Quote of the Hour: Worlds Within Worlds

I knew more than they did, more than Blau, more than most people do. People think of reality as immutable: solid and reassuring, that it is true merely because it is there.

But I knew better. Even Tirosh, that hack, had a sense of the real truth of it, in his wild inventions and his torrid fictions. The world is the sum of what it could be, what it might have been, and how it could have been.

I know how fragile the borders are between the worlds, how quickly madness settles, and fiction becomes fact. The world is always stranger, after all, than we imagine. You can call it quantum mechanics, you can call it Kaballah, but either way, it was my job to stop it from happening.

 - Lavie Tidhar, Unholy Land, p.146

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/30/23

As I type this, the post for last week hasn't gone live yet; I could add this book there. But I don't feel like it, so I won't. Instead, for the moment - unless and until I unwrap some Xmas presents I got myself - this week's post is another single book from the library.

Adventuregame Comics, Vol. 2: The Beyond is the second in a somewhat Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style series of graphic novels by Jason Shiga. Leviathan came out last year, and both follow the model of the (much larger, much more ambitious, vastly more work as far as I can see) decade-old Meanwhile..., still one of the best, most interesting GNs I've ever seen. I thought Leviathan was fun, if not as impressive and overwhelming as Meanwhile..., and it's good to see it is continuing as a series.

Quote of the Hour: The Chorus Girl in Her Native Habitat

At the corner of Fifth Avenue [on the MGM lot], a flock of impossibly tall hula dancers in mock-coconut bras gabbed and snapped their gum while they waited for a prop man rolling a golden sarcophagus to cross, then went on, their grass skirts rustling, shedding fronds. Was there anything more heartbreaking than starlets, their sisterly camaraderie, their shared dream so nakedly on display? A veteran, he was better at concealing his ambition and fear. He'd been worried, uncertain of the wisdom of his return, but the goofy business of production soothed the song-and-dance man in him. Here was a game company and a waiting stage, all they needed was a decent book, a few catchy tunes. He had to believe he was still capable of that.

 - Stewart O'Nan, West of Sunset, p.17

Quote of the Hour: Unspeakable, Uneatable

My feelings about foxhunting were (and remain) deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, I like foxes, and, since I don't keep chickens, have never regarded them as any particular threat, while at the same time I don't much like most of the people who hunt foxes. On the other hand, riding full tilt over unfamiliar stone walls has a certain appeal to me, as do all the ancient traditions of dress and behavior that go with foxhunting, and in fact constitute its chief attraction. Either you enjoy getting dressed up in what amounts to costume to risk your neck on a horse, or you don't, is what it amounts to. No great moral issue has ever seemed to me at stake, one way or the other.

 - Michael Korda, Country Matters, p. 39

Quote of the Hour: China Shops Comma Bulls In

Lady Hermione, who deprecated the introduction into the tea-table conversation in her drawing-room of reminiscences of one-eyed three-card-trick men, however sound their hearts, changed the subject by asking Bill if this was his first visit to Shropshire, and the latter, shaken to his foundations by the innocent query, once more kicked over the cake table. The fact was that Bill, though an admirable character, was always a little large for any room in which he was confined. To he ensure his not kicking over cake tables, you would have had to place him in the Gobi Desert.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Full Moon, p.189

Quote of the Hour: Everything

For two months one summer, I thought golf could be everything. For the rest of my life, I thought, I'll put all of my energy into golf, all my spare time, all my passion, and that's what I did, for two months, until I realized that I could put all my energy into golf, all my spare time, all my passion, for the rest of my life. I don't think I've ever been so depressed.

 - Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, pp.5-6

Quote of the Hour: Absent-Minded

In a creatively nonproductive phase, my body almost mirrors my emotional state and I can become uncoordinated and a risk to myself and others as I bump into tables and walk into closing doors. When it gets like this I forget which side of the Atlantic I am on. I invariably trip up on the pavement, drive on the wrong side of the road, and generally become a danger to anyone who happens to be walking near me.

 - Ray Davies, Americana, p.150 

Quote of the Hour: Think of the Children

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful, more resilient, and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms, and they loom large, White celebrities busybodying in Africa loom especially large. I watched Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Sudan, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, and the image that sprang to my mind was of Tarzan and Jane.

 - Paul Theroux, "The Rock Star's Burden," in Figures in a Landscape, p.210-11

Quote of the Hour: Why They Call It an Emergency

We were come upon a wasteland...as was calculated, true, when emergency landing areas were designated, but in fact 'emergency landing area" was a sort of joke, wasn't it, intended to somehow give the impression that things were somehow under control somehow even after a crash, but they were not under control, were they? No, they were not under control; nothing was under control.

