Reviewing the Mail: Special Festive Edition 2023

I've gotten into the habit of doing these "Reviewing the Mail" posts, when I have books to list, on Sundays. That's fine when I only get books once a week, but sometimes, even in these lesser latter days, it happens faster than that.

So today I'm listing things I unwrapped yesterday, even though I already have a short post scheduled for this coming Sunday. I did briefly consider pushing this one out to the next Sunday, in January, but I'm also thinking about a possible bookstore trip later this week, and would that then mean those books would get listed on January 14? That way lies madness.

So, anyway: all of these were presents. Several of them I bought myself, which I will not apologize for - it's the best way to make sure you get what you want.

System Collapse is the new "Murderbot" book by Martha Wells, seventh in the series. They're kind of a big deal. You may have heard about them. And Wells has been a fun and inventive writer for a long time - I read her first book way back in my SFBC days, and I think pretty early in those days, too - so it is wonderful to see her get a big success when she's been doing such good work for so long.

4 Fantastic Novels is a collection of - just in case we have any slow students in the back, barely paying attention - four novels, which are fantastic in at least two ways, by the inimitable Daniel Pinkwater. The books are originally from 1979 to 1992, and the omnibus was published in 2000. I had a copy of this before my flood, but I've been without it for about a decade now. My long national nightmare is now over.

The Demon Princes, Volume One collects the first three books in that five-book SF series by Jack Vance. I just finished the last of the four "Dying Earth" books in that Vance omnibus, so I wanted something else to pick up intermittently overt the next couple of years, and Demon Princes it will be. As I recall, this is some of his best work, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it.

The Problem of Susan and Other Stories is another one of the series of books from Dark Horse that seem to be aimed at adapting every last short story Neil Gaiman ever wrote into comics. This one has two stories and two poems adapted into comics, which I think are each drawn by someone different. (The book is still wrapped in plastic as I write this.) Credited on the cover, besides Gaiman, are P. Craig Russell, Scott Hampton, Paul Chadwick, and Lovern Kindzierski (who I think is a colorist, so maybe one person did both poems?)

Children of Palomar and Other Tales is the fifteenth book in the uniform "Love and Rockets Library" series, collecting that long-running and excellent series. This one is all Gilbert Hernandez, with a couple of stories written or co-written by his brother Mario - it collects Julio's Day and New Tales of Old Palomar/The Children of Palomar, plus those also-with-Mario tales.

Monica is the big new Daniel Clowes graphic novel this year. He's talented and always an interesting creator, but I've found his stuff chillier and more distant as I've gotten older (or he has, or we both have). This one has gotten ecstatic reviews, which I hope is a good sign.

And last is Fallout: The Vault Dweller's Official Cookbook by Victoria Rosenthal, a line extension from a video game series I play a lot. It got it from Thing One, and I don't think it's a joke gift. I don't cook much, and these all have odd names (as fitting the theme and fictional world), but I think these are all real recipes that can be made in the real world with real food, that make things that people will generally enjoy eating. In other words: it's the kind of book that could be a joke, but I don't think it is. I guess I'll have to see.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

This is a cliché, but our impulses often conflict or interfere with each other. Yes, yes, I know you already know that. (At least I hope you do.) But stick with me.

So I want to read more good books, as I'm sinking into middle age. And I also have the habit of rambling about everything I read here, no matter how little anyone else in the world cares. That's the conflict.

When I read something new, I can at least be a small ray of light pointed at it. When I read comics or fantastika, I have at least my history in those genres (I judged awards! I edited stuff ! I used to be somebody, in a small way!) to lean on.

More and more, though, I'm reading Big Famous Books, by Big Famous People, some of those books older than I am - and I am, as I've implied, somewhat old myself - and I keep getting myself tangled around that axle, pointing out (counterproductively) that you folks have no reason to take anything I say seriously.

But, then again, none of us have much of a reason to take any artistic judgements by others seriously. It's all force of argument and inertia and existing prejudices and borrowed gravitas and stuff like that. So: I'm going to try to stop running through this argument each time. Let's see if I can.

Those thoughts are brought to you by the fact that Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley came across to me as a well-written, psychologically smart...fairly standard noir novel of the era, of the subset published by larger and more reputable publishers and in which the POV criminal gets away with it. Those two things are tightly linked, though it's hard to say which is the cause and which the effect: the books from paperback houses could be well-written, could be smart, could be just as good - but the criminal would always be caught and punished, or possibly die in a thematically appropriate way.

I don't mean that as a negative: I like mid-century noir, have read in it off and on for a long time, and think it's a deep well with things I can probably keep digging up for as long as I'm still able to read. But The Talented Mr. Ripley came to me in fancy literary-novel dress, and it was an interesting experience to peer more closely and see the disreputable character lurking in those borrowed clothes. 

