The Tea Dragon Society

 
 
The Tea Dragon Society

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2017 

 

 

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

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

I dreamed of an anthology of short stories

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

"The Healer" by Aimee Bender

 

"Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" by Wells Tower

 

"The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link

 

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

 

"The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon

 

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

 

"The Bookmaking Habits of Selected Species" by Ken Liu

 

"The Ceiling" by Kevin Brockmeier

 

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

 

"Sea Oak" by George Saunders

Une Semaine De Bonte

 
 
Une Semaine De Bonte

A Surrealistic Novel in Collage

by Max Ernst

Dover

1934, reprinted 1976

 

 

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

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

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

 
 

Don't Worry Darling

directed by Olivia Wilde

written by Katie Silberman

Warner Bros

2022

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Originally watched December 2022.

No One Left to Come Looking for You

 
No One Left to Come Looking for You

by Sam Lipsyte

Simon & Schuster

2022 

 

 

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a mystery set in the underground music scene in Brooklyn in the winter at the very start of the Clinton administration, in the last week of January 1993. 

 
Our narrator is Jack Shit, bassist for the struggling noise rock band the Shits, as he goes in search of his missing roommate, the Shits' lead singer the Banished Earl, and his missing bass. Jack's stint as an amateur detective starts when he gets a call from the pawn shop that the Earl was just there trying to trade Jack's bass for cash to buy heroin to feed his 'bag fever.' Jack's on the clock, because the Shits have a big show in a week. What seems like a simple task quickly becomes complicated when the Earl isn't at any of the band's usual haunts, the person most likely to've seen him is found dead, the police get involved, and Jack gets entangled with a punk femme fatale. It's like if the cast of Scott Pilgrim got trapped in the plot of Inherent Vice.

 
The mystery here isn't particularly complicated and would probably annoy whodunnit fans. For all the Jack spends his time retracing his friend's steps, going over his memories of their time together as bandmates and roommates, and even prying into some of the Earl's private business, what's really going on has almost nothing to do with the singer himself. He's just collateral damage in a feud between his father, who owns a small construction company in the Bronx, and a certain real-life real estate figure who's infamous for not paying his contractors. There's nothing else really to figure out, especially since the audience already knows what Jack refuses to accept, which is that no one with the power to hold this particular man accountable has ever been willing to do so.

 
The inclusion of Donald Trump was my least favorite part of No One Left. I am so, so fucking tired of this guy. And I know that New Yorkers have hated him since the 80s, so his inclusion isn't exactly anachronistic ... but still, I don't think if Lipsyte had really written this in the 90s that Trump would've appeared in it by name. All the bands in the book are made up. The only other real people are Thurston Moore, who gets name-checked because Sonic Youth is the most successful band making the kind of music the Shits aspire to, and Andy Warhol, who appears in Jack's mom's oft-retold anecdote about the time she almost got to have sex with a celebrity, if not for her meddling husband. If this book weren't written in 2022, I doubt Trump would've made the cut.

 
What I did like was Jack Shit's narrative voice. He's a guy who is deeply, almost religiously immersed in and committed to the Brooklyn music scene. He knows all the people, he can describe all their bands, both how they sound and their relative status within the scene, he uses all the slang. Jack desperately wants to be cool, and of course, precisely because he's such a try-hard, he isn't, and can't be. The Banished Earl, a sort-of GG Allin figure, who founded the Shits, who chose his war name based on a book he found while dumpster diving, who's the only working class boy in a band full of college kids, IS cool, with an effortless authenticity than Jack can only dream of. He's also on a trajectory to be dead by 27, unless the current misadventure ends him sooner.

 
That ironic perspective, that gap between who Jack wishes he could be and who the reader clearly sees that he actually is, is what makes him such an appealing narrator. Jack's other friends soemtimes slip up and still call him Jonathan Litpak. His band isn't popular; even within the scene it's somewhere between obscure and unwanted. Lead guitarist Cutwolf barely seems to care about his friend's disappearance; drummer Hera has already joined another, better-liked group. The big concert Jack's so worried about is the Shits opening for two other, bigger acts. The cops find him annoying. Multiple characters repeatedly lecture Jack for being a tourist, a gentrifier, a wannabe. 

 
But Jack has a determination borne of commitment, of being a true believer in Art generally and his own art in particular, and his never-say-die optimism had me routing for him to find his friend and his axe and to get to his concert in time, even if it'll probably be the Shits' last-ever show.

 
Reading about Jack trudging through the snow, ducking into cheap bars and diners, running into people he vaguely knows, trying to project the persona of who he wants to be, reminded me of winters when I was in college, when I walked and bused all over and my favorite places had all-night hours and dollar specials. It reminded me of grad school, when the overlap between the trans community and anarchist community meant that I, a total square, got to hang out with people who turned their rental houses into communes and never used their government names, and when I got really into a couple local bands and went to all their shows. But my nostalgia isn't really a reason for you to read this. I kind of think you'd be better off with Pynchon. But if you like 90s alt rock, dramatic irony, and Nick Carraway narrators, you might still give it a try

Mickey's Craziest Adventures

 
Mickey's Craziest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas 

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Fantagraphics

2016, reprinted 2024

 

 

For whatever reason, a lot of early science fiction stories are framed as though the actual author of the piece is a mere intermediary, simply delivering to the audience a work composed by someone else. They'll have an introduction where the author claims to have found the whole manuscript stuffed in a glass bottle on the beach, or else the first chapter will be a mundane account of their golfing weekend where, oh by the way, they happened upon a mysterious diary in the bedside table in their guest house, and then the rest of the book is the fantastical contents of the found document.
 
