The Tea Dragon Festival

 
 
The Tea Dragon Festival

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2019

 

 

The Tea Dragon Festival is sort of a prequel to K O'Neill's Tea Dragon Society. The older gay couple who serve as mentors in Society are young men here, still active as fantasy adventurers and bounty hunters, not yet settled down as tea shop owners or tea dragon enthusiasts. I think we may see the moments when Erik and his boyfriend Hesekiel decide what they eventually want to do when they retire, but it's not a pivotal moment in the story, just a conversation we see them have near the end of the book. A lot of O'Neill's storytelling is like this. The pace is slow, the plot is minimal, and key moments of characterization are so brief and so gentle that you only recognize their importance in retrospect. 
 
Erik and Hesekiel are the only recurring characters, and the tea dragons - who are the only other connection between Society and Festival - play a very minor role this time around. The stars this time are Rinn, who is Erik's 'nibling', a term that's the nonbinary counterpart to nephew or niece, and Aedhan, a dragon in humanoid form who's just woken up from almost a century of magical slumber. Rinn is an aspiring cook who really excels at foraging for mushrooms in the forest. They live in a fairly isolated village (though it does have a train station), and they find Aedhan sleeping in a ruined shrine. Aedhan was sent by their dragon clan to be the village guardian, and he's shocked when he realizes how much time has passed.
 
We follow Rinn as they show Aedhan around the village and take him on a foraging trip. Erik and Hesekiel are visiting in pursuit of a bounty on an ancient spirit that puts people to sleep. 
 
We see Rinn and Aedhan become friends, and possible develop the beginnings of a romance. I know Rinn is nonbinary because the four main characters get one-sentence biographies at the front of the book. No one ever uses a pronoun for them in the actual text, though you could probably read the book without noticing. The closest we get to explicit acknowledgment is Erik calling Rinn nibling, and a brief exchange where Rinn asks Aedhan is it's true that some dragons are skilled enough shapeshifters to not only change between humanoid and dragon form, but to also change between male and female forms, and when Aedhan says yes that's true, Rinn says that sounds nice. Without the bio at the beginning, I don't know if I would've read that as an expression of Rinn's identity, as opposed to like, Rinn being impressed by how cool dragons are. Aedhan's admiration for Rinn's mushroom hunting gives them the courage to keep cooking as a hobby instead of a career, and to focus more pn foraging. (K O'Neill has come out as nonbinary since this book was originally published, which makes me wonder if Rinn is at all a representation of the author.)
 
Erik and Hesekiel find the ancient spirit. It puts them to sleep, and they dream of the forest as it was in the magic-filled days of the ancient past, a place of awe-inspiring beauty. The two manage to wake up, but decide the spirit doesn't understand human lifespans and isn't trying to hurt anyone, so they politely ask it to stop. They seem to think this will work, and I guess the audience is meant to as well. Since they didn't capture the spirit, they won't collect a bounty - I think this is the turning point that leads them to think forward to their eventual retirement from adventuring, decades hence.
 
The last thing that happens is the titular tea dragon festival. The handful of tea dragons in the village are like communal pets. The mountain chamomile dragon is very fluffy and adorably grumpy looking. For the festival, they get dressed up with ribbons, and the villagers eat a feast and drink tea. Rinn shares some tea-dragon tea with Aedhan, which shows him some memories of village life that help relieve his guilt about his delayed start to being a guardian, and kind of affirms his friendship with Rinn.
 
There's a deck-building board game based on the tea dragon books, where each player has a tea dragon and tries to give them the most fulfilling experiences while reigning in their misbehavior. (They're very cat-like.) The game has two versions, one based solely on The Tea Dragon Society and one based on both Society and Festival, and the second version is probably better. It's more intuitive, has fewer turns where it feels like you can't do anything, and just generally seems to capture the intended play experience better. I think The Tea Dragon Festival is the same way. O'Neill seems better able to tell the kind of story they want here, to tell a stronger version of the same sort of coming-of-age tale about a young person deciding on their career befriending someone just returning to society after a debilitating magical illness, helped by mentors, and needing to give help to the fussy little tea dragons. 