I read Ripley, I think, because I realized I had two copies of it, in different omnibuses, on my shelves, and took that as A Sign. So I read it in the 1999 Everyman's Library of the three Ripley novels - back in those days when there were only three; two more came later - which also was a big clue that this noir novel would not go in the obvious direction towards justice and retribution.

It's a 1955 novel, set at that time. Tom Ripley is a young man not overly burdened with conscience or purpose: he's running some vague short cons in New York, caught up in a vaguely sleazy downtown crowd he's coming to hate, and wants more without having a clear vision of what he wants or any desire to work for it. He falls into an opportunity when the father of a vague acquaintance, Dickie Greenleaf, hires him to go to Europe, find Dickie, and convince him to come back home and take up a boring job at the father's quite profitable boat-manufacturing operation.

Tom sees this as a way to get to Europe with money in his pocket, and, like so much else in his life, he's happy to let other details figure themselves out later. He goes. He finds Dickie in a small Italian town, and befriends him. He becomes the third wheel in Dickie's not-quite-courtship of fellow American expatriate Marge Sherwood. She distrusts Tom, while Dickie mostly likes him, in that vague way rich people have when nothing impinges or bothers them very much.

Things escalate from there; if you've heard of the book, you probably know how. It is noir, of a type: that's a clue. And Tom both wants to be Dickie - take over his life, live the same kind of life - and, in a sublimated '50s way, wants to win Dickie, get him away from Marge. (There's a bunch of period-appropriate demurrals, mostly in dialogue to each other, of anyone being "queer," and Tom comes across as mostly asexual, but there's some level of sex in Tom's fascination with Dickie. I gather the later novels make Tom officially bisexual: from the evidence here, he's either uninterested in sex entirely or gay but entirely closeted from himself.)

I won't fill in the dots: it's a good novel, and a short one. (It's also been turned into a movie that's generally well-regarded - I've never seen that and probably won't.) If you've ever liked writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis and Chester Himes and Charles Williams, you'll probably like this one. Highsmith is mostly working in that contemporary paperback idiom, but breaking away from it to have a more serious-novel ending.

This Year: 2022

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

This is not a Christmas song. Today's post has nothing to do with today; it's the end of the series that I've been doing all year. Sorry to disappoint you, or maybe happy to reassure you, depending.

This is the end. But I've liked writing about music once a week, and will have something new for 2024 - the fact that last week was a two-woman duo and today is a solo artist might just be a hint as to the direction I'm taking for the new year.

For the last song of the series, for the newest one, I picked a new artist, vastly younger than me and different from me, someone I discovered randomly, with a lovely touching, deeply personal song. All of the things that are great about popular music: it's always moving, always changing, with new people and ideas and sounds and songs.

The last song is Disco Ball by Caitlin Cobb-Vialet.

I’ve never been known for my patience

I love a song that can just drop a line like that in the middle - discursive, introspective, self-aware.

To close out the series, it's - yes, you guessed it! - one last break-up song, one last singer with a head full of regrets and a mouth full of thoughts that come tumbling out.

I’m starting to think you don’t
Want to be seen
I’m stopping myself from believing that you might
Exist on the same plane as me

There are a million ways to say "this isn't working" or "this is already broken." Cobb-Vialet has a great one here - fully fitting the talky, discursive narrator of this song, who runs around and round the same ideas, showing how restless she is at the same time she says so.

I couldn’t wait one more day
But I would wait for a month
For a year
If I had known at the time

This is a lovely, personal, pointed song. I don't know if it's "true," but it's as true as it needs to be for the space of a four-minute song. And it's a great song by a great new talent - Cobb-Vialet was just out of college when this album was recorded, and I think that's still less than two years ago. We could be at the start of decades more music like this: I hope so.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/23/2023

One book this week, again from the library. This one was on the new-fiction shelves, alongside a bunch of novels - the first time I've ever seen a graphic novel there. (I think the current TV adaptation has more than a little to do with that.)

Anyway, I don't have high hopes, but I was willing to take a look:

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: The Interconnectedness of All Kings is a newish (copyright 2016, which is longer ago than I thought) story about the character Douglas Adams created and wrote two novels about in the 1990s. I have no idea why Dirk got a line extension twenty years later, but I guess the wheels of commerce must always grind. This story is written by Chris Ryall, with art by Tony Akins (pencils for two-thirds), Ilias Kyriazis (pencils for the rest), and John Livesay (inks). A project that switches penciler in the middle of a short run is generally not a good sign, but whatever bumps happened during creation of the miniseries a decade ago are clearly baked in now.