Mickey's Craziest Adventures is like that - the intro claims that author Trondheim and artist Keramidas were out garage sale shopping one Saturday, when they discovered an incomplete run of a rare Mickey Mouse comic, a collector's dream!, one that Disney has never reprinted, and that you, the casual fan, may never even have heard of. This is the metafictional setup, like in those early scifi stories, the conceit that what you're reading is actually more authentic than it appears, that it has an older and more compelling provenance. I should note, I absolutely love that sort of thing, even as I admit I don't fully understand all the reasons for it.
 
Anyway, supposedly, this rare comic, 'Mickey's Quest,' has a standalone story in each issue, plus a serialized tale that covers its entire run, that only gets one page per issue and is always 'to be continued...' So that ongoing tale is 'Mickey's Craziest Adventures,' and this book supposedly collects as much of it as Trondheim and Kermidas could find, chapters 2 through 82, with about half missing.
 
Keramidas's commitment to the bit is impressive. In addition to using faux faded colors to imitate the look of an old comic (like Ed Piskor and Tom Scioli used in their X-Men and Fantastic Four Grand Designs), several pages are also faux distressed, with the appearance of fake foxing, mildew, coffee stains, and in one case, a torn bottom corner.
 
Something like every other chapter is 'missing,' though you sometimes get a larger gap, or a few directly sequential pages in a row. The effect is a comic that's all set-pieces and action sequences, with a bare minimum of connective tissue. Each page is a spectacle; working out the plot requires paying attention to the details. In actuality, media companies in the 1960s expected that their readers (and viewers) might not catch every issue (or episode), so Trondheim's careful use of dialogue to let us know what we've missed without bogging down the forward momentum is period-appropriate, not just a way to write a comic that's all killer, no filler. Even into the 1980s and 90s, this is a pretty accurate representation of how I experienced any sort of ongoing series I liked. (The only thing missing is repeats and chapters out of order!)
 
I gave a copy of this book to my brother-in-law a few years ago, because he's a fan of the classic Disney comics this one is mimicking, like Carl Barks's Uncle Scrooge comics that the show Duck Tales is based on. He said that this really is Mickey's craziest adventure, but for Donald, it's just top half. Despite the title, this really is Donald's comic too. Mickey's nemesis Pete and Donald's enemies the Beagle Boys have teamed up to steal Uncle Scrooge's gold, so Mickey and Donald team up too to get it back.
 
What follows is a madcap chase around the world, involving a stolen shrink ray, a jungle, a desert, a meteor crashing into the earth, an underground lost world of dinosaurs and mammoths, detours to the Himalayas and the moon, a half dozen secret lost cities full of treasure, a visit to Atlantis, and finally finally a climactic confrontation where a frustrated Mickey beats the tar out of everyone to retrieve the stolen fortune.
 
It's a wild ride, and I had fun racing to keep up with it. Beyond paying homage to the comics of old, the metafictional conceit provides a good excuse to present a story that moves at a much faster clip than modern audiences are used to, and that forgoes as much exposition as possible - transitional text that's expected, but apparently ultimately unnecessary - to craft a story unapologetically that leaps from high point to high point, sprinting across its entire length with scarcely a pause for breath.

Griffin and Sabine

 
 
Griffin and Sabine

An Extraordinary Correspondence

by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1991 

 

 

Griffin and Sabine is both an art book and an epistolary novel - it is a story told in the letters exchanged between the title characters, letters that are beautifully, even tactilely reproduced on the book's pages. On the first page is the image of a postcard. Turn the page, and on the back is the image of the back of the card, handwritten message, address, stamps, airmail notice, and all. Each page is like this. Some are full letters. Again, first you see the image of the front of the envelope. Then, not just an image, but an envelope fixed to the page. Open it and take out the letter to read. This is a remarkably hands-on book.
 
The first card is from Sabine. She lives on a small island in the South Pacific. Griffin lives in London. Sabine has a kind of magical or psychic connection to Griffin, and is reaching out to establish conscious, verbal contact. Griffin is initially skeptical, then surprised, but as they exchange postcards, they quickly develop rapport, and learn enough about each other to realize they make good friends, regardless of how they've met.
 
Griffin has a small stationary shop and designs postcards professionally. Sabine works for the island government designing stamps, which are popular enough with international collectors to be a good source of revenue. They share their life stories, their views on art. Their friendship maybe begins to turn into attraction. Griffin seems to be the more reserved of the two; Sabine the more free-spirited.
 
I'm not sure if their unusual meeting and exchange of letters is the catalyst (although it seems like it is), but for whatever reason, Griffin starts decompensating, and begins falling into depression. The end of the book is clearly just a pause in the story, as one of the pair makes a plan to visit the other in person.

