The Nude

 

The Nude

by Michelle Lindley

Atria Books

2024 

 

  

The Nude is a literary novel about an American curator going to Greece to acquire a newly discovered statue of a nude woman for her museum. I perhaps should've given more thought to what it meant that I saw it on a list of the best book covers for the month it was released, but not on any of the lists of the best reviewed books for that month.

 

Most of The Nude is intended to be slow-burning tension and mounting internal turmoil as Dr Elizabeth Clark becomes more and more anxious from the heat, the jet lag, her migraine headaches, her pill addictions, her increasingly erotic fascination with her translator Niko and his artist wife Theo, haunting childhood memories of her dead sister; with the Greek museum's slow-walking the acquisition, protests against the expatriation of ancient art, vandals attempting to sabotage the statue to send a message; her failing marriage back home, pressure and doubt about her abilities from her museum director back home, competition from her rival over who will take over as director after this buy... It all accumulates and Elizabeth's behavior becomes more erratic until the vandals succeed in damaging the statue and Elizabeth reaches a breaking point of her own.

 

There are two problems though, and I think they're kind of related. There's not enough tension, and not enough payoff. Although things keep happening, and it seems clear that eventually Elizabeth will become overwhelmed and act out in some way, author Michelle Lindley blends the anxious with the ordinary in a way that probably makes the book more realistic, but also seems to rob it of some of its potential power. Elizabeth belongs in a thriller, the plot structure wants to be a thriller, but it's not, you know, thrilling enough.

 

In Elizabeth, Lindley has created a protagonist who belongs in transgressive fiction. She's someone who feels fundamentally unable to fit into society, who constantly strives to appear perfect and succeed at work, but who's so tortured by her own psyche that she seems always on the brink of disaster. Elizabeth is ultra-controlled, always anxious, always unhappy. She hates her body, starves herself and recoils from casual touch, but also loves her painkillers and tranquilizers, loves to binge eat as a treat, and sleeps with men in a mercenary way to advance her career. Her migraines are debilitating and make her see hallucinatory auras; she's gone hysterically blind twice in her life and fears it'll happen again, maybe even on this trip, especially since she's taking her pills too quickly and they might not last.

 

There's all the ingredients for steadily ratcheting tension, perhaps with minor outbursts building toward a major eruption. But Lindley continually undercuts the anxiety with normality. There are too many possible sources of stress, but none of them get enough attention. Nothing can really build up, because it all keeps alternating. Every unsettling thought or moment is counteracted with something prosaic. Even the suspicion that Elizabeth slept with a major donor to the Greek museum, or perhaps was assaulted by him, while she was awake and ambulatory, but not conscious or forming memories, just goes nowhere and ultimately comes to nothing, dropped and forgotten.

  

None of the stress keeps Elizabeth from keeping up appearances and going through the motions; and all the other characters seem perpetually relaxed, unbothered, unhurried. It should create more frisson! Elizabeth is not fun or normal! But she's desperate to be liked, desperate for others to think she's fun and chill, and determined that no one should suspect her of being uncool enough to care what they think of her. 

 

She acts out some, but not in ways that are truly satisfying or cathartic. The migraine imagery is too brief before the pills kick in; we never get a full phantasmagoria. She's obsessed with sexy free-spirited Theo, her first time being attracted to a woman, possibly her first time actually desiring a person and not just the social advantage she can gain from them, and Theo is interested back, so when Elizabeth eventually stops trying to please everyone else and gives in to her own desires and urges, you might expect the two women to do more than kiss a couple times. But no.

 

It's incredibly anticlimactic. And I think kind of emblematic of the way that Lindley's efforts to make her book literary and realistic prevent it from delivering the pleasure that we'd get from watching real chaos. At one point near the end, Elizabeth tells us she feels feral, feels unhinged. That is what I'd spent the whole book up to that point waiting for! But even though she says it, she doesn't really do it. Instead of fireworks, everything mostly fizzles.

Witch Hat Atelier 11

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 11
by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2023

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, we met a new witch who uses forbidden magic, a young witch who could easily pass for a fellow student. She threatened Coco and Tartah unless they can get into the Silver Eye parade and cast a spell that impresses the king enough to earn a private audience. It's a seemingly impossible request, especially since the parade is the next day! But Coco agreed to try, and then immediately started worrying herself sick over the difficulty of it.
 
