The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I Got Nothing

2009-11-11T22:50:00.000-05:00

Work is really busy this week -- particularly since it's a short four-day week sandwiched between the big family vacation and a business trip (starting Saturday morning, no less) to San Francisco -- and so I haven't had two brain cells to rub together to do any blogging.

Tomorrow is less meeting-intensive, so I may make it through the working day somewhat less fatigued. (And, if so, I might actually make a stab at writing about some of the books stacked up on my desk here, or actually doing the mulligan for this week's Reviewing the Mail" post.) No promises, though.

All I can say definitely is that I'm still here, and I will blog again...at some point.

World Fantasy Awards -- Only a Week Late!

2009-11-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

I was deep in the wilds of Disney when this was announced, and I'm still thousands of posts behind (in two separate feed readers, no less), but I did catch up far enough to see the winners of the 2009 World Fantasy Awards were...

Lifetime Achievement: Ellen Asher & Jane Yolen
Best Novel (tie): The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow) & Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)
Best Novella: “If Angels Fight”, Richard Bowes (F&SF 2/08)
Best Short Story: “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 7/08)
Best Anthology: Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Senses Five Press)
Best Collection: The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford (HarperPerennial)
Best Artist: Shaun Tan
Special Award – Professional: Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (for Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House)
Special Award – Non-Professional: Michael Walsh (for Howard Waldrop collections from Old Earth Books)

(via Science Fiction Awards Watch)

Congratulations to all of the winners, but particularly to Jeff Ford (two awards for books in one year!) and to the incredibly deserving, for ages now, Ellen Asher and Michael Walsh.

This year's judges were Jenny Blackford, Peter Heck, Ellen Klages, Chris Roberson & Delia Sherman, and I wish them all a pleasant time getting back to reading what they want to read.

Next in the barrel, for the 2010 awards, are new judges Greg Ketter, Kelly Link, Jim Minz, Jurgen Snoeren and Gary K. Wolfe. This is pretty early for the whole judging panel to be announced (I think), which I hope means they'll have more time to read all of the worthwhile stuff and not have a mad rush at the end. (However, that hope runs entirely counter to my personal experience as a WFC judge a few years back; the flood of stuff that looks at least half-decent is so large, and so relentless, that it takes all five judges just to winnow it down to a reasonable list of works that they all then need to read.) Anyway, best wishes to them as they embark on this reading adventure, and my hopes that none of them turn out to be the Crazy One.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/7

2009-11-09T08:30:00.001-05:00

Sometime this week, there will be my usual "Reviewing the Mail" post in this space, covering whatever books came in last week. But it's not here yet, because I'm still at Walt Disney World, and have been during every mail delivery this week. So I have no idea what books are waiting for me, though I will get to them just as soon as I can.

For now, you just get the disclaimer: I haven't read any of these books yet, so this isn't really a "review." Some of them I might never read, because of lack of time or interest. But I want to give some attention to all of them, since not everyone has my tastes, and because publicists sent them to me hoping for a little publicity, and I can do that "little," if nothing else.

So, the books I saw the first week of November 2009 are:

coming soon

It's Got a Great Beat, But I Don't Think You Can Strip To It

2009-11-08T08:30:00.001-05:00

Right at this moment, I'm still at Disney World, and the last thing on my mind is blogging. Luckily, I have emergency posts stored up in the attic for just such situations as this.

The Internet, as always, feeds on spare time and produces odd thoughts. This was true even back in 2004, when a thread on the Straight Dope Message Board was started about the most inappropriate songs to strip to. I got to it more than a hundred posts later, with many of the best ideas taken, so I went in a more conceptual direction:

Since practically every song that has been mentioned as completely unsuitable seems to have been used by some stripper, I thought I'd create some unsuitable and bizarre scenarios. I wouldn't be surprised if any of these have happened, but I haven't witnessed any of them (though some would be fun...and others would be appalling).

Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat, either as a lap dance or (for bonus points) on stage, with the dancer using a chair as a prop.

Fishbone's Lyin' Ass Bitch, probably dedicated to some other dancer in the establishment. (Leading to a cat-fight, I expect.)

Hell, as long as we're doing Fishbone, I'd love to see someone try to shake it to It's a Wonderful Life (Gonna Have a Good Time). The lyrics are pretty inappropriate, and it has a tempo like a frog on a hotplate.

Aimee Mann has probably never done a song that's danceable, but I'd vote Wise Up as her least stripper-friendly tune. Even for a slow floor number, it's way too quiet and slow. Maybe it could work for Mindy, the Clinically Depressed Ecdysiast.

And how about a two-girl act, coming out in a pantomime horse costume, to America's Horse With No Name?

Bob Dylan's as bad for stripping to as Neil Young, but how about Subterranean Homesick Blues, as performed by a woman in bell-bottoms, dashiki and granny glasses? (not for long, of course)

I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays yet -- it's very depressing, probably undanceable, and is about a young woman deciding to kill a whole lot of people...

I could see a stripper using some of Bruce Springsteen's songs -- I'm Goin' Down is pretty obvious -- but how about doing Johnny 99 in a fake prison outfit?

Pink Floyd's early long space-rock songs could be good for some of the more theatrical strippers (the kind with lots of dry ice, occasional live animals, and more props than you can shimmy a hip at). But I still think One of These Days would be a mood-killer.

In the category of You Could Dance To It, But You Wouldn't Want To, I give you In The Coliseum by Tom Waits. The opening lines are "The women all control the men/With razors and with wrists..."

And, finally, They Might Be Giants have been mentioned, but I would love to see a good act built around their live version of Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass of Incandescent Gas).

Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley

2009-11-07T08:30:00.002-05:00

It's a miracle that Christopher Buckley came out halfway normal, with two such attention-grabbing parents as Patricia (socialite among socialites) and William (prime mover of the conservative movement, writer at immense length about nearly everything, and premiere stuffed shirt of the 20th century) Buckley. Losing Mum and Pup is not the story of how he managed to do that, though there are hints around the edges. Instead, this is the book of how he coped during the year between their two deaths -- a more focused memoir, about a particular period of time, one that he can encompass more easily and get down into words.