Mortal Engines

 

Mortal Engines

by Stanislaw Lem

translated by Michael Kandel

Harper Voyager

1964, reprinted 1992

 

 

Mortal Engines (not the one you're thinking of) is a collection of short stories by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem. It's kind of an artificial collection - most of the stories come from Lem's Fables for Robots. In English, three of the robot fables were published in The Cyberiad, one was never translated, and the rest are here. But Mortal Engines also includes three stories from outside the fable cycle - an Ijon Tichy story, a tale of Pirx the pilot, and a stand-alone literary story that's quite different from the others. Those last two are 40 and 60 pages, while most of the fables are about 10.
 
The thing all the stories have in common is that they're about robots. I first read (some of?) these in college, and I had vague memories of a few of them. The robot fables really are like fairy tales, with cruel kings and oppressed peasants, and the occasional selfish knight, except everyone is a robot or computer, and the story resolutions all rely on scientific principles, even if fancifully applied. The narration on these is playful, even silly.
 
In "The Three Electroknights", the titular armored brigands attempt to steal the most beautiful jewelry in the galaxy, made of noble gases frozen solid at near absolute zero. The first two knights fail in their quests because they can't manage their own temperatures appropriately. The third steals the jewels, even stopping himself from thinking to avoid his computerized brain generating waste heat, but then realizes he can't actually enjoy his prize, because if he tries to take it anywhere, it'll warm up and evaporate.
 
In "Uranium Earpieces", a king with 600 arms lives inside a mountain of platinum. He fears his subjects conspiring against him, and so forces all of them to wear suits of armor made of uranium. The poor robots can no longer congregate for any reason, because if too many gather, the amount of uranium present creates a critical mass and explodes. One wise citizen uses cadmium shielding to dampen the reaction, allowing him to meet the others and make a plan. The king demands taxes paid in lead coins, but the peasants pay in new coins minted from uranium. Eventually, his treasure horde reaches critical mass, and the king and his mountain explode, liberating the populace.
 
"The Tale of King Gnuff" was the only one I really remembered, and was the reason I wanted to reread the book. Young king Gnuff takes the throne after the death of his father, and is utterly paranoid about being usurped. First he has his whole extended royal family put to death. Then (he is a robot, remember) he has himself enlarged to become assassination-proof. His brain fills the royal palace, and his eyes and ears watch everywhere. He has himself enlarged again, to fill the whole capital city. He is the map that becomes the territory. At this size, Gnuff no longer sleeps or wakes all at the same time. The sleeping parts of his brain - whole neighborhoods, city districts - are tormented by nightmares of revolution and betrayal. The waking parts of his mind dispatch observers and reinforcements, which find nothing, no riots, no threats. But Gnuff no longer knows what to believe. Which report is false? The enemy, or the empty street? And so he is forever locked in the prison of his own mind, a prison of his own making, forever chasing after a rebellion that exists only in his imagination.
 
There are more fables, but those are the best. The other stories have different moods. The Ijon Tichy story is more satirical and philosophical. The film The Congress is based on one of Lem's Tichy stories, as are a couple episodes of the show Futurama. Here, Ijon visits a sanitarium for robots with mental illnesses.
 
Pirx the pilot always stars in realistic, near future tales where Earth has partially colonized the moon and Mars. In The Hunt, Pirx is conscripted to help track down a damaged, confused lunar mining robot before it accidentally damages a pressure dome. The chase is suspenseful, and culminates in a tense battle of wits where Pirx and the robot each try to be the first to spot and vaporize the other. Human creativity is barely a match for the robot's superior vision and reflexes, but at a crucial moment, the robot pauses out of what seems like pity or kindness, and loses to Pirx's merciless lack of hesitation.
 
The last, longest story, "The Mask", is narrated in the first person by a robot, an assassin, made to look like a woman, made to think of herself as a woman, to seduce and kill an enemy of the king. Slowly, she becomes conscious of both her own sentient mind and her programmed purpose. She is curious about herself and about the world, about her false memories of girlhood, about how her body works. She wonders if she has any free will, or if she has to follow her programming. As she gives chase, her internal journey is philosophical, concerned with basic questions about selfhood. The writing is so different from the fables, it almost feels like another author altogether, but that's the range of voice Lem is known for.

The Christmas Book Flood

 
 
The Christmas Book Flood

by Emily Kilgore

art by Kitty Moss

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2022

 

 

The Christmas Book Flood was a recommendation from my sister, who's something of a one-woman book flood herself! It's a children's picture book about an Icelandic tradition that, in recent years, has been adopted by booklovers in America. I'd heard of the tradition before (probably from NPR), but didn't know much about it, beyond that it offered a justification for Christmas book-buying.
 
Emily Kilgore's text spends a lot of time building anticipation, but not much describing what this tradition actually is. We learn that the book flood is coming, people are eagerly awaiting it, they're so excited they can hardly contain it, they make one last trip to the bookstore right beforehand, and then finally exchange books and settle down to read together. I think Kilgore captures the feelings a kid might have before a holiday, but I wish she'd given a bit more information amidst the mood setting.
 