The History of the Computer

 
 
The History of the Computer

People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World

by Rachel Ignotofsky
Ten Speed Books

2022

 

 

I really like Rachel Ignotofsky's art, and her illustrated non-fiction, aimed at middle-grade and young adult readers, seems well-balanced to me. She provides a broad introduction with just enough detail to get you started, and hopefully inspire you to seek out more information about the parts that interest you most. Her writing is clear and accessible, without seeming to over-simplify or dumb anything down. The experience of reading her books is a lot like visiting a good museum - it provides a good overview and probably whets your appetite to learn more.
 
In The History of the Computer, Ignotofsky shows us advances in calculating and computing devices, and in the advances in human knowledge and understanding - including math and information theory - that allow us to invent and then build new devices.
 
As in The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth which I read previously, Ignotofsky starts with an overview that defines key hardware and software terms, explains the basics of how binary logic works, and then shows timelines of important on/off switches, storage mediums, video games, and robots. We get a couple chapters about precursors to the modern computer, including numbers and the abacus in the more distant past, and Boolean logic and mechanical calculators during the industrial revolution. The first 'computers' were human workers who could devise and then solve math equations for governments and businesses, so that others could simply look up the answers on a printed table. (The conversion tables in every school notebook, showing how to switch from Standard to Metric would be like the simplest version of this.)
 
We join the 20th century as new electronic computers were invented and immediately put to work in World War II, breaking codes and calculating missile trajectories. After WWII, the American government continued funding computer research as part of the space race. Initially, the only computers were housed in government agencies, prestigious universities, and large corporations, but over time they proliferated.

 
In this and every subsequent period, the sorts of advances we see are switches and memory storage getting smaller and more electronic; truly exceptional thinkers creating new programming languages and user-interfaces (including graphical and tactile interfaces) that make computers easier for everyone else to use; and new applications, previously only theorized, becoming feasible because of the increased speed, enlarged memory, and greater accessibility those innovations provided. For virtually anything you can think to do do with computers, someone was theorizing it and someone else trying to build it much earlier than you probably think.
 
In the 1970s, new inventors working outside of the big businesses that manufactured room-sized mainframes and refrigerator-sized 'mini-computers' began to build much smaller devices for small businesses and households - the 'micro-computer' or personal computer desktop. In the 1980s, artists and other creative people used computers to make their work, leading to a flourishing of computer animation, electronic music, and video games.
 
In the 1990s, existing government, business, and academic computer networks were combined to make the hardware of the internet, and the software protocols of the web made it possible for the public to get online. In the 2000s, computer components were finally small enough to combine multiple devices and still be small enough to fit in someone's hand - the 'all-in-one device' or smatphone.
 
At the end, when she talks about the newest inventions that might drive the next stage of computing, Ignotofsky singles out self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence (by which she means Machine Learning, since ChatGPT and genAI didn't exist yet), smart homes and internet-of-things, and using Big Data in science.
 
Ignotofsky gives attention both to 'firsts' and to iterations on an idea that lead up to its most famous form. She provides us with the names and a bit of biographical detail for lots and lots of thinkers and workers. You can't read this book and come away thinking that a handful of geniuses did everything themselves, and you probably notice that the people who got famous are not necessarily smarter or more creative than the ones who didn't. Fame seems to follow money, which comes from making the first really commercially successful version of something - which is not the same as having the idea, making and of the prototypes or intermediate steps, or even actually being the first one to sell it. Fame and success are both fickle, and it took a lot of other people doing less-noticed work to make each Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg possible.
 
I mentioned I like Ignotofsky's illustration style, and it seems especially suited to kid-friendly technical drawings. She draws outlines that are filled in with block colors, but crucially, the outlines aren't just black, they're in color too, which provides an awful lot of extra information. Her drawings of the old mechanical calculators, the early computers likes ENIAC and UNIVAC, and the prototype quantum computer are especially good looking, possibly because they have a lot of visible parts. Every improvement makes the parts smaller and the connections harder to see, which is aesthetically a bit of a shame, but Ignotofsky also shows us all the many housings and cases computers came in too. 

