than most of Blumlein's work, more of a microscope than a scalpel. I wished Blumlein had time or space or desire to detail his world more, but he didn't. This is the book we have: knotty in a small space, taut and poised, a story that implies and questions more than it says.