Gentlemen Callers

 
Gentlemen Callers

by Corinne Hoex

translated by Caitlin O'Neil

Dalkey Archive
2017, reprinted 2022

 

 

Gentlemen Callers is maybe halfway between Hilary Leichter's Temporary and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but for sex.

 
Each night, an unnamed woman, who is presumably a partially-fictionalized version of Hoex herself, dreams of a sexual encounter with a man she's encountered in her waking life, mostly men with service industry jobs. 

 
Each chapter, each dream, is a vignette, maybe 1 - 2½ pages long, and introduced with an epigraph vaguely about the man's profession quoted from the French literary canon. Each vignette seems like the amplification of someone's passing thought when she spots a good-looking stranger, magnified and expanded into an imaginative, poetic wet dream.

 
In one dream, Hoex is a cloud, and a pilot flies around and through her until she rains. In another, she is the sand, and the beach attendant rakes her. She's a Persian cat, and the groomer brushes her until she offers her belly. She is a stream, and a construction worker splashes her on his face and chest to cool off before drinking his fill. Hoex seems to like men who are skilled with their hands.

 
In some dreams, she stays human. In a few, she ends up disappointed. Her adventures are mostly told through metaphor and analogy, but Hoex also isn't afraid of a simple dirty pun (as when she snuggles close to a beekeeper to avoid being stung but still feels a little prick), or a straightforward porn scenario (as when she watches the butcher work, he asks her if there's anything else he can do for her, and she answers knowingly, 'I think perhaps there is.')

 
This is a short book, but it's better not to read it too quickly. Hoex's encounters with her gentlemen aren't usually smutty in a conventional way, but you can also enjoy the breadth of her imagination and her playful, joyous use of language. While I can't independently verify the quality of O'Neil's translation, the syntax here seemed agile and playful, which matches the tone set by the content, so I think it's faithful in that sense.

Dark Nights: Death Metal

 
Dark Nights Death Metal
DC Comics

2022

 

 

Sometimes it's nice to take a break with some good old fashioned comic book madness, and Dark Nights: Death Metal is just about the most unhinged superhero story I've ever seen.

 
Death Metal is one of those big annual crossover events, and a rough sequel to the Dark Nights: Metal event from a few years ago. In that outing, when the Batman Who Laughs (an evil Batman who's also the Joker) invaded with a small Justice League of other evil Batmen (evil Batman-Superman, evil Batman-Aquaman, etc) from the Dark Multiverse.

 
This time around, Batman Who Laughs has completely conquered the planet with an army of hundreds of evil Batmen, counterparts to seemingly every other DC hero and villain. Plus like, a Batman who uploaded his mind into the robot dinosaur from the Batcave, an evil sentient Batmobile, and an evil giant mecha Gotham City robot. This is the ridiculousness I crave! 

 
What about the good guys? Batman is undead and using a Black Lantern ring to raise an army of zombie heroes, Superman is turning to stone because evil Darkseid-Batman exposed him to Anti-Life, and Wonder Woman has turned her Lasso of Truth into the ripcord and 'chain' for a badass Chainsaw of Truth. It's nice to see her getting to have some fun!

 
To prevent the whole multiverse from being destroyed, there's a convoluted plan that involves revisiting the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis, and funneling some of their 'crisis energy' to reboot another new multiverse, again. Whatever. Of course things go wrong, until eventually a skyscraper-tall metal-dipped goddess Wonder Woman faces off against an equally huge an powerful Batman Who Laughs whose brain has been transplanted into the body of a Dr Manhattan Batman, with the fate of everything at stake.

 
Wonder Woman seemingly loses, but actually wins, everything is reset, and DC announces its new approach to continuity, which is to stop pretending that each 'crisis' ushers in an actually new comic universe with new backstory, and go ahead and acknowledge that the history of the DC Comics universe is just the history of what's been printed in the comics. And yes a lot of it's contradictory, and collectively makes no sense, but while you can pretend or ignore parts you don't like, you can't actually go back and prevent them from having already been published. I don't expect this one to last any longer than any of their other, previous new approaches to continuity, but for what it's worth, I think this more relaxed attitude is the right way to go.