The story apparently sees Gently go to San Diego (?!) to handle three cases, which seems deeply random, even given that both the huge North American comics convention and this book's publisher IDW are headquartered there. I guess I'll see if it makes more sense in the reading.

Quote of the Week: Can a Woman Be a Flâneur?

By now there were other people at the gym, though the man on the bicycle next to me was going at a speed barely fast enough to sustain life, while the woman beside him, who was on a treadmill, was walking at the right speed for window-shopping on the Boulevard Saint-Germain on an especially sunny day when your heart is filled with love and your pockets are filled with money; it was as thought she had set the machine at "Saunter."

 - Adam Gopnik, "The Rules of the Sport," pp.67-68 in Paris to the Moon

War and Peas: Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers by Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich

Another day, another collection of a webcomic I don't normally read - I do tend to get into these grooves, don't I? (I wish Europe Comics was still on my library app, so I could keep up the "reading stacks of random BD by French people" groove, but we don't get to choose the brane we're sorted into.)

Anyway, this is the first collection of the webcomic War and Peas, titled (somewhat obviously) War and Peas: Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers. It's been running for more than ten years (since 2011), comes out once a week, and this first (and, so far, only) collection came out in 2020.

A lot of aspects of the War and Peas experience are familiar: the two creators (Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich) met in art school, they have a Patreon these days, the strips start out as one-offs but a number of characters (particularly the self-named Slutty Witch, on the cover, but also including Death, a researcher and her robot, and a eventually-married couple) and storylines grow over the course of the book. The art style is on the simple/cartoony style, which is a good choice for the often dark or cynical jokes, including very distinctive (and notably large) dot eyes in otherwise blank faces.

It has a dependable gag-a-day rhythm; even the continuing characters don't have storylines, just moments. The jokes do tend to be cynical or dark - this is a modern, webby thing - but not mean or forced. It is funny, in that old juxtaposing-odd-things way - Kunz and Pich just have a really broad world from which to pick things to juxtapose.

One possibly unique thing: Kunz and Pich are German - the art school they met at was the School of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken - but War and Peas is written in English. (Well, I haven't done serious research. Maybe they're both Americans who happened to go to art school in Saarbrücken? If so, ignore me.)

So this is another one of those strips - you know the kind. If you're the kind of person who complains that newspaper strip comics is an ossified and depressing medium - I am, intermittently - it's exactly the area you should be checking out more often. I am, intermittently - as in right now. Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers is fun, and has both Death and a Slutty Witch on the cover. What else could you ask for?

Finder: Voice by Carla Speed McNeil

I'm not caught up yet with Finder, but I'm getting close: there are two more books after this one, which means I'm now in the back third. And I find the world-building is still what causes me the most consternation, but I'll try to hold that for the end.

Voice was published in 2011, collecting pages published online a few years earlier and (I think) somewhat revised for book publication. It's the ninth Finder collection; see my posts on Talisman, Library Vol. 1, Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, The Rescuers, and Five Crazy Women for more background.

The world is medium-future, set on an Earth that seems to have been depopulated. There are some cultural artifacts from our 20th century, but McNeil never explains how we got to this world. It's divided into a few gigantic domed cities, which seem to be more a vertical stack of basically 20th century cities (literally, sitting on top of each other and held up by handwavium since we never see the massive structural columns that would require) rather than the more usual Trantorian hives of corridors and apartments.

This is because, I think, McNeil wants to have an essentially late-capitalist 21st century society in those cities, with some shiny advanced tech, to tell the stories she wants to tell. So there need to be individual houses - gigantic mansions and hovels - that stand alone, have streets in front of them, and cars whizzing by. There need to be dive bars with windows in their bathrooms one can shimmy out of, and recognizable malls. If the dome means the poor sections are noirishly gloomy all of the time, well, that's a bonus.

Living in the city is a massively regimented and stratified society with no apparent government, organized almost entirely by custom and ruled by a matrix of self-defining and often competing "clans," who form the aristocracy and have all of the money. For example, Medwars are all dark-haired people who get medical degrees and work as cops - this is almost literally how McNeil describes them, albeit not all at once. In the books, we tend to focus on the Llaverac clan in the city of Anvard, a flighty, image-obsessed, all-female-presenting group of mostly media personalities to which the Family of Protagonists belong. They may be more corrupt, greedy, and Procrustean than the average clan, for maximum drama, but McNeil's notes make it clear they're not different, just more obviously flamboyant about it.

McNeil here finally makes it clear that most people are not full clan members - that's been implicit for a while, and is the thrust of the main plot of Voice. Her notes also say pretty explicitly that the rest of the population have only bad options: there's seemingly no way to just do a job, open a store or provide a service, so everyone not part of the aristocratic clans is either an indentured servant of someone in the clans or dependent on "patronage" from an aristocrat, which McNeil notes repeatedly is not just about being a sex slave...so it's probably mostly being a sex slave.

