The Runaway Road

 
 
The Runaway Road

by Stan Mack

Parents Magazine Book Club

1980 

 

 

When I was a kid, my parents had a subscription to the Parents Magazine Book Club. By the time my sister and I were too old for them, we'd built up quite a collection. I didn't keep most of them, and recently, when I was going through a box of kids' books I'd kept, my goal was to pare down further. But The Runaway Road by Stan Mack is still kind of nice, so I'm still keeping it.
 
Every year, the family goes on their two-week summer vacation to the mountains, taking good old Route 100. It's a sign of the times, I guess, that this seems like absurd luxury to me, but was probably meant to be unremarkable and relatable to the typical PMBC subscriber.
 
Anyway, this year, the road itself seems to have other ideas, and goes on a detour, taking the family in their car along for the ride. What follows is what I've come to recognize as a typical children's book plot structure. As the road scoots along its way, it crosses paths with various people who get caught up in things and have to follow along to the destination - a woman whose line-drying laundry gets caught on the family station wagon, a farmer whose pig stands on the hood, a hotdog seller who needs to get paid for lunch, police who want to know what all the fuss is about.
 
Eventually, the road gets where it's going - the beach! The end of the road enjoys feeling the lapping of the waves. Everyone gets their stuff back, and the family decides to go ahead and vacation at the beach instead. Apparently, Route 100 will do this for two weeks a year from now on, but still go up to the mountains the rest of the time.
 
It's not some deep or profound story, but it's one of the few Parents Magazine books I could've described for you, even before rereading it.

Die 1

 
 

Die 1

Fantasy Heartbreaker 

by Kieron Gillen

art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2019 

 

 

Before Tolkein, one of the most popular formats for fantasy stories involved someone from the real world traveling somehow to another, magical world. Think of Neverland or Oz or Wonderland. These kinds of stories are sometimes called portal fantasies, if the way you get to the fantasy world is by dying, and the world operates according to the rules and logic of video games (and you're writing in Japanese), you might call it isekai. Outside of isekais, stories where someone travels to a fantasy world that explicitly exists inside a game are rarer - the main examples that come to mind are Jumanji and the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon series.
 
That's also the premise of the Die comic book series. If author Kieron Gillen is referencing one thing in particular, it's probably the D&D cartoon. Gillen's characters are roleplayers, and they initially get pulled into the magic world of Die because they're looking for something cooler, more indie, more adult than D&D the game, which they've played before. At the start of the game, one weekend night in high school in England in the early 1990s, six friends start their new game and vanish from the Earth. A couple years later, five of them reappear, unable to talk about what happened.
 
And then, 25 years after that, when they're all in their early 40s, they get pulled back to Die again. Their lost friend Solomon has defeated the old Grandmaster to become the new one, and as the new GM, he really wants his friends to come back and play in the fantasy world. They don't want to stay, but they can only leave if everyone in the party agrees, so they'll either have to change Sol's mind... or kill him.
 

Fantasy Heartbreaker is set in the present with only a little dialogue, and no flashbacks, revealing what happened the first time the friends went to Die. We find out only a little. The old Grandmaster wanted them to tell more people on Earth about Die and recruit them to come there, which is why they used magic to prevent themselves from talking about it. And Sol got trapped by accident, plucked out of the circle when he joined the others in wishing to return home.
 
We don't exactly learn where Die came from or how it works, but like Limbo in Inception, it seems to be built up by accretion, layered with all the dreams of those who've visited before, but shaped most directly by its current occupants. It's currently shaped like an icosahedron, a 20-sided dice. We're told that its earliest manifestation was a realm of pure wargaming math, implied to be HG Wells's Little Wars, now represented as the endless Great War between Eternal Prussia and Little England. We also learn that Die hosts Glass Town, Gondal, and Angria, invented by the Bronte siblings as part of a make-believe game, which I read about last year, too. This is a real gamer's comic; I feel lucky to understand the references. (Although if I didn't, I guess this could've been my introduction, the place I first learned of things I wanted to read more about. I'm sure it has been that for others.)
 
Each of the friends plays a character they invented in their teens, possibly on a lark, when they thought they'd be playing for a couple hours, not a couple years, and certainly not again in midlife. As a teen Dominic came up with the femme fatale Ash. Once they can finally talk about it, the others want to understand, because Dominic doesn't seem to experience gender dysphoria in either body, wears men's clothes at home and fancy ballgowns here, seems to prefer dating women on Earth and men on Die. He can't explain to them. As narrator, he tells us it's simply that, by magic, he's a man on Earth and a woman on Die. I wonder if it's really just that simple, or if we'll learn more later?
 