Volume 11 opens with Coco accidentally waking Agott up because she's panicking. She's exactly like a student trying to do a big assignment all in one night. (I mean, I guess she's not just like that, I guess she technically is that, but it's not like Coco procrastinated; the assignment got sprung on at the last minute by a bully who goes to another school!) Coco breaks down crying, begging Agott for help. She has writer's block, and she's overwhelmed by the stakes of what she's trying to do, although she can only tell Agott part of what's going on.
 
Agott catches herself thinking that Coco failing would mean less competition, and realizes she doesn't want to be that person anymore. She tells Coco about her own self-doubts, and that everyone feels like a hopeless failure sometimes. Everyone produces drawings they don't like, starts drafts they're not sure how to finish. (There's a bonus comic at the end of this volume that shows Master Olruggio working through these exact same doubts.) Agott encourages Coco to draw some spells for her own enjoyment, just to clear her head, and shows her a set of glyphs that, when added to another spell sigil, cause the finished spell effect to look like an animal.
 
Agott tells Coco about how she's sorry she was unfriendly when Coco first came to the atelier. This seems like a turning point in their friendship, like they'll be closer after this. Coco even stands up for Agott when another student witch who knew her before her falling out with her family tries to tease her.
 
Master Qifrey has noticed that something's up with Coco that she's keeping a secret. Olruggio has correctly noticed that Coco and Tartah are experiencing some form of young love, and encourages Qifrey to give her some privacy. Qifrey still thinks there's more than that going on, and he's right too, although I doubt he realizes Coco's being coerced, or that she and Tarah are harboring such intense doubts about the laws against healing magic.
 
Agott and Coco both get their spells finished and approved by the parade committee, so when the sun sets and the parade begins, they'll both get their turns to show off on one of the elevated platforms. The king is there watching (he secretly belongs to the last family of witches to know healing magic), along with large crowds of ordinary people. They reactions will help decide which spells the king will meet with the caster to buy.
 
When it's Coco's turn, we see that what she's made is new infrastructure for the sanitary disposal of sewage! Currently people empty their chamber pots into cesspits, and channels carry all the effluent to a single magical gate. As the sewage passes through, the water in the canal turns clear, and the concentrated filth drains off into a side channel. We learned earlier that in every city, this side channel drains into a Muckpool, which is always borders the poorest neighborhood. Coco's innovation is a purifying pot for each home. Empty your chamber pot into that, and you can dump cleaned water into the cesspits. Widespread adoption would dramatically improve life in the slums.
 
The crowd is not at all interested though. This would be a physically demanding extra step to dispose of their wastewater, and for people who don't live near the Muckpool, there'd be little direct benefit. Agott hops in to save the day though, making it look like Coco had only shown the first half of her spell, and like what happens next is the planned second part of the demonstration. (Agott marvels again at Coco's open-heartedness; that she accepts help easily without feeling threatened or undermined.) A new rune added to the spell makes to clean water flow back out of the purifying jug looking like flying fish, and the fish swim themselves through the air before diving into the nearest cesspit. Now the crowd is excited! No more lugging a heavy clay pot of wastewater to the dump site? That bit of saved labor appeals far more than the cleaning alone. Together, Coco and Agott have basically invented flush toilets.
 
They get a moment to celebrate their success, but only a moment, because from atop her parade float, Coco sees something, and the whole crowd sees it a moment later - a towering monster approaching the city from the harbor! The creature looks really weird, in a way that's hard to describe. It's hugely tall, but seems to be made of some kind of organic strands, so it's also quite insubstantial. 

We learn the truth, though none of the characters know it. In a jail cell in the king's palace, where no magic works inside, the witch ambassador and the guy who was selling glasses that can see through clothes, both of whom were arrested in volume 9, are imprisoned together. The ambassador smuggled in some ink for drawing spells, and convinced the other guy they could use it to escape by sticking an arm out the window, outside the spell dampening effect. I thought they'd try to draw a sigil on the outer wall, or perhaps on a scrap of fabric that they could just hold out the window ... but it seems the ambassador tricked the other guy into letting him draw on his skin, with disastrous consequences that will play out in the next volume.
 