The rest of the world is desolate wilderness, at least according to those city-dwellers. (They may be somewhat biased.) In particular, we've never seen anything within a million miles of farming anywhere in this world; maybe they have massive hydroponics levels in those cities or maybe it's just a detail McNeil doesn't care about. Living in that wilderness are Ascians, who I'm afraid come across as Wild West Movie Indians a lot of the time: principled and free, with Strange Ways and Complicated Rituals,  second-class citizens even below the "culls" and half-breeds of the clans, their craggy faces filled with pain at the indignities they are forced to endure in this sad world.

Voice is the story of Rachel, oldest child of the Grosvenor family we've been following from the beginning. (Her sister Marcie's story was told in Talisman.) She's the one of the three kids who basically fits Llaverac standards, so it's her job in the family to be accepted as a full-clan member, to be the aristocrat who can protect the other members of the family for the next generation. And this is the story of cotillion season, more or less: a televised pageant (since Llaveracs are dramatic down to their core) in which that year's "girls" compete for however many slots are available, to either become part of the ruling class for the rest of their lives or, if they fail, to have a moment of fame helping them to find a fairly nice person to whom to be a sex slave.

(I may be slightly exaggerating. Prostitution is respected in this world, as we saw in Mystery Date. But it also seems to be a career choice a lot of attractive young people find themselves shoved into for lack of other options, and I don't think their later lives go all that well.)

Rachel is competing this year, one of twenty young Llaverac "girls" (many of whom have penises, as we see in the first scene). And if she does not get clan status...well, her mother is still around, and fairly powerful. They have other connections. Her life won't be immediately destroyed. But the options for both her and her two sisters will narrow massively, and the clock will start ticking against the time their mother is no longer around to protect them. (There's something very Jane Austen about the core set-up, under all the girls-with-penises and shrugging acceptance of the sex-slave career path.)

Voice's main plot is set in motion by an act of violence: Rachel is mugged, on the way home from what seems to be the first night of this gala competition. And she loses the physical token she absolutely needs, as part of this complicated ritual, to assert her right to be a full-clan Llaverac.

Rachel is flighty and has a deep well of self-loathing, but this is an existential crisis that she throws herself into - she has to get that token (an antique ring) back, or scheme some kind of replacement. She thinks if she can find Jaeger, her mother's occasional half-Ascian lover and the overall main character of the whole Finder series, that he can solve the problem for her.

One of the main types of fiction, for centuries, is Protagonist Faces Impossible Problem, Sees How Everyone Else Has Failed, and Succeeds (Because Protagonist). That's more-or-less what happens here: Rachel's story, as a Grosvenor, is happy in the end, but McNeil's notes make it clear that there are...millions, maybe? of similar stories every single year in this society, and they mostly end with the culls becoming sex slaves, or, at best, indentured servants who are also probably expected to have sex with their bosses, at least as long as they're nubile and attractive.

And that led me to my main worldbuilding complaint this time. This story starts with a small act of violence, the mugging. That made me realize how little violence there is in this world, despite immense pressures and no clear government above the clans. We see cops a lot here, as we have before. But McNeil makes it clear that they're all Medwars, and she also makes it clear that each clan is most concerned about the clan, and handles things their way. Even assuming that the other clans bribe cops six ways from Sunday - they must, right? - when it comes down to it, the police are already a distinct, discrete, separate and self-organized group in this society, and I still don't see why they would care about or listen to anyone outside their clan about anything.

But, more importantly: this is a world with only bad choices, most of the time, for most young people. It is profoundly unfair, and obviously so, corrupt and twisted - with mass-media to spread stories of that unfairness.

There would be multiple terrorist movements in a city like Anvard. Maybe an Ascian one as the most radical, setting bombs to collapse major parts of the city. Young anarchists or communists, some variety of visions for a cleaner, fairer world on the other side of bloodshed. Maybe even clan-aligned groups that attack rival clans, a la Ireland in the 1970s or the Middle East for the past seventy years.

The clans also would not be static. One or two might be actually ancient, but I'm sure several have been smashed in the past century, destroyed by combinations of bad planning, scheming by rivals, the inevitable paucity of their new-member pipeline, and just bad luck. And others would have jumped up - maybe street gangs, maybe corporations - creating new clans with initially vague criteria or taking over the name of defunct clan and pretending to be its inheritor.

This world just seems way too static for how much stress everyone in it is under. There's just no way that it keeps chugging along in the same vein this way. Maybe the next city over was destroyed by a terrorist bomb, and everyone is scared and tentative because of that. Maybe the Medwar cops mostly spend their time smashing cells of radical groups looking to destroy the entire society.