 
This volume contains the complete story, but there are companion volumes that add detail to various parts, so look forward to me reading those soon!

Blankets

 
 
Blankets
by Craig Thompson

Drawn & Quarterly
2003
 

 

20 years old this year, Blankets is a graphic memoir that tells the story of the author's strict Evangelical childhood, his first love, and how he eventually outgrew both relationships. It's moderately famous, and something that I think is sometimes credited with helping to popularize independent comics in the 2000s.
 

There's a central narrative that's told in order, but time moves subjectively. We return over and over to Thompson's painful memories of his childhood, when he shared a bed with his younger brother, their parents were harsh disciplinarians, and a babysitter abused them. Thompson remains haunted by guilt for not being a better brother - from growing up and out if their early closeness, and for failing to protect him from the adults who hurt them both.

 
In his rural high school, Thompson is bullied for having long hair and being sensitive and artistic. (He's not gay, just grunge.) He feels even more an outsider at the church camp he attends every winter - he's still bullied, the other kids come from better-off families, and he seems to be the only one there who's really devout. But at camp he meets Raina, a sensitive artistic girl, and the two of them become fast friends.

 
Because Raina's parents are also conservative Christians, Thompson gets permission to visit her at home in Marquette, Michigan for two weeks. She greets him with a handmade quilt. Raina's parents are getting a divorce, and she does a lot of the care work for her two adopted siblings (who both have Downs Syndrome) and her infant niece (because her recently married biological sister wants more time alone with her husband.)
 

Thompson and Raina spend all their time together, he helps her with her caretaking responsibilities, and at night, at her request, he sleeps beside her before sneaking back to the guest room each morning just before her parents wake. Over several days, they work up the courage to kiss, then make out, then, if not actually 'have sex,' then something very similar. They make plans that Thompson will come back after high school graduation, live with Raina, work in her father's construction company. The two weeks span at least half the book, their brief time together seeming to last forever, the way it must have felt at the time.

 
Afterward, we see Thompson and Raina try to maintain a long-distance relationship by phone, begin to grow apart, break up, stop talking entirely. We also see him begin to question his faith, and during seminary, lose it. Throughout the book, child and high-school-age Thompson quotes Bible verses related to his current situation. His sexual love for Raina is maybe the first thing that really makes him question his faith, but other doubts come from the strictness and intolerance of the church. Learning the history of Biblical translation is the nail in the coffin. He moves to a city, gets a job, and resumes his art. He also reconnects with his younger brother, now an adult too.

 
Thompson's lines are fluid and expressive. Almost the entire book takes place in the winter, beneath the snow, another kind of blanket, along with the one from his childhood bed, and the one he shared with Raina. Thompson's love and faith are both incredibly intense. There's something comforting, in the final part of the book, about seeing that intensity reach a fever-point and break, seeing him healing and leading a calmer, healthier life afterward.

Revenge of the Librarians

 
Revenge of the Librarians

by Tom Gauld
Drawn & Quarterly
2022
 

 

Revenge of the Librarians is the most recent collection of Tom Gauld's standalone comics. Gauld usually draws his comics as single panels the same size as an old newspaper daily strip. Physically, the book is like a much nicer version of the old Garfield collections I used to read as a kid.

 
Gauld's comics return again and again to a few themes - in this volume, particularly, writers who procrastinate instead of writing, readers who buy more books they can read, and the effects of the pandemic. As usual, he is witty and self-deprecating, which I appreciate, since book culture has a tendency to be overly self-serious.

 
Gauld also experiments with comics in the form of a diagram, a flowchart, a random generator, and a choose-your-own-adventure. (Pretty impressive, given the space constraints!) And he has several comics with variations on famous books, such as prequels like 'Brideshead Visited' and 'The Young Man and the Sea.'
 

This is the first Gauld collection I've read since You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. I should try to find out what else he's published in between!

Twee

 
Twee
The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film

by Marc Spitz
It Books

2014

 

 

I'm glad that I finally read Twee, but also glad I got it from a library. I've been wanting to read it, but I ended up wanting to like it more than I actually liked it. 