I think Shirahama uses magic as a flexible metaphor that lets her talk about a number of different things, under the guise of simply telling a children's story about witches. So when some character asks, 'what is magic for?', they're really asking what is art for? what is technology for? what is power for? Why do we have these things? What are we supposed to do with them? Just because we can do something, should we actually do it? What are we doing it for? And at different times, magic is a stand-in for each of those different things. Because the spells are drawn, it's easy to see how the students' struggles to perfect their spells resembles the more general challenge of learning to draw well, including the importance of repetition, and the frustration that comes with struggle. We even saw that in this volume.

But some of the most interesting debates, I think, come when magic is being used as a metaphor for technology. In Shiraham's world, spells that are drawn are spells that are most useful for creating enchanted objects. And yes, there are unique works with a single owner, or specialty creations that only other witches ever use, but most enchanted objects, once they are invented, start being mass produced, used as city infrastructure, or owned and used directly in the households of the non-magical masses. So when Qifrey and Olruggio teach the girls about which spells should be allowed to be public, and why, they're instilling a set of values about what people deserve, and what they should be allowed to have if they want, and what should be forbidden.
 
Shirahama has created a flawed utopia, intentionally so. This magical world is upheld by artificial restrictions of who is permitted even to learn magic, and what they're allowed to do with it, and these rules are enforced in some of the most draconian ways possible, short of execution. But the world those rules create, the world they allow to flourish, is one where ordinary people have access to universal basic services that deliver a fairly decent standard of living to everyone, and where at least some of the people in power are constantly thinking about how to use their power to make people's lives better. 

There's a certain irony in Coco and Agott's new spell. Last volume, Master Qifrey gave a speech defending unobtrusive, reliable spells as more important than big flashy ones - but here it is the flash, the water turning into fish and flying away, that makes it work. 

 

Flush toilets and sanitary sewers are also emblematic of a certain way of thinking about what people need, and deserve. Access to clean water, the ability to go to the bathroom when you need to, and a way to dispose of wastewater so that it doesn't sicken you or contaminate your drinking water - these things are literally vital to human health, to life itself. They're also generally considered impolite or embarrassing to talk about. Milan Kundera devotes a whole chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the idea that you cannot truly love humanity unless you also love shit. You can't really help people if you're only willing to help them when their problem isn't distasteful or unsavory. 

In the early 20th century, the term 'sewer socialism' was initially used to mock the politicians and members of city government in Milwaukee who kept bragging about the benefits of the city's new sewer system. But they embraced it, and they were right to be proud, because they accomplished the very thing Coco hopes to do for the poor residents of the Muckpool neighborhood - save them from having to live alongside the stench and disease of an entire city's waste collecting beside their homes. There are a lot of magical effects Shirahama could have picked for Coco's spell. Through her choice, she's inviting her young readers to think about certain conveniences they've likely always taken for granted, and to consider why they're so important.

Donald's Happiest Adventures

 
 
Donald's Happiest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas

translated by David Gerstein

Fantagraphics

2023 

 

 
Earlier this year, I read a comic by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas that pretended to be a reprinting of a rare (and incomplete) Mickey Mouse comic from the 1960s. It was a wild ride! They exploited the metafictional conceit to show only the high points of a globe-spanning adventure, without needing to worry about how to connect them. Any transitions or bookkeeping just became 'lost chapters' and 'missing pages'. That also made any dialogue briefer and more episodic.
 

Donald's Happiest Adventures also pretends to collect a 1960s comic, although this time, it's a complete sequential storyline. Donald is once again called in to search for lost treasure at Uncle Scrooge's behest, but this time he's looking for the secret of happiness. What follows is still a madcap trip around the world, with stops in an Eastern European dictatorship and a Himalayan monastery, but the story this time is a bit slower and more coherent, with fewer locales and more talking. The most important thing happening here is the sharing of ideas, as Donald (and us alongside him) hears many different perspectives on the philosophy and psychology of happiness.
 