The junior Buckley has never written with the stentorian seriousness of his father; his novels are cutting satires of contemporary politics (at their best, such as the scalpel-sharp Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley rivals Waugh for clear-eyed nastiness), and he's written little nonfiction before this. (There is one previous memoir-like object, his first published book: Steaming to Bamboola, which tells the story of one year that he spent as a merchant seaman, without ever explaining how William F. Buckley's son came to be a merchant seaman or connecting that year with anything before or after in his life. Losing Mum and Pup is a bit more expansive than Steaming, but the younger Buckley is still mostly a private person; he's willing to write about his very public parents clearly, but keeps offstage the parts of his life that don't directly relate to those dying parents.)

Losing Mum and Pup is thus not the story of what it was like to grow up with those two larger-than-life figures as parents -- which is probably the story that most of us would be most interested in -- but what it was like to realize that they were going away. Buckley reflects on "orphanhood" in the first chapter, after a number of people refer to him as an orphan (and he wryly notes that becoming an orphan at fifty-five is rather different than having it happen when a child), but comes to realize that the moment when you understand that you are part of the older generation does have unexpected power.

Buckley does give some medical details -- thankfully, not all of them, but enough to give the reader the shape of the situation, and have him share in the feelings of unease and powerlessness. But Losing Mum and Pup is primarily a book about coming to terms with one's dying father. Every man has a complicated relationship with his father, and the more alpha-male that father is, the more complications. William Buckley wasn't physically dominating, true, but imagine growing up in that household and hoping to win just one argument, once!

Grief and sadness are not in Christopher Buckley's usual emotional register; Losing Mum and Pup is thus not a book steeped in sadness and melancholy. It's not light-hearted or cynical, either, but it's an essentially clear-eyed look at an event that has to come to all of us that live long enough ourselves. Given the alternative, I know I'd prefer to be the one outliving my older relatives, and it is the natural order of things. Christopher Buckley has moved far from the high-church Catholicism of his father, but it's clear that "the natural order of things" is still a concept that has power to help him make peace with the world.

So Losing Mum and Pup is not as funny as the usual Christopher Buckley book -- thankfully -- but it is as incisive and insightful as we've come to expect from him. I probably wouldn't recommend it to a reader currently mourning her own parents -- one doesn't want to get into comparisons over the dead, and it's hard to compete with the Buckleys -- but, otherwise, it's a fine meditation on loss and all the kinds of separation a child needs to make.

Quote of the Week (Slight Return)

2009-11-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

"'And I myself,' continued Ford in a voice so superior it would have caused single-cell life forms to accelerate their evolution so that they could use their fab new opposable thumbs to pick up a rock and beat him to death. 'I myself base most of my calculations on emotions.'"
-And Another Thing..., p.48, showing the strengths and weaknesses of Eoin Colfer's aping of Douglas Adams

Quote of the Week

2009-11-06T08:30:00.000-05:00

"Since masturbation is what erotic writing so often leads to, that was reason enough to make [D.H.] Lawrence's novel [Lady Chatterly's Lover] controversial; but in addition, through the character of the gamekeeper, Lawrence probes the sensitivity and psychological attachment that man often feels towards his penis -- it does indeed seem to have a will of its own, an ego beyond its size, and is frequently embarrassing because of its needs, infatuations, and unpredictable nature. Men sometimes feel that their penis controls them, leads them astray, causes them to beg favors at night from women whose names they prefer to forget in the morning. Whether insatiable or insecure, it demands constant proof of its potency, introducing into a man's life unwanted complications and frequent rejection. Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is a man's most honest organ."
- Guy Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife, pp. 115-116

Six GNs That Won't Get a Full-Fledged Review

2009-11-05T08:30:00.004-05:00

Because all I have to say about them can be said more succinctly:

Things Undone by Shane White (NBM/ComicsLit, November 2009, $12.95)

This is White's second graphic novel, after North Country, which I didn't see. His hero, Rick Watt, is a mopey twentysomething who moves jobs from Philadelphia to Seattle -- and, in flashbacks, moves from one girlfriend to a prettier model -- but is still mopey and depressed. White shows the mopiness and depression by having Watt slowly turn into a zombie, complete with body parts falling off -- and that's a great visual metaphor...except that it doesn't make up for the fact that Watt has no real reason to be mopey and annoying. His new job isn't going as well as he'd like it to, but he's also just being a jerk, particularly to his girlfriend, Natalie.

White is going for existential ennui, or maybe a quarterlife crisis, but, really, it's just that Rick is a passive-aggressive jerk who can't communicate effectively with either his girlfriend or his co-workers. He gets a happy ending of sorts by learning to have "backbone," which is precisely the wrong lesson -- Rick needed to be able to talk, not to fight and pretend to kill himself.

The zombie motif is artistically interesting, but the moments of greater zombification aren't consistently related to Rick being more beaten down and dehumanized; more often, they're a product of his own anger or lack of attention. There's nothing wrong with Rick that a but of slowing down and paying attention wouldn't cure; he's not a zombie, just a self-absorbed guy who thinks he deserves to get better than he gives.

Joe & Azat by Jesse Lonergan (NBM/ComicsLit, November 2009, $10.95)

Lonergan spent time in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan; the "Joe" of this graphic novel is a young man in the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. (And "Azat" is his driver/guide/best friend there, the usual super-energetic, vaguely entrepreneurial young man in backward or developing countries, always on the hunt for the next big thing, cheerfully forward-looking, and hugely outgoing.) But Joe and Azat is not autobiographical; it's only based loosely on Lonergan's own experiences.

That means, I suppose, that life didn't neatly turn itself into a story for Lonergan during his time in Turkmenistan, but, then, it never does. The story here is episodic and without much overall shape; the episodes are individually interesting, but they tend to turn into "look at these colorful people, so unlike bland American Joe! My, aren't people in the less-known parts of the world so much more ethnic than we are!" in the aggregate.