 
Twee is a cultural history of a particular aesthetic that is more or less the same as 'indie' or 'hip.' The archetypal Twee kid, in Spitz's mind at least, is shy, maybe not friendless but certainly an introvert, who retreats to the safety of their bedroom to immerse themselves in their books, records, or other hobbies. The Twee kid is fussy and proper, hates sports, likes things just so, has encyclopedic knowledge of their own slightly esoteric interests, and probably prefers the controlled neatness of the world inside their head to the messiness of reality.

 
If all this seems a little vague, you might be picking up on one of my concerns with Spitz, who seems to have trouble defining his own key concept. Twee is opposed to mainstream pop culture, but also to what's currently being called 'indie sleaze' - the Mods were probably Twee, the Punks unquestionably weren't. But Spitz also spends a whole chapter arguing that Kurt Cobain should really be considered Twee, so it's hard to know how well defined the term is, even in his own head. Model trains are probably a Twee hobby, superhero comics definitely aren't, but I don't know if he could explain why not.

 
The chapters are roughly chronological, starting just after WWII and leading up to 2014, when the book was published. There's a kind of messiness to the book's structure that annoyed me. Most chapters aren't about just one thing (though a few are!) and I couldn't always sense the logic in what Spitz put together. For a book about the sort of people who don't want any of their foods touching on their plate, I found Spitz's organization surprisingly sloppy.

 
Certainly, the highlights are all here - Belle & Sebastian, Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, mumblecore movies, indie pop music, Garden State, Juno, Gilmore Girls, Zooey Deschenel. We also get a chapter on Glasgow's pre-Belle indie rock scene, one on French New Wave movies, one claiming that Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are presaged the rise of punk, another anointing the Smiths and They Might Be Giants as the Twee equivalents to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

 
Spitz's opening chapter, in the aftermath of WWII, posits that Twee comes from an impulse to create a kindler gentler world, one that is aware of real danger and death, but safe from it, and where sexuality is both intriguing but also just out of reach. A world of precocious, prolonged childhood, in other words, as obsessed with youth and beauty as mainstream culture is, determined to preserve an ideal of 'purity' in a way that's both polite but also moralizing, and seemingly both White and middle-class, that's probably as exclusionary as the other flavors of Nerd culture in the US. That's my critique though; Spitz has nothing but praise. (Incidentally, his opening chapter identifies Walt Disney, the Peanuts comics, Dr Seuss, Buddy Holly, James Dean, "The Catcher in the Rye," Truman Capote, and Anne Frank's diary as key proto-Twee influences. Make sense of that if you can, because I couldn't!)

 
A few final questions worth asking. The answers are not in this book. First, when does the word 'twee' actually first get used to define this aesthetic? Relatedly, just because Twee tastemakers today like something older, is it really fair to say that it was Twee in its time (something I especially wondered about New Wave cinema?) How has Twee changed over time? To what extent is Twee an aesthetic, and to what extent is it a movement of people promoting that aesthetic? How much can we distinguish it from other things indie, hip, or just 'cool?' And seriously, what are the dangers inherent in revering a cocoon of perpetual, mythic childhood and trying to exclude everything from outside it?

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt

 
The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt
by Caroline Preston

Ecco
2011

 

 

Although it would end up shelved with literary fiction in any bookstore, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is truly a graphic novel, written like a diary and illustrated with collages of vintage ephemera. The effect is a book that looks like it was hand assembled by its narrator.

 
Frankie is a young woman from small-town New England and an aspiring author. Her scrapbook covers about 8 years of her life, from the summer after high school graduation in 1920, through her college years on scholarship at Vassar, and her attempts to make a living as a working writer, first in Greenwich Village and then in Paris.

 
Frankie struggles with money and her art in ways that are familiar in this sort of coming-of-age story. At key moments of need, she befriends other women, and draws support from their advice and aid - wealthy libertine roommate Allegra in college, stylish 'spinster adventuress' Lorraine on the steam ship to France.
 