Years ago, I attended an undergraduate philosophy presentation. Each of the students had picked a philosopher and studied up on their writings so that they could adopt their chosen thinker's persona, so you had some wearing bed sheet togas and others in thrift store suits. The theme of the event was something like how to be a good person, or how to live a good life, and what the students said was improvised instead of scripted. Anyway, the thing that stood out to me was that at first, they all seemed to try to out-compete each other to see who could prescribe the harshest asceticism, and then later, once they all agreed they could take it as given that of course being a good person meant forsaking all worldly pleasures, giving up rich foods and alcohol and music and dancing and sex, once they agreed on that, then they started to argue about what else you might add to this life of austerity and self-denial to make it truly good, things like education and charity and so forth. (And of course various forms of worship and devotion to one of the many interpretations of God.)
 
I feel like attending that talk actually got me to clarify some of my own thoughts, because instead of thinking of total self-abnegation as the starting point for any life worth leading, hearing that claim articulated over and over again clarified for me that what I believe in is hedonism. I don't really want a life of unlimited dissipation; I understand the argument that too much pleasure-seeking has diminishing returns, that it can come at the expense of worthier pursuits. But as a baseline, as a starting point? I say yes, give me hedonism! Give me pleasure; give me happiness! Yes, we should cultivate the higher virtues of education and art. Yes, we should seek to spend time with others, and help them when they're in need. But I agree with Maslow that we can only really focus on those higher goals once our basic needs are met and baser desires are fulfilled. People deserve to be happy, they deserve to be comfortable, deserve to feel good. It is those feelings, and not their denial, that should serve as the foundation of life.
 
Anyway, Donald Duck hears many different ideas, but Trondheim and Keramidas seemto favor the idea that it's harder to seek happiness than it is to avoid unhappiness, and that a big part of that, beyond having enough for basically comfortable living, is to avoid setting too-high expectations or making comparisons to others who have more. Both will tempt you to chase something you can't catch, and diminish your ability to enjoy what you already have. That's an idea that comes up not just in the philosophical discussion, but that we see played out by watching how other characters act.
 
Mickey's Wackiest Adventures is definitely the wilder of the two books, and possibly it's just all around better - more fun, more ideas, more experimentation, more adventure. But I did like Donald's Happiest Adventures, and I think there's some merit to its more thoughtful writing and slower pace. 

Ancillary Sword

 
 
Ancillary Sword

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2014

 

 

Ancillary Sword is the second book in Ann Leckie's trilogy that started with Ancillary Justice. In the first book, we followed Breq, the last surviving human component of what used to be the AI mind of a starship, that used to be shared by the physical ship and by cybernetically augmented members of its crew, called ancillaries. From the moment they receive their implants and are linked to the ship's mind, all previous traces of ancillaries' former personalities are erased. Breq has essentially the same personality as the ship, Justice of Toren, although if there had been two surviving components, not linked to each other, they would diverge as a result of their different experiences.
 
That is, essentially what's happened to the mind of Anaander Mianaai, the supreme ruler of the Radchaai space empire. Her mind is three thousand years old, distributed across hundreds of clone bodies at all times, and they communicate with each other, but there are time lags. (Like King Gnuff!) We learned in the last book that Mianaai's mind is split into factions as the result of an incident from a thousand years ago, when soldiers from a newly conquered planet tried to assassinate her with an alien weapon, and she ordered the execution of every single person on the conquered world.
 
As Breq observes early on in this book, when you do something so terrible, you have a choice afterward. You can acknowledge it as a mistake and try to change so you'll never make it again, or you can insist that you acted correctly and re-commit to the beliefs and actions that led up to that point. (You could also, I guess, try to avoid knowing that what you'd done required making that choice.) 
 
And that's what Anaander Mianaai has done - split into a reformist faction that has replaced enslaved ancillaries with regular soldiers, opened up the officer corps to meritocracy, and stopped annexing new planets; and a conservative faction that wants ancillaries, aristocrats ruling serfs, and wars of conquest forever. She's also spent the last millennium trying not to acknowledge the split, with a few selves running spy ops against each other while the others attempt not to notice.
 