Fakes

 
 
Fakes

An Anthology of Pseduo-Interview, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, 'Found' Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

WW Norton & Company

2012

 

 

Fakes is a collection of 40 literary short stories in the subgenre we might think of as 'gimmick fiction', where the writing is very visibly constrained by some higher concept that shapes the text. Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style and Matt Madden's tribute to it, 99 Ways to Tell a Story are veritable catalogs of gimmicks, each retelling the same simple story over and over again with a different high concept each time. One common type of gimmick is to imitate the form of another kind of writing or document; not every gimmick is like that, but the ones in Fakes all are.
 
Despite the connotation of the title, the stories collected here are not actually trying to trick anyone into thinking they're really whatever style of writing they appear to be. No one reading JG Ballard's "The Index", for example, is going to be fooled into thinking that it's the only surviving remnant of the autobiography of Alexander Hamilton's secret son, who inspired and was then denounced by every major historical figure of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ballard's story definitely qualifies as ergodic fiction - where the narrative is implied rather than told, often because our only access to a character is indirect, mediated through a document supposedly prepared by the character - but most of the stories here are more straightforward than that. The most oblique is probably Donald Barthelme's "The Explanation", which is a surreal sort of interview. Also, with the exception of these two luminaries, most of the stories are from the 1990s and 2000s.
 
There are a few commonalities among the stories. One is that an awful lot of them are humorous, likely because of the playful nature of this style of writing influences what sort of story you want to use it to tell.
 
Another is that many of these authors play up the irony of a style that's usually fairly business-like or professional to talk about parts of life or express emotions that are inappropriate for that setting, such as loneliness or romantic desire, over-the-top misogyny, a too-crude interest in sex or drugs, self destruction or other symptoms of mental illness, or grief or mourning over a recent death. The effect of this disjunction is sometimes funny, sometimes sad. It almost always communicates that the narrator of the story has feelings so powerful that they can't be contained by social norms of propriety.
 
A few stand-outs for me include "Officers Weep" by Daniel Orozco, a police blotter that shows two patrol partners falling in love while ineffectually following a vandal with a chainsaw cutting a swathe of random destruction through town (it also reminded me of Carmen Maria Machado's "These are There Stories," which does something similar with fictional Law & Order SVU episode summaries); "Our Spring Catalog" by Jack Pendarvis, where we infer a publishing intern's crisis over her status in the industry and the overall direction of her life from the deteriorating quality of the summaries she writes to advertise upcoming books; "Life Story" by editor David Shields, which is told entirely in bumper sticker slogans and variations; "Reply All" by Robin Hemley, where a poetry club falls apart when one member accidentally sends a love letter to the entire email listserv instead of solely to the woman he's having an affair with; and "National Treasures" by Charles McLeod, an auction catalog where the object descriptions tell the seller's very troubled life story.
 
A few stories missed for me because there just wasn't enough going on, like a letter to a funeral parlor complaining about their use of the word 'cremains,' or an essay about depictions of the crucifixion that seemed to be straight nonfiction as far as I could tell.
 
A few others I didn't personally care for because they seemed to me to be trying to express grandiose and exaggerated inappropriate sentiments in a way that should be humorous, but I couldn't really find them funny. I found that I couldn't quite forget the reality that there are people who truly think and do things like this, which made them more troubling than funny. Joe Wenderoth's "Letters to Wendy's" is supposedly a series of letters sent by a disturbed young man to the fast food company, where he announces his drug use, speculates about other customers' genitals, plots to physically assault employees, plots to sexually assault the non-existent Wendy herself, and declares his plans to get his dock out and wave it around the store. Stanley Crawford's "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood" is a maniacally over-controlling set of instructions for a wife from her husband governing every aspect of her appearance, behavior, inner life, and an exhaustive list of chores, all woven through with an extended metaphor about how the house is the marriage. (Incredibly, both those two were story-length excerpts from book-length complete works!) Editor Matthew Vollmer's "Will & Testament" is supposedly written by a young man just before his suicide, and supposedly sent to strangers chosen from the phone book, asking them to dismember his body and send the parts to all sorts of people, including all his ex-girlfriends and former bosses, and to then engage in a lifetime of ritual mourning on his behalf.

