Arca

 
Arca

by Van Jensen

art by Jesse Lonergan

IDW

2023 

 

 

A few years ago, I read an article someone who attended a conference for billionaires who wanted to strategize how to survive the apocalypse in luxury and comfort. Obviously they'd want a well-furnished compound and a retinue of personal servants; equally obviously they'd want a cadre of well-armed thugs to defend the lair from outsiders and force the servants to work. But how to ensure the loyalty of the private army when there's no way to pay them anything of value? Is it better to use Suicide Squad bomb implants, or addiction to Ketracel White? I kept thinking about this article while I was reading Arca.
 
The city in a bottle is a classic kind of dystopia, the bad place you can't escape because you can't go outside, or because there's nowhere else to go. I would place Arca alongside a few other recent examples, like the Silo and Fallout tv series. Arca is a scifi graphic novel by Van Jensen and Jesse Lonergan, set on a spaceship fleeing the ruined Earth for a distant planet Eden. The wealthy citizens are protected by the crew and served by the young settlers, who get to retire from servitude once they become adults. This retirement is totally comfortable, it just takes place on a different part of the ship where they're never seen or heard from again. But they'll be vital to the colonization process once the ship reaches Eden, in just a few years more.
 
In any city in a bottle story, you know that the populace is being lied to, and thus that you the reader are being lied to. The pleasure of surprise and discovery in these stories comes from learning the truth, and especially from learning you were being lied to even more than you thought you were. Lonergan's visuals build dramatic irony from the start, pairing Jensen's anodyne descriptions of the harmonious society aboard Arca with images of citizens who look instantly suspicious and untrustworthy, settlers who seem oblivious and naive. Arca as a whole is incredibly successful at showing us Arca's mythology, how it really works, and what it would be like to have to live in it.
 
Our viewpoint character is Effie, a settler on the cusp of adulthood and retirement, whose curiosity is certain to get her in trouble. Like Frederick Douglass, Effie is empowered by her ability to read, and thus her ability to understand the citizens and the system they've built much better than they expect her to. Effie seeks out the truth, and finds it, and does indeed get in quite a lot of trouble. I don't know if Jensen read the same article I did, but he seems to share the same assessment of our current billionaires' motivations and goals.

FOUND Polaroids

  
 
FOUND Polaroids

by FOUND Magazine

Quack! Media

2006 

 

 

FOUND Polaroids is a small art book published by the creators of FOUND Magazine, showing off some of their collection of Polaroid pictures. FOUND was a collective art project started in the early 2000s. The founders, Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner, used the internet to solicit people to send them things they found that other people has lost, especially things like old notes and pictures. FOUND Magazine then curated the submissions and published a zine, then a magazine, then several books. In my mind, I place it in the same category as PostSecret.
 
I'm not completely sure of the criteria for photos in this book, beyond that they're Polaroids. (Surely their storehouse of regular film photos is much fuller.) Are these the best, the most interesting, or an attempt at a representative selection? Each two-page spread has a photo, the name of the sender, where it was found, and sometimes some additional context, like the circumstances of the find, or the sender's thoughts about what the photo depicts. These vary quite a bit in length, from just the bare facts conveyed in a handful of words (tweet-length with characters left over) up to a couple paragraphs.
 
There are no chapters or section breaks, but the photos are mostly grouped by topic. There are photos of parents with children, teens, parties, home interiors (including several bathrooms), cars, home exteriors, damaged or graffitied photos, people with pets, people with Santa, people with friends. 
 
Some of the photos seem like real losses - sentimental images the owner probably wanted to keep, sometimes discovered after an eviction. Others kind of seem like trash, not so much lost as littered or dropped. They vary in condition, mostly clean, a few pretty dirty and scuffed up, none pristine. 
 
Some of the photos, quite frankly, are boring. Some were so dark or blurry you could scarcely see anything, a couple were extreme close ups of stairs or walls, and some are just dull because they show an ugly, undistinguished landscape, shot with no sense of composition. I'd throw them away too! But the photos of people tended to be more interesting, if only because you might wonder what they're doing, what their relation is to each other or their photographer. One of the damaged photos had been found in a puddle, and the image was discolored as a result, which I thought was fascinating. 