Lonergan does have a great eye for black; he has huge areas of inky black throughout Joe and Azat. His faces are also very expressive; his people really come to life on the page. (His body language is equally good; the cover is a good example of that.)

Joe and Azat is very enjoyable, but it's a pretty standard me-and-my-wacky-ethnic-friend comedy (crossed with here-I-am-in-this-weird-foreign-country). I have to think that Lonergan could have put together a stronger piece if he's kept closer to his own actual experiences; I doubt there was a "real" Azat -- and the people that he put together to make Azat would probably have been more interesting in their complexities.

Prison Pit: Book One by Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics, October 2009, $12.99)

I've only seen short Johnny Ryan strips before, so I wasn't adequately prepared for the apocalyptic, WWF-meets-a-disturbed-seventh-grader's-notebook quality of Prison Pit. There's no narration or scene-setting; a prisoner is about to be dumped on some hell-hole planet when the book begins, and it goes on from there, through ultra-violence and even less expected and palatable events.

It's a good thing for Ryan that comics don't have rating like movies do, that's all I can say -- the little box explaining the elements that went into the rating would be pages long ("decapitations, pervasive verbal obscenities, copious sadistic violence,..., disturbing imagery,....").

Prison Pit is un-reviewable; it is what it is, and most readers will loathe it. A few will actually enjoy it, and more will claim to like it, because they think they should like something as "transgressive" as this. Ryan is one crazy motherfucker, man -- and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 2 by The Hernandez Brothers (Fantagraphics, October 2009, $14.99)

Love and Rockets is difficult to review for the opposite reason that Prison Pit is: there so much here -- on the page, and in the backstory -- that just finding a place to begin is difficult. This particular yearly "issue" has a hundred pages of comics, evenly divided between Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez.

Jaime's half comes in two parts, but they're continuing the same story -- the story that began in last year's first issue in this new format, "Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34," as if all hundred pages of this story was a superhero comic from a more female-friendly (and multicultural) universe than any of the ones we know. It's also a sideways version of his main, generally realistic continuity, in which some minor characters from his Locas stories are superheroines and the ubiquitous Maggie makes a brief appearance. Jamie's view of superheroes owes more to wrestling (particularly the masked wrestling of Mexico) than is usual for American comics, and it's also a surprise to see his all-female casts beating up on each other as strongly (and with as few consequences) as the spandex-clad men of Marvel and DC. I didn't find this story as successful as Jaime's work usually is; it's too in-jokey and hermetic, as if the superhero comics of the world he's invoking are nearly as tedious and inbred as our own.

Gilbert also provides two stories, which fill up the middle of the book. But his are unrelated to each other, though "Sad Girl" seems to be set on the fringes of his Palomar continuity (in the more recent incarnation, with the current-generation characters relocated to southern California) and the main character of the literally nightmarish "Hypotwist" looks like, and may indeed be, Fritzi. The first is more of an episode than a complete story, and the latter is another one of Gilbert's periodic experiments with the comics form -- interesting and evocative, but difficult to describe, since it relies entirely on that dream-like atmosphere and imagery.

So this is a decent Hernandez Bros. book, but a horrible starting point for anyone who hasn't read them; thus, practically speaking, a unreviewable book.

Sky Doll by Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa (Marvel/Soleil, November 2008, $24.99)

This tale of a female android -- sexy but utterly innocent, sweet and loving and searching for love and her place -- in a galaxy-spanning medium-future civilization under mildly corrupt theocratic rule reads like as pure a distillation of the essence of Heavy Metal as is possible. And so it only makes sense that it would be published over here by marvel, which has been in the business of triple-distilling superhero comics, like some mad purveyor of punch-em-up Scotch, into ever more esoteric and self-involved forms.

There's not a single page in Sky Doll that's less than stunning, and not a single word or idea in it that any reader with the slightest knowledge of vaguely smutty commercial French comics (shall I just say "Heavy Metal" again?) will find the least bit surprising. In the alternate world that is France, this is Marvel Comics. And now it's so here as well.

Universal War One, Vol. 1 by Denis Bajram (Marvel/Soleil, January 2009, $24.99)

This book is pretty generic as well -- hard-bitten soldiers in space, in the midst of the usual inner system vs. outer system civil war, dealing with a suddenly-appearing black wall in space. Even more generically, they're a "purgatory squadron" -- made up of court-martialed officers (each for some very distinct failing that serves as each one's only personality trait), led by the un-respected daughter of a great (tough, hard-bitten, unbending...add your cliche here) military leader, who is also nearby.

There's the usual adventure-SF mix of tough-talking, vaguely enigmatic alien artifacts, punch-em-ups, and fighters banking in space as they dogfight. If you're the kind of person who can take any of that seriously, it could be a rousing story; it all looks very shiny and dramatic, and the dialogue only induces actual cringes a couple of times.

Abandoned Books: And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer

2009-11-04T08:30:00.001-05:00

It would be unfair, and arguably wrong, to say that Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series went straight downhill from the beginning. Even the most crazed fan has to admit that the records were just as good as the original radio show, and that the Infocom game is possibly even better. But, if the conversation is restricted to the books, then there would be much less argument. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the funniest and best of the lot, both The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe, and Everything have real strengths, and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is only faintly embarrassing. (We don't talk about Mostly Harmless, the book reportedly finished on a flight into Los Angeles for a major book trade show, because it's not nice to speak ill of the dead.)