 - Algis Budrys, Hard Landing, p.330 (in SF Gateway Omnibus)

Quote of the Hour: Reality-based Community

Deane Hinton is an interesting man. Before he replaced Robert White in San Salvador he had served in Europe, South America, and Africa. He had been married twice, once to an American, who bore him five children before their divorce, and once to a Chilean, who had died not long before, leaving him the stepfather of her five children by an earlier marriage. At the time I met him he had just announced his engagement to a Salvadoran named Patricia de Lopez. Someone who is about to marry a third time, who thinks of himself as the father of ten, and who has spent much of his career in chancey posts - Mombasa, Kinasha, Santiago, San Salvador - is apt to be someone who believes in the possible.

 - Joan Didion, Salvador, p.398 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Quote of the Hour: What the Smart Set Are Thinking This Year

Once again, I have too many quotes, so I'm burning them off as Quote of the Hour. I did this the last day of last year, and on the July 4th weekend this year, so I guess it's now a twice-yearly activity. For the few of you who, like me, still use RSS, apologies for spamming your feed.

She wasn't sure that the people she worked with and listened to and admired were right about everything, and as she got older it only became more confusing. But she had learned that, to her friends and colleagues, all the things her father believed were as musty and unattractive as a trouser suit in a department store sale. You could refuse to care about fashion if you wanted to, but if you were going to spend all your time in the company of with-it people, you needed to know when they were laughing at you.

 - Nick Hornby, Funny Girl, pp. 270-1

Quote of the Week: Ego Sum Ergo Accumula

He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. No ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn't that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money.

 - Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p.249 in the 1999 Everyman's Ripley omnibus

One Star Wonders by Mike Lowery

Sometimes, you want to read a book, but not any specific book. You look at a bunch, and everything is not quite right. (As my family puts it, echoing the Berenstains: too beady too bumpy too leafy too lumpy.)

So you pick up something quick and light that you hope will be fun, to read something and get going again.

That's how I read One Star Wonders by Mike Lowery. I have no regrets.

In a previous era, it would sit next to a cash register in a thousand Borders across this great nation. It might be next to the cash-wrap in stores even now; I see it was published this year, so it's new enough that it might still be on promo. If you do happen to see it, while buying something else, pick it up and take a look - it might amuse you enough to grab it yourself.

(I read it digitally, from my library app, so I had a different experience.)

Lowery is an illustrator and author - I don't think he does "comics," exactly, but he's made a lot of illustrated books, for kids and old people, and he's got a detailed sketchbooky style with a lot of life and energy to it. He also travels a lot: looks like sometimes it's related to work, but mostly he seems to find ways to turn the travel he already wants to do into work. (Which is a great thing, in the old "pursue your passions" way.)

This book is an illustrated collection of quotes from reviews that Lowery has collected over the years. The quotes are by random people - you know, SoupLover9736 and DebbieFromScarsdale67 and 420Life6969; those kind of people - on various online review sites. The reviews are of famous landmarks and locations in the world: the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, the Statue of Liberty, stuff like that.

And, as you may guess from the title, all of the reviews are dismissive.

Some of them are things you will have heard other places, such as this take on Venice: "You will remember the smell of raw sewage."

Some seem to miss the point, as on China's Tianzi Mountains: "Only awesome if you like scenery."

Lowery puts each quote on a single page, with a drawing of the place. Again, he has a cartoony, quick style, so they're all recognizable but fun and cartoony.

This is a short book, amusing and quickly read and quite frivolous in the best ways. What more can I say about it? I'm going to see what else Lowery has done for people my age, which is as good a recommendation I can make: I read this guy's silly frivolous book, and it made me look for more.

The Great Pencil Quest by Will Henry

Dependability and consistency are underrated as virtues - often even seen as faults. But a creator who can do good work, over and over again, in the same style and with similar results should be treasured. Dependably inventive and consistently amusing are wonderful things.

Will Henry, creator of the daily strip Wallace the Brave, is both of those: he has a strong, mixed cast that lets him do different kinds of jokes, a penchant for longer continuities rare these days, and a detail-filled, unfussy art style that sells all of the wild ideas and antics. Wallace is both dependable and consistent - but still manages to surprise, regularly, with a grace note or goofy concept.

The Great Pencil Quest is the new book collecting the strip; it came out about a month ago, I think, and follows four previous collections. (All of which I recommend - Wallace the Brave, Snug Harbor Stories, Wicked Epic Adventures, Are We Lost Yet? - and, in the way of a good daily strip, any of which could be a good way to start reading.)

This time out, it seems to be all daily strips - the previous ones included Sundays as well - but I could be mistaken, since the strips are somewhat reconfigured in the books to fit onto taller-than-wide pages. Each page has generally three or four panels, which always look like a single strip. (Henry does one-long-panel strips every so often, too - usually wordless, usually with multiple characters reacting to a single situation - and those are collected here in small clumps and shown uncut. I think in the physical book they run vertically to fit on the pages; I read this digitally, where space can reconfigure from page to page.)