Frankie also struggles to figure out what she wants from love. She has a fling with an older man before college that shapes her approach to romance and has other effects on her life downstream. In Greenwich she dates Allegra's handsome brother. She has another fling in Paris, then returns to her hometown when her mother gets sick, and reconnects with a surprising old flame.

 
Along the way, Frankie is at the periphery of key 1920s events, witnessing the founding of The New Yorker, reading Ulysses, meeting a handful of literary celebrities, hanging out with the Left Bank ex-pats in Paris, and meanwhile working for the sort of prestige-less popular magazines that paid the bills, even if they're rarely remembered today.

 
If this book were just text, I don't know if I'd have read it, and I doubt I'd like it as much as I do. It's really elevated by Preston's collages, which remix magazine illustrations, sewing patterns, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, old photos, and fortune-telling cards in a way that's not quite like any other graphic novel I've seen.

The Girl from the Other Side 7

 
The Girl from the Other Side 7

Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2019

 

 

The seventh volume of The Girl from the Other Side is pretty action-packed.
 

The last volume ended with two cursed human soldiers finding Teacher's and Shiva's new cabin. One confronts Teacher outside, the other searches the cabin, trying to find Shiva's hiding spot.

 
The Outsiders who came to talk to Teacher help him defeat his soldier. The soldier searching for Shiva is starting to turn into a tree and has gone blind. She initially sneaks past him, but he throws his sword at her as she's getting away, and gives her a frightening cut on her back. He catches her, then turns all the way into a tree in his moment of triumph. Shiva is caught in the branches until Teacher can come cut her free.
Teacher cleans and bandages Shiva's back, but there's a bigger problem - she has a patch of blackened skin on her chest that looks like a very slow-moving version of the Curse. 

 
The visiting Outsider counsels Teacher that Shiva could be healed by stealing the soul from another human and using the soul-stuff to heal Shiva - although it also notes that this is only a theoretical possibility. Although the Mother of the Outsiders imbued them with the ability to steal human souls and tasked them to do so (to 'steal back' the souls she claims were stolen from her originally), none of them have ever actually managed to do so successfully. The technique is tricky.

 
Teacher feels really guilty about Shiva's condition, and is prepared to kill to help her. He goes out and finds a band of not-yet cursed human soldiers (who are also hunting for him and Shiva, natch.) He severely wrecks up their campsite during the night, and gets into a duel with the leader. He loses and gets his foot chopped off, though setting fire to the camp does chaotically disperse the threat of the soldiers. See what I mean about this one being action-packed?

 
When Teacher hobbles back to the cabin to check how Shiva is doing, she's missing... Did she go off alone for some reason? Did a soldier make it home faster than the injured Teacher? Or, my personal guess, did the visiting Outsider seize the opportunity to fulfill its mission (which it openly declared last volume) of bringing Shiva back to its Mother in the lake?

Sirens and Muses

 
 
Sirens and Muses
by Antonia Angress

Ballantine

2022

 

 

Sirens and Muses is a recent literary novel set initially at a prestigious New England art school, and later amidst the art world in NYC. This one caught my eye at the book store, and I read it quite quickly; I felt invested in the characters, and wanted to keep reading more than I wanted anything that might've distracted me.

 
Angress follows four viewpoint characters in close third-person. We follow them for a semester at art school in part 1, and then return to them after they've all moved to New York in part 2.

 
In art school, Louisa is a working-class scholarship student trying to find her artistic voice, and crushing on her roommate Karina. Karina is the daughter of wealthy parents, already on the cusp of commercial success, crushing back on Louisa, and dating bad boy Preston. Preston is an insufferable bro, trying to make a name for himself as a provocateur (or less generously, as a troll,) and semi feuding with visiting professor Robert. Robert is a has-been, a former political artist who's been coasting on his past glory for years, and who once briefly had an affair with Karina's mom.