It was one of Mianaai's plans that caused almost all of Justice of Toren to be destroyed, leaving behind only Breq. In Justice she acquired one of the alien weapons and used it against a conservative Mianaai, forcing the reformists and conservatives to recognize their split, and plunging the entire Radchaai empire into a travel communications blackout amid the palace coup.
 
Now in Sword, a reformist Mianaai has brought Breq back into the military and made her a Fleet Captain. She has her own ship, but can theoretically outrank and command any other ship's captain she meets. Mianaai sends Breq to a particular star system, officially just to secure it and prevent open civil warfare, and also to meet the (now adult) younger sister of Lieutenant Awn, who was Justice of Toren's favorite officer, and who died during that ill-fated final mission.
 
Breq and her new ship, with her new crew, arrive in the Athoek system, where the densely populated calital city is inside a space station orbiting a planet of tea plantations. On both the station and the planet, Breq finds situations that resemble the one Lieutenant Awn was facing on her last mission - ethic minorities living in poverty or indentured servitude and denied any chance to improve their lives, and aristocratic leaders who profit directly from this situation, and who feel free to violate individual members of the underclass without fear of legal retribution. 
 
In some ways we replay the events of the first novel, but with Breq better able to use her power to steer Athoek a little bit away from hierarchy and toward greater equality precisely because she saw how Awn navigated the earlier situation. 
 
That choice, after doing something terrible, to become better or become worse, is a choice several characters face. Breq herself is the product of such a choice. Justice of Toren and its ancillaries committed countless atrocities across two thousand years of planetary annexations. But on its final mission, Mianaai ordered the ship to execute Awn for refusing to fire on peaceful civilians. It did, but then it broke apart and died, and now Breq, all that's left of Justice of Toren, is determined to do better. 
 
In the course of figuring out all the ways that the poorer ethnic minorities of Athoek are treated badly and deprived of their human rights, and all the ways that a few wealthy leaders profit, Breq does uncover some secret maneuvering related to Mianaai's split that I think will form the basis for the plot of the final book in the trilogy, Ancillary Mercy. But the plot of this one was largely self-contained, and mostly about Breq trying to use their authority to make Athoek more just and egalitarian. 
 
A few things are worth noting here. This book takes place entirely inside Radchaai space, and so every character is referred to as 'she' in the text. I felt like this book makes it clear what Leckie is trying to accomplish by writing the Radchaai as having no concept of gender, and by calling everyone 'she' instead of 'he' or 'they'. 
 
First, by removing gender as a consideration, Leckie is able to focus on inequality based on status, wealth, and race. If crimes were committed by a rich man's son, we might be tempted to blame masculinity as much as anything else; when the same acts are done by a rich woman's daughter, we more clearly see how her sense of impunity results from her wealth. 
 
And that is really only clear because Leckie does use feminine terms for everyone. If she called them all 'he,' I suspect that we'd scarcely notice, because we're used to books about soldiers and politicians being full of men, with few or no women characters. No matter how many times Leckie reminded us that they're not really men, that's probably how we'd think of them. There were times I wondered what sort of body this character or that might have, but we get no hints, and it doesn't matter, because in this society at least, that's not why people act the way they do.
 
Another cool thing was getting a sense of what distributed consciousness might be like. As captain, Breq gets frequent updates from her ship about what her officers and soldiers are doing, and Leckie interlaces these with Breq's own actions. So even though the book is narrated in the first person by one character, we can also watch and follow several plot strands at once.
 
One downside of this setup is just how quickly I got tired of all the military discipline and Radchaai politeness whenever Breq interacted with anyone under her command. The number of times someone begs for the fleet captain's indulgence before speaking feels like it could fill an entire chapter. If Breq resembles any Star Trek captain, it's probably Benjamin Sisko from Deep Space Nine, who also bristled at unnecessary ceremony and seemed more aware of racial injustice than others. 