There is no sign at all that And Another Thing..., the unnecessary but inevitable continuation of Adams's series by Eoin Colfer, is anywhere near as bad as Mostly Harmless. In fact, it's probably, by all objective standards, a better book than So Long. But it's not by Douglas Adams, and that becomes apparent in a thousand small ways as the book goes on -- the characters speak in un-Adamsly ways, are overly emotional (and the wrong kind of emotional), and the plot shows suspicious signs of actually having been thought through and kept organized. Another Thing is at least a half-decent humorous SF novel featuring characters named "Arthur Dent" and "Ford Prefect," but it doesn't succeed at raising the ghost of Douglas Adams. It couldn't have done that, of course. But all those of us who try to read it are hoping for that. Another Thing also has the usual fault of a continuation by other hands: it relies too heavily on the reader's memory of the original Douglas Adams jokes (lots of bits supposedly from the Guide itself, the return of Vogons, the Heart of Gold, and so on -- I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that Marvin shows up before the end, too) instead of doing the same sort of thing in a new way.

So I gave up on Another Thing about ninety pages in, roughly a third of the way through. It's not Adams, and I'm no longer the ten-year-old who first read Hitchhiker. You can't go home again, death is final, but commerce is eternal.

But I just might try one of Colfer's own novels; he's funny pretty consistently here, though the Adams-isms are sometimes too florid and overworked. (Not to say that Adams didn't get that way himself, because he did. Again, this is better than about half of the writing Adams did in this milieu.) I wish this book didn't exist, but the world doesn't exist to please me. I can only hope that most readers of Another Thing are happier with the beating-So Long part of it than they are disappointed with the Colfer-isn't-Adams part. Don't let me stop you from reading Another Thing -- but go into it with reasonable expectations, please.

Chemistry for Beginners by Anthony Strong

2009-11-03T08:30:00.001-05:00

What is science fiction? Chemistry for Beginners is not a novel most of us would fit under that umbrella, even though it's all about working scientists doing cutting-edge research on the frontiers of biological science in what may be the very near future. But that research is into female sexual response -- Female Sexual Dysfunction, to be even more clinical about it -- and Chemistry for Beginners turns out to be a romantic comedy in the end. (Though it's more Shakespearean in both its romance and comedy than the usual slapsticky modern style.)

So not even the fact that it's written in the form of a scientific paper -- with footnotes and references at the end and everything -- can save it from the taint of un-seriousness and girlyness. SF is about Big Men doing Big Things: shiny phallic rockets thrusting into the void and penetrating alien worlds, giant machines probing deeply into the inner recesses of the universe, wars and fighting and death. Getting an anorgasmic woman to achieve bliss is much too yonic for the True World of Skiffy.

Strong's hero is Dr. Steven J. Fisher, a brilliant young biochemist at Oxford working on a chemical treatment for FSD as head of a team comprising the usual hot-to-trot female sexologist and bevvy of young and eager post-docs. (Eager for each other in particular, as the reader learns bit by bit as Chemistry for Beginners goes on.) Strong has a weakness for the cliche in his characters; Fisher is implausibly innocent for a researcher into sex, and fits far too closely the typical media stereotype of the science nerd. He is our first person narrator, so we get inside his head, the better to learn how carefully organized, disciplined and regimented it really is. We're told that Steven is brilliant, but he never exhibits the quirky, random interests that the truly brilliant acquire; he's focused entirely on his work to an unlikely degree.

The other half of the sexual equation is provided by Ms. G. (Annie Gluck), a late addition to the study. She's goaded into it by her thesis advisor/boyfriend -- she's reading for a doctorate in English -- who gotten annoyed by her lack of response. She's attracted to Steven almost immediately, but denies it for a very long time; we read her locked blog entries interspersed throughout Chemistry for Beginners, so we can see that she's lying to herself as well. Strong isn't quite as clear about the results of the study -- since Annie is lying about it, and Steven is, of course, clueless -- but it seems as if she's quickly become orgasmic because of the sound of Steven's voice during the treatments, but lies about it for personal emotional reasons that never become entirely clear.

Steven and his team are preparing a major paper on his treatment, KXC79, which will be a showpiece of a major conference presented by Trock Pharmaceuticals, the sponsor of his research. Steven is working hard, in the way that only monomaniacal fictional scientists can, to iron out the last few discrepancies -- which are nearly all relating to Annie's continued lying to him and the other researchers about the orgasms that their test equipment keeps recording her as having.

Chemistry doesn't turn into anything like a conventional romance until very near the end, since Annie is trying to deny her feelings for Steven and he's written to be as obtuse as a 179-degree angle. Strong does maneuver them into a position where it makes sense for them to have sex for the good of the experiment, but never plays up the comedy as much as he could.

And, in the end, Chemistry does rely heavily on the expected morals and endings -- there are betrayals, but True Love cannot be defeated, and that nasty reductionist science-y stuff is swept away by feeling. It's a pleasant novel that doesn't aim all that high: it wants to be an amusing novel with some romantic and comedic elements without ever committing to being either a comedy or a romance. Strong is witty, and makes up in novelty and cultural references what he leaves out in gripping plotting. (There is a flurry of plot near the end, to set up the required confrontations and reverses, but most of the book is an amble through a few months of these people's lives.) Chemistry finally is neither a SF novel nor a romance, and is closest to a chick-lit book, with its clueless protagonist documenting everything happening to him. If he'd been actually as smart as he's supposed to be, Chemistry for Beginners could have really been something. But, as it is, its a decent diversion, with characters that came too directly from Central Casting to be entirely believable.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/31

2009-11-02T08:30:00.002-05:00

The actual list will begin after the ritual disclaimer: These are books that came in my mail last week, sent by various publicists in the hope that I'll review them. I get more books than I could ever review -- leaving aside the currently-large pile of books I read intending to review that I haven't managed to write about yet -- and so these will not all be covered in depth. So, to make sure I do mention everything, I run these posts every Monday morning.

Or, in bullet-point form:

I haven't read these books.
I might never read these books.
This is not a "review."