 
In New York, Louisa gets a job as a studio assistant, and struggles to find the time and energy to continue her own art. Karina and Preston score a high-profile joint gallery opening - Karina rises to the occasion while Preston increasingly flounders. Robert is reduced to tutoring rich children, but also finally learns to stop feeling sorry for himself. All the characters end the book with just a hint of resolution, of either finding the next step in their life, or at least being positioned to make a decision rather than being forced into one.

 
Structurally, Louisa is the first among equals. She gets the first and last chapters, and is probably the most sympathetic character. Karina is at the center of the web of connections between the characters, and depending on your social class, probably either Louisa or Karina will seem like the most relatable character. 

 
Preston is very enjoyable to hate, although to her credit, Angress finds empathy for his actions without condoning them, and he's never reduced to a caricature. Robert's links to the others are tenuous at first and nearly non-existent later, but his presence keeps the book from 'just' telling the story of a love triangle, and he provides a kind of balance by being near the end of a journey that all the others are just starting.

 
Each of the young characters wonders about what kind of artist they want to be, worries about their romantic relationships, fears becoming like their parents, aspires to professional greatness, struggles with young-adult milestones like getting jobs and apartments, deals with troubles with family back home, each in their own unique way. All this happens against the backdrop of Occupy Wall Street, and a period of tumult within the art world about the roles of money and politics in art.

 
As I said, I really liked this one. Louisa and Karina's relationship nearly glows with emotional intensity that reminds me of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (as does Karina's decision to attempt to prioritize her more conventional heterosexual relationship over that bond.) Preston and Robert's involvement in politics and agitprop are more reminiscent of Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys. Preston in particular reminds me of the most annoying contestant of Bravo's old Work of Art show.

 
I like that we combine the campus novel and the post-college novel into a single package, and that we get to clearly see the almost-contemporary setting through eyes with just enough hindsight. We see the earliest effects of Bitcoin and AI art, and the kind of behavior by powerful men that will soon lead to MeToo.

 
Among Agress's strengths, she trusts her readers to notice connections between the characters without her explicitly pointing them out. To Louisa, Preston's blog is just 'that blog that's so popular on campus.' Preston sees Karina's sketches of Louisa as just 'a bunch of drawings of some girl.' A lesser author would go on to provide more detail to make sure you don't miss it, but Angress stops there, because that's what the characters would see. She doesn't lavish extra attention onto something the characters wouldn't notice just to ensure that her audience will.

 
I don't feel comfortable predicting that a book will get a lot of attention, but this one deserves to.

Rasputin's Bastards

 
 
Rasputin's Bastards
by David Nickle
Open Road Media
2012, reprinted 2020

 

 

Rasputin's Bastards is a psychic spy novel set during the 1990s, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. One thing that author David Nickle does very well, both here and in his earlier book Eutopia, is to use free indirect verse to depict in close third-person the perceptions of people who are under the sway of some form of mind-control or illusion. Which, as you might imagine, is pretty important in a psychic spy novel.

 
In Nickle's vision of psychic spycraft, there are spymasters called 'dream-walkers' who can go into sensory deprivation tanks, project their consciousnesses into the world, and can take over the bodies of specially conditioned agents, called 'sleepers.' The sleepers don't know they've been conditioned and have no idea that they're spies. Whenever a dream-walker is piloting a sleeper (or has given them instructions to complete on auto-pilot), the sleeper experiences themselves as returning to a comforting daydream of their childhood. 

 
All the spies we meet are the products of a secret underground Russian science city, and the plot is about them finding new purposes now that the Cold War is over, the USSR is gone, and no one living remembers them.

 
The structure of the novel is such that we open in media res, and primarily follow sleepers, so we learn the truth of what's going on at the same time they do. All the viewpoint characters have important secrets, kept even from themselves, in their pasts, and so even as the overall plot moves forward, we also keep moving further and further back, through the accumulated lies of their lives, to discover the truth about each of them.

 
The story opens with a Canadian human trafficker buying a group of children from a Turkish arms dealer, a deal that takes place on the ocean between a yacht and a submarine. The deal goes badly when several sleepers intervene, and when it turns out that the children themselves are a new generation of powerful psychics, capable of dream-walking in anyone, not just a specially conditioned agent.

 
The children want to go to Canada to be free, former spymaster Babushka wants the children and every sleeper in the world to come to Canada so she can psychically rule over them, rival spymaster Fyodor and his sleepers want to intervene to thwart Babushka, and the gangster wants omnidirectional revenge on everyone for messing up his deal. 

 
It's a rather complex conflict, whose sides and stakes become clear only gradually, at the same time that the viewpoint characters are gradually becoming aware of the truth of their lives. Nickle handles this juggling act well, both in terms of the overall pacing, and in terms of planting seeds of doubt and unease at each stage that blossom into new revelations in the next.

How to Read Chinese Ceramics

 
 
How to Read Chinese Ceramics
edited by Denise Patry Leidy
Metropolitan Museum of Art
2015

 

 

The first book I finished this year is one I checked out from the library for my partner, but ended up reading myself before she got the chance.

 
How to Read Chinese Ceramics is a tour through the history of Chinese pottery, as well as a tour through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. Author Denise Patty Leidy is one of the curators of the Met's Asian art collection, and reading it does feel a bit like touring a museum. 

 
The 41 primary objects get full-page full-color photos (plus close-ups on key details) and a couple pages of description. There's also almost always photos of one or two similar objects for comparison, or more rarely, a reproduction of a painting from the time, either depicting the potters at work, or someone using a similar finished object.

 
In my reading, the history of Chinese pottery can be divided into four main eras. The earliest Chinese pottery was porous and unglazed, with decorations painted on after firing, making it especially fragile. Its purpose was to be buried in tombs to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. You got a lot of figurines of dancers and musicians - the famous Terra Cotta Soldiers are a well-known example. The few dishes in this era are copies of the sort of metal dishes people actually used. This era goes from prehistoric times to maybe sometime around 600 AD and the Tang dynasty.

 
At that point, there is a switch, a pottery starts being made for use rather than just display, to be enjoyed by the living, rather than buried with the dead. For like the next 700 years, you get a flowering of diversity as kiln complexes all over China each start cultivating their own unique local style. In this period, you see influence from trade with Japan and with the Muslim world to the west. Among the few recurring motifs I saw were floral decorations, and use of the pale green glaze that Westerners call 'celadon.' (Apparently in China at the time, this was associated with the Yue-region kilns. Celadon as a name seems to come from a character in a French pastoral romance.)

 
Around 1300 AD, during the Yuan dynasty, you get a seismic change. Potters in the Jingdezhen region started making white porcelain ceramics with painted cobalt blue underglaze decorations and clear glaze. Leidy calls this one of the most important inventions in the history of ceramics. It's fair to say that people went a bit crazy for it. 

 
Very rapidly, the regional styles vanish, production is centralized in Jingdezhen, and 'china' as the name for porcelain dishes is born. All over the world, local potters start copying the style as best they can, usually using white slip over darker clay, but for like 400 years, no one else can figure out how to make porcelain, and real china from China is one of the most prestigious and expensive exports that money can buy. (The Yuan dynasty ends fairly early in this period, and is succeeded by the Ming dynasty, whose name in the West is also more-or-less synonymous with blue and white ceramics.)

 
Around 1700, a few things happen. The transition from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty was apparently rather rocky, and caused slow-downs of pottery production and export. Potters in Japan and Germany independently figure out how to make real porcelain instead of an obviously inferior facsimile. And the Dutch push out the Portugese as China's primary European trading partner, and are considerably more ruthless in their dealings. 

 
So in this fourth era, China is no longer the single dominant world source of china, and maybe no longer the most prestigious. Japanese potters copied the Chinese style but used full color instead of only blue; at this time Chinese potters start experimenting with other colored glazes and enamels to copy the Japanese! (The Dutch still want blue and white ware with traditional, perhaps stereotypical, decorations.) You get a reemergence of some of the local diversity that vanished overnight when porcelain was discovered.
 

The newest piece in the Met's collection that Leidy shares was made during the Chinese Republic that followed the Qing dynasty and was overthrown by Mao's revolution. The fate of Chinese pottery in the Communist era is a question for another book.