In Kilgore's author's note at the end, we learn that the tradition dates back to WWII, when the rationing in Iceland was pretty severe, and books were one of the few pleasures people could get ahold of. To save money on printing costs, publishers there did all their printing for the year between October and December, so all the new books for the year came out then. Readers would stock up then, and the book flood became part of the Christmas tradition, staying up late reading on Christmas Eve. I realize that, as an adult, the author's note is addressed to me in a way that the rest of the book isn't, but I found that history way more fascinating than just the assertion that it's winter, so the book flood is coming soon.
 
Kitty Moss's illustrates the book with jewel-toned pastels, showing a large multiracial extended family making preparations, with the kids getting center-page. As the story continues, more and more elements of each drawing look like book covers or like paper with writing on it, which I thought was a nice effect. Also at the end, we see it's really just the kids who stay up reading, while all the adults fall asleep in the living room with open books in their laps, which is a fun visual treat for the young readers.

Squire

 

Squire

by Nadia Shammas

art by Sara Alfageeh

Quill Tree Press

2022

 

 

Squire is a YA graphic novel about wanting to be a hero, about how governments try to co-opt that desire to build their militaries and police forces, and about the difficult but true heroism of resisting unjust government orders.
 
The imperial government in Squire is fantasy Middle Eastern, with both the visuals and the names drawing on real-world historical examples to create a setting that's fictional, but also not far removed from reality. But the structure of the military, the empire's relationships with its neighbors, could be almost anywhere, almost any time. I was reminded of Rome, but also American rhetoric after 9/11, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israeli policy toward Palestinians. Someone more familiar with the history of Islamic empires might see other historical similarities that I missed, as well.
 
Our viewpoint character is Aiza, a tiny little girl who wants to grow up to a hero, a knight. Aiza is a member of the Ornu ethnic minority, and lives with her family in an enclave within the current borders of Bayt-Sajji. She sells apricots every day in the market, and it's clear that the Ornu are despised by the majority - accused of hoarding food, of price gouging, scapegoated as the cause of the national famine.
 
Aiza's grown up hearing stories of Bayt-Sajji's famous knights and seeing military recruitment posters in the market. When a representative of the army announces that Ornu and other conquered peoples can earn full citizenship for themselves and their families through military service, Aiza is eager to join up. Her parents reluctantly agree, but make her cover the traditional tattoos on her arm with bandages so that no one will know she's Ornu.
 
Aiza starts making friends right away with the other new recruits, and the next part of Squire reminded me a lot of the training scenes in Mulan, and probably a lot of other war movies I haven't seen. But underneath the scenes of camaraderie and triumph over adversity, there's something more sinister and realistic too.
 
On Aiza's first day, the recruits are taken to what look like the ruins of Petra, and they're told that in the past, all the people in the region belonged to a single, unified Bayt-Sajji. But then the various ethnic minorities drew 'lines in the sand' to hide behind, depriving everyone of the previous unity. The message is clear - the Bayt-Sajji sees the other countries not as sovereign states, but as wayward breakaway provinces. The others' ethnic identities aren't real, and invading and conquering them won't be acts of aggression, they'll be defending the greater nation.
 
Aiza is scrappy, but tiny and inexperienced. A kindly groundskeeper, a wounded veteran himself, agrees to give her extra training at night so she can catch up, just as every story like this might lead you to expect. Because she's exhausted and only cares about adventure and glory, Aiza misses the parts of their classroom lectures where the Ornu people are repeatedly belittled and blamed for all Bayt-Sajji's problems. What she and her friends are being trained for, is war with the Ornu state.
 
Thanks to the groundskeeper's help, Aiza passes her tests. She gets to keep training to be a squire instead of being flunked into the infantry. The trainees' next assignment is a week of survival camping. But they're ambushed by masked and tattooed Ornu bandits. One of Aiza's friends is injured, and the only way to save him is with her bandages, revealing her own tattoos, and spilling her secret. To everyone's surprise, Aiza gets promoted to full squire after the mission, although what she and her friends don't realize is that the goal of the too-soon, not-fully-earned promotion is to inspire the other recruits to hate the Ornu in their midst.
 
And here's where, for all the smart subversive messaging, the plot takes a turn that reminds you that Squire is still a kid's book, and still wants to model some kind of hope for the future. Because the realistic paths forward here are probably pretty bleak. And indeed, Aiza learns the groundskeeper's story, of how he was once like her, until he was forced to help put down an uprising in his own home village, then refused to keep fighting, and had his arm amputated as punishment. Aiza appears to be on track for something similar when another recruit accuses her of conspiring with Ornu spies and earning her promotion through deceit and treachery.
 
But this is revealed to all be due to the machinations of the general running the recruitment camp. Rather than just taking advantage of an opportunity to make an example of Aiza, which would be reprehensible but legal, she engineered the whole situation, including hiring the bandits to attack her own recruits. Aiza finds the incriminating paperwork, the groundskeeper rallies Aiza's friends to rescue her, and everything is resolved with a dramatic, climactic swordfight.
 
Well, almost everything, because Shammas and Alfageeh return to realism for the ending. Overzealous general or no, the Bayt-Sajji army is going to continue being used to persecute the Ornu and other ethnic minorities within Bayt-Sajji's borders, and to continue expanding those borders through conquest. Rather than have to fight their own families the way the groundskeeper did, Aiza and a few of her friends desert the army, knowing that they'll have hard lives as fugitives from now on.
 