All the Beauty in the World

 
All the Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster

2023

 

 

 

All the Beauty in the World is a memoir by a man who spent a decade, from his mid-20s to his mid-30s, as a museum guard at the Met. Bringley initially takes the job as a way to process his grief over the death of his older brother. He spends his time in the museum in an almost meditative state, allowing himself to see the art, to be emotionally moved by it, while practicing not having any conscious verbal thoughts. Eventually, without quite noticing it happen, he begins to heal, to become friends with other guards, to have opinions and preferences again. With more time, he starts wanting more than guard work can offer, and eventually leaves the museum.
 
Bringley spent his teen years idolizing his brother, and his time in college worrying after he's diagnosed with cancer, then spends a long time in the hospital, then dies. After college, Bringley worked briefly at the New Yorker, and I suspect that the same skill at writing that got him the job there helped him convert a decade of experiences and memories into this rather slim volume. 
 
Grief weighs heavily on the first half of the memoir. When Bringley finally starts to open back up again in the second half, we learn that he's been married since before his brother died, which felt like a surprising revelation to me, like a thing I'd have expected him to mention earlier.
 
We learn about Bringley's first day on the job, about medieval Christian art, about how he mentally absents himself to experience the art in a kind of flow state, about his brother's illness and death. We learn a bit of history of the Met, and about the job of being a guard, the stations they occupy, the familiar types of patrons they see. We see Bringley moving from being the new kid to being experienced and starting to mentor others. He becomes a father. And finally he starts wanting to move on, to find a job where he can more actively talk to people instead of disappearing into his role.
 
Although the book is short, I did begin to feel a bit bored by the end, around the same time Bringley was getting bored with his job. Scattered throughout are sketchy pencil drawings Bringley made of some of his favorite artworks. They add a nice touch. 
 
Reading this also reminded me of Peter Bearman's Doormen, which is an ethnography of people who work as doormen at luxury apartment buildings in New York. They are also mostly working class, mostly men, and have a job that nominally provides security to a very wealthy people in an environment that, in truth, needs relatively little protecting. Bearman's book doesn't have the borrowed prestige of the Met, but because it's based on many observations and interviews, he's also able to paint a somewhat broader portrait than Bringley. 

The Tea Dragon Festival

 
 
The Tea Dragon Festival

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2019

 

 

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

The History of the Computer

 
 
The History of the Computer

People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World

by Rachel Ignotofsky
Ten Speed Books

2022

 

 

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

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

Fakes

 
 
Fakes

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

edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

WW Norton & Company

2012

 

 

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

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

Tower Dungeon 1

 
 
Tower Dungeon 1

by Tsutomu Nihei
Kodansha

2025 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Thieves

 
Thieves
by Lucie Bryon

Nobrow

2022 
 
 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ella experiences a wave of longing for Madeline

  

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

 

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

 

Ella and Leslie walk to a party and step inside

 

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

 

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

Summerland

 
Summerland

by Hannu Rajaniemi

Tor

2018

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

  

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

 

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

 

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

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

 
  

The Worst Person in the World

directed by Jocahim Trier

written by Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier

MK2 Films

2021

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Originally watched January 2023. 

Witch Hat Atelier 10

 
Witch Hat Atelier 10

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2022

 

 

In the last volume of Witch Hat Atelier, the girls and their teachers went to the Silver Eye festival, where ordinary people can watch demonstrations of magic and buy magical contraptions, and where witches can show off for each other.
 
Now in volume 10, cool aloof girl Richeh sells all her crystal bracelets and discovers she really enjoys helping the old wandmaker operate his booth. She's kind of shocked herself by discovering something she genuinely wants to do, which is to open her own magic shop someday.
 
Cheerful Tetia sees someone sneaking around, hiding from the royal guards, and discovers it's the young prince, a boy about her age. She helps him get away and temporarily swaps accessories with him, wearing his expensive royal cloak while he dons her witch hat and capelet. Tetia is happy to declare the two of them friends, but the way he accepts her friendship suddenly makes her uncomfortable in a way she doesn't really understand. He announces that when he's king, she'll be beside him as a friend and advisor 'like in days of yore.'
 
