L'esprit D'escalier

Sometime last night, I realized that my previous post was sadly mistitled. It should have been "The Sweet Smell of Excess."

Ah, well. I guess that's how my brain works -- always a bit too late for it's own good.

The Sweet Smell of Success

So earlier this evening -- before the kids are in bed, even -- I walk upstairs from this computer, and in the main hall of the first floor there's a faint, familiar smell. But it seems very unlikely, so I call The Wife over. She agrees with me, after a minute-- it's that very sweet smell that can be nothing else (but you never expect to smell unexpectedly in your own house, even with all of the windows open).

Together, we follow the smell to the back of the house -- it's coming through from the backyard somewhere. But not from the neighbors on one side (who are Grateful Dead fans and thus always suspect). And not from the house two doors down the other way, which was a low-key drug den for a while earlier this year.

So, if you live behind me, and you're reading this, you should know that your teenage kids are doing a little smoking out back by the pool. And the whole neighborhood can smell it...

Maybe We Don't Get No Respect...

But at least ex-SF editors don't write long articles in the national press about how our genre is "bad for America."

Chick-Lit, I feel your pain. I mean, I'm also snickering at you behind my hand, because it's funny, but I do feel your pain.

Steve Irwin Is Dead, Alas

I believe it's in the small-print somewhere on the Blogger website that everyone with a blog must make a post when someone like "the Crocodile Hunter" dies.

Since I don't want expensive legal trouble, this is my entry.

(I was working up all kinds of puns in my head after I saw the first mention of it, but further blog-reading shows that they've all been used -- and, besides, he's a young guy who died in a very sad, unlikely way. My condolences to his family.)

Book-A-Day #49 (9/4): an unnamed epic fantasy book

There's nothing wrong with this book, but I don't have anything particularly nice to say about it, either. So I'll leave it anonymous.

Book-A-Day #48 (9/3): Hit Parade by Lawrence Block

This is the book I figured I get through on Wednesday and Thursday, but time constraints (I couldn't read at lunch Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, and then it was the weekend) stretched it out much longer than that.

This is a classic fix-up (made up of at least six stories originally published elsewhere, but presented unblushingly as a novel), and the third "novel" in the Keller series. Keller is a high-priced hit man, and our sympathetic protagonist. (Block is one of the few writers who would try to write a series about a hit man without dropping into black comedy or melodrama, and one of even fewer who could actually pull it off.)

I wonder about the genesis of this series. Block wrote an essay some years ago (I don't think it was the one about dividing mysteries into cats and no-cats, but it could be; I haven't been able to dig it up with a quick search) where he mused about mystery protagonists with "codes" and said something like

"I've read one mystery series about a detective who's obsessed with his code; he has long discussions with his girl friend about it. I don't have a code myself, and I don't know anyone who does. Often I don't know if I'd do something until the opportunity comes up and I either do it or don't do it. I think most people are the same way."

The Keller series reads to me like Block's exploration of that idea -- that you don't know what you'll do until you have to do it. The reader follows Keller though his various jobs (all of which, of course, involve killing people for money) and through the complications of each job -- not complications in the Richard Stark sense (as in more people that need to be killed), but complications about what Keller himself is comfortable doing, and what he can do. I wouldn't want to say Keller is a portrait of the "banality of evil," since I don't think that's Block's aim, but it's somewhere in that neighborhood: a portrait of what one man can find himself doing, step by little step, and still like himself.

The series started with Hit Man and continued in Hit List, and any reader interested should do the same. And I'll highly recommend them: Block is not only one of the smoothest and most readable writers today in any genre, but the Keller books are some of his best work; it doesn't hit you over the head, but I think you'll, like me, start thinking about what you will and won't do.

Book-A-Day #47 (9/2): Book One: Work 1986-2006 by Chip Kidd

A monograph of the first twenty years of Kidd's book-designing career, with lots of notes and a biographical introduction by Kidd, as well as appreciations by a number of people he's designed covers for.

Kidd is the famous cover designer of the modern age, in large part because he's the one of most exciting and innovative designers working now. A lot of his covers do look heavily designed, which isn't necessarily a virtue, but there are lots of exciting visual ideas in here.

Anyone seriously interested in book design already has this, I'm sure, but anyone in the business who deals with covers from any position of power (and some interested readers, who want to know how things get to look like that) should check out this book.