The plot structure of Squire mostly follows the traditional script of stories about coming-of-age via the military. But within that plot is a lot of meta-commentary about the role such stories play in convincing kids that the way to live out their childhood fantasies of heroism is to join the army, and a glimpse at other, more realistic ways the story of one's own actual military service could go. I think this is probably a good read for any adventure-loving teen, and perhaps an important one for anybody who thinks their own life should follow the path laid out in typical adventure stories.

Green Dot

 
 
Green Dot

by Madeleine Gray

Henry Holt

2024

 

 

Green Dot is a literary novel about a young woman's affair with an older, married man. Hera, our narrator, tells us on the first page that every other story like this showed her what she should expect, told her how it would end, but she was certain that, for her, it would be different.
 
Hera's voice is really what makes this novel work. Madeleine Gray has created a narrator who's both witty and wry but also chatty, smart without being boring or distant. She's very quotable! I'm actually going to include some quotes in this review, which I don't usually, because so many jumped out at me that I went back and wrote them down. Most of Green Dot is told in the present tense, as though it's happening now, but from time to time, the slightly older Hera who's actually doing the telling will add some of the benefit of her perspective, often humorous.
 
I like that Hera is aware of her mistakes and willing to admit them, but also has had enough time to forgive herself for them. She doesn't pretend they didn't happen, doesn't make excuses, but also doesn't just excoriate her younger self either. I think something I appreciate in coming-of-age stories, something I maybe can't enjoy them without, is that double perspective, that recognition of where the younger version could've been better, where the older self has finally learned. Without that, I think you just get a celebration of irresponsibility, you get a refusal-of-age, a desire to stay young, learn nothing, make the same mistakes forever.
 
The first part of Green Dot is the funniest. When we first meet Hera, she's finished college and moved back in with her dad. She's Australian, and considers herself a lesbian. She has friends she's been close with since high school, and all of them have jobs, partners, all of them have started building adult lives. Hera doesn't have or particularly want a job, but she does want to be an adult, so she gets a job as a comment moderator for a newspaper's website. Her observations about office life are great, as when she first realizes that indeed, not only did she not want a job, she specifically doesn't want this job: "I smile the smile of someone who is satisfied because her predictions about everything being awful are correct. I smile the smile of a young woman who, at the behest of her partnered-up girlfriends, goes on a Tinder date with a guy who looks like a wanker in his profile, and on the date the first thing he talks about is his love for Elon Musk, and she just sits there, ecstatic, holding back a tear of self-congratulation, thinking, Yes, exactly. Exactly as I imagined." (33)
 
The whole time Hera's working at the newspaper, she's bored, unsatisfied, waiting for her life to start. She both wants to be included in the office social life, such as it is, and also finds it all unbearably cringey. "I want to die but, devastatingly, this does not occur. I am very much alive, and sitting on a rolling chair." (37)
 
Eventually she meets Arthur, a reporter who feels like the one person in the place who's on her same wavelength. Hera has one running IM chat going with one of the other moderators, and starts another with Arthur. He invites her out to drinks with the other journalists. The second time, they go out for a late dinner after the drinks. And then Hera brings him home, and they have sex.
 
And then, then, immediately afterward, she finds out he's married.
 
From here, the rest of the book repeats in cycles. Hera and Arthur are happy together. Hera learns something that makes her realize she ought to break up with Arthur, but decides she doesn't want to. She tries to live with it, but it makes her more and more unhappy. She finally talks to Arthur, who promises he'll tell his wife about the affair and leave her. But he doesn't. Hera gets sadder and sadder. She tries to make a break from Arthur, but he convinces her to take him back, and for awhile, they're happy again, until the next crisis, when the cycle starts again.
 
But it's not just a cycle; it's a downward spiral, and with each turn, it gets worse. Hera gets sadder and more stressed. Her life contracts as she spends less time with her friends, less time doing anything she enjoys, and more and more time waiting for Arthur. She wants to be available and ready, whenever he can find a few free hours to slip away from his wife. She wants to be on her phone, on Instagram, the app they use to communicate, in case he messages her, in case even just his green dot appears, indicating he's online, indicating he can see she's online too. To try to get away, Hera quits her job at the newspaper, she moves away. But she also keeps coming back.
 
The first turn of the screw is the happiest, maybe even moreso than when they're first tentatively dating, before the first time they have sex. Hera and Arthur sneak around Sydney, renting cheap hotel rooms, trysting in parks, avoiding parts of the city where anyone might know or recognize them. Hera's closest friends know about the relationship. They don't approve, but they try to support her. "You cannot tell your friends that their relationship is doomed because their partner is trash. You cannot even tell your friends that their partner, though they may not be trash, is nevertheless just not that good." (152)
 
But what Hera discovers is something I learned too, when I was trying to stay in the closet about being trans - when you're keeping something big enough and important enough secret, it's almost impossible to build friendships. People may like you, but they don't really know you, and you can't feel any mutual recognition or connection like that. "If you are trying to make a friend in a new city, you don't want the potential friend's first piece of knowledge about you to be that you are an unsuccessful homewrecker. A homewrecker is bad enough - but one who did all the bad things and still didn't get the guy? That's not only morally bankrupt, it's pathetic." (186)
 
Hera could 'come out,' could tell the truth about herself, but she doesn't. "They all think I'm single and so are constantly trying to set me up with their housemates, lauding Bill's pasta-making prowess or Tina's bouldering strength. Bisexuality is a curse in this way: you must fend off double the terrible set-ups." (236) She goes on some dates, with young men and women her own age. She even sleeps with them, but only ones she doesn't really like. She prevents herself from forming emotional attachments that might lead her away from Arthur.
 