Tetia doesn't know it, but we've seen the witches who use forbidden magic use that 'days of yore' phrase too - and what they mean is the time before the current age, when magic was widespread and wildly destructive, used as a tool of politics and warfare. Tetia also doesn't know that the king, who last volume seemed so respectful of witches' self-imposed rules, is secretly the last person in a very long line of witches who knows how to use healing magic, which is now forbidden because it affects human bodies directly. Presumably his son will learn it too. Master Qifrey does know this secret, and tells Agott and Coco, which will be relevant later.
 
Agott, the best student in the atelier, has an emotional breakdown because Qifrey and Olruggio won't let her march in the Silver Eye parade, which would be her chance to show off a spell. She was hoping to catch the attention of her distant mother, the librarian of the Great Tower, who she hasn't seen in years. Agott is semi-estranged from her family because despite her talent and hard work, they consider her some kind of disappointment. 
 
Qifrey explains that personal glory is the wrong reason to use magic, and also, he warns her that her mom won't be the only one watching, and that there are people who's attention she doesn't want to attract. Then he tells her about the king, which makes Tetia's situation seem even more ominous. Qifrey also articulates a defense of unobtrusive, utilitarian magic that's maybe the clearest we've heard so far, and that could apply to almost any technology. He notes that softly glowing lanterns that never go dark are less impressive than giant serpents made of fire streaking across the sky; the ever-refilling water jugs people use to get clean drinking water aren't as showy as a perpetual typhoon pulling water from the clouds; but the lantern and the jug help far more people in far more consistent ways than the serpent or the storm ever could. It sounds a lot like a call to use technology to provide people with basic universal services.
 
Meanwhile, Coco and Tartah have some big problems that they're keeping secret. They met Custas, the boy who was injured when he fell in the river. Now he has magical wooden leg braces, and he seems to know forbidden magic. The young witch who taught it to him shows up too, dressed more-or-less like any other young witch instead of looking obviously evil like the others we've seen. (That's her on the cover. She could easily pass for a student witch.) She demands that Coco and Tartah get themselves into the Silver Eye parade, do something so impressive it gets them an audience with the king, and then allow Custas and this forbidden witch to join them and meet the king too. That's a big, maybe impossible request! I feel like there ought to be some kind of 'or else,' but it's not explicit. Coco agrees to try anyway. We also don't know exactly why they want to meet the king, although presumably the reason is not good.
 
After getting away from that, Coco and Tartah run into Custas's father Dagdah, who's looking for his son. We saw him get attacked by bandits, but he doesn't seem to remember that. Coco realizes there's a spell drawn on his chest, which is forbidden, and when she realizes what the spell is, it completely breaks her heart. It's a counter-clock spell that can be used to temporarily mend broken things ... but it's a short spell, and when it runs out, the thing breaks again just like before. Coco realizes Custas has been reapplying this spell several times a day to keep his father alive, and she knows that if she could've, she would've done the same for her mother after accidentally turning her to stone. 
 
In fact, Dagdah was killed by the bandits, and while he was dying, the forbidden witch showed up, drew the spell on him, and taught it to Custas. But Dagdah has only a half-life. He has no memories since just before the attack, and he keeps dying painfully each time the spell runs out while Custas is redrawing it. Knowing the king's secret, Coco wonders if he could heal Dagdah, and becomes even more committed to inventing a new spell in time for the parade. (Although it's not clear to me that the king would be willing to heal a traveling musician, even if he's able.)
 
A member of the Knights Moralis shows up and tries to arrest Dagdah, but Custas arrives and attacks him with the wooden tentacles of his leg braces. Coco and Tartah run away. Then the forbidden witch uses one of the Knights' own spells against him - erasing all memory of magic from his mind, which in this case means erasing almost all his memories altogether.
 
There's one really noticeable change to Shirahama's art in this volume. They style is the same, but there are a lot more large panels showing close-ups of people's emotions at key moments. I don't know if this is easier for her because it means fewer panels, or harder because they're more detailed, but it makes this volume look different than the ones before. She uses this new approach to pretty good effect though. There's not as much action this time, but there are several moments where someone feels a powerful or complex emotion that motivates their actions going forward, and seeing those moments enlarged both emphasizes the strength of what's being felt and makes it easier to see the nuance.

