Otto

 
 
Otto

A Palindrama

by Jon Agee

Rocky Pond Books

2021 

 

 

Jon Agee calls Otto a 'palindrama,' a portmanteau of his own devising that describes the fact that every bit of text in the body of the book takes the form of a palindrome, a word or phrase that reads to same forward and back, like racecar or noon. This is a children's comic rather than a picture book. Each page has multiple panels of sequential art, and the story is mostly told with pictures. 
 
The text, when it appears, is largely dialogue, but also sometimes signs and labels. An awful lot of these are longer than any of the palindromes I'm used to (which top out at like, 'Madam I am Adam,') and many of them are formed by a statement and reply, two characters working together to make one palindrome.
 
The story follows young Otto on an adventure that seemingly takes place in his own imagination, but that also involves a wider and stranger world than you'd think he could dream up alone. I've come to appreciate this as a pretty classic structure for kid's stories. In Otto's case, he's playing with his dog Pip when his mom and dad call him into the dining room to eat his wonton soup. Staring into the soup bowl, he's imaginatively transported to a beach where his parents are asleep on blankets in the sun, leaving him unsupervised. He wanders off and has his adventures before returning to the beach just as his parents are waking up, and then returning to reality as his daydream while staring into his soup comes to an end. The structure is fairly symmetrical, which suits the theme well.
 
On the beach, Otto sees a rat carrying a surf board; Pip gives chase and Otto follows. Soon he's in a desert. He briefly meets and passes by a few eccentric characters and odd food stands. He finds a doctor asleep on the railroad tracks, who's saved at the last moment by the 'Mr. Alarm' mascot from Otto's bedroom clock. He reaches a road where someone gives him a ride into the city. He sees lots of signs and advertisements, and once in town the driver points out various notable cityfolk. Otto wanders a bit, goes to the 'mueseum,' and meets more strange people, including a woman in a pink cat costume who wants his help stacking cats on a ladder. He continues wandering, through a park, a cemetery, to the lake shore and into the lake. Eventually he takes a boat ride, braves a storm, and ends up back where he started. It's fair to say Otto's dream is action packed!
 
At the end, Agee credits people who suggested a few of the palindromes to him, and of course some were simply well-known. But it seems he made up most of them himself, especially the longer and more complex ones. Whether that's something his brain was uniquely suited to, or a skill he practiced, I'm really impressed! 

Chrono Trigger

 
 
Chrono Trigger

by Michael Williams

Boss Fight Books

2014

 

 

Michael Williams' Chrono Trigger is the Boss Fight Books book about the Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger. I previously read BFB's Spelunky and Earthbound books. Spelunky was pretty great, but it was also written by the game's designer, and so had insight into the creative process that will simply never be available in a book written by anyone else. Earthbound disappointed me because the author paired a walkthrough of the game with a roughly equal amount of narrative about his own life, which was not what I'd hoped for.
 
Chrono Trigger has a much better balance, I think. Williams describes the basic plot, the characters, and a few key moments, in the early chapters, then spends the rest of the book on actual criticism. He looks at the portrayal of gender, race, and sexuality in the game. He talks about the portrayal of social institutions like government, law, and the economy. He actually gets brief interviews with both the original translator who wrote the first English localization, and the one who retranslated the game for a rerelease. He even explores a bit the role of time travel in the game's narrative.
 
Williams does discuss his life a little bit, what it was like to first play Chrono Trigger in the 90s, and he mentions his time as an English teacher in Japan, but like, his reasons for doing so are obvious and help to advance his discussion of the topic at hand. He talks about himself about as much as I do in these reviews; he definitely does not put a whole memoir's worth of life stories into his video game review.
 

Chrono Trigger the game is one of the most highly regarded Japanese rpgs of the 16-bit era, with colorful pixel art, and a plot and cast that ranges across time to include a cave woman, a cursed medieval knight who looks like a frog, a robot from the future, all trying to save their world from the apocalyptic Lavos, who crashed into the planet in the distant past, and who will erupt to fly off to another world in their year 1999, wiping out almost all life in the process. Players travel back and forth in time to assemble their party, face off against Lavos, definitely lose their first battle against the living embodiment of mass extinction, then continue exploring the world at different times until they're finally ready to fight Lavos again.
 