One of the best scenes in this collection comes when Ash is briefly separated from the others and takes refuge in a trench on the front of the endless war. She meets a soldier from Little England, who looks an awful lot like Elijah Wood, part of a group of four from the same home village. He tells his story, which parallels The Lord of the Rings, and then dies, and then Ash meets Tolkein, or at least, Solomon's representation of him, bringing the author's real life into contact with the stories that grew out of those experiences.

The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales

 
The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales

by Alex Rose

Hotel St George Press

2007

 

 

A little while ago, I read a novel called Impossible Views of the World. The title refers to a specific kind of forgery, one that purports to be from a particular time, but that could not have been made then, because it relies on knowledge or techniques that weren't available at the time. In the novel, author Lucy Ives claims that such forgeries are especially desirable, precisely because of the false hope they offer. By being better than the real thing, they offer the hope that the world is secretly more interesting than most people know, that those secrets are attainable to the discerning connoisseur, who proves themself better than others just by being in the know.
 
It's that same desire, I think, for hidden esoteric knowledge, that lies at the heart of Alex Rose's The Musical Illusionist. Rose is self-consciously channeling Borges and Italo Calvino here, writing fictions in the style of nonfiction, in the idiom and syntax of truth. This is a collection of short stories written to sound like a museum catalog, with text like a guided tour between sections, illustrated mostly with public domain maps and diagrams. (I suppose this also resembles the SCP, but that seems more coincidental than deliberate.)
 
Rose invents things that don't exist, that couldn't exist in the times and places he says they're from, and presents them as artifacts from a plausible but unreal past. His inventions are false, but not overtly fantastical, relying on extensions of real phenomena rather than magic. And he always introduces them, these fictional things, after first talking about things that are real but little known, real but unusual - the sort of things that show up in wunderkammern and cabinets of curiosity and Atlas Obscura articles. In the chapter on a display of microorganisms, for example, he first discusses the extreme environments that archaea live in, before suggesting the existence of a foot-long, single-celled macro-bacteria that lives inside certain animal livers. The line between truth and fabrication is blurred. I think all the extremophiles he mentioned are real, for example, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn he slipped a fake into the list.
 
The tour guide sections are formatted interestingly. Each sentence crosses the spine to cover the whole two-page spread. (It would've been impressive if you could also read down each page, but Rose didn't manage that trick.) The stories themselves are formatted normally. The guide claims that you're visiting an underground library, that you can only reach it by waiting at an abandoned subway stop after hours, that you'll see the exhibits out the train windows. Each story describes one exhibit, and there are sometimes several on the same general topic in a row. The phenomena being described kind of get less plausible as you go, but it's not a very strong trend.
 
If there's one danger, in fact, it'd that the stories themselves are a little boring. There are stories about time, about language - but in general, there are no characters, and unlike Invisible Cities or Einstein's Dreams, which invite the reader to think about their own experiences of place and time, there's no personal connection either, so they feel detached from humanity. Mostly they're like, 'imagine this thing - isn't it cool? wouldn't it be cool if it existed?' And it would, but also, there's a limit. Real things that fall along the boundaries we draw between concepts, or that somehow fit outside of our usual organizing schema, definitely are cool, and learning about them can challenge how we think about the world. But Rose's objects are more like thought experiments.
 
The title story, for example, purports to tell the story of a French composer living in the mid-19th century, who manages to write extremely postmodern, avant garde music that like, sounds like it moves around auditorium as though thrown by a ventriloquist, or that somehow amplifies and incorporates all the audience noises of rustling coats and squeaking seats into the performance, or that's basically atonal noise, or that is silent, but is accompanied by a projection of colored lights onto a white sheet so precise and vivid that each audience member's brain synethetically generates their own experience of music, etc. And somehow one man has the skill and fortune to write all this, an orchestra capable of playing it, and countless audiences who never riot and burn his concert hall down in shock or disgust. It's a mix of things that are possible but couldn't be done as impressively as described, things that supposedly happened a hundred or so years earlier than reality, things that rely on knowledge of modern music theory or advanced neurological imaging, and things that probably wouldn't work at all, allegedly working perfectly. It's kind of interesting to imagine, but at the same time, Rose somehow doesn't engage or move me as much as other authors writing in this way have.

The Tea Dragon Society

 
 
The Tea Dragon Society

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2017 

 

 

The Tea Dragon Society is a cute little graphic novel about a group of people in a fantasy setting who are involved in what seems like is their world's equivalent of slow food - raising tiny fussy dragons that grow tea leaves out of their heads, and brewing and drinking the magic tea made from those leaves.
 