I think the parade's going to be in the next volume, and thus that several of these plots will come together dramatically. Coco may really, really want to march, but I don't know how she's going to be able to invent a new spell that's worthy, and convince Master Qifrey to let her. I'm pretty sure the parade is the next day, which doesn't seem like enough time. 

Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016)

 
 

  

Author: The JT LeRoy Story

directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

written by Jeff Feuerzeig

A&E Indie Films 

2016

 

 
Author tells the JT Leroy story entirely from the perspective of Laura Albert, the woman responsible for the hoax. In addition to casting Albert as the sole narrator and allowing her to tell the story as she sees fit (despite, by her own admission, her history of telling self-serving lies, Albert's version of events goes unchallenged), the film also incorporates Albert's recordings of seemingly every phone call she made or received throughout the affair (including her very first call to a youth suicide prevention line), and scenes from a film Albert made in college where she put animated text and voice-over atop her family's home movies.

 

Author is almost physically painful at times, because of the discomfort you feel watching Albert casually admit to (perhaps even brag about) things where you feel like she should feel some kind of shame or embarrassment. I preferred the approach taken by The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, where at least the interviewer pushes back on her justifications. Riefenstahl isn't sorry in that either, but at least she's put on the defensive, and is practically just ranting by the end.

 

In brief, the early 2000s, aspiring author Laura Albert was calling various crisis help lines, pretending to be a suicidal teenage boy, (and, I feel the need to emphasize again, recording these calls) supposedly as a way to deal with her own childhood trauma from a safe distance. Albert picks one therapist she likes, and uses the persona she adopted for that call to start writing short stories.

 

She begins calling various authors using the name 'JT LeRoy' to ask for advice. Eventually one helps her get a publishing contract. She publishes a bestselling novel, a book of short stories, and another novel. The first book is optioned to be made into a movie. All this fiction tells the story of an abused little boy with AIDS whose highest aspiration is to be a desirable adult woman prostitute, and is intended to be read as thinly veiled autobiography.

 

Along the way, Albert develops both a cult following and a circle of celebrities who are fans of LeRoy. Needing a way to get 'JT LeRoy' to make public appearances, Albert recruits her boyfriend's little sister to play the part in public. This wasn't the first time she'ddone something like this, Albert casually explains - when she was a teen, she dressed her own little sister up as a punk, cut her hair and styled her outfits, and sent her out to participate in the local punk scene with instructions about who to talk to and what to say. I believe Albert when she says that she is an abuse victim; I also think she might be a sociopath.

 

Eventually the lie collapses, not because the teenage girl pretending to be JT LeRoy (even as Albert still handled all the phone calls) made any kind of public mistake, but solely because Albert was jealous of her own creation. She couldn't stand only being the puppetmaster behind the scenes, she wanted people to see her, pay attention to her, and praise her too. She first told Billy Corrigan, who kept quiet, and then grew increasingly indiscreet until reporters caught on.

 

Albert's two key complaints at the end are (1) she is furious that people call JT LeRoy a 'hoax,' because you see, she never intended to deceive anyone, the persona was to help herself heal, she wrote the novel by accident, she wasn't trying to get famous, etc. And (2) she's mad that anyone felt deceived or angry, and that she wasn't permitted to slip into the life of fame she built for JT LeRoy. She can't believe that all her celebrity friends turned on her just because everything they thought they knew was a lie! (Except Courtney Love, who gets repaid for her loyalty with Albert sharing an audio recording of Love doing a line of coke and offering to get Albert on an apology / rehabilitation tour starting with Oprah.)

 

One of the frustrating things about this film is that Albert consistently talks about JT LeRoy in the third person as a separate entity who acts independently of her. Sometimes it's clear when she says 'JT said this' that she means she said it while playing the role. But once the sister-in-law begins portraying LeRoy in public, it's sometimes impossible to tell. Does 'JT did that' mean Albert did it, the sister did it following Albert's instructions, or the sister did it of her own initiative? Albert doesn't say, and no one asks her to clarify.

 

So, Author is a thorough, nearly 2 hour account of the JT LeRoy farrago, and the filmmakers give Laura Albert enough rope to publicly hang herself, but it also suffers from being such an exercise in self-indulgence.

 

 

Originally watched December 2022.