Maybe. But, even though the stories McNeil tells are engrossing and thought-provoking, I can't help but think this whole world is collapsing even as we look at it: that it's going through it's own late-capitalism crisis, and McNeil just hasn't shown us the bloody end of it yet.

Sorry I Ruined Your Childhood by Ben Zaehringer

I'm reading a bunch of collections of webcomics lately, for no obvious reason. More specifically: books of webcomics I don't regularly read, to get a concentrated burst of new gag-a-day stuff.

Well, let's not be precious here: there's no mystery. I've always liked the rhythms of a gag-a-day strip. I'm of the age that grew up with newspaper dailies - they used to be printed larger, they used to be more varied within a paper and between papers, they used to be mostly by their actual creators who were mostly still alive. That field has gotten stonier and duller over the last three decades, obviously. The only newspaper strip that I currently read in reprint collections is Will Henry's Wallace the Brave - which I highly recommend, by the way.

Luckily, newspapers aren't the only home for gag-a-day. Webcomics platforms might be poorly capitalized, sometimes fly-by-night, difficult to discover or navigate, and vastly less ubiquitous than newspapers used to be, but they exist, and the barrier for entry is far lower. (Is that the mantra of the Internet Age? "Sure, it's crappier in almost every aspect of the experience, but everyone can and already does it!")

That's how I got to Sorry I Ruined Your Childhood, at least. It's the first collection of Ben Zaehringer's Berkeley Mews strip, which can be found on GoComics. (One of the two big platforms for newspaper-style comics, and the more-easily-accessible one at that.) It was published in 2019, by Andrews McMeel, who sometimes seem to be keeping the lights on for gag-a-day comics in book form all by themselves.

Childhood collects 137 strips - my guess is that these are the first 137 strips of Berkeley Mews, maybe even in roughly original-publication order, but Zaehringer has no continuing characters or situations, so he could easily have arranged these in a different order on purpose. Most commonly, they're three equal-sized panels, like late Peanuts, but Zaehringer also does strips as vertical tiers or four panels pretty regularly. That's the one clear advantage of a webcomic: a JPG file on a page doesn't have to fit any size or configuration constraints; HTML will adjust around whatever size and shape it is.

Zaehringer draws round-headed people, often in bright colors, usually without hair - he can and does draw in other styles for specific gags, especially references (Zelda, Mario, Disney movies, etc.), but he's got a standard style for the general gags. The title implies that these are mostly comics about cultural references from his childhood (mostly the '90s), but that's not really the case. I didn't do a count, but it's only maybe a third of the comics that are references like that - and, even there, I'm probably including vaguer things like "Santa" and "God on a cloud creating the Earth."

The bottom line is: I like Zaehringer's gags. They're funny, they're well-constructed, and he's a varied enough artist to switch up his style to sell each gag the way it needs to be sold. He's a bit like a more prolific, but not quite as protean, Perry Bible Fellowship. I'm looking forward to catching up with this strip.

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

I am not the guy you go to for deep explication of a generation-old #1 bestseller. (I'm frankly not the guy you, or anyone, goes to for anything: I'm some random blogger still typing things out a good ten years after the form withered and the things that made me vaguely interesting or relevant faded into the background. But leave that part aside; even at what I would laughably call my peak, no one would care what I said about Adam Gopnik.)

I found Paris to the Moon in a library sale a decade ago, ten years after it was huge. I read it this year, after taking it off the shelf a bunch of times in the intervening years to look at it. Bottom line: it's well-written and thoughtful, but one of those books that tries to obscure how miscellaneous it is, and also is a generation-old at this point.

Gopnik was a feature writer for The New Yorker - still is, but was in the mid-90s - and he and his wife Martha had been talking about living in Paris for a while. They'd just had their first child, a boy Lucas, and realized this was the last moment such a move would be relatively easy. They both had creative-class work that could be done anywhere, and the New Yorker had a history of having random writers report back from Paris and, luckily, no one in that role at the moment. So they did it.

They stayed there for about five years, roughly 1995-1999, and I gather Gopnik continued to write about his family after the return to New York City, producing a book I may have to look for eventually. But this is the full chronicle of this period of their lives: what he produced, journalistically, during that stint in Paris.

Paris to the Moon collects what seems to be eighteen New Yorker pieces, probably somewhat edited - with an additional new piece, somewhat shorter, as an introduction - and four longer "Christmas Journal" pieces that each sums up a year and which may not have been previously published. They are placed in what seems to be chronological order (at least of publication; some cover periods of time that overlap), and, as I said above, are pretty miscellaneous: the through-line is their family life, especially Lucas's growing up from an infant to a small boy, but most of the pieces are one-offs either personal or let-me-tell-you-about-this-thing-in-France.

