Putin's Russia

 
 
Putin's Russia
The Rise of a Dictator
by Darryl Cunningham

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

Putin's Russia is a work of graphic nonfiction, maybe graphic journalism. 

 
It's also a book overtaken by events, since it was published in February 2022, but completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fairness to Cunningham, something similar could happen to anyone who writes about still-living world leaders, and he does conclude with a warning about Putin's continuing threat to global democracy.

 
Cunningham's art uses thick lines and only a little solid color. His images accompany the text much like the visuals in an episode of Frontline, or the like.

 
The book briefly covers Putin's childhood and his work as a KGB officer in East Germany. The important part of the story probably picks up with Gorbachev's dismantling of the Soviet empire, when Putin starts as a corrupt municipal bureaucrat in 90s St Petersburg and quickly rises in the government, probably aided by his connection to the KGB, until he is Yeltsin's chosen successor, and the second president of 'democratic' Russia.

 
In a typical early incident, a non-corrupt city official realizes that Putin has been authorized to sell state assets to buy food, but instead he'd just been keeping the money. Ordinary people went hungry, Putin got rich with stolen money, the city councilors who voted to punish him were all dismissed by the mayor, and the official who reported him was intimidated into going into exile. The most unusual thing about this case, compared to Putin's future pattern of conduct, is that the official who challenged his theft was not murdered by hired thugs.

 
A lot of the rest is probably well-known by now, although I appreciated Cunningham showing how badly the post-Soviet rebuilding of Russia went wrong, and how likely it was that some oligarch or other would consolidate power over the others by using assassinations and selective prosecution (for the same corruption all of them engage in.) 

 
If Putin is distinguished from the crowd of kleptocrats, it is perhaps by his unusual brutality, such as when he arranged for the KGB's successor agency to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow in order to blame the crime on Chechan separatists and use that to justify an invasion and carpet bombing.

 
Cunningham's focus widens and his narrative becomes more diffuse as we reach the present day, and it becomes harder to decide which incidents are most important. The book ends with a call to action for the US and UK governments to crack down of money laundering and stop treating Putin like a normal world leader, rather than a mobster with a country.

Possession

 
 
Possession
The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present
by Erin Thompson
Yale University Press

2016

 

 

Possession is a university press book about people who collect Greek and Roman antiquities, based primarily on diaries and other documents written by collectors. Thompson claims that most accounts of collectors have taken non-collectors' judgments of them as accurate, and that hers is one of the first studies to look at how collectors account for themselves.

 
Beyond a general interest in understanding this group of people, over the course of the book Thompson becomes more and more interested in understanding them in a way that will lead to actionable strategies to get them to stop buying looted antiquities (and really, more or less stop buying antiquities altogether, since it's their demand that makes looting economically viable.) Because collectors are mostly rich, and already not deterred by laws, she looks for something analogous to the mostly successful attempt to switch big game hunters over to big game photography.

 
To the extent that collectors worry about looting, they tend to worry that beautiful objects will be damaged in the process. Thompson argues that the bigger worry is the one voiced by archaeologists - that understanding the human past requires finding lots of mundane objects laid out normally to see how they were used in relation to each other. This is something you can only do by digging very slowly and documenting everything. Digging quickly and chucking aside everything that isn't a masterpiece destroys an irreplacable record of everyday life in the past. Thompson's solution is to encourage rich antiqity lovers to fund and witness archaeological digs, channeling their love of the past into an activity that preserves the record instead of erasing it.

 
To get to that point, we follow historical collectors, from the wealthy Romans who collected Greek statues in order to fabricate historical lineages for themselves, to the English nobles establishing a spiritual lineage between their empire and Rome's, to the rich British and eventually American young people making the Grand Tour, seeing statues that reminded them of their childhood Classical education, and becoming lifelong afficianados. It has always been a prohibitively expensive hobby, and always the people who've wanted beautiful things from the past have ignored any laws intended to stop them, or even charge them a sales tax.