There's also a real bibliography at the end, listing other works that could've been included in a much, much longer collection. I was aware of a few of the book-length recommendations, but most of them, and essentially all the short stories, are news to me, and have the potential to keep me busy looking them up. 

Tower Dungeon 1

 
 
Tower Dungeon 1

by Tsutomu Nihei
Kodansha

2025 

Tower Dungeon is a new fantasy manga series by an artist who's best known for a couple of scifi series. In the first volume, it appears to be a fairly straightforward story about a quest to rescue a princess from a tower, although there are hints that things might become stranger as the story goes on. 

 

The tower, for example, is a megastructure. It's not big like a medieval tower, or even big like a modern skyscraper; it's big like a mountain, big like something only magic could make. It's white a covered in pillars, and it hovers hundreds of feet above the ground, accessible only by vertiginous staircases, and only when it floats past. One of Nihei's previous series, Blame!, is about an infinite city, and since we've only glimpsed the lowest levels of the tower, I suspect we'll see more fantastic architecture as we go. The way things work seems directly influenced by D&D and Delicious in Dungeon. The tower also reminds me of the one in Senlin Ascends, but I don't know if Nihei was influenced by it.

 

The first volume of Tower Dungeon opens in a small village, where superhumanly strong teen Yuva spends his days doing chores for his grandparents. When news reaches the village that the princess has been kidnapped and taken to the Dragon Tower, and that the royal army has already been decimated trying to rescue her, Yuva's neighbors are quick to offer him up to the military recruiters to spare their own sons from conscription.

 

Yuva travels to the base of the tower with only a barrel lid as a shield and a small metal cookpot that looks like a wide-brimmed hat to wear as a helmet (a bit like Don Quixote and his shaving bowl). The surviving soldiers are covered in bandages and eye patches and slings. A small expeditionary force of the leaders and the new recruits go back in. Yuva's strength is put to work carrying barrels of salt on his back to use against a slime monster on level 50. Along the way, they find rare mushrooms that can be used in a powerful healing potion, fight off several waves of skeletons in armor, and meet a badly-wounded but still firebreathing dragon.

 

On level 50, the 'slime monster' is a bizarre giant humanoid that's protected by a thick carapace of translucent slime. Yuva manages to dissolve the slime with the salt, but before anyone can finish the fight, a strange tentacled man appears and threatens to kill the princess unless they spare the monster. The princess speaks up to say that he wants her as a live hostage for now, so they shouldn't let this threat scare them! When the slime monster dies, a coin-like token appears, and the tentacled man says they can trade the token for the princess up on level 100.

 

Back on the ground, we learn that the remaining royals have decided to coronate a replacement, and are recalling the guards to the ceremony. Outfitted in better armor, Yuva is left behind with a master archer and a young woman who can use fire magic to continue the rescue on their own. I suspect the main plot next time will continue following Yuva and his new companions, but I hope we'll also learn more about what's going on in the kingdom, why the princess was kidnapped, who the weird man who took her is, and so on.

 

Nihei's art has a kind of rough quality to it, like his pens can only produce thick lines with wobbly edges. It immediately looks harsh and brutal compared to Witch Hat Atelier, for example. The story here also seems more violent and might go on to include more sex. Nearly all the soldiers except Yuva have been injured or maimed; the fire magician wears a modest black cloak ... but nothing underneath, as we realize when her cloak floats away from her body while she conjures a bonfire.

 

In addition to monumental architecture that, for all its neoclassical and gothic flourishes looks more science fictional than fantastic, Nihei's monster designs are strange enough to spill over from dark fantasy into weird fiction. The slime monster, for example, might've been a traditional cube shape or an amoeba, but instead it was a humanoid secreting its own slime armor. The dragon looked like pterodactyl. The tentacled man is so asymmetrical he looks less like Cthulhu and more like Swamp Thing or Man Thing. I'm curious to see what's next.