But here's what I saw this week:

Nightchild is the third book in James Barclay's "Chronicles of the Raven" fantasy series, which has been confusing me for several months now. Pyr is publishing the books of this series -- originally published in the UK about a decade ago -- in quick succession, but have also been sending me both finished book and bound galleys...so I've been seeing each of these books at least twice, and not necessarily in order. But this one has a big "3" on the spine, which I am entirely in favor of. And this book will hit stores on November 10th. I haven't read these books, but they're the kind of fantasy that's not quite epic -- though definitely secondary-world -- that I always faintly assume has a gaming basis, somewhere far in the background. (Though I could easily be wrong.)

I don't actually have a copy of Fairies Art Studio by David Riche, since it won't be published (by Watson-Guptill) until March of 2010. But I do have a letter and color photocopies of sample pages, which reminds me of my days back in the book clubs. (This is exactly what I would see for art books in those days -- though I'd have wanted to see it much earlier than this; I bet the print run has already been set, for one thing.) It's a book about drawing fairies digitally -- as far as I can tell, there's nothing about drawing using the implements traditionally associated with that term -- and contains art by Myrean Pettit and Yishan Li. I'm not an artist, and I only have a small sample, but I'm not massively impressed so far. But, if you want to draw fairies with your computer, I doubt you have many choices in book tutorials -- and this one looks very professional and detailed.

Vatican Hustle is the first graphic novel from Greg Houston, a new cartoonist from Baltimore. (No word on whether there's a similar Young Turk from Houston called Greg Baltimore.) The art is highly stylized, drawing a bit from Munoz (perhaps via Giffen) as well as from Wolverton and the '80s RAW crowd. The story looks to be equally stylized; it's a '70s Blaxpoitation movie in comics form. That's an awful lot of style for one book.... This will be published by NBM in December.

And last for this week is the eighth collection of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack stories, coming November 17th from Vertical. (I reviewed the first and second volumes of the series for ComicMix, and I expect this book is broadly similar to those flamboyantly entertaining pieces of pulp craziness.)

Read in October

2009-11-01T00:01:00.005-04:00

I do these monthly lists mostly for my own benefit, and to serve as an index of my reviews (either here or elsewhere). I do scatter a few new capsule reviews into each one, of books that I didn't write about at greater length elsewhere. Links are mostly to those reviews, with a few (the capsule reviews) jumping straight to a certain online bookseller for immediate gratification.

This time out, you'll find short reviews of Top Shelf Under the Big Top, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe, Sundome, Vol. 5, and Naruto, Vol. 37 within the trackless waste of links below.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (10/1)
Brett Warnock, editor, Top Shelf Under the Big Top (10/2)
This was both older (from 1999) and more generically indy-comics (deliberately crude and often low-life short stories) than I expected, with a lot of stories that I respected rather than liked and even more that I couldn't bring myself to respect. It does have work by K. Thor Jensen, Dylan Horrocks, Matt Madden, Josh Simmons, and Craig Thompson, but there are no lost gems here -- just decent early comics from people who were still learning the ropes and would later do better work. It's a shame, since I was hoping to be led from this book to cartoonists I haven't read before, but that didn't happen.
Leland Gregory, Idiots at Work (10/2)
Joshua Glenn & Mark Kingwell, The Idler's Glossary (10/3)
Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs The Universe (10/4)
After five months of reading these incredibly entertaining twentysomething-life-as-a-videogame graphic novels, I'm finally caught up...and that means I'll have to wait for the sixth (and last?) book like everyone else. This one only came out in February, so I'd expect at least a six-month wait -- hmm, I probably should have spaced these out more. If you've been avoiding this series because you thought it looked too juvenile, I'd recommend taking another look: I'm about the worst person in the world when it comes to tolerance of dumb behavior by child-men protagonists, and Pilgrim didn't come across that way to me at all -- he's immature, yes, but he's a sweet, realistic kind of immature rather than the usual full-of-himself media-product immature guy. (If that makes any sense.)
Guy Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife (10/6)
Kazuto Okada, Sundome, Vol. 5 (10/7)
I reviewed the first four volumes of this series for ComicMix -- here's a link to the most recent one, and you can track backwards from there -- but I didn't have anything new to say this time, so I bumped it down to a mention here. It's still a creepy, disconcerting look at obsessive teenage sexuality -- alternately horrifyingly broad in that stylized, templated manga way and cuttingly precise and true -- and just as compulsively readable as ever.
Jack Vance, This Is Me, Jack Vance! (10/7)
Susumu Katsumoto, Red Snow (bound galleys) (10/8)
Shane White, Things Undone (10/9)
Jesse Lonergan, Joe and Azat (10/12)
Matthew Hughes, Template (10/12)
Arvid Nelson, Will Conrad, & Jose Villarrubia, Kull: The Shadow Kingdom (10/13)
Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (10/14)
Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
Anthony Strong, Chemistry for Beginners (10/15)
David Small, Stitches (10/15)
Lewis Trondheim & Fabrice Parme, Tiny Tyrant, Vol. One: The Ethelbertosaurus (10/16)
James Strurm, Andrew Arnold, & Alexis Frederick-Frost, Adventures in Cartooning (10/19)
Edgar Allan Poe & Gahan Wilson, The Raven and Other Poems (10/20)
Jessica Mitford, Poison Penmanship (10/20)
Shinobu Ohtaka, Sumomomo, Momomo, Vol. 2 (10/21)
JinHo Ko, Jack Frost, Vol. 2 (10/22)
Svetlana Chmakova, Nightschool: The Weirn Books (10/23)
Richard Sala, Cat Burglar Black (10/26)
Jeff VanderMeer, Finch (10/26)
Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim & Christophe Blain, Dungeon: The Early Years, Vol. 2: Innocence Lost (10/27)
Bill Willingham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 4: Americana (10/28)
Peter Greenberg, Don't Go There! (10/28)
Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 37 (10/29)
At this point in a series -- that would be roughly 7400 pages in to a complicated story with a cast of dozens and nearly as many factions, martial arts styles, and secret ninja villages to keep track of as well -- there's really no point in trying to give a synopsis or review; it would only be for the people who are at roughly the same point in reading the series. So I'll just say: after a long time, I finally found the next volume at the library, and I am still trying to keep up with this one. Make of that what you will.
Bill Willimgham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 5: Turning Pages (10/30)

Getting the Hell Out of Dodge

2009-10-31T21:55:00.000-04:00

About half an hour ago, I finished updating a spreadsheet for work and uploaded it back to the company portal, meaning that I've officially finished all of the work I needed to do and that I can now consider myself On Vacation.