Gopnik is thoughtful, interesting, and very quotable:

One of the striking things about Paris is that it is filled with old people who actually look old: bent, fitted out with canes, but dining and lunching and taking the air and walking their small, indifferent dogs along with everybody else.

 - "The Chill," p.73

Some of the pieces in here are more ephemeral than others - the epic two-part story of how Gopnik and a large number of other journalistic and publishing people failed to affect, in any serious way, the takeover of their favorite brasserie by a restaurant mogul is probably the height of the "amusing to read, absolutely meaningless twenty years later" aspect of the book.

But some, as with an article about a major, and very late, war-crimes trial coming out of WWII, are perhaps equally relevant today, and Gopnik just as quotable:

To deliver a child to the secret police is as large a crime against humanity as you ever need to find, no matter where you think he is going or what kind of car he is going to travel in.

 - "Papon's Paper Trail," p.122

But the bulk of the book ends up being personal - the big news stories are largely about his angle on them, and the greatest pleasures of the book are in the Gopnik family life. (Gopnik knew this, in assembling the book; he says as much in the first piece. Good writers know their material.) And, near the end, the family grows with another child, in a way that Gopnik the writer must have thought was the perfect bit of material to close out the collection. He got some good stuff out of that, too:

In New York, in other words, pregnancy is a medical condition that, after proper care by people in white coats and a brief hospital stay, can have a "positive outcome." In Paris it is something that has happened because of sex, which, with help and counsel, can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York pregnancy is a ward in the house of medicine; in Paris it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.

 - "Like a King," p.301

Paris to the Moon had a vogue, but I bet it's still read avidly today. I mean, people still read the Peter Mayle books about Provence, and those are a decade older. Good writing lasts, and this is good writing. It may be bittersweet to look at the dates and realize the small boy traipsing through these pages is probably about to turn thirty - I'm not going to look him up to see what he's doing - but that's how time works. This made me want to read more Gopnik, more New Yorker writers, more about Paris - more good books, in general, and who could ask for more?

This Year: 2021

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

For 2021, I'm going to repeat myself. I posted about this song when I first heard it, as Your Bluesy Stomp of the Moment.

What I said then:

Trust me: it's awesome. Psychedelic guitar rock meets bluesy swamp-rock. I just listened to it three times in a row across two devices: that's how awesome.

This is Raven by The Living Pins, which is two women from Austin, TX. My understanding is that they've been around the music industry for a while - maybe not quite my age, since I am old, but not kiddies - but The Living Pins was a new collaboration, and you can hear both of those things in the music: they know what they're doing, and they're having a lot of fun making it new. (They've since been putting out music semi-regularly since this initial EP - also a good sign!)

Bye bye freaky little monster children

I have no idea what any of the lyrics mean, but I love that first line of the refrain, and admit to singing along with it almost every time.

This is another song that just hits me with the sound: another chugging beat, not fast but relentless, and that bluesy guitar winding in and out and around, until we get the quick solo after the second verse.

And just remember: no one here gets...uh huh yeah. Words to live by, whatever they mean. The very best songs mean whatever you need them to mean, whatever you bring to them.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/16/2023

Another week, another new book from the library - as I type this (pretty early in the week), there's only one, but maybe I'll have to amend this post if I get things actually in the mail.

The Kaiju Preservation Society is a recent humorous SF novel from John Scalzi, who is pretty well-known in those parts. I realized I've missed his last, um, eight or ten novels - I have The Human Division and The End of All Things on the to-be-read shelves, so that was probably when I stalled out - and figured I should remedy that. Back when I edited SF, I thought Scalzi was an incredibly talented writer whose books leaned harder into the quick and facile stuff than I wanted them to. These days, I'm often looking for quick and funny reads, so I might be more in tune with his sensibility - I'll see.

Quote of the Week: You See But Do Not Observe

"In a world ruled by men, a woman's looks are more important than her moral character. Women are to be seen and not heard. That is why my audience was always so enchanted and somewhat afraid of me. I had attained great power as a woman simply because I was invisible yet possessed something men desire: knowledge of their fate, their destiny. I will not join the world until my outer form and inner being can be perceived at once, each equal to the other. So I wait, and test the waters now and then by luring a man to show me what he sees."

 - the title character, on p.272 of Jeffrey Ford's The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

Reset by Peter Bagge

I'm running close to a decade behind reading Peter Bagge's books - but, the weird thing is, I seem to still be reading all of his books, just with that big time-delay. I have no explanation, and may catch up one of these days: cartooning is time-intensive work, and even someone as prolific as Bagge doesn't pile up books the way a prose writer like Stephen King or Nora Roberts does.