Our viewpoint character is Greta, a young goblin learning blacksmithing from her mother. Greta notes that it takes a long time to make anything this way, but her mom assures her that there will always be people who value things that are well-made by hand. This is probably as close as the book gets to a thesis. One day at the market, Greta spots a little tea dragon being chased by dogs and rescues it. Someone in the market directs her to the dragon's owner, Hezekiel, an old man who looks like a dragon himself. He invites Greta to cone back some time to learn more about tea dragons. He's glad she's interested, since it's a dying art.
 
On successive trips to the tea shop Hesekiel runs, Greta bonds with Jasmine, the little dragon she rescued; meets and befriends Minette, a girl about her age who used to be a seer as a child, but effectively got burnout and amnesia from overwork, who's caring for the tea dragon Chamomile, and Erik, a retired adventurer and Hesekiel's partner, who now uses a wheelchair due to an old adventuring injury. There's not much plot beyond the group getting to know each other.

The whole story kind of takes place at the margins of a traditional fantasy world. Blacksmithing and tea-selling seem to generate enough income to finance a slow-paced life that accommodates Erik's and Minette's disabilities, and seems to suit the temperamental little tea dragon pets. I feel like it's more-or-less explicitly stated that artisanally-produced luxury goods can command high enough prices to avoid needing to hustle, grind, or suffer deprivation. (Yes, I know I shouldn't look to children's books for sound economics. And, I mean it IS sound, if you can find the customers. Just ask the restaurateurs who make a nice living by serving a couple dozen customers a day and charging them my entire week's wages for a single meal!)
 
The tea dragons are silent, which I think suits the mood and tone of the book. A lot is communicated wordlessly through the art, especially when the characters share tea and see visions of someone's memories thanks to the dragons' magic. There are four chapters plus an epilogue, and really only one main scene per chapter. The pace is as slow and gentle as the characters and their crafts. The dragons appear to live a very quiet, cozy life, and their caretakers also seem to enjoy a relaxed pace and schedule.
 
There's a bit of lore at the back of the book about tea dragons and their magic, which might inspire kid readers to make up their own tea dragon stories, or perhaps incorporate some of the ideas from the book into playing house or having tea parties.

I dreamed of an anthology of short stories

I dreamed of an anthology of short stories recently. I was sick with fever, not delirious, but my dreams were unusually vivid. I dreamed an anthology, and in the dream, I read through the table of contents several times. I woke up practically reciting it.

 

That part of the dream was so lifelike, it felt like a memory. The stories are all real; they're all ones I've read. But I've checked, and this collection doesn't seem to really exist. It seems to be loosely based on a couple of real books, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and Feeling Very Strange. But it's not the same as either of them. 

 

The idea was so insistent, I had to write it down.

 

It's not unusual for me to dream about books, but it is unusual for me to dream about anything real, and it's unusual for me to remember any of the titles. I blame the fever.

 

I dream all the time about visiting used bookstores, old converted houses with shelves lining every wall, the floors covered in tables, everything stacked full. Most often, I dream of finding roleplaying books, ones that supposedly came out in the 1980s or 90s, but of course, none of them ever really existed.

 

I dream of libraries, and I'm always reshelving. The collections are immense and comprehensive, I get distracted looking at everything else on the shelves.

 

I dream often of music. In my dreams, I have a collection that I don't really own. I have a favorite playlist that shows up over and over, a mix of indie pop music. The first few times, years ago, I thought I was dreaming of music I'd really heard, in an arrangement I could reproduce. But it keeps showing up, and I've realized that none of the songs or the artists are real. They don't even have imaginary names. In fact, I've noticed that I never actually hear the music in the dreams. I know what it's supposed to feel like when you listen to it, but not what it actually sounds like. 

 

But that's how it often is in dreams. You can have experience the feeling of understanding something without knowing anything; you can feel the epiphany of a breakthrough without actually having a new idea. You can read or watch or listen to something in your dream, and feel the emotions the art was supposed to elicit in you, without dreaming the content of the art at all.

So this dream anthology, made up entirely of real stories. Is something unusual, something rare.