Thieves

 
Thieves
by Lucie Bryon

Nobrow

2022 
 
 

Thieves is one of my favorite comics so far this year, and it mostly came as a pleasant surprise, because I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, just that I'd heard that it was good. It's fair to say I caught only a fraction of the buzz. In addition to being praised in basically every publication that prints reviews, Thieves won Lucie Bryon the Entente Litteraire Prize, which was presented to her by the queen of England and the first lady of France. Which is pretty impressive for a comic about two queer girls in high school going to house parties, getting drunk, and stealing things!

 

Thieves isn't quite as scandalous as I make it sound, but Bryon is willing to allow her characters to be imperfect, to make mistakes, to handle their emotions and their social relationships badly. But most of the book isn't about doing the wrong thing, its about trying to put it right again afterward. Friends and girlfriends push one another to be better, to try harder.

 

Ella is a social butterfly and a bit of a tomboy; she has a crush from a distance on Madeline, a femme girl who sits in front of her in morning class. Ella's best friend Leslie sits beside her every day, and tells her to stop longing from afar and actually just go talk to her already! But before Ella quite gets the chance, she and Leslie crash a house party, and Madeline is there. Ella is nervous, gets drunk, blacks out, and wakes up at home to discover that she's stolen a half dozen curios from one of the party host's closets...

 

Ella experiences a wave of longing for Madeline

  

Ella got home safe the night before hanks to Leslie, and also thanks to Leslie, Madeline comes over that morning to check on her. It turns out that Madeline's been crushing on Ella from a distance too, and now that they both know, they start dating. Ella soon realizes that the person she stole from was Madeline, but there's a twist. All the curios were things Madeline had stolen too. Not because she was drunk; more like acting out at times when she felt overwhelmed by negative emotions.

 

Ella and Madeline agree that it will feel better to stop carrying physical reminders of mistakes around with them. They spend the rest of the book returning the stolen items one by one, sneaking them into house parties and leaving them where the owner will eventually find them. Returning the items means confronting the original negative feelings, which is hard. A few times, Ella and Madeline fight. Leslie helps with a few of the reverse-burglaries, and she helps the couple work things out after arguing. She is like, the straight analogue to the 'gay best friend' character of 90s rom-coms. Like all stories set in the senior year of high school, the story ends with graduation.

 

Ella and Leslie walk to a party and step inside

 

I like Bryon's characters and her storytelling, and the emotional realism of a shy kid acting out when she gets bullied or teased, in part because she has no one she can talk to. Once Madeline has a real friend and can put her feelings into words, she's able to control her actions better.

 

I also really, really like Bryon's art. Her figures are fairly realistic, but they're also quite expressive. They're like, just the right amount of stretchy and cartoony for the story she wants to tell. Her use of color is great, too. Each scene has a single accent color that reflects to mood and time of day, to complement the black ink drawings. School is orange, outdoors at night is green, parties are red. Some background and scenery details appear solely in color and negative space, with no black outline at all. The colors are soft, and rich, like muted jewel tones. On the few occasions Bryon uses more than one, the art suddenly takes on surprising depth.

Summerland

 
Summerland

by Hannu Rajaniemi

Tor

2018

 
  
Summerland is a spy novel in the tradition of John le Carre, set in London during the Cold War, its intrigue driven by the accusation that there's a traitor, a Soviet mole, in the heart of the British secret services. But this is an alt history. The year is 1938. Germany lost the Great War so comprehensively that it stands no chance of rearming to invade its neighbors. Instead, a tense stalemate between the UK and USSR plays out as the belligerents pick sides in another country's civil war, prolonging endlessly. But this war isn't in Vietnam or Korea - its the Spanish Civil War, with a British-backed Franco unable to defeat the Soviet-supported Republic. And, oh yeah, half the spies on both sides are ghosts.