And so I am.

Tomorrow morning, very early, all four members of the Hornswoggler clan will be boarding one of those newfangled aeroplanes and jetting off to balmy Orlando, Florida, where we will spend the next week and a bit firmly ensconced in the arms of The Mouse.

I've scheduled at least one post to pop up every day that I'm gone, including several reviews (and one it's-not-a-review) and some more frivolous stuff as well. But actual real-time blogging will not resume until the evening of the 9th at the very earliest.

Don't do anything too ridiculous while I'm off the grid, O Internet, and I'll see you in a week.

At Least It's Not Yellow...

2009-10-31T15:17:00.000-04:00

My "Manga Friday" column for this week featured a review of a collection of gekiga stories -- in this case, historicals set about a hundred years ago in small Japanese villages -- Susumu Katsumata's Red Snow.

Next week I'm on vacation and pretty much incommunicado, but if I manage to write something later today and get it into the ComicMix system, there may be a post or two from me there. But I wouldn't bet on it.

My Deadly Sins

2009-10-31T13:57:00.002-04:00

Another one of those Internet quizzes, which I suspect I may have done before...but it's a Saturday, so it's an easy post. I got this from James Nicoll.

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	High
Wrath:	Very Low
Sloth:	High
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Low

Discover Your Sins - Click Here

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

2009-10-30T12:30:00.000-04:00

Every reader needs comfort: something to retreat to when things aren't going as planned, a calm oasis of perfection while the storm rages outside. For me, the books of P.G. Wodehouse perfectly fit that bill. Even better, he wrote over a hundred of them in his long life, so I'm still able to read new books when I need them.

And so I turned to The Inimitable Jeeves after Gail Carriger's Soulless, a nice novel that wasn't what I had thought it would be, an aborted reading of The Sheriff of Yrnameer, and some other things that weren't just as I wanted them to be.

Inimitable is from 1923, and was the first novel-length appearance of Jeeves (and his employer -- "master" would be entirely the wrong word -- Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, one of the idlest of the idle rich and dullest of the Drones), though it was actually a fix-up of eleven previously published stories. It's stop-and-start pacing betrays that origin, but Wodehouse has turned the stories into a continuous plot, so it all feels like one book, even if it isn't quite a novel.

As always, Bertie is dim and continually getting into scrapes -- the ones in this book mostly concern the lovelife of his friend Bingo Little, who keeps falling into love with unlikely females and calling for Bertie's help to win them. Bertie, of course, is very little help, but Jeeves's plots are cunning and true...though they're not always designed to do what Bingo or Bertie would like.

Inimitable is not quite top-drawer Wodehouse; it sees him still tuning the instrument of the Jeeves-Wooster stories, and organizing the elements that he would later turn into the most exquisite of farces. But "not quite as good as Wodehouse later got" is still vastly better than most modern humorists, and the world of Jeeves and Wooster is so timeless -- one part Gay Nineties, one part Roaring Twenties, one part pre-war gaiety, and several parts pure Wodehousian invention -- that it never feels dated.

And, as always, I have to give high praise to The Overlook Press, which has been publishing Wodehouse's books, four or six of them a year, in these wonderful small editions, for about a decade now. They make Wodehouse's work not just a joy to read, but a joy to have on the shelf.

Quote of the Week

2009-10-30T08:30:00.001-04:00

"It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins."
- Chinese proverb

Publishers Weekly Also Thinks the Year Is Over

2009-10-29T11:57:00.002-04:00

To me, this is like having Christmas decorations up in August -- there's still sixty days left in the year, folks! it's not over yet! -- but clearly no one listens to me. PW has just posted their top ten books of 2009, excerpted from a longer list of 100 top books which they'll publish in next week's issue.

And that's another thing -- you do the long list first, and say that the Top Ten list will be coming later, to build interest and get debate going. Geez Louise, do I have to tell these people how to do everything?

(Oh, well. At least the list has one book relevant to my interests on it -- David Small's not-as-great-as-everyone-says-but-still-pretty-darn-good comics memoir Stitches.)

Don't Go There! by Peter Greenberg

2009-10-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

Greenberg, as the cover of Don't Go There! helpfully notes, is the Travel Editor [1] for NBC's Today Show, so many of you may already have heard of him. This is his latest breezy book about traveling the world, with an emphasis on the places he expects people will want to avoid.

Don't Go There! has seventeen chapters, each of them focusing on one particular kind of unpleasantness -- they range from air pollution to political corruption, from disease and natural disasters to unsafe and unpleasant trains, roads, or airports -- and counting up the worst offenders both in the USA and around the world. Interspersed are a half-dozen shorter sections which are not numbered in sequence with the chapters, but provide very similar lists and commentary in a few other areas, such as the most expensive cities, the most depressed destinations, and the most dangerous theme parks.

Most of us are unlikely to have the hugely widely scope for world travel that would make Don't Go There! particularly useful; those of us who do regularly travel to lots of different destinations are likely to do so for work purposes, and so have less control over those destinations than leisure travelers would. But anyone who likes to travel at all knows that the armchair kind of travel is almost as much fun as the real kind -- and cheaper, too. Don't Go There! is like hearing stories of someone else's travel travails while sitting comfortably wherever you happen to be. It has a lot of charts and statistics, which are fun to look at but probably won't make anyone change their bookings.

In short, this is a fine book if you come across it something like the way I did: in a library, to read on a whim. It doesn't provide much depth, and doesn't really cross-reference the different measures of horribleness to make a grand index of places to avoid, so it reads a bit like a collection of separate essays. Still, if only a few isolated facts stick in the reader's head, that will probably be useful.

[1] This implies that some people at NBC don't know the difference between what a text editor -- of magazines or books -- and a video editor do, since Greenberg is apparently the soliciting-pieces kind of editor rather than the cutting-it-to-fit-in-a-time-slot editor. Either that, or they just don't care. My money, as always with TV folks, is on "don't care."
----------------
Listening to: Future of the Left - The Hope That House Built
via FoxyTunes

Melding with the Mainstream

2009-10-28T09:49:00.001-04:00

There's a new Mind Meld post up at SF Signal, and I'm part of it.

The question this time is:

INTRO: Recent events and discussions once again bring the topic of genre fiction's mainstream respectability to the forefront. So we thought it'd be timely to ask this week's panelists:

Q: In your opinion, does literary science fiction and fantasy have mainstream respect? Why, if at all, does it need mainstream approval? What would such approval mean for genre fiction?

(This is actually the second part of a diptych answering the same question -- in best SFF form, the document got too long and had to be split in half for publication.)

To see my answer -- and those of my fellow Melders Lucius Shepard, Adam Roberts, James Enge, Tim Akers and several others -- go check it out. But you might guess that I didn't have a lot of sympathy for those who whine about not getting literary respect for their wish-fulfillment space operas.

Thy Neighbor's Wife by Guy Talese

2009-10-28T08:30:00.001-04:00

This is the great smutty book of the baby-boom Seventies, one of the cornerstones of the mythology of the Me Decade and a major work in the canon of the New Journalism -- the exemplar of several things at once and tremendously popular and influential for many years. Coming to it thirty years later, though, the reader is struck by how diffuse it is, lacking a real through-line or conclusion. Perhaps there could never have been a conclusion to a book that was so thoroughly "the way we live now" -- we all did not stop living in 1980, and the way we lived kept changing, as it always does -- but Talese doesn't even make an attempt to sum the book up, just drags himself into the last chapter to explain what he wanted to do, or thought he was going to do, before bowing out quietly.

Thy Neighbor's Wife only explains itself in that last chapter, with Talese taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of all of the books that Thy Neighbor's Wife didn't become -- a consumer guide to massage parlors, Talese's own sexual autobiography, an in-depth look at the Sandstone Retreat, an examination of the intersection of nudism and sex -- before ending suddenly. Before that, it ran through twenty-five chapters, each one on a discrete topic, only slightly connected to the chapters before and after -- though he did circle back to a few topics: Sandstone, Hugh Hefner, and the place of Chicago in America's libido. Talese begins with a photo of Diane Webber (the model immortalized on the new edition) to tell the story of the late adolescence of a Chicago teen, Harold Rubin, who then disappears for several hundred pages. The narrative jumps from Rubin to Webber, on to Hefner, off to the couples who will later form Sandstone, and then wanders away into describing obscenity cases for a while (with the requisite thumbnail sketches of the then-current Supreme Court justices) before bouncing back to many of those earlier subjects for a while and bounding onward.

It's a scatter-shot approach, dizzying at times, and Talese's workmanlike prose moves it forward ploddingly, less leaping from topic to topic than building isolated foundations for various buildings in the same development. Talese hints at larger structures and plans, but refuses to speculate about them -- he'll only concern himself with the particular. One particular love affair of Hefner's is given in great detail, while a myriad others are left unmentioned or swiftly skimmed over -- probably because the one woman in question agreed to be interviewed by Talese, and the others didn't.

Talese wants to tell a grand sweeping story -- of how all of America changed its view of sex and love over the course of the decades of the '60s and '70s -- but to tell it entirely in particulars, and to tell it while keeping himself out of the story almost entirely (until that last chapter, unveiling his part in the proceedings like the Wizard of Oz). Unfortunately, the story is too big to be told that way -- Talese, from what he tells us here, never even visited most of the country, and didn't do any general or sociological research. He wants to present his subjects as exemplars of changing Americans -- but without saying what they are exemplars of, or how the exemplify anything.

And so Thy Neighbor's Wife comes across -- especially now, thirty years later -- as a collection of primary documents from the period, not a coherent single narrative. We see Hefner as he puts together the first year or so of Playboy, and then again at the height of its success in the early '70s -- but not how he got from one to the other, or what that meant (to him, or to America). We also see very little about what Playboy meant to the young men who read it -- and nothing about its place in the lives of the young women who appeared in it. In fact, if there's one single glaring flaw in Thy Neighbor's Wife, it's women -- they exist here almost entirely as objects, as beings seen from the outside. Talese is a man, and he gets into the heads of the men in this story -- from Hefner and Rubin to Al Goldstein of Screw and John Bullaro of Sandstone -- but not the women. The women here, as in the traditional American male view, control the access to sex, and are capricious and ultimately not understandable -- men can just try to figure out the rules so as to get as much sex as possible. And the problem then with this era was that the rules were changing radically and without warning -- that was good for men, since it generally meant that more sex was available, but it was also bad, since getting that sex required entirely different methods and plans.

I kept wanting Thy Neighbor's Wife to either stay on one subject long enough to cover it in depth, or to zoom out to a big picture once in a while to provide some context. (Sandstone was an outlier even in the sexual revolution -- but how many couples were swapping partners, in one way or another, in those mid-'70s years? How did the loosening of sexual morality affect people in the middle of their lives? How were the teens of the '70s different from those of the '50s, in ways that can be traced back to Playboy and Lady Chatterly and Henry Miller?) But Thy Neighbor's Wife is a book of reportage, not of analysis -- Talese never makes this clear, but his aim was to show what he saw, and not presume to make judgements about anything larger. And so Thy Neighbor's Wife is a book focused primarily on Chicago and Los Angeles, and even there on the Playboy Mansion and Sandstone, because that's where Talese spent the most time on the ground, talking to people. (And, as he coyly hints at in that last chapter, screwing around with at least a couple of those newly liberated young women before going back to his marriage.)