 
To read about some of these earlier collectors, it seems a wonder that there are any antiquities left. Thompson notes that our vision of what the past looks like has been affected by the restorations collectors pay for, and our knowledge of the source of various items influenced by the often made-up stories told by collectors who believe they have a special, almost psychic connection to the history of their objects. One guy bought a surprisingly intact statue of Hermaphrodite with three children, and had the kids and genitals removed to create a solo Venus. The kids of many collectors let statues get ruined, or use them for quotidian tasks, like a sarcophagus holding firewood, or serving as a cow trough. And the Bourbon Kings, who owned the ruins of Pompeii at one point, found giant wall-sized fresoes and had painting-sized fragments cut out to hang amongst their other art, and the rest destroyed to prevent any competitors from matching their prizes.

 
An interesting tour, and certainly one that puts the lie to the idea that collectors are somehow 'saving"'antiquities by buying them up and having them shipped away from their source. I believe Thompson's evaluation that these people do genuinely love their antiquities, and also that they often harm them and nearly always harm our record of the past by collecting them.

The Third Person

 
The Third Person

by Emma Grove

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

The Third Person is a graphic memoir, which tells the story of a trans woman in her early 30s who goes to a therapist to get prescribed hormones, and instead spends most of a year being treated for Dissociative Identity Disorder and multiple personalities.

To be clear, by Grove's own account, she did have DID, so this was not like, a confused therapist mistaking transition for multiple personalities. But this also wasn't the book I expected to read. It's not a book about Grove being trans, it's a book about her having DID. That she is trans and should live as a woman are essentially taken as given by both Grove and her therapist. Being trans isn't quite incidental to her story - it's why she thought therapy, and homophobic bullying as a child is a key part of why she began dissociating - but it's certainly not central either.

 
Although The Third Person is a little over 900 pages, it reads quickly. Grove's art is cartoony, but very effective at depicting facial expressions and body language, so we see when her therapist is skeptical, confused, exasperated, etc, and you can virtually always tell which personality is dominant in each moment.

 
The first 100 pages show a scene of tween Grove trying to hide her crossdressing from her family, and then a long scene of teen Grove having blackouts and a second personality during a stressful social event. There's also, in montage form, a few pages showing her life working during the day as a guy and going out at night as a woman.

 
The final 200 show Grove after dropping her therapist. She buys a DID workbook and uses it to work through her traumatic memories. She gets a new therapist who helps her finish the process of reintegration. And she finally gets to live full-time as a woman.

 
In between are 600 pages of dialogue between Grove and her therapist. This is not how I wish she'd structured her story. I find this pacing really odd, but I guess this interaction is what she wants her book to be about, with the rest of her life collapsed into prologue and epilogue before and after. The therapist first suspects she has DID, then spends a long long time suspecting that she's faking having multiple personalities to get attention, then trying to treat her, but by that point, the two have accumulated too much history of negative interactions for the therapist's change of heart to matter. So finally she leaves.
 

One thing worth noting if you decide to read it. At times, Grove seems unbelievably obtuse in her inability to understand the therapist's suspicions and accusations. (It certainly doesn't help that always answers her questions with questions, like 'Why do YOU think I'm saying I think you're lying to me?') But a thing Grove the author never explicitly points out, although the therapist says something about it once, ironically to justify his suspicions, is that one effect of her mental illness is that it prevents her from understanding someone pointing out her illness. If she dissociates to protect herself from unpleasant knowledge, then of course she is 'absent' at key moments to protect herself from being made to understand how dissociating is harming her. 

 
Without understanding that though, you'll find yourself asking 'how can she possibly think he's accusing her of pretending to be trans to get attention when he's OBVIOUSLY accusing her of pretending to have multiple personalities to get attention?'

The Best American Comics 2011

 
The Best American Comics 2011
edited by Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2011

 

 

I'm continuing to read my way through the Best American Comics series with the 2011 edition. In retrospect, 2010 was a very strong year, and 2011 is more like a return to the norm.

 
Chris Ware shows up again, and there's another Love and Rockets excerpt. This might be the first volume without Ben Katchor or R Crumb. Joe Sacco's graphic journalism is probably the most 'famous' comic in this volume. We get an excerpt of his interviews with Gazans who survived a massacre committed by the Israeli army 50 years earlier, which highlights both what we can verifiably know, and the ways that eye witnesses recall slightly incompatible versions of the same event.

 
Jeff Smith's RASL gets an excerpt (a biography of Tesla, a story that slightly-alt creative types never seem to get tired of re-telling), which mostly serves to remind me that I read the first volume of Bone back in the 90s and liked it.

 
The biggest highlight for me was seeing Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant get recognized, specifically, her "Great Gatsby" strips. Apparently Beaton is the first webcomic artist to make it into the BAC, so I'll have to keep an eye out for how well webcomics are represented in the future.

 

Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City is the one new thing I definitely want to read. It tells an alt-historical account of a New York menaced by flying predators large enough to eat humans, and the hot air balloon-riding municipal employees who hunt them.

The Burning House

 
The Burning House
What Would You Take?
edited by Foster Huntington
It Books
2012

 

 

The Burning House is a blog turned into a book. The premise of the blog was that people would submit a photo and an explainer list of the things they'd want to take if their house were on fire. Huntington, the blog's creator, would curate and post these entries, and the book is a further distillation.

 
Most of the results are surprisingly similar, though the clever staging of the photos lends the project even more visual interest than you might expect. When thinking of their most treasured possessions, most people seem to think of a mix of the prosaic (wallet, keys, passport); the sentimental (photos, journals, letters, childhood toys); the financially valuable (phones, laptops, cameras); and the kinds of things that serve as symbols for one's self-image (favorite clothes, books, movies, music). The variations within those constraints are fascinating.

 
A few people took the prompt more literally than most. They emphasized survival gear, or limited themselves to just one or two items. Their accompanying essays often sounded scolding, but arguably it was them, not all the others, who'd missed the true point of the task. A few people actually had survived house fires and submitted photos of what they'd actually saved.

 
Beyond merely the similar ways people respond to the same prompt, the entries had other things in common. Almost everyone had a film camera to save, and most had several. Nearly all the phones and laptops were from Apple; most of the journals were Moleskine. People with pets, or occasionally children, mentioned saving those too, and usually included them in the photo.

 
The overall effect is like touring a museum. Each page is an exhibit of the most important things in someone's life, arranged to try to tell a kind of story of their life, their loves, their values ... as well as their coolness, their status, etc.

The Pillowman

 
The Pillowman
by Martin McDonagh

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2004

 

 

A friend lent me a copy of The Pillowman, which is the first play I've read this year, and truthfully, maybe the first since high school.

 
The entire play takes place in a police interrogation room and adjoining prison cell. Two police officers have brought in Katurian for questioning. Initially he doesn't know why. They ask him about some of his short stories (he's written 400 and published 1). In the stories they ask about, bad things happen to children. Eventually the police reveal that two children have died in ways that mirror two of his stories, and a third child is missing. Also that they've arrested Katurian's brother too. It's relevant to note that these are bastard cops who beat Katurian, threaten to torture him, and plan to have him summarily executed by the end of the day.

 
In act 2, Katurian briefly wonders if the whole thing is a frame job. He remembers how his parents tortured his brother when they were kids to inspire Katurian's writing, and how he killed them to protect this brother. The brother is 'slow' as an adult because of it. Eventually, Katurian learns that it was his brother who killed the kids, and thinks he learns which story inspired the third disappearance. Katurian then kills his brother to spare him from being tortured.

 
In act 3, Katurian makes a deal with the police to preserve his stories as 'evidence' in exchange for him confessing in writing to killing the kids, his parents years ago, and his brother in the jail cell. Based on what the brother told Katurian, the police find the final missing kid, who isn't dead, because the brother lied about which story he reenacted. One cop is much more self-righteous about protecting children, but by the end, he realizes Katurian is innocent of those murders, and also that the people Katurian killed had harmed children. He wants to let the writer go, but the other cop is more by the book, and executes Katurian as planned.

 
So there's like, a lot going on here. Let's focus on Katurian's stories and their 'influence' on the brother.
Throughout the play, we get a half dozen or more monologues retelling a story, and several of them are acted out in a kind of phantasmagorical dream space. Katurian's stories are kind of awful little fables, akin to the cautionary tales from Der Struwwelpeter, or like, the version of Little Red Riding Hood where the wolf eats her, the end, no one shows up to the rescue - they also have a kind of gallows humor about them.
 

The cops repeatedly express their disgust at the stories and at Katurian for writing them. They say they want to burn the stories, and that even if no children were killed, they would like to execute Katurian over what he's written.

 
(I want to point out something none of the characters notice - both cops and the brother were abused in various ways as kids, and none of their parents were supposedly influenced by 'bad' books. Also worth noting, the stories that the cops find so horrible? Again, we hear 6-7 of them as part of the same play. Ah, democratic freedom of the press!)

 
McDonaugh wrote the play in the 1990s, when, I have to think, he was thinking of the Satanic Panic of the 80s, and the fear of violent song lyrics and video games in the 90s - both examples of the idea that art will harm children or inspire people to act out violent scenarios. It's still relevant today, but also reads differently, contrasted against QAnon's obsession with imaginary child abuse, and the recent Republican campaign to ban hundreds of children's and YA books.

Dirty Pair Omnibus

 
Dirty Pair Omnibus
by Haruka Takachiho
art by Hisao Tamaki
Seven Seas

2017

 

 

Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to discover an anime from 1985 that had just recently been added to Crunchy Roll. The Dirty Pair anime ran for one season, and follows the adventures of a pair of young women heroes-for-hire who fly around the galaxy solving people's problems. (I heard about it because it has one episode with a trans character, who is treated much better than trans characters generally were on American tv in the 80s.)

 
In the anime, Kei and Yuri both appear to be in their early 20s, they constantly wish they had more time off (and keep trying to negotiate bonus pay for working overtime), they're interested in finding cute boys to date, and they're best friends who quarrel with each other constantly, which I find very relatable. The call themselves 'the Lovely Angels,' but everyone else calls them 'the Dirty Pair' because inevitably their problem-solving involves a lot of chaos. (And presumably because a salacious-sounding name for the series helped attract an audience.)
 

Having watched the show, it's a lot of fun, and I think it was actually made with the idea that girls would be the primary audience. Kei and Yuri are depicted psychologically realistically within their wacky scifi universe - as two young women who are balancing the demands of their first professional jobs, their close friendship, and their desire for a more active social and dating life. The two main characters have costumes that look like swimsuits - but the camera never does the kind of gross, leering male-gaze close-ups that you sometimes see in more recent anime for boys.

 
The 1985 anime was based on a series of light novels (semi-equivalent to American YA) from the late 70s and early 80s, and the 2019 manga omnibus, which is what I just read, was written by the author of the original light novels. Unfortunately, basically everything I liked about the show was missing or changed in this new manga. It's probably my least favorite book that I bothered to finish this year.

 
The omnibus tells two stories, with Kei and Yuri solving two different space mysteries, although the details of each case are pretty forgettable. Both the text and Hisao Tamaki's art depict the girls as literal teenagers, which is made gross by the facts that their costumes are drawn as more revealing, they're explicitly sexualized by older men they encounter, and the panel art has a lot of voyeuristic close-ups.
 

Also, in the anime, the girls fight using lasers, and their chaotic problem-resolution is shown as humorous. In this manga, they're basically psychopaths with machine guns, and their actions across the two stories result in millions of deaths, when, for example, they shoot down a fleeing corrupt politician's giant starship and it crash lands on the densely populated capital city. 

 
Everything fun or funny, everything I liked on the show has been replaced with more explicit sex, gorier violence, and a general mean-spiritedness that I found impossible to enjoy. I found this manga while looking into whether I could locate a copy of one of the original light novels, but after reading this, I'm not going to bother. I liked the anime series, and clearly, what I liked was brought in by the people who made the show.

The Girl from the Other Side 4

 
The Girl from the Other Side 4
Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe

Seven Seas

2018

 

 

The fourth volume of The Girl from the Other Side opens with the Outsider 'Teacher,' cute little girl Shiva, and Shiva's aunt who has turned into an Outsider all returned to Teacher's cabin.

 
There's very little 'action' in this volume. The aunt and Teacher talk, and we learn that the aunt isn't a blood relative to Shiva, she found her as a baby, Outside among the dead of a village whose human inhabitants had all been killed by the military because they were believed to be Cursed, and she took the baby home and raised her.

 
Teacher worries that now that Shiva has her aunt back, that they won't want or need him anymore.
 

Then Shiva's aunt tries to get Shiva to run away from Teacher with her. The aunt believes that Teacher passed the Curse to Shiva, and that's why the aunt transformed and the military burned down their most recent village. Shiva manages to convince her aunt that the Curse was passed on by a different Outsider, and that she wants the three of them to live together, and the aunt agrees to bring Shiva back to the cabin.
 

There's a sweet period where the three of them live together as family. Then things turn sad again, because Shiva's aunt loses her memory of her life before, including losing her memory of Shiva. Teacher observes that this happens to everyone who transforms into an Outsider. (And I think we've previously seen that he has no memory of his own prior life.) With no memory and thus no attachments, the aunt wanders off.
 

Throughout this volume, the Outsiders from the forest have shown up to pester Teacher to 'return the Pure Soul to Mother,' meaning take Shiva to the giant Outsider who lives in the lake. At the very end, one shows up again to demand it, and shows them the severed, broken, Outsider head of Shiva's aunt.
 

The pace of this volume felt kind of slow. We learned a little but mostly reaffirmed things we'd already learned. The plot of the aunt trying to separate Shiva and Teacher kind of detracted from the emotional impact of their (very brief) new life together dissolving when the aunt lost her memory. The slice-of-life homemaking scenes served an important character-development function in the first volume, but here they both take too long (pausing the development of any other part of the story) and pass too quickly (without enough time to actually establish a new status quo.) The plot of the other Outsiders wanting Shiva spent the whole time idling in neutral, but I think it will start moving again in volume 5.

The Fifth Science

 
The Fifth Science

by exurb1a

self-published

2019

 

 

I'm not sure if Amazon kept recommending The Fifth Science to me because its algorithm genuinely picked me as a good match, or just because I fit the general parameters of author exurb1a's ad buy. (I'm also not sure how many people buy this by accident because they misremembered the title of The Fifth Season...) Fortunately, a single public library in the state bought one copy, which was enough to let me try reading it without having to buy my own. It's not bad, but I also don't see anything in it particularly worth recommending.

 

The Fifth Science is a collection of 12 short stories. "Timeline of the 500 Year Climb," "101 Things Not to Visit in the Galaxy Before You Die," and "The Want Machine" are basically vignettes. They benefit from being so short. But probably the best three are also the longest. 

 
Most of the stories concern technology that manipulates human consciousness, or that grants sentience, first to robots, then to the stars themselves. All supposedly take place in a shared setting, a galaxy-spanning Bulgarian empire, although they're mostly so localized on whatever planet that they don't feel as connected as this description might suggests.

 
The characters and themes of the stories mostly strike me as cynical and, at times, mean-spirited. We see robots who use Star Trek style transporters to repeatedly recreate and then kill the same human scientist. In a different story, we see AI minds who discover realms of thought that drive every AI who tries thinking about them to suicide.

 
In the first good story, "For Every Dove, a Bullet," a consciousness separate from the physical brain splinters off from the mind of a wicked man. This consciousness moves from body to body over thousands of years, watching the rise of the Bulgarian space empire, driving the development of the Fifth Science of consciousness manipulation, until this mind's own wickedness in pursuit of science gives rise to a second splinter self who kills the first.

 
In "The Girl and the Pit," a famous archaeologist finally gets permission to dig on a planet that houses some ruins of the oldest-known alien civilization. He gets frustrated by the passivity and incuriosity of the locals, then meets a girl who kind of explains the local philosophy to him, one that maybe matches the beliefs of the ancient aliens who seemingly just vanished at the height of their civilization. And then the human space empire begins violently collapsing.

 
In "Be Awake, Be Good," emissaries from two of the last human-inhabited planets arrive on the third, an ocean world where everyone lives inside giant living habitat ships. The emissary from the last democratic planet arrives at an ocean city controlled by a drunk, stupid despot, while the emissary from the last authoritarian planet reaches a democratic city, and goes on a killing spree until they put him in charge. The two emissaries are racing to bring to life and influence the personality of one last sentient star, who will break a tie vote among the other stars about whether to let the universe continue as-is, or engage in some kind of reality-engineering project that might make a better universe for the stars, but will definitely make biological life impossible.