Book-A-Day #46 (9/1): Fairies by Yoshitaka Amano

Another art book, this time one I picked up at Worldcon (if that matters). Amano is a Japanese artist who apparently is a big deal over there (he's Artist GOH at next year's Yokohama Worldcon), but is probably best known in the English-speaking world for illustrating Sandman: The Dream Hunters.

This book is a collection of paintings (and a few small works in pen) along with text (presumably by Amano himself, and translated by Carmellia Nieh) about fairies from the British Isles. They're mostly from folklore, with a few bits from Arthurian legend and Shakespeare.

Amano's art is (I think) all executed in watercolor, often over pen lines; there's generally a delicacy and transparency of color, particularly in the figures. In fact, many of the fairie figures (generally the larger, human-sized ones, particularly when female) don't seem to be painted at all, but left as negative white space, defined by a few faint pen lines and the colors surrounding them.

Some of the pieces (mostly the first few pages, all from A Midsummer Night's Dream) are too busy for their own good, and the negative-space figures, supposedly the focus of the art, are very hard to pick out. But it settles down after that, and it's a nice collection of art. It compares interestingly to the similar works of Brian Froud and Alan Lee; Amano is coming at the legends as an outsider (and one from a very different artistic tradition), but his fairies don't look vastly different to my eye.

This book was probably more new and exciting to a Japanese audience (where Amano would have been introducing many of these characters, ideas and themes), but it's still a nice book of fairie art here.

Hours of Fun for Bizarre People Like Me

I just discovered this site, where one can type in a phrase or sentence and have it read out loud in about a dozen different voices.

The obvious use is obscenity, of course, but what I've been doing is having various voices read out Yosemite Sam's immortal line

I can't get along little doggie,
I can't even get one that's small,
I can't get along little doggie,
I can't get a doggie at all.

and then giggling hysterically.

I've found that "Clair" is the closest thing they have to a real Western accent, but, I have to say, the accents available are all pretty bland and uninteresting. If you're going to do a selection of accents, they should be flamboyant accents.

People I Wish I'd Met At Worldcon

I'm more than a bit of a misanthrope (which probably surprises exactly none of you), and I used to get very antsy and anxious in crowds. It doesn't happen all that much anymore, but I'm also on two kinds of heart pills, so I may just be medicated down to a less frantic level.

Conventions have been deeply anxiety-inducing since I started going to them about ten years ago. I always want to have a good time, and I sometimes even have a rough idea of what a good time would be, but I generally end up afterwards thinking that I've missed doing everything I wanted to do. (Ask me about Glasgow sometime: I was there for six days with my wife, but I saw hardly any of the convention, didn't really talk to anyone, and I also feel like I didn't do any good touristy stuff, either.)

L.A. Con IV left me feeling less depressed than usual, but I still have a massive sense of lost opportunities. This was recently brought home to me by reading Mark Kelly's convention report, in which he talks about chatting with both me and Julie Phillips (author of the great new biography James Tiptree, Jr.) at the Eos party on Friday night. I would have loved to have met Julie Phillips; I had no idea she was even at the con. (On the other hand, Tim Powers was at the same party, I would also love to meet him, and I was too shy to go over and introduce myself.)

So now I'm making a mental list of people I saw but didn't talk to at Worldcon, people I probably could have talked to if I was the kind of person who was good at talking to semi-strangers. I walked right by Bob Silverberg at least once, and Mike Resnick twice. Similarly with Rob Sawyer, Karl Schroeder, and probably a dozen others. I didn't even see Cheryl Morgan, whom I'd hoped to meet in person.

I'll hereby make a solemn vow: I will spend the four days of World Fantasy actually talking to people, until either my voice gives out or I run screaming and curl up in a nice quiet corner somewhere. If you're there, say hello to me and see if I twitch...

Book-A-Day #45 (8/31): Frank Cho Women: Selected Drawings and Illustrations

Another day, another book with hardly any words in it. In fact, this one (which I picked up at the comics shop and read on the bus on the way home) has no text sections at all -- no introduction, foreword, appreciation, or afterword. It doesn't even have captions for the art, which is unfortunate; I'd have liked to have seen some explanations and background from Cho.