I think Williams's work here probably represents a pretty good baseline of what one should reasonably be able to expect from the whole 33⅓, Pop Classics, Boss Fight Books format. There are a few more of these books that I kind of feel interested in, but I've also realized I'm more interested in histories of how things were made more than I am in commentaries about them. Williams provides a blend of both. But I may have been spoiled by the wealth of insider knowledge in Spelunky.

The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend

 
 
The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend

by Mieri Hiranishi

Viz Media

2023

 

 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
 
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
 
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
 
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
 
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
 
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print. 
 
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.

The Eyre Affair

 
The Eyre Affair

by Jasper Fford

Penguin

2001, reprinted 2003

 

 

The Eyre Affair is the first in a series of mysteries involving living people who cross into, and fictional characters who cross out of, the world of books. Like the idea that our toys have secret lives that they act out when we're not looking at them, the thought that the characters in books are aware of their stories, are conscious of acting them out, even when we're not reading them, has a deep, almost primal appeal, a resonance with some of our earliest childhood imaginings. It reminds me of old Looney Tunes like "Have You Got Any Castles?" or "Book Revue" that depict everyone stepping out of their books at night to mingle and party. 

It's a scenario that makes intuitive sense, but that also doesn't fit neatly into the distinctions we usually draw between science fiction and fantasy, although in this case, Fforde fills up his world with alt history, time travel, mad science ... plus supervillains, werewolves, and vampires. His protagonist, Thursday Next, is a secret agent working for the busiest, least glamorous branch of British Intelligence, the ones who investigate book-related crimes. 
 
In Fforde's world, the Crimean War that started in the 1850s is still dragging on in the early 2000s, Britain and France use time traveling spies to sabotage each other's histories, cloned dodos are a common pet, and the general public is fanatical about classical literature and live theatrical adaptations thereof, seemingly to the exclusion of almost any other form of entertainment. Instead of football hooligans, you get crowds dressed up like Shakespeare or Milton rioting because they encountered a banned art style like Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, or they witnessed a play that illegally departs from approved interpretations. Those sorts of crimes, plus lots and lots of attempted forgeries, are the things Thursday ordinarily investigates.
 
At the start of The Eyre Affair though, Thursday gets a temporary promotion to a division that's trying to arrest super-criminal Archeron Hades, who's bulletproof, invisible on film and security footage, who can dominate men's minds, and who's just stolen the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The attempted arrest goes badly; Hades overpowers and kills the entire team of investigators, except Thursday, whom he merely injures. 
 
The structure of the plot reminds me of a Bond film - short job, reassignment, meeting with the tech guy, long job. After the massacre, Thursday transfers from London back to her old home town to recuperate. She visits her family, and her genius uncle shows her his latest inventions, including the Prose Portal, his brand new device that will let a person travel inside a book. Later, while Thursday's at work, Hades steals the device, kidnaps her uncle, and announces his plan to extract the character of Martin Chuzzlewit from the manuscript and kill him, unless his ransom demands are met. If you use the portal to enter an ordinary book, you'll only change that one copy, but if you enter an original manuscript, any changes will affect all the other copies that are based on it.
 
Thursday's uncle manages to sabotage Hades's first plan, but that only prompts him to go after an even bigger prize, the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. Thursday is too late to prevent the theft, or the initial kidnapping, which results in half the book getting erased. But Thursday is able to go into the book to rescue Jane and thwart Hades, which accidentally results in the book getting a new ending, the one it has in reality.
 
I'm assuming that future Thursday Next mysteries will also involve the Prose Portal and travel into other books. I don't think I'll be continuing though. Fforde's worldbuilding feels like an unsuccessful collage, the smorgasbord of different genre elements never really blending into a coherent whole. I liked Shades of Grey, a later work of Fforde's which is equally wacky, a novel of manners set in a dystopian future where social status is based on the ability to see color. But Fforde's humor in this one didn't really work for me, and the plot felt too unwieldy. 
 