That's as close to a reason why I read his 2012 miniseries/2013 graphic novel Reset here at the end of 2023. As usual, I find bits of the worldbuilding to be weird, especially in retrospect: maybe because of the things Bagge needed to create this story, maybe because I fundamentally don't agree with his assumptions about life and society in general.

Bagge's worlds are full of mildly updated '50s gender-essentialism: men are hot-headed and often physically violent, because They Are Men and the World Is Frustrating. Sometimes they are divided into the smart ones (effete, tentative, too weak for this world, typically wearing glasses) and the strong ones (stupid as a post, addicted to incredibly counterproductive ideas, full of zeal and energy for all the wrong things, typically wearing mullets). Women are sneaky, vindictive shrews who you (the reader, who is of course a man) can never trust and who drive you (ditto) crazy all the time, and usually won't even let you fuck them! (Not that you want to: damn harpies! But a man has needs!)

This time out, the man is Guy Krause, right in the middle of that Bagge male stereotype: we meet him in a mandated traffic-safety class, where he was forced after a road-rage incident. Krause is a minor celebrity, a former stand-up comedian turned movie actor, maybe B or C-list at best but recently hitting a stretch of bad luck and bad breaks.

The woman is Dr. Angie Minor, who meets him in that class - with ulterior motives, we soon learn - and recruits him for a research project.

That project is not what it seems to be, of course. And Bagge seems to be interested in yet a third aspect of the project, which makes the book a bit lumpy and thematically jumbled. But let me start with what it seems to be.

Angie is working for an unnamed company, developing a fancy new VR headset and associated software program. They claim not to know what they'll use it for yet, but they can create a Choose-Your-Adventure version of a subject's life, after some serious, presumably expensive research, to build the world-model. (Anyone who understands capitalism will have warning bells ringing in their heads at this point: there's no plausible product here aside from maybe masturbatory fantasies for billionaires.)

So Guy will be put in a chair with this headset and some fancy electrodes and relive important moments of his life, while Angie and her tech, Ted, monitor him to find out...something they're unclear about. The title comes from the fact that Guy has one control, a button that pops him out of the simulation and resets it back to the base state: the beginning of this particular scenario.

It is also the big honking metaphor at the center of the book, of course: what would you do if you could live the important moments in your life over? If you could Reset, what would you do? Bagge runs away from this idea almost immediately; it doesn't fit his plot and his tech is too crude to really be believable to the user.

Ray is both a bad subject - headstrong and unwilling to be led and obnoxious (did I say he's a Bagge main character yet? I may be repeating myself) - and the only possible subject for this custom bespoke simulation based entirely on his life, which seems really weird and becomes the obvious Chekhov Gun looming over the whole book. And, yes, the real explanation of Angie's research comes into it - though Bagge never gives any adequate explanation of why Guy was chosen, aside from the very weak initial "you're famous enough that it was easy to research you" one, which is only plausible if they sign up the subject before doing the research.

The plot is more about what's really going on and less about Ray's re-living his life, though I think Bagge wants the core of this story to be what Ray learns. (He does re-connect with a girl he had a crush on in high school, for example.)

Again, in a Bagge world, everyone is selfish and horrible and unpleasant - occasionally not all that bad to specific other people that they like, at that moment, but you can never count on that. So people yell at each other, act out, ramp up the experiments, maliciously comply with instructions, and much more. We do find out the secret reason for the project in the end, and it's dumb and vague and doesn't make a whole lot of sense that that would lead to this.

So it's a Bagge book: full of talky, angry people with rubber-hose limbs gesticulating at each other, spitting fire, yelling, and so on. I don't have an overly sunny view of humanity, I think, but even I think he can be a bit much. This one is amusing and doesn't have any unpleasant background assumptions (unlike Apocalypse Nerd, for example); it's somewhat lumpy but generally moves well and is full of amusing Bagge stuff. Maybe not top-tier Bagge, but pretty close: good, almost current work from a creator who is like no one else. If Bagge seems interesting, this is a decent one to dive into, though Hate is still the core.

Pixels of You by Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota, and J.R. Doyle

It's not usual for a creative team to accrete members over time. OK, sure, you can think of bands that got bigger as they got successful enough to add, for instance, a horn section, but those accretions tend to be semi-separate: The Fantastic Desperadoes with the Horns of Doom! People get replaced, of course. But it's not common for new people to come in, set up, and just be added.

So I'm wondering what will be next for the team behind Pixels of You, a 2021 graphic novel from Amulet, Abrams' teen-comics imprint. Co-writers (and partners in life, too, I think) Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Oda did the book Lucky Penny together before this - there, Hirsh was billed as the writer and Oda as the artist, but we all know artists in comics do at least half the storytelling (which means "writing") anyway.

This time out, they have a new artist - maybe to have a particular look, maybe for other artistic reasons - J.R. Doyle, who also does a webcomic called Knights Errant and seems to do storyboard work as well.