 

 

 

"The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" by Kij Johnson

 

"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E Lily Yu

 

"The Healer" by Aimee Bender

 

"Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" by Wells Tower

 

"The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link

 

"Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster 

 

"The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon

 

"St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell

 

"The Bookmaking Habits of Selected Species" by Ken Liu

 

"The Ceiling" by Kevin Brockmeier

 

"The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter" by Glen David Gold

 

"Sea Oak" by George Saunders

Une Semaine De Bonte

 
 
Une Semaine De Bonte

A Surrealistic Novel in Collage

by Max Ernst

Dover

1934, reprinted 1976

 

 

Une Semaine De Bonte is the Dover Press reprint of Dada artist Max Ernst's series of five collage pamphlets, whose collective title translates to A Week of Kindness. It's slightly tempting to claim that Ernst invented the photocopy cut-up zine with this series. The first four pamphlets / zines / chapters are each named for a weekday, Sunday through Wednesday. The fifth covers Thursday to Saturday; Thursday is further divided into two sections, Friday into three.
 
This is an art book but not, I don't think, a graphic novel, because the images don't seem to be sequential or to convey any narrative. Ernst made collages by cutting up and reassembling lithograph illustrations. In this case, he used whole images from popular fiction and embellished them with details from like, Gustave Dore's fantasy and Bible art. If the illustrations are anything to go by, publishers at the time put out a lot of the same kinds of things we like today - mysteries and true crime, romances and domestic soap-operatic dramas full of affairs, rivalries, jealousies, conflict between attractive nicely-dressed people in well-furnished houses. But the embellishments take those familiar scenes and make them surreal and uncanny.
 
Each day is associated with an element and an example. Sunday is mud, and the Lion of Belfort, a famous French statue. The images in this section show men with lion's heads, wearing in suits or police or military uniforms. They're variously wooing, dating, or kidnapping and holding captive topless and naked women. (Probably most of the women in the book are like that, but especially in this chapter.)
 
In addition to the changes to the people, Ernst added other strange details to many of the scenes. Any mirror or portrait or statue now shows a naked woman instead of whatever was originally there. And the pictures are invaded by life - a giant blood vessel from an anatomical diagram, a sword replaced by a femur, a bird with the face of a state, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And so on.
 
Monday's element is water, and the example is water. Here we have women, nude or in nightgowns or showgirl costumes, and we have ocean waves infiltrating domestic spaces, often while men stand around looking stern and confused. In several, the women are in bed sleeping, and it looks like they're dreaming the water, like their dreams have become real, as the ocean replaces their bedroom floors.
 
Tuesday's element is fire, its example the Court of the Dragon. These are mostly scenes in ballrooms and parlors. In most scenes there is a dragon, or perhaps a snake or bat. In most scenes, someone has bat or bird wings. Often someone is crying. Why so much despair?

On Wednesday the element is blood, the example is Oedipus. Men with various birds' heads commit acts of violence, fighting, shooting, stabbing, carrying off tied-up naked women (again, as on Sunday), or running away. There are huge feathers and giant insects about.
 
Thursday is blackness, its first example is the rooster's laughter. Roosters and men with the heads of roosters abound, committing more acts of violence. The nude women here are being accosted or tortured, or else they are corpses. Pools of dark blood mar the floors. The men crow in triumph for their misdeeds. The second example is Easter Island. Men with moai statue heads lurk behind curtains, spying on women, watching jealously the embrace between ordinary, human-headed lovers.
 
Friday's element is the Interior of Sight, and its example is Three Visible Poems. It's divided into sections. In the first, Ernst has collaged together images of plants and sections of anatomical drawings, especially skeletons. In the second has a lot of shoes. The third is just two images - a row of disembodied shaking hands that recedes toward the vanishing point, and two rows of eyes, looking at each other, that does the same.
 
Saturday, the element is unknown, the example, the Key to Songs. We see women in bed, in postures like they're falling or suffering violence, their faces frightened or angry.
 
I would say that Ernst succeeded in creating a lot of striking, provocative imagery. In part though, his success comes from the provocation of seeing so much violence committed against nude women by fully clothed men, images that must have been popular enough in the fiction of his time, that he could find so many examples to work with. I especially liked the water images, where it seemed like the boundary between dream and life had ruptured, and the ocean poured through the tear.

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

 
 

Don't Worry Darling

directed by Olivia Wilde

written by Katie Silberman

Warner Bros

2022

 

 

Don't Worry Darling feels like maybe someone optioned the script during the 90s, paid extra for some kind of insane 25 year exclusivity deal, then forgot all about it, and then, when time was almost about to run out, tried to recoup their investment with a rushed production and a maximal amount of behind-the-scenes cast drama doubling as a marketing blitz.