 

In Summerland, the afterlife is a physical place, a layer of four-dimensional space just below the layer of the living world. Theosophical exploration discovered the ruins of Summer City in the 1890s, the remains of an earlier civilization built by the now vanished Old Dead. If a person can imagine a specific 4D shape as they die (with the help of a Ticket, a printed card that seems to function like a psychic QR code, a visual representation of the unique coordinates of a specific location), then their soul will reawaken at that location in Summerland. If you die without a Ticket, your remains near where you died, and rapidly Fades until you lose all of your memories and sense of self.

 

These discoveries have given rise to a world where the death has lost its sting. Indeed, the living envy the dead. Each nation exists half on Earth and half in the afterlife. The ghost of Queen Victoria still rules the British Empire, aided by her living Prime Minister, HG Wells. Spy duties are split between the dead in the Summer Court and the living in the Winter Court. Lenin still rules the Soviet Union as well - in death, Soviet citizens merge with their leader, transforming him into a truly collective superintelligence, the Presence. Because the dead are not gone, the torch is never passed. Living children remain beholden to their dead ancestors; Stalin is the dissident leader of a splinter faction, trying to use the Spanish Civil War to create a Communist but non-Leninist enclave.

 

When they visit the living world, ghosts can only see electromagnetism and souls. They can read emotions but not thoughts, and they can be blocked by Faraday cages. For a price, a ghost can temporarily possess the body of a medium wearing an electric crown. Ghosts make very good spies. In this world, radio and electric technology have advanced rapidly, all cars use electric motors for example, and medicine has languished. The only treatment for severe illness or injury is an overdose of morphine administered while you stare at your Ticket.

 

Summerland starts when a Soviet defector reveals to living British spy Rachel White that there is a mole loyal to Lenin among the ghost spies of the Summer Court. The mole is Peter Bloom, wunderkind and illegitimate son of the Prime Minister, who is simply too beloved for anyone to suspect. Because her defector tells her this just before committing suicide without a Ticket, Rachel gets demoted for fucking up her case. Not knowing who she can trust, if anyone, Rachel goes off-books to catch and expose Peter on her own.

 

Peter meanwhile is desperate to avoid getting caught, and to be exfiltrated to the Soviet afterlife to become one with the Presence. He's trying to stop Britain from switching their alliance from Franco to Stalin, and looking for a British secret to steal that's big enough to buy him a way out of his double life. He thinks he finds it, in the form of an old study HG Wells commissioned investigating the afterlife equivalent to the Fermi paradox - if the souls of any intelligent dead can travel to Summerland and set up civilization there, why was it empty when humans first arrived in the 1890s? where are all the alien minds? Not realizing that Rachel knows his identity, Peter picks her, obvious disaffected after a recent hushed-up embarrassing incident, and tries to use her to steal the physical file he needs.

 

Rajaniemi has really succeeded here on two fronts. First, this is a fun and imaginative scifi novel. What if Victorian era ideas about the affinity between electricity and spirits were true? What if the Theosophists' beliefs about immortal souls and four dimensional space were correct? And what if the tradition of all dead generations very literally weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living? I like how Rajaniemi imagines and describes the afterlife, and especially his depiction of movement through 4D space, and the ana and kata directions that function as analogues for up and down. I like the way he extrapolates. The ghostly storage of information resembles cloud storage of digital files, and the way everything in the afterlife can be located and indexed using hypercube diagrams reminds of librarians' ambitions for a semantic web, where all real-world objects, including people, have URLs that allow them to be linked consistently online. Rajaniemi provides enough detail so you can imagine this strange, half living, half ghostly society, and so that the powers and limitations of the ghosts appear consistent, but not so much that everything is belabored or weighed down in minutia.

 

Second, Summerland succeeds as a spy novel. The alt history sets up an alternative Cold War with comprehensible stakes and sides. There's plenty of suspicion and paranoia, plenty of intrigue, and well-described scenes of tradecraft like spotting a tail or developing an asset. Multiple characters hidden agendas, and Peter Bloom is not the only double agent. But at the same time, the characters are consistent enough that their actions remain plausible, even when they catch you by surprise in the moment. They have comprehensible motivations, whether loyalty, ideology, or self interest, and they behave true to those motives even when they're trying to act in secret. Getting close to both Rachel and Peter as viewpoint characters not only lets us see the living and dead worlds, it provides us with direct and accurate information about the two main covert ops being run. And both have personal histories that give them a complex relationship with the current state of the world, and relatable reasons for wanting to change it.