Pixels looks nothing like Penny, and the tone is completely different, so that's my assumption: Hirsh and Oda knew they wanted this new project to go in a different direction  If so, it worked: I had to look them up to remember what it was I read by them, and didn't bring any expectations to Pixels.

Pixels of You is a personal drama, enemies-to-friends division (maybe more than friends, as is often the case), set in a near-future SF world. AI is ubiquitous and well-integrated - the SFnal kind of AI that quite likely will never actually exist, humaniform persons who are just part of human society. They don't seem to be an underclass, though there are hints of prejudice and most AI persons may be vaguely considered lesser than meat-people. There are also hints that AI personhood, or possibly citizenship, are contingent in some way, with regular tests AI persons need to pass to stay in their current status.

Indira is a young woman working as an intern in an art gallery: she's a wannabe photographer, and her boss is influential in that world. The internship is a strong way into the world she wants to be part of, and she's trying to make the most of it. She also has a cybernetic eye - totally realistic-looking; no one knows unless she tells them - from a tragic accident in her past, and either that accident or the eye or both are the source of health issues, pain and bad dreams and sometimes worse.

Fawn is the next intern in line at the gallery: she's on her way in as Indira is finishing her time. Fawn is a human-presenting AI, the "daughter" of two traditional-looking AI persons who seem to be quite successful - maybe managerial-class jobs, something like that.

They meet at a show, and immediately get on each other's worst sides: Fawn insults Indira's work, without know it's hers. Indira is prickly and standoffish to begin with, so gives as well as she gets.

But the gallery owner needs them to work together, and forces them to do so: the next show, which was originally planned to be a combined look at their separate work, now will be of work they make together.

Both Indira and Fawn are well-meaning, mostly nice people, so they don't stay enemies all that long. (Coming from Penny, I might have expected a longer, funnier sequence of squabbling, physical or verbal, but Pixels is a quieter, much more serious book.) They do learn to work together, they do learn each other's secrets, they do become friends.

That sounds trite, I suppose, but any story is trite when stripped to the barest plot. The team here tells this one well - there's a lot of single-panel pages to show what Fawn and Indira's work looks like, and a lot of semi-wordless sequences, since photography is more about seeing than talking. It's a sweet story, even if I do have some quibbles with the SFnal background.

Quite a Mountain by Jim Benton

This book was shorter than I expected, so today's post should be quick.

Last time around with Jim Benton, I read and enjoyed his all-ages graphic novel Attack of the Stuff but noted that I might be getting to the end of the all-ages bits, leaving only the definitely-for-middle-graders books. (And, don't get me wrong: middle graders are fine people who deserve awesome books, but I'm not one of them and haven't been for some time.)

And that seems to be true: from here, Benton's work is a vast sea of Frannie K. Stein and My Dumb Diary, plus a clutch of board books for even younger people. There are some other things in graphic format that I might be tempted to look at eventually - the Catwad series, maybe Batman Squad - but they are very clearly middle-grade-y, and, again, I am at a different point in my life right now.

Quite a Mountain calls itself "a fable for all ages." I pretty much knew what that meant going in, and I bet you do, too: short, accessible, with some kind of a message, a book designed to sit by the cash register and sell itself to the random passers-by. It's hard to tell, since I read it digitally, but I would bet serious money that it's in a small, gift-y format as well. I read it within maybe fifteen minutes, and I was trying to stretch it out.

I tagged it as "comics," but it's an illustrated book - one big drawing to a page, with typeset text to accompany it.

So there's a bear and his friend, a frog, at the bottom of a mountain. The frog is mildly disgusted at the idea of a mountain at all, but the bear decides to climb it. He does. He comes to various things on the mountain, finds a place to live for a while, but...you know the metaphor, you know the lesson.

To Benton's benefit, he never leaves the metaphor or says the lesson clearly. He's telling a story about a bear. Any lessons are up to the reader. And he's got a lovely stark illustrative line in the drawings and his usual casual quick writing: this is a book that feels light and fun and amusing on every page. It's not setting itself up seriously in any way.

But this is inherently a "you can do it!" book, to be given to new graduates or bought by people to cheer themselves up. It's a fine mini-genre, and it will always be with us. I'm not complaining, just defining. Benton has the attitude I share towards the matter and the genre: not entirely believing in it in its purest form, but clear that nothing comes without effort. And clear that "effort" is annoying and not what you want to do most of the time.

So this is a solid fable, with no detectable saccharine - unlike most of its cohort - by a fine creator.

I'll just end by giving the last word to the frog:

I'm not going to tell you that you can't do this, because that would be discouraging. But I am thinking it. I am thinking it pretty hard.