Thursday has a few episodic book-police adventures felt extraneous, although Fforde did give them some connection to the main plot in the end. Her dad is a rogue time traveler who repeatedly stops time to pop in and have a non sequitur chat with her before disappearing. Thursday has a lot of bad memories of her time in the army in Crimea, which relate to a present-day plot about whether Britain will escalate or finally seek peace. And she has a romance plot with her old boyfriend that I think is supposed to parallel Jane and Rochester, but that mostly ends up feeling incredibly rushed and emotionally unrealistic. It's a lot! And to me, it just doesn't work together well enough to make me want to continue.

Funny Ha Ha (2002)

 
 

Funny Ha Ha

directed by Andrew Bujalksi

written by Andrew Bujalski

Goodbye Cruel Releasing 

2002 

 

 
Funny Ha Ha is probably the first mumblecore movie (especially if you think of it as a movement rather than a genre). My introduction to mumblecore came via a New York Times article. Ever since, I've had a soft spot in my heart for these rough-around-the-edges movies about young people trying to figure out who they want to be.

 

We follow Marnie across a single summer sometime after college. As the film opens, her life is destabilized in a couple ways - she just lost her job, and Alex (who she has a crush on) has been dumped by his girlfriend. She also seems very open to influence - early on, a couple friends spot her out walking while they're driving by; they invite her to join them for dinner, and she does. Many of her other interactions have a similar chance quality.

 

Marnie's friends all push her to try to date Alex, who beats her to the punch by calling her to preemptively tell her he's not interested. But then later he also asks her out for coffee. Alex clearly has feelings for Marnie, but wants to keep stringing her along instead of dating her. Every time Marnie starts to get over him, he contacts her to build her up and then reject her again. The one part of Marnie's life she figures out by the end is realizing what he's doing and deciding to stop going along with it.

 

Outside of Alex, Marnie tries to kiss a cute guy who she's chatting with at a party, and he rejects her. Her friend Dave (who's dating her friend Rachel) kisses her, but she's really not interested. And Marnie wants to be friends with former coworker Mitchell (played by director Andrew Bujalski), but he keeps asking her out, even after she's said no, until she gets mad and throws him out of her apartment. Every crush in this movie is unrequited.

 

After losing her first off-screen job, Marnie tries temping at the same company as Mitchell, then gets a job as a research assistant for Alex's professor uncle. She tries to quit drinking, tries basketball and chess, and maybe makes a couple new women friends by the end.

 

I like Marnie as a character, but overall I think I want to like this movie more than I actually like it. The sound is rough, much too loud in parts and quiet in others, depending on where the mic was. Some of the actors are not so great at improvising dialogue. And all the guys seem kind of sexist and unlikable, none more so than Alex. It feels authentic, but also painful.

 

I was in college when Funny Ha Ha came out, and the friend-group Marnie is sort-of a part of looks and sounds like friend-groups I saw back then because I knew one member and attended the occasional group event. I think the film captures that time and social position very well.

 

One kind of fun thing about re-watching it now is the technology. Marnie has an answering machine, and at one point uses a pay phone. Only one character in the whole thing has a cell.

 

 

Originally watched December 2022. 

Playing with Books

 
Playing with Books
The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book

by Jason Thompson

Quarry Books

2010

 
 
Playing with Books is a craft book about art projects created using printed books as a raw material. Thompson showcases about 30 projects, mostly of his own design, that the reader could attempt. He also showcases about 30 professional artists who create using books.
 
Reading through Thompson's suggested projects, I was struck by the fact that book crafts are mostly just paper crafts, using a specific source of paper. Thompson suggests making envelopes and origami, beads made of rolled-up pages, and various items of jewelry or decor from shapes cut out of the paper, usually circles or butterflies. For a few projects, Thompson leaves the spine on the book and fans it out - by combining 2 or 3 like this you can make a cylinder, which can then by modified by folding or cutting the pages to make shapes. In a couple cases, he suggests laminating paper and plastic together and using the composite to make purses or bags.
 
The projects are mostly easy enough for an adult to do together with a kid, though for any of the projects more difficult than that, I don't really think he provides enough instructions. Each project gets 2-6 pages, usually 4. The first page is always just a large photo of the finished project, the second only has the name and a list of materials. This section takes up the vast majority of the book, in a way that feels unbalanced.
 
The artist showcases mostly get only one page, very occasionally two. Each of these pages then includes several smaller photos of the artist's works, along with a very brief bio, probably written by the artists themselves. Compared to the very (overly?) spacious layouts of the crafting section, this part seems quite cramped, and for many of the artworks, I wished for a larger photo so I could see the details better. 
 
The artists often modify whole books, creating sculptural objects that are both built up and cut away. Many of the books were soaked in water so they could be reshaped, warped, wrinkled, splayed, twisted, the pages cut into strips like tentacles. I found the collages and assemblies the most interesting. I think that, ultimately, I may be more interested in seeing really skilled book artworks made by others than I am in attempting to make my own little craft projects. In retrospect, I am struck by just how exceptional Good Mail Day is among craft books - the projects are achievable, the instructions are genuinely helpful, and the authors write in a way that's conversational and that genuinely encourages you to try.

The Forest

 
The Forest

A Fable of America in the 1830s

by Alexander Nemerov

Princeton University Press

2023

 

 

The Forest is a rather unusual work of creative nonfiction. Nemerov is a professional historian, and everything he's written is supported by primary documents, very often diaries. At the same time, rather than the usual register of academic writing, Nemerov narrates in the close third person, creating an intimate sense of understanding each person's interiority in a way that's usually reserved for literature. The Forest also lacks any explicit central thesis or obvious connection between its parts. What Nemerov has written are a series of factually true vignettes that read like short stories.
 
There are themes here though, even if they don't coalesce into a clear argument about what life was like in America in the 1830s. Essentially all the vignettes are set in the forest, where people work or visit for leisure or travel through on the way to somewhere else or depict in art. Most of the vignettes include someone who is an artist or a craftsperson. Another theme is a growing sense of loss and disconnection from 'the wilderness' and 'the frontier,' from the founding ideas and myths of America in a country that is increasingly populated and settled, and especially, increasingly industrialized. You get a real sense of how wood was harvested and used at this time, a view of pretty much every stage of the process. A final theme are precursors to the Civil War, incidents that reveal a populace uncomfortable with the compromises and contradictions of allowing slavery in half the states in a country that is supposedly an embodiment of freedom. In the afterward, Nemerov explains his writing philosophy, though predictable, he does so by relating a parable.
 
Many of the vignettes are about people who are anonymous (though Nemerov may know their names and simply choose not to use them), others are about people who were famous or infamous at the time, whose names might also appear in other histories, but were unknown to me. A few of the vignettes are about incidents involving people who are still famous today - Alexis de Tocqueville, James Audubon, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson. Several also include thorough descriptions of specific works of art. There's a section of color plates where all the illustrations are gathered. They're well marked, though I wished for some indication in the text that you ought to go look at the next one.
 
In most vignettes, Nemerov combines at least two, sometimes more perspectives, from people who were in about the same place at around the same time, even if they might not've known or even encountered each other. These chapters, 'fables,' as he calls them, are mostly between 3 and 10 pages long, and I think mostly on the shorter side. The chapter the includes Harriet Tubman, for example, finds her still a child, sneaking out at night to visit her mother on a different plantation, awed by the sight of the thousands of meteors in a uniquely bright Leonid shower. On the same night, nearby, a slave-owning doctor traveled to a friend's plantation to treat his friend's sick daughter and, when she died, to comfort the grieving family.
 
If I have one complaint about the book, it's that I frequently felt like Nemerov's writing was overwrought. Everything is epic, everything portends something else, every little detail and incident reveals the essential nature of humanity, etc. Axe chops echo forward through the years, the current of a river propels events forward, conversations make a cathedral of words. The latter half, at least, of every single vignette is written like the concluding sentences of The Great Gatsby. It's just too much. It's probably fine in small doses, but it's overwhelming if you read more than one or two chapters in a row with no break.This is clearly a stylistic choice Nemerov is making, but I did wonder how much it was solely his own voice coming through, and how much, perhaps, people at this time might've written their diaries full of metaphor and apocalyptic intensity about every little thing. It's possible that what, to me, seems like Nemerov overdoing it is in fact an accurate representation of how high-minded people often sounded at that time when recording their experiences.