Cho is a cartoonist who seems to be in the middle of turning from the creator of his own series (Liberty Meadows, which started out as a newspaper strip, was reprinted in comic-book form and then migrated to comics entirely, and which seems to have ended at some point after I stopped keeping track of it) to a Marvel Comics gun-for-hire. He's got an appealing, just-to-the-cartoony-side-of-realistic style, does faces well, and has a good eye for areas of black. But the reason he's a fan favorite is that he usually draws the kind of women who will have severe back problems later in life. (He always draws them as if they're just eighteen, though, and the anatomy of any one of them is just barely plausible. All put together, though, it's clear what type of woman he prefers.)

He has a very good eye for covers/pin-ups/calendar illustrations, so much so that he seems to have been born about fifty years too late for his own good. If he can paint like he draws, he could have been another Gil Elvgren.

This book goes by very quickly unless one stares at each page for a long time -- admittedly, perhaps the expected audience will do just that. There is a fair bit of nudity in it, but that's the point of a book like this. I enjoyed it, but it's not as good as it should have been -- it looks like it was put together for a quick buck. I'd have much preferred a book with some real design, more than one picture on most of the pages, notes and details from Cho about the pictures and how he worked on them, and just more words to make this into something more like a real book than a portfolio that just happens to be bound between boards.

Book-A-Day #44 (8/30): Prohibited Book 3 by Luis Royo

Reading time this week has been scarce, for various odd reasons, so I've had to keep up the book-a-day pace by knocking off some of the art books I've picked up recently. Luckily, that's one of the reasons I buy art books -- another is that I do buy art books for the SFBC, and I've found more than one thing over the years by paying money for a copy of it myself.

Prohibited Book 3 is the third and last in a series of smaller-than-art-book-usual format (about 6" x 10") compendia collecting some of the smuttier sketches and paintings by the Spanish artist Luis Royo. There's also some overheated, quite pretentious text -- I'm not sure if it reads that way because it's translated, because smut always brings out the over-writer in us all, or if it was that bad in the original. But it is there, and it is too much.

Royo is the best of the current crop of artists who do ridiculously gorgeous women (and men) well -- his anatomy is generally good (though it always is right up against the extremes of human possibility), his poses are fluid rather than stiff, and he has a strong sense of composition. In other words, he paints good pictures that just happen to have half (or fully) naked swordsbabes in them. I like his work several ways: as a guy who likes looking at naked babes, as a connoisseur of good illustration, and as a marketer who knows that his covers really sell books.

But the Prohibited Book series is stuff that's not just too sexy to be on American book covers -- it's too sexy to be sold outside of shrinkwrapping in many jurisdictions. (There's not just copious nudity -- to be expected in any Royo book, of course -- but more than a little explicit sex.) So be warned. If you don't know Royo, don't start here -- pick up Secrets or Dreams, or the career retrospective Fantastic Art. But, if you do know Royo, and wonder what he would be like even sexier, then you might be interested in the Prohibited Book series. (And this one is pretty much the same as the first two; Royo's level of work is amazingly consistent.)

Bedtime Reading: 9/1

It's the beginning of a new month, so what better time to start a new feature? I think about and read a lot of books for kids (since I have two sons, Thing 1 and Thing 2, and I read to them, or at least one of them, nearly every night), and I've wanted to write about those books here for a while. But I hadn't really found the right way to do it, until today.

On nights that I read "short books" (the most recent "long book," Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, went into hibernation when I went off to Worldcon and hasn't come back out yet), there are four of them, which is a nice workable number. So I'm going to try to jot down some thoughts about the books I read on the nights I remember to do so and have time to spare. (Even once a week would be OK, and I think I can do better than that.)

Tonight, Thing 1 decided to read a My Neighbor Totoro storybook in his own room, and Thing 2 decided tonight's breakdown would be that he picked one book and I picked three. And those were:

• Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson (him)
  I was hitting the puns very hard tonight (draw up the bed, make land, etc.) to emphasize them to Thing 2 -- his brother is at the age of memorizing and telling jokes, so the little one wants to work out what makes things funny for himself. And, of course, this is a wonderful little book.
• The Little Farm by Lois Lenski (me)
  One of the middle books in the long-running "Mister Small" series (originally published from the '30s through the '60s, I think). I discovered these with Thing 1 and bought the nicely colored reissues as they came out over the past few years. Some of them seem a bit dated (The Little Auto is from 1934!), but it hasn't bothered the boys -- I'm not sure if they've even noticed. I picked this one tonight because it's from later in the series, and has fewer words. (Some picture books have too many words for their own good; you need to be able to read them at a natural pace and still turn pages at a reasonable speed. It is possible to have a crammed-full book that takes forever to read and is screamingly funny -- like Laurie Keller's great Arnie the Doughnut -- but that's very hard to pull off.)
• Bunny Cakes by Rosemary Wells (me)
  One of the Max & Ruby books; Thing 2 noted that this story was one he'd seen on TV. It's funny and enjoyable, like all of the Max & Ruby books, and it also has "shopping lists" of single words several places, which are very good to use as a reading/word recognition exercise. (That sounds awfully highfalutin', but Thing 2 is starting kindergarten in less than a week, and I'd like to help him learn to read if I can.)
• One Monster After Another by Mercer Mayer (me)
  I love Mercer Mayer's books; I imprinted on them when I was a boy in the '70s and he was doing some of his best work. This is from that era, and has lots of odd creatures with great names (the Stamp-Collecting Trollusk, the Bombanat-Munching Grumley, the Free Floating Ice-Ferg, and so on). This one doesn't have all of the silly things going on in the background, like some of his books of that era do (like How the Trollusk Got His Hat), but the art is nicely detailed and...I'm afraid I can't be objective about Mercer Mayer. He's just one of the greats to me.

Book-A-Day #43 (8/29): James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips

First of all: yes, this is as good as everyone has been saying. Allie Sheldon had a long, full life, did a lot of interesting things, and was the kind of complete mental wreck whose life is morbidly fascinating. On top of that, Phillips is a subtle, engaging writer who takes the time to tease out Sheldon/Tiptree's contradictions, and who can present her life fairly, without whitewashing or demonizing. Phillips is particularly good at synthesizing all of the different parts of Sheldon's life, and her paragraphs often start with a quote from Allie at the time, flash-forward to expand that with a Tiptree quote, and then dive back to the original time-period, without losing focus or coherence. She also shifts pronouns, referring to Sheldon as "she" and Tiptree as "he" -- this doesn't come across as affectation, but instead as an honest, serious attempt to keep the personas separate. (It actually aids comprehension at times, which is amazing.)

Sheldon changed careers many times in her life; it seems like she couldn't stand to do the same thing for more than three or five years straight. The reader can get very frustrated and unhappy with Sheldon as the book goes on; she keeps abandoning things just when you hope it will help her turn herself around and find a purpose for herself. (Yes, of course we all already know how it ends -- how it has to end -- but you still want Allie to somehow transcend the already-known facts of her life and burst free into herself.) As with many other aspects of Sheldon's life, the reader keeps wondering if she would have had it as hard if she had been born a man. Could she then have been able to find something fulfilling and stick with it? (And what could she have accomplished if so?)

It's inevitably a life full of "what if"s -- Sheldon had so many problems (her relationship with her mother, her two not-quite-functional marriages, her desire to do something artistically without quite knowing what, and, above everything else, her tangled, tormented sexual life) that the reader keeps wanting to reach into her life and do this or that to fix things. But all of those problems intertwine, so even the imaginative reader can't quite figure out the magic bullet that would have made her happy, healthy and the artist she so clearly both yearned to be and could be.

It's odd that a life so long and full of events -- she had been on three year-long African safaris before she went to college! she went to boarding school in France and basic training! she worked for the CIA and ran a chicken farm! -- feels so unfinished, but that's because the pieces didn't add up to a whole. Every piece was part of Allie Sheldon's search, and the end of her search only brought her to the barrel of a shotgun.

James Tiptree, Jr. is a book that got me thinking seriously about feminism, and, more generally, just about the roles people are born into and can't get out of. Sheldon needed a society with a more fluid perception of self; maybe she would have been happier and healthier born five decades later (in my own generation), but maybe even that wouldn't have been enough. I can say that some of the expectations and ideas she encountered from men seem quaint and historical to me (born in 1969, educated at Vassar College but not a feminist), so the world has moved on in some direction. And, just maybe, Allie Sheldon as James Tiptree, Jr. had a little bit to do with that motion.

If you're at all interested in the lives of writers, read this book.

Quote of the Week

"Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this."
- Gustave Flaubert