 

Darling is very much like one of the 'what is reality?' movies that were popular in the 90s until The Matrix came along and did the whole concept so well it basically put a nail in the subgenre. For about a decade between the rise of personal computing and the start of the new millennium, movie characters wandered through philosophical thought experiments come to life, wondering whether they're living in a simulation and whether any such thing as 'the real world' even exists. In terms of quality, these films ranged from Vanilla Sky at the low end to like, The Truman Show near the top. Don't Worry Darling wouldn't have been at the bottom of this particular barrel back then, but it definitely would've been bottom half, even if it were released when it was still trendy. Today it just seems like a total mess.

 

On the off chance you're planning to watch Darling, I don't want to strip it of one of its very few viewing pleasures by giving too much away, but it's clear almost immediately that Something Is Going On in this perfectly manicured suburb, full of immaculate stay-at-home wives and husbands who drive sports cars off-road through the desert to go work on some secret (military?) project they're not allowed to talk about. This obviously isn't the real 1950s or 60s, which makes the ubiquitous mimicry of that era's style a source of mystery. The total isolation from the outside world, and the sinister undertone to the men's work also draw you in.

 

Florence Pugh plays a character who starts off just like every other woman in this little community. She spends her days gossiping with the neighbors, taking bizarrely choreographed exercise classes, methodically cleaning every surface in her house, and preparing elaborate home-cooked dinners that get ruined when her husband Harry Styles decides to ravish her on the dining table. But Pugh's housewife was friends with another woman who recently disappeared from the neighborhood - and while everyone else obeys a tacit directive to never speak of this woman again, Pugh misses her friend and keeps asking awkward questions about what really happened. And as she pulls on that thread, the whole sweater quickly unravels.

 

One day, once her mind is open to questions and new possibilities, Pugh witnesses a plane crash in the desert. She does what no one is supposed to, and leaves town. She heads into the desert to investigate the crash and check for survivors who might need help. And then ... Something Happens in the desert ... and she wakes up in bed, back in her perfect home.

 

Once you know the ending of the film, and understand the secrets Pugh's character is trying to discover, you may ask yourself - what was that plane? where did it come from? why did it crash? And you will not for the life of you know the answer. It's like foreshadowing left over from an earlier draft when Darling had a completely different secret and different ending, that now points to nothing, and by all rights shouldn't happen at all.

 

After that, Pugh experiences a series of nightmarish dislocations. She wonders if they're hallucinations, if they're related to the plane crash, if they're connected to her missing friend, if she's going crazy, if she's going to disappear too.

 

These incidents are cryptic, maybe intentionally misleading. They're not tonally consistent, and only seem to indicate what's really going on one single time, perhaps by accident. I think director Olivia Wilde was just trying to capture as much strange imagery as she could on camera, apparently without worrying if it ever made sense. The bizarre synchronized dance classes seem to be in the film for the same reason. The most memorable of these strange incidents is when Pugh is cleaning the floor-to-ceiling windows in her hallway, and the hall suddenly narrows, crushing her against the windows, before suddenly returning to normal. The one actually-revealing scene is when Pugh is in the bath next to a mirror, and she slides her head underwater, but her reflection remains visible in the mirror and appears to be watching her. I wish they'd all been well-crafted.

 

Eventually, of course, Pugh will figure out the truth, though not before declaring war on Chris Pine, who runs the place, and not before wondering if she can trust her husband Styles. She can't, of course. In the 90s, Don't Worry Darling's tepid feminism might've seemed revelatory in a film of its (intended, hoped for) stature. Today it seems like the thinnest veneer, mostly there to provide a semblance of motivation to the characters who are eventually revealed to be villains.

 

Again, once you know the truth, all these scenes of conflict make even less sense than they seemed to when you still thought they were clues to help you solve the mystery. They're not. They're just more spaghetti thrown at the wall in the hope that anything will stick. What sticks with me is Pine cackling 'look at that boy dance!' like a crazed impresario as Styles does a little jig on stage for his boss's amusement. That's like, memorable, but it doesn't mean anything.

 

The best way to enjoy this film is probably while drinking with friends, letting the weirdness wash over you, and laughing at the absurdity - there's a lot of it! - along the way.

 

The one high point I want to give credit to is the soundtrack. Throughout Darling, there's nearly always a pop song from the 50s or 60s playing, audible to both the characters and the audience. At first this seems to be just one more piece of set dressing, only meant to help build up the faux mid-century pastiche. And it is that, too. But also, it's clear that the songs were all chosen with intention, for a reason. They're all thematically consistent, and in retrospect, almost comically on-the-nose in terms of their foreshadowing. But good! The music the only part of the film that's actually pulling its own weight in that department, the only aspect of the production that seemingly knows what it's doing, what its goal is and how to accomplish it. I'd much rather have that, than a soundtrack that really is just there because of the years the songs were written.

 

 

Originally watched December 2022.