Thy Neighbor's Wife is still an important book, but all of the things that it did have been done since -- and mostly done better -- by many other books, each of them focusing on one aspect of that era and examining it in more depth. It's a decent starting point to the world of the sexual revolution, but it only leads on to other books that make more of an effort to answer the questions that Talese only raises.

Time to Quit Working; 2009 is Over

2009-10-27T13:55:00.001-04:00

...because Amazon is already counting down the top 100 books of the year.

I say this every year, but what the hell?! There are a good ten weeks left in the year, folks -- you can hold your horses at least until it's December. It's not like the best books of the year are going to get away from you if you don't start nailing them to the wall in mid-Summer.

Movie Log: King of California

2009-10-27T12:30:00.000-04:00

I haven't seen a movie as stripped down as King of California in a long time; it has two (and only two) major characters, with a third that's important but doesn't get much dialogue, and then a lot of walk-ons. Those two characters are a father and daughter, Charlie and Miranda, living somewhere in suburban California. (If the movie ever gave them a last name or a hometown, I didn't catch it.)

Charlie (Michael Douglas) has just been released from a mental institution as the movie opens, and this leads us to have severe doubts about the efficacy of the California mental health system. To be blunt about it, he's still quite crazy. (In flashbacks throughout the movie, we see that he always was at least a bit cracked, but that he's probably gotten worse as he's gotten older.) He's now obsessed with a treasure that he's sure a Spanish priest hid somewhere in their vicinity in the 1600s, which is just the latest in a long line of things he's been obsessed with.

Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) is the sensible grown-up in this relationship, despite the fact that she's not even seventeen. But she's been living on her own for the two years that Charlie was in the institution, and clearly taking care of both him and herself for years before that. She at first resists this latest crazy plan of her father's, but, finally, goes along with him and begins to believe in its possibilities.

Netflix defined this as an "indy comedy," which is why I saw it...but that's only true if "indy," as a modifier, means "not primarily funny and without a traditionally happy ending." It's a well-acted movie -- Douglas probably though he had a shot at an Oscar nomination, though I don't recall if he was talked up for it two years ago -- that tells its story well, but it is yet another indy-drama about dysfunctional families trying to make their way in the world. It will be entirely understandable if any particular viewer has had more than enough of that particular style of movie for this decade.

Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford

2009-10-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

Jessica was once the most famous Mitford on this side of the Atlantic -- her The American Way of Death being of more interest locally than her older sister Nancy's almost autobiographical novels of the backbiting British aristocracy in love -- but her position may be slipping. And any of the Mitford sisters are always in danger of being subsumed into the myth of the Mitfords, that legendary six-headed female aristocrat that was simultaneously fascist and communist, married to all of the crowned heads of the world after being the most famous debutante ever, and speaking in private tongues to itself.

Poison Penmanship is a collection of Jessica Mitford's shorter journalism, most of it -- as the subtitle, "The Gentle Art of Muckraking," makes clear -- in the declamatory, j'accuse style of the '60s and '70s. It's been out of print since the original trade paperback edition of 1980, though, coincidentally, NYRB Press has a reprint planned for the middle of next year. (So this may perhaps be the time for a Jessica Mitford revival.)

Mitford structured Poison Penmanship as a primer in muckraking -- journalism that goes after a practice or industry hated by the writer, taking a strong position but also doing solid research to aid in the attack -- with a long introduction on the principles of her work and afterwords for each article bringing them up to date (to 1979) and providing background. She doesn't seem to have noticed that the articles collected here show her moving from advocacy and muckraking (tackling large issues like prison reform, racism in the South, newspaper prejudice and the funeral industry) towards more general journalism -- particularly since she closes with the long piece "Egyptomania," from the German travel magazine Geo, in which she investigates the then-current digs in the Valley of Kings without any particular point of view. So an unfriendly reader -- someone inclined to muckrake Mitford, perhaps -- could use this book as evidence that success ruined Mitford, turning her to puffier pieces like "Egyptomania" and a similar investigatory journalism piece on a super-expensive Elizabeth Arden desert beauty clinic.

In 1979, muckraking was still exclusively the province of the Left; the very idea of similar work being done by the Right would be ludicrous. But the world has changed since then, in part because of Mitford and her fellow muckrakers, and now muckraking is not only bipartisan, but universal. (What are Perez Hilton and Gawker if not muckrakers of the most frivolous sort?) The Internet sometimes seem to exist purely for the raking of muck, and subsequent lobbing of said much at one's targets. We are all in the world Jessica Mitford built, but we have found that it's no longer "we" who attack "them" -- the war is now general, a Hobbesian war of all against all.

And so Poison Penmanship might be more useful now than ever before. Its specific examples might be old and out-of-date -- though the causes are still strong, often complaining about exactly the same abuses as Mitford did forty years ago -- but the lessons in advocacy journalism, in research and in getting the story solid before a reporter confronts a major hostile witness, are still as strong as ever before. And looking at the poor quality of muckraking currently -- since most of it could more honestly be called mud-flinging, with no serious attempt at research, analysis, or coherent thought behind it -- shows that Poison Penmanship is sorely needed now. Kudos to NYRB Books for bringing it back, and we should all hope for a rise in the general quality of muck raked about a year from now.

Dumb Sentences, Day 26,349

2009-10-26T12:53:00.000-04:00

Today's Dumb Sentence comes to us via a tweet from Don Linn. (As always, we must exercise caution: tweeting something is not necessarily the same as agreeing with it.)

The sentence comes from Cody Brown, and reads:

"News is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible."

What's so dumb about it? That first noun can be replaced with literally anything and it still makes sense, positioning the speaker as a radical, tough-minded proponent of the cloud against the elite, as a free-thinker striding valiantly into the future. In short, it's utterly content-free, and serves only to say "I am a smart 21st century person. Please hire me as a consultant for your organization."

Try it yourself!

Policing is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Government is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Fire prevention is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Literature is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Banking is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Sandwich-making is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.

Garbage collection is so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is irresponsible.