There are 167 pages of comics here, so my guess is that it's about half a year of strips. Some of them were familiar, but some weren't - but Rose, a fairly new character, is in the book consistently, so it's mostly recent. It might well be a run of six specific months, maybe last winter or 21-22; these all take place during the school year, since Wallace takes its rhythms from the lives of its mostly grade-school cast.

And I've already written about this strip, at length, four times. I pretty much agree with all of that, though I see I was more tentative about my praise of Wallace the first couple of times. Well, I wanted to see if Henry would be dependable and consistent, I guess. He's proven that he is, with about five years of regular strips since Wallace hit newspapers. Even better, that's formed a solid base for his inventiveness to leap from - Wallace is always funny, always drawn with verve and enthusiasm, but some days and for some sequences it's more exciting and inventive and just fun than that.

To my mind, Wallace is the great traditional newspaper strip running today, the heir to things like Peanuts and Cul de Sac. It's wonderful to see that level of energy and joy on the comics page regularly, and it makes me think, just maybe, the American daily strip is not doomed, so long as Will Henry is working there.

Three Rocks by Bill Griffith

Who expected that the creator of Zippy the Pinhead would turn into a non-fiction graphic novelist? More specifically, that he would build a career creating biographies in graphic format - first his own mother's long-running affair with a cartoonist (Invisible Ink); then "Schlitzie Surtees," who performed as a pinhead in circuses in the early 20th century (Nobody's Fool); and now a full-scale biography of a fellow cartoonist, with another biography listed as coming next.

One book can be an aberration, two is a trend - three is at least a career phase, especially in a field so time-intensive as cartooning. Interestingly, there's stylistic tics and storytelling choices in those books that echo what he's done in the long-running Zippy comics - most obviously the use of his own avatar, "Griffy," as a viewpoint and narrator in the story itself, the person telling us this story.

Bill Griffith came to Three Rocks - which has the somewhat cumbersome double-barreled subtitle The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy - a decade into this new phase of his work, with habits of research and organization already established. This is a more conventional biography than either Invisible Ink, the story of one aspect of a life, or Nobody's Fool, which was hampered by a lack of serious records about "Surtees" and any way into the mind of his subject. Ernie Bushmiller created a body of work, lived fully in the world, and talked about his work regularly, both in published materials and to people who were still alive for Griffith to interview.

Griffith has long been a fan of Bushmiller's work, particularly focused on the simple clarity of Bushmiller's lines and gags, how he made cartoons (as others have said) that's it's almost impossible to not read and get immediately. So readers might wonder how he goes about recreating Bushmiller's characters and scenes - but the surprising answer, buried in the backmatter, is that he didn't.

As it says on the very last page of the book: "All drawings of Nancy, Sluggo, Fritzi Ritz, and/or any other creation of Ernie Bushmiller in this book are drawn by Bushmiller and have not been drawn by the author." In an odd way, Three Rocks is a posthumous collaboration between Bushmiller and Griffith, with Griffith recontextualizing hundreds of Bushmiller drawings to tell this long story of their creator's life and work. Griffith doesn't talk about tools, but I suspect he used Photoshop (or a similar program) to extract the figures he needed, clean up any visual artifacts, replace lettering, and collage those figures into his own pages - or into the many mostly-Bushmiller pages here, since Griffith also uses Bushmiller backgrounds and objects, particularly on pages where Nancy comments on her creator.

It's a bit post-modern, but Nancy was always playing with forms and art itself - from a middle-brow stance, of course, and all in service of a good gag - so it's appropriate, and there are a lot of somewhat surreal Nancy images for Griffith to work from. For example: that cover. The Nancy is Bushmiller, but the cross-hatching on the rocks looks like Griffith, so I think the rest of the cover is his work.

Bushmiller's life wasn't particularly exciting: he went to work at the New York World as a copy boy at the age of fourteen, and his whole career flowed from that. He never jumped syndicates or papers, and he did the Fritzi Ritz strip - later retitled Nancy, after the character he added to it - from 1925 through his death in 1982. Griffith tells that story here, with digressions by Griffy and Bushmiller's own characters about the nature of art and humor, what makes a great "snapper" (the final panel that makes the joke work), and other related topics.

It's a fairly long and dense book, circling Bushmiller's life but, in the end, more about the impulse to create - and, in particular, to create something funny. Both Bushmiller and Griffith are and were masters of that. It's thought-provoking and funny itself - both in the full Bushmiller strips it reprints (many of them, mostly shot from old scrapbooks) and in Griffith's new work here.