  

I would compare Summerland favorably to Rasputin's Bastards, which also features psychic spies, and very favorably to The Eyre Affair, which also has a fairly divergent alternate history.

 

My complaints are very few. First, Rajaniemi's dialogue almost never includes contractions. The effect isn't so much to make the speakers sound posh or proper as it is to make what they're saying sound a bit stilted and artificial. 

 

Another thing I found odd is that although the British PM is very specifically HG Wells, man of imagination, author of Little Wars and The Invisible Man, both of which play roles in the plot, for some reason Rajaniemi calls him 'Herbert Blanco West,' and then has to repeatedly make really obvious allusions to make sure you realize that 'HB West' is really supposed to be HG Wells. Rajaniemi references Lenin and Stalin by name, as well as radio inventor Marconi and 4D theorist Charles Hinton by name, so it's difficult for me to understand why he doesn't do the same for Wells. I even sort of wonder if it's somehow a legal or practical decision rather than and artistic one.

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

 
  

The Worst Person in the World

directed by Jocahim Trier

written by Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier

MK2 Films

2021

 
 
Do other people ever experience their lives as settled? Do they ever know what they want, get it, and then just enjoy having it? I think one reason I like coming of age stories is because I have experienced my own life as a continuous 'becoming' with no arrival, as though what emerges from each cocoon is just another chrysalis, with no butterfly in sight. But sometimes I wonder if maybe that's just life, and though I worry that I'm alone in feeling that way, maybe everyone else has the same feeling, the same worry, and maybe they can't see the doubt in me any more than I can see it in them.

 

One reason I liked The Worst Person in the World is that it really spoke to my sense of unsettledness and indecision. Julie starts the film as a blonde medical student. She quits that, dumps her boyfriend, dyes her hair purple, enrolls in psychology, and immediately begins dating one of her professors. The she drops out, takes up photography, has a fling with a model, meets underground comix artist Aksel at a party, sleeps with him, falls in love, moves in, gets a job in a bookstore, and returns to her natural brunette. And my sisters in Christ, this is only the prologue. There are 12 chapters and an epilogue to go!

 

This is a movie about Julie wondering who she wants to be, what kind of person she wants to be, thinking she's decided, then changing her mind and trying again. I admire her courage and energy. She won't settle, even if that means she leads a restless life.

 

Aksel is in his mid 40s and ready to have kids. His career is beginning to blossom, with book signings for his newest releases, and a movie deal for an animated version of his most famous comic. (He's ambivalent about his illustrated alter-ego getting tamed for a kid's movie, but presumably the money is good.) Julie doesn't want kids yet, maybe not ever, still works at the bookstore, and abandons photography is favor of writing occasional opinion essays for online publications.

 

One night, Julie leaves one of Aksel's book signings early, crashes a wedding, and meets Eivind, who's her own age, and there alone. They're both determined not to cheat, but spend an incredibly intimate evening flirting. Among their not technically cheating activities - biting each other's arms, smelling their armpits, watching each other pee, and sharing secrets. Julie tells Eivind something she later puts in an article, but they otherwise leave knowing only their first names, with no way to find each other.

 

Aksel and Julie keep struggling. Eivind and his increasingly-environmentalist girlfriend struggle. Eivind and Julie meet again, and both decide to try again together. But this is still only about the halfway point, not a fairytale ending.

 

The narration and editing of this film reminded me lot of Amelie, although Worst Person is much more naturalistic, not nearly so stylized or whimsical. But when the narrator tells us what Julie's mother, grandmother, great-gran, great-great, etc were doing on their 30th birthdays, or when time stops as Julie runs across the city to kiss Eivind, or when Julie trips on mushrooms, the pace and style of the cuts as a storytelling device seemed quite similar, even if their content is different.

 

 

Originally watched January 2023.