Ancillary Mercy

 
 
Ancillary Mercy

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2015

 

 

Ancillary Mercy is the final book in Ann Leckie's trilogy following the last surviving segment of an imperial warship's computer mind, now confined in a single cybernetic body. For 20 years, Breq has been living in a single human body, mourning the loss of the rest of herself (both her ship-self and the dozens of other networked bodies that collectively made up her electronic brain), and planning revenge on Anaander Mianaai, the emperor of the Radchaai Empire. 

 

Mianaai is also distributed across countless bodies (clones, in her case). She has ruled the Radch for 3000 years, and for the past 1000 she's been in an unacknowledged cold war with herself after wiping out an entire star system - revenge for them resisting annexation into the Radch using weapons supplied by the alien Presger. After the massacre, Mianaai signed a treaty with the Presger and began reforming the Radch, eventually including no annexing new star systems into the empire, and no longer making ancillaries (the cybernetic bodies, like Breq, made from recently annexed civilians). But part of her never wanted to admit the massacre was wrong, and has been covertly scheming to force a return to unapologetic colonialism and chauvinism ever since.

 

We learned this, in flashback, in Ancillary Justice, as Breq remembered being the warship Justice of Toren, who was overseeing the last annexation, where the ultra conservative part of emperor Mianaai was secretly trying to stir up ethnic conflict as an excuse to start a mass killing of civilians. One of Justice of Toren's officers refused to go along and was summarily executed, Justice of Toren was heartbroken, and that part of Mianaai triggered the destruction of the warship, with the segment-body that eventually became Breq as the only survivor. In the book's present, Breq hunted down the only remaining alien weapon capable of killing Mianaai, the Presger gun, and took responsibility for a former officer, who'd been cryogenically frozen since the planetary massacre, and who, since being awoken 1000 years after her time, had become depressed and addicted to space drugs.

 

Breq managed to kill at least one segment of Mianaai, and more important, forced all of the emperor to realize that she was no longer one coherent mind spread across her many bodies, triggering open civil war. In Ancillary Sword, a reformist segment of Mianaai made Breq a fleet captain, gave her a ship and crew, and sent her to take control of a star system, including the inhabited planet, the space station orbiting the planet, and a couple warships with unknown loyalties. Breq agreed mostly because her favorite officer, the one who was executed for refusing to fire on civilians, that officer's sister worked on the station. 

 

Once she arrived, Breq found a situation similar to the one at the time her ship-body was destroyed - the station was ethnically divided, and someone was cynically trying to stir up violence against the minority for their own benefit. This time the person orchestrating events was merely a wealthy private citizen, not the emperor of known space, so this Breq was able to out-maneuver her, expose the manipulation, and use her authority as fleet captain to impose fairer conditions for the minority group. It's like a more successful replay of the events that led to Justice of Toren's destruction. Unfortunately, during the chaos, a Translator, a human raised by the alien Presger to act as a diplomat, was killed in what was essentially a police shooting, when she was mistaken for a member of the minority group violating curfew.

 

Now in Ancillary Mercy, Breq fears the star system will be attacked by the conservative part of Mianaai, and also that the Presger, who are vastly technologically superior to the Radchaai empire, will retaliate for the killing of their Translator. Very early on in the book, the Presger send a new Translator, and station security arrests an infiltrator - an ancillary from a 3000 year-old star ship that survived the war that led to Anaander Mianaai becoming emperor, that's been hiding out in a neighboring star system ever since. Because the ship is still intact, even if out of communication range, this segment has basically the same mind as the whole, as Breq did when she was just one segment of Justice of Toren. This segment, like its ship, wants to kill Mianaai, and has come to see if Breq might be a potential ally.

 

In the previous book, I really liked Translator Dilique, and missed her after she died. Translator Zeiat is a little more business-like, although she's so psychologically different from human humans that she still seems comedic. We get some cryptic, but still fascinating, hints about how the alien Presger think. They fundamentally can't understand any distiction between different types of humans, between the Radch and non-Radchaai, for example. When Breq is injured and her leg is amputated partway through the book, Zeiat thinks she's now a completely new person who happens to slightly resemble the precious fleet captain. Even 'Dilique' and 'Zeiat' seem like they might be roles instead of names, like if an interrogator introduced themselves as 'Officer Goodcop' - although that's just my interpretation, and it might be wrong.