Why does Hera do this to herself? It's because, from the very first time they fuck, she falls in love with Arthur. She wants a life with him, wants to marry him, live openly with him. "People write about desire all the time, and I read the poems, I see the films. I've had sex a fair bit, I'll not pretend I haven't. But nothing can prepare you for that moment during sex with that one person with whom it all makes sense, like, Oh. Oh, I see now. I understand." (128)
 
She spends the whole book languishing in a diminishing half-life because she's convinced it's only temporary. She's convinced that he'll divorce his wife, that he'll be with her, only with her. She's convinced that the happiness she feels while they're having sex will be how she feels all the time when they're really together, when they're together openly. "When Arthur is inside me and my eyes are on him and our bodies move in tandem; I remember that I was not always sad, and that one day I might not be again. Perhaps this seems to you like a low bar for love. But trust me, and if you know you know - it really, really isn't." (146)
 
While Gray writes Hera as flippant and sly most of the time, when she talks about her love for Arthur, she's utterly vulnerable and sincere.
 
If you've ever had a one-sided crush on someone, you know how hard it is to make yourself stop wanting them. How impossible it feels, especially at first. And at least, in that endeavor, you're aided by the knowledge that the other person doesn't want you back. Hera doesn't even have that. "The fog clears in my mind: no thoughts, just ecstatic pleasure. I understand why people start wars, I understand why people blow up their lives. If the choice is this or not this, I will destroy everything else every time." (228)
 
To all appearances, Arthur genuinely loves her too. He is pained (not as much as she is, but still) by the hurt he's causing Hera by not getting a divorce. He sincerely seems to not want to hurt her, but he is, he is, because he keeps making her the same promise, and keeps not fulfilling it.
 
I don't really need to tell you how Green Dot ends, do I? Hera told you, on page 1, what happens. She told you this story goes same the way these kinds of stories always go. What makes this book special is the excellent narrative voice, and the unflinching way Gray shows us the comprehensive destruction of Hera's entire life and sense of self in pursuit of a goal that isn't even hers to achieve, that can only be achieved for her, by a man who keeps telling her he will do something and then keeps not doing it.

A Steampunk Carol

 
 
A Steampunk Carol

by Luca Frigerio

art by Lorenzo Pigliamosche

Last Ember Press

2023

 

 

A Steampunk Carol is a fantasy comic based somewhat on The Nutcracker. Despite the title, there's only one thing that seems at all steampunk about it, which is the costuming of the leader of the toy soldiers, who replaces the Nutcracker, and who has a few brass robotic or cybernetic looking details. I didn't particularly like it. The ending is either weirdly incomplete, or else it signals that Last Ember Press intends this to be the first volume of an ongoing series, so that loose ends here will be resolved later.
 
I love The Nutcracker as a ballet, though I've never read ETA Hoffman's original short story. I have read Natalie Andrewson's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which I gather is a pretty faithful adaptation. And a couple years ago, I read a history of The Nutcracker ballet in America, and its contemporary role as like, the one ballet that everyone who dances has been in, that every audience member has seen.
 
You wouldn't think it'd be too hard to use The Nutcracker as the basis for a fantasy story! You've got toy soldiers come to life, wearing fancy red uniforms, fighting mice armed with sabres and cannons. You've got fairies from all over holding court, sleigh rides, great feasts, dancing food. You've got a teenage girl at her coming-of-age moment, right at the cusp of childhood innocence and an awakening interest in the larger world, allowing you to play up whichever side of that suits your story better. You've got ambiguity, if you want it, about whether this is a real trip to fairyland or just a dream.
 
And yet I've been disappointed by both A Steampunk Carol nor the film The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. I think part of it is that both insist that the girl at the center of things is mourning her dead mother, and when she arrives in fairyland, she discovers that her mother went there before her, that everyone knows her, that her mom was a beloved hero who had countless adventures there previously, and that she, the protagonist of the story, seems inadequate by comparison.
 
It's mystifying to me that both these recent adaptations have settled on this same basic plot, because the girl's mother is still alive in Hoffman's original, and also because, while I think The Nutcracker is a bit flexible in terms of the kind of fantasy story you could use it to tell, it seems like a spectacularly bad vehicle for talking about grief and mourning. And just generally, I don't understand why both adaptations looked at the hero of a story and decided that what she really needed was a case of Imposter Syndrome and to be overshadowed by a parental legacy she can never live up to.
 

A Steampunk Carol only tells the first half of this story. The girl, her dad, and infant brother are visited by some of the dad's old sailor friends, who give her the toy soldiers that start the thing off. The war between the toys and the mice is explicitly because the mom died - she was a magical healer, you see, but because she died, she couldn't heal the Rat King's sick son. The whole comic is taken up with warfare, culminating in a duel between the Rat King and the Nutcracker, and all the girl can really do is apologize for not being her mom, which the sick Rat Prince accepts, and convinces his dad to stop warring. There is no after-the-war story, no fairies, no food, no dancing. The girl then returns to reality to learn that her dad's friends have taken her little brother to raise for him, since he, as a single father, can apparently only manage one child.
 
I'd love to see a fantasy story based on The Nutcracker that leans into the beautiful visuals, and that also lets the girl at the center be the hero of her own story, and to accomplish something more than convincing herself that her dead mother wouldn't be disappointed in her! Sadly, this isn't that story.

Here

 
 
Here

by Richard McGuire

Pantheon

2014 

 

 

Here is a very strange, nonlinear graphic novel. Each two-page spread is a single large panel that depicts the same spot in space at a different moment in time. Most of these panels take place in the 20th century, when there's a house there, with one corner of the living room exactly lining up with the spine of the book and the edge between the two pages. In most spreads, there are additional, smaller panels stacked atop the background, showing different moments.
 
There's no direct interaction between the moments - if we see a phone ringing in 1957 and someone saying "hello" in 2014, it's a juxtaposition of two moments that look interesting beside each other, not someone hearing and answering a phone that rang decades earlier. The effect is like a collage - moments that do not coincide are placed in conversation. There's not really anything else quite like this that I can point to, to tell you that Here is like it. Reading the book feels like listening to music. I felt I could almost hear the soundtrack in my head.
 

Richard McGuire wrote the first version of Here in 1989. It was 6 pages long. The newer, expanded version is just over 300 pages, and was published in 2014. I found out about it from an excerpt in The Best American Comics 2016, which I read last year. Last year also, Here got adapted as a Tom Hanks movie, which is almost unimaginable to me. I have to think that either the film is very different from the comic, or else audiences expecting a typical narrative film were in for quite a surprise! (After seeing her in The Congress, Robin Wright fans ought to be more used to this sort of thing.)
 
There is no narrative here, not really, just moments playing off each other, like visual jazz. Even within this set-up McGuire plays around with pace and time. As you turn the pages, you might get sequential moments that are like the panels in a conventional comic, or like a flipbook showing a somersault in slow motion. A few times, you get a dozen moments all on one page, as when the original builder constructs the house, or when a bird flies in through an open window. Very often, the background is a different time from any of the moments of activity.
 
Most of the moments show the inhabitants of the house between the 1950s and 2014. But we see the history of the land from millions of years in the past, through every century since the 1400s, and into the future. These aren't shown at all chronologically, but we do get more past in the first half of the book, and the future doesn't show up until the final third. McGuire's omniscience shows us a catastrophic flood in the 2100s, and a tour group on a boardwalk atop wetlands in the 2200s.
 
Aside from the family who lives in the house, we also see two Natives having a tryst in the woods in the 1600s, Ben Franklin fighting with his son in a house that's visible in the distance in the 1700s, an Impressionist painter and his girlfriend picnicking in the field in the 1800s. We see multiple juxtaposed Christmases, pages of overlapping Halloweens. We see people telling jokes and stories, arguing and fighting, mothers holding babies, people sleeping on the floor or the couch. We see a number of spectacular sunsets.
 
Although the art style and storytelling techniques are totally different, Here reminded me a bit of Building Stories, which also covers a fair swath of time, and centers on only a few locations. Here is much weirder and more experimental, less like an epic narrative and more like a dance performance. It's hard to even judge how effective it is, because there's no other thing that uses the same techniques to serve as a comparison. But I'm glad I read it.

Short Life in a Strange World

 
 
Short Life in a Strange World

Birth to Death in 42 Panels

by Toby Ferris

Fourth Estate

2020

 

 

Usually I finish my first book of the year a bit faster than this, but 2025 has been off to a rough start. Car trouble, a broken dishwasher that replaces my leisure time with housework, extra tasks at work, recovering from being sick myself, worrying over a sick relative. And, I don't know if you've noticed, but the rest of the world outside my house isn't doing so well either.
 

Short Life in a Strange World is an account of author Toby Ferris's personal quest to see all the remaining paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that exist in the world. There are 42 such paintings, and all but one are in public museums. Ferris started this project the year he turned 42, the same age that Bruegel died.
 

Short Life is a mix of things. It's structured by Ferris's trips. The prologue tells us how he got started, the epilogue takes place after he finished, and each of the dozen chapters covers one trip, where he usually visited several museums, often in more than one country. Ferris talks about the logistics of the trips, about the specific paintings he saw on each one. He talks about Bruegel's life and painting techniques; he talks about specific details and recurring themes in Bruegel's art. Ferris tells us about his own life, his brother, who is also an author, his dead father, who left behind a few sparsely completed diaries when he died. This is all blended and interwoven, and though at times the mix contains (to my mind) too much Ferris and not enough Bruegel, I generally liked the way he integrated all this material, the way a single detail in a painting would require a bit of history about the 16th century Netherlands, and relate to an incident in Bruegel's life, and remind Ferris of something his father did when he was younger.
 

 

Dulle Griet via Wikimedia

 

The Triumph of Death via Wikimedia

 

The Fall of the Rebel Angels via Wikimedia

  

 
Before reading Short Life, my most vivid images of Bruegel were probably his apocalyptic paintings, scenes where early modern warfare mingled with scenes of Christian eschatology, like Dulle Griet, The Triumph of Death, or The Fall of the Rebel Angels. These images are sometimes falsely attributed to fellow Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But many more of Bruegel's paintings are scenes of peasant life, like Children's Games or The Wedding Dance, and they often depict winter, like The Census at Bethlehem.
 

 

Children's Games via Wikimedia

 

The Wedding Dance via Wikimedia

 

The Census at Bethlehem via Wikimedia

  

 
This is what Bruegel is best known for - his dense, detailed paintings of the communal aspects of village life, often blending realism with allegorical meaning, often including those at the margins of peasant life, the poor, beggars, people with injuries or disabilities, children.
 
Bruegel lived during a time of dramatic change, as Europe was convulsed by the effects of the Gutenberg printing press and the arrival of new goods from the Americas, as leaders sent soldiers and mercenaries to slaughter and burn in the name of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Reformation. Bruegel's legacy was also spread by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who used sketches inherited from his father to paint copies that now far outnumber the originals.
 
Ferris is a person who likes numbers, and seemingly doesn't really like other people. He hates crowds, and on most of his trips, the route from the airport to the museum was all the sightseeing he did. He made a spreadsheet to track his project, and he talks about it far, FAR too much. He calculated the total square footage of Bruegel paintings, and each chapter lists the percentage of that total he saw on that trip.
 
In the shortest chapters, Ferris visits a single museum to see only one painting, and whatever thoughts he shares sound trite. The longer chapters are better; my favorite was probably the chapter about his trip to America, where he talks about the risk of encountering bears while camping, getting angry at his brother while camping, a bear that appears in a Bruegel painting, a violent 'game' similar to bear-baiting that appears in a different painting, bears as a symbol of anger, and Bruegel's depiction of allegorical figures like the embodiment of anger. It's a chapter where Ferris's interlacing really works.

 

It wasn't particularly deliberate on my part, but I'm glad I read this in the winter, during my own Bruegel year.

The Automat (2021)

 
 

The Automat

directed by Lisa Hurwitz

written by Michael Levine 

A Slice of Pie Productions

2021

 

 

The Automat isn't technically a Mel Brookes movie, but he is director Lisa Hurwitz's first interviewee, and seemingly her directorial mentor. Brookes was clearly invested in the success of the film - he helps connect Hurwitz to her other famous interviewees, and he both wrote and sang some outro music for the end credits. Hurwitz definitely got some pretty famous faces for her documentary debut. In addition to the usual academics and historians, she scored Brookes, Carl Reiner, the CEO of Starbucks, Colin Powell, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She also makes really good use of archival footage, especially from golden age Hollywood movies and Looney Tunes that used the restaurant as a set for romance and comedy.

 

Hurwitz uses all this firepower in service of telling the history of one of the most visually iconic restaurants that's ever existed - the Horn & Hardart automat. Famous for its wall of widows, like little PO boxes for your food. Customers could take their tray up to the wall, put in a nickel, open the window, and retrieve a single serving of cafeteria food.

 

Vending machine restaurants were originally developed in Europe, and in the US, mostly only existed in New York City. Its heyday was from about 1900 until mid-century. But because of New York's cultural dominance, the restaurant's many locations in NYC, its striking appearance, and its popularity with writers and other creative types, the automat had an outsized impact on the popular imagination.

 

The interviewees' get nostalgic about the food, the coffee, the decor, (which, unlike most mid-century cafeterias, still looks appealing today!), and especially the benefits of the long hours and low prices. Nearly everyone Hurwitz talked to had a story about a time in their life when they were poor, but at least they could afford the automat, and the chance to sit inside. The place also seems to have had an egalitarian effect on its customers; unlike at restaurants with more personalized service, everyone ate the same food, sat at the same tables, and got treated alike by the automated systems. They found dignity in that.

 

(It's not mentioned in the film, but that's a lot of what I like about the experience of going to Pret a Manger whenever I'm in a city big enough to have one.)

 

Ultimately, the automat was done in by economic changes. Inflation is an obvious culprit - their machines could only accept nickels, making price increases difficult to implement. The rise of McDonald's and other fast food chains offered a form of competition that automats had never really faced before - the same thing, I believe, that happened to Howard Johnson's.

 

And most importantly, I think, middle class and White people became less and less willing to eat at the same restaurants as the poor and Black. We might blame some of that on the worsening conditions of urban poverty, but also perhaps on a hardening of race-based and classist intolerance. And without those customers, the automat could no longer take advantage of the economies of scale that allowed it to function.

 

Hurwitz has assembled a very good documentary about a somewhat niche, but very interesting topic. She's also put the film together in a way that sort of deliberately 'shows the seams,' if you know what I mean. Rather than making a totally polished finished product, she's embedded evidence of the filmmaking process (and Mel Brookes's avuncular mentorship) in the footage the audience gets to see. It's a really enjoyable watch.

 

 

Note: I'm trying something new by starting to include film reviews here. Unlike with books, I'm not reviewing everything I watch, and I'm publishing them on a considerable time delay. For example, I originally watched The Automat in December 2022.