 

Anyway, as expected, the most conservative part of Mianaai arrives and takes over the station (which, as emperor, no one can refuse her), with the goal of killing Breq, destroying her new ship, and either fully conquering or destroying the station. Breq wants to protect the station and its people, which takes priority over revenge. Fortunately, because of the ongoing civil war, the emperor isn't nearly as laden with resources as she could be - she comes with only a single body, a handful of ships, and no guarantees that reinforcements might arrive before the reform faction does. Plus, Breq still has the Presger gun, which can not only pierce Mianaai's armor, it can destroy Radchaai space ships ... if you can hit one, which isn't easy, because it's a hand gun, and they're, you know, space ships.

 

Breq has the gun, and her pair of strange new potential allies, but her greatest asset is the earned loyalty of almost everyone living on the space station thanks to her actions during the crisis in the previous book. Meanwhile Mianaai shows up angry and paranoid, accidentally damages the station and kills a transport shuttle full of civilians by crashing into them upon arrival, immediately demands the total obedience of everyone on the station, including the station's computer mind, and restricts all the civil liberties and elements of self-government that Breq had been granting. There's no grand violent conclusion, and little about the wider civil war is resolved, but Breq does manage to protect the people counting on her (and they, collectively, protect her) in what feels like a local victory for equality and democracy over hierarchy and authority. 

 

In Ancillary Justice, and to a lesser extent in Sword, the Radchaai's absence of a concept of gender and universal 'she' pronoun for all humans was something Breq had reason to talk about several times, especially when she interacted with gendered non-Radchaai humans. But in Mercy, it fades into the background. Everyone is still she, but the book never draws attention to it or comments on it.

 

Outside this trilogy, Leckie has written a few more books set in Radchaai space, and her success in telling this story has me curious to see more.  Structurally, it seems like these books might be similar to Iain Banks's Culture novels, where they share a broad setting, but don't necessarily have recurring characters or locations, and where we view the society from many angles and perspectives across the books, mostly from the edges where it touches outsiders.

Colossal (2016)

 
 

Colossal

directed by Nacho Vigalondo

written by Nacho Vigalondo

Neon 

2016

 

  

In some of the best literary scifi, the thing (whatever it is) is obviously a metaphor, but also treated as a real thing in its own right. The thing doesn't need to make sense, it doesn't have to be scientifically plausible. What it needs is to resonate emotionally. One of the best examples I can think of is Kevin Brockmeier's short story "The Ceiling", where a literal ceiling appears in the sky and begins lowering to Earth, slowly crushing all of human society beneath it, just at the same time the protagonist finds out his wife is leaving him.

 

Colossal is like that, and it's so much better than you can possibly expect it to be, in part because it spends its first act convincing you it will be dumb, before revealing in the second act that it's so, so smart.

 

Anne Hathaway is unemployed, spends every night going out drinking, and lives in the city with her boyfriend, Dan Stevens. He gets tired of her and throws her out, so she moves back to her parents' old house in a small town, where she reconnects with her childhood friend, Jason Sudeikis. He owns a bar, gives her a job as a waitress, and she hangs out every night getting drunk with him and two buddies. It's obvious he likes her, that he likes her likes her, and maybe she's starting to like him too? This part of the film is pitch perfect romcom, and you think you know where it's going, but you don't.

 

Also, just when Hathaway moves back home, a giant kaiju monster starts appearing in Seoul, Korea, and kind of wrecking up the place. Andy is astonished, then horrified as she slowly realizes that the monster mirrors her movements at a particular time, when she's at a particular place in town. She shares this information with the others, who first don't believe her, then are amazed, but also kind of treat it like a joke, especially when they're drunk, which they always are. Amazingly, Sudeikis can also manifest a giant robot when he's in the same spot.

 

At first, this all seems too silly. It's an absurd premise, and none of the characters take it too seriously. It initially seems like the film won't take it seriously either, and all the fear and destruction is South Korea will just be a joke, a prop, something that happens too far away, to people who are too foreign and too Asian to be treated as though they're as important as whether or not a couple of White people fall in love.

 

Then, two things happen that change everything. First, Hathaway falls, destroying buildings, killing hundreds, and feels devastated by guilt. Second, she sleeps with someone. Not Jason Sudeikis, but his handsome friend she's had her eye on since the first night.

 

And this is when the movie gets smart. After Hathaway bangs his friend, Sudeikis's character shows us what kind of man he really is. His nice guy persona, the one the actor is famous for, makes us think the character is nice too, before revealing just how angry and controlling he is, before revealing that he'll blackmail Hathaway by threatening to destroy Seoul unless she submits to him. To prove his point, he wreaks some havoc, in a poignant scene where we see him stomping in the dirt, but hear monster movie sound effects of giant footfalls and crowds screaming.

 

Initially, it seemed the monsters were just a metaphor for the destruction drunk people can cause without intending to. The trip-and-fall and the deaths it caused perhaps analogous to a drunk driving car crash. And maybe it is, but flashbacks reveal that it's also a specific moment from the two lead characters' shared childhood. A moment when he was bad and hurt her, still replaying after all those years, now grown to colossal proportions as they're adults.

 

Dan Stevens shows up again, briefly, to try to win her back, but Hathaway isn't a prize. They're both bad boyfriends (although Sudeikis is worse!) and picking one of them isn't what she needs to do.

 

Hathaway tries to stop Sudeikis on his terms, and she is a fierce fighter, but he's bigger and stronger than her. And even if she wins, can she really leave town and trust that he'll stay away from the spot that lets him terrorize her by terrorizing Korea? Again, the movie is smart. It takes the rules its taught us about how all this works, and shows us how Hathaway can use those rules to get the upper hand over Sudeikis, and make amends to the people of Seoul.

 

There's no reason why a dumb little movie, a romcom about a drunk girl who accidentally controls Godzilla, and moves back to her small town to learn a lesson about life and love, has any business being as good as this, but Colossal is very, very good.
 

  

Originally watched March 2023.

The Golden Mean

 
The Golden Mean

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Concludes
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1993

 

 

The Golden Mean is the last book in Nick Bantock's original trilogy of epistolary art books about the long-distance romance between Griffin and Sabine. 
 
The series started with British artist Griffin Moss receiving a homemade postcard from a woman he never met, Sabine Strohem, who lives on a South Pacific island. He replied back with a homemade card of his own, and soon they both found they were falling in love. Sabine is also an artist; she designs stamps for the island government. And she has a psychic connection to Griffin, which is why she contacted him initially.
 
Then Sabine decided to fly to London to visit Griffin. Faced with the prospect of meeting his penpal dreamgirl in real life, Griffin panicked and went on a trip around the world to find himself. Sabine stayed in Griffin's loft, and they continued trading postcards and letters. Sabine would have to go back to the island soon, so Griffin plucked up his courage and came home, only to find his loft empty... Strangely, the date on Sabine's last card sent from London suggests the overlapped by a week without seeing each other.
 
The Golden Mean leans a bit more into the supernatural elements of the story. Griffin finally develops a psychic connection back to Sabine, just as hers to him starts mysterious waning. They wonder if they're living on parallel worlds, or what else it could be. (Normally I might refer to this as a Lake House plot, except Bantock wrote this over a decade before The Lake House!) A menacing man starts following Sabine around the island, claiming to be a scientist who studies psychics, who wants to examine her and Griffin. The strange man starts writing postcards to Griffin too. Sabine and Griffin know they need to meet, and to escape the scientist, so they agree to find each other at the Pharaoh's Gate in Egypt. 
 
Later, an African doctor gets a mysterious postcard from Sabine that suggests she and Griffin have married and had a child...
 
Although The Golden Mean concludes the trilogy, it's clear there's more story ahead! As usual, Bantock infuses the postcards and letters with the characters' personalities. Griffin's cards are more surreal, and his handwriting is neat and precise. He types his letter. Sabine's cards use more collage, she handwrites everything in cursive in what looks like fountain pen ink. The mysterious stranger uses Sabine-designed stamps, but his postcards are store-bought unlike the ones the penpals make for each other. I suppose I'll continue reading to learn what happens next!

Paper Girls 3

 
Paper Girls 3

by Brian Vaughan

art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2017 
 
 
In the third volume of Brian Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls comic, the girls find themselves 10,000 years in the past, where they meet a cavegirl their own age, and the first person to ever travel through time, a woman scientist born in the 2010s. 
 
Much to the scientist's horror, her maiden voyage is to a past already despoiled by travelers from further in the future. Not only are teen girls from the 1980s already there when she first arrives, but a trio of menacing cavemen (collectively, the fathers of the cavegirl's infant child) are wearing space helmets and are using the Playstation controller button symbols to decorate themselves.

In Paper Girls volume 1, we first met the girls as they met up in their Cleveland suburb to ride their paper routes together, the morning after Halloween in the late 1980s. New kid Erin was introduced to KJ, Tiffany, and tough-girl Mac, who's kind of the group leader. Weird things started happening! Everyone else was frozen in place, and then started disappearing, with only the paper girls unaffected. White knights riding pterodactyls patrolled the skies, and a small gang of black-clad teenagers from the far future ran around looking for things to steal. When the teens' time machine exploded, the paper girls were accidentally sent to the 2010s.
 
Luckily, in volume 2, the first person they met was a middle-aged Erin, who took them in until they could figure out what's going on. Another future teen, this one a clone of Erin arrived, and accidentally brought some giant tardigrades through time with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown Cleveland, which caught the attention of the time traveling pterodactyl knights. The knights are led by an old hippie who operates out of a giant airship cathedral. 
 
Dramatic as they look, they seem to be trying to prevent changes to history. The heavy-handed tactic of putting every potential witness into some kind of temporary stasis seems to be in service of that goal. We don't know why the girls aren't affected, about Erin's clone suggested the reason she is a clone is so she could piggyback off of whatever's protecting Erin. While the airship and flying knights fought a city-destroying tardigrade, the girls fell through a hole in time created by all the disturbances.
 
Now in volume 3, we don't see either of the warring factions at all, we just see hints of how much they've time traveled based on the apparent changes to the prehistoric past. The girls get separated, with Erin and Tiffany meeting the cavegirl and then the time traveling scientist. KJ and Mac encounter a strange creature that looks like an inverted pyramid with tentacles. KJ touches it, and sees visions of her future, including her and Mac kissing, which troubles her, because she didn't realize she likes girls, and Mac is vocally homophobic. (Mac is also dying - in the 2010s she learned she has leukemia and only a couple years to live. She's trying to act tougher than usual to cover her fear.) 
 
KJ is slightly able to play off her sudden awkwardness as being caused by getting her first ever period while trapped in the Stone Age, although Mac, who's never had any sex ed because her Catholic family disapproves, is super curious. They manage to reunite with the others, agree to protect the cavegirl from the trio of cavemen, and agree to help the scientist get back to her time machine, which Mac and KJ saw earlier. Things don't go as planned! In the end, the time machine leaves on autopilot without the scientist, and the paper girls get caught up in it's wake and transported somewhere new.

The Last Human Job

 
 
The Last Human Job
The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World

by Allison Pugh

Princeton University Press

2024

 

 

The Last Human Job is social theory that's deeply grounded in interviews and ethnographic research that author Allison Pugh conducted with people in a wide variety of caregiving professions, including hair dressers, home health aides, teachers, chaplains, and medical doctors. Pugh has two goals - first to name and describe the work of making an authentic connection with another person, and second to show how this necessary labor (and the workers who do it) are being degraded by various attempts to accelerate and automate it.
 
Pugh identifies what she calls connective labor, which is work we do while interacting with another person. It's the work of listening to them and responding back to them so that they feel understood, they feel seen. Care work often requires connective labor as part of the job - but so do lots of other kinds of work too. Pugh thinks we often fail to recognize this as a kind of work, and she thinks that for many jobs, how well the worker can connect with the client determines how well the actual job will go. A good hairdresser, for example, isn't just good at styling hair, but at knowing how each person wants their hair to be styled, understanding how they wants others to see them. For some jobs, the 'real' work can't happen at all unless the worker can make a connection first. 
 
For one person to see another can sometimes be a powerful, profound experience, for both of them. It can also be draining for the worker. Jobs that require connective labor often have high rates of burnout. People probably vary in their innate talent for making connections, but Pugh thinks it's also a skill that can be learned, practiced, and improved on. Ultimately Pugh thinks that it's the organization of the workplace, much more so than the qualities of the individual worker, that determine whether they are able to successfully connect with their clients, and whether they can do so consistently and sustainably, without using themselves up. 
 
Pugh identifies three characteristics of workplaces that make it possible for workers to successfully provide connective labor to clients. First, they're set up so that workers are supported by leaders and supervisors who believe in the value of connection, mentors who can help them learn what to do, and peers who can act as sounding boards. To keep doing this kind of work, people need advice, encouragement, the ability to admit mistakes and learn from them. Second, workplaces support connective labor by making relationships an official priority. They recognize that they need to make a connection first, before they can do their 'real' work.Third, they support this work with resources - enough workers to meet client demand and enough time with each client to do the job well.
 
That last requirement gets at the heart of what Pugh thinks is the biggest threat to our collective ability to connect with one another. Connective labor often costs too much for the people who need it most to afford it, it pays too little for many of the workers to keep at it. There is too much work to be done, too many people in need, and not enough staff or time to do it all. And meanwhile workers are under constant pressure to see more people, spend less time with them, do the job faster, get more done, to do it without actually connecting at all. Collectively, these pressures threaten to reserve high-quality connective labor for the rich, while everyone else gets worsening service. And the worse the service becomes, the more tempting it is to replace it with some form of automation.
 
Pugh finds a few really common arrangements for workplaces that deliver connective labor to clients. There are mission-driven facilities located in poor areas, where staff are called on to be heroes, and there's always a backlog of unmet need. Workers here are often able to connect well, but become burned out from simply having to do too much, for too long each day. Corporate facilities have more resources and allow workers to have a home-life separate from their work, but they schedule lots of very short appointments. Workers are still overworked, and they're denied the ability to make meaningful connections. The personal service model is a luxury for the well-off. Workers have time and resources, but get treated like servants, and often feel bad about the people who can't afford their help. Set-ups that provide concierge-level resources to workplaces that serve the neediest people do exist, but they're much rarer.
 
From the outside, it seems like there wouldn't be quite so much unmet need if we didn't organize this work in such a way that it continuously burns people out and uses them up. I have to suspect that people vary somewhat in their need for connective labor. We might not be able to give everyone the concierge treatment, but not everyone needs it. But also, the people who need it most are probably the least able to afford it. Again from the outside, government funding seems like the obvious solution to this mismatch. Especially because programs like housing-first approaches to homelessness, or assigning care coordinators to patients with complex conditions, or experiments with unconditional basic income always produce better results and cost less long-term than the way we usually do things.
 
The threat to connective labor comes primarily from corporations, governments, and other leaders who all want to find ways to spend less money on it. Inevitably, these plans involve some form of automation. By automation, Pugh does not primarily mean things like replacing therapists with genAI chatbots - although she does explicitly consider that companies might try to deprive poorer clients of any human contact at all. Automation here refers to any attempt to use technology or organization to divide work into smaller components so that they can be performed more efficiently. Pugh argues that leaders are currently trying to do to care work and connective labor what the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line did for manufacturing.
 
Automation promises to save workers from burnout by helping them work more efficiently, but mostly worsens it by raising expectations for how much they should be able to do while draining their work of autonomy and meaning - the things that make it satisfying. And despite their promises, automation schemes often actually add tasks and take more time - but that time is moved away from clients and onto the work of following and documenting the automation protocols.
 
The most common forms of automation for this kind of work are scripting and counting. By scripting, Pugh means a whole variety of ways that work can be standardized by employing scripts, templates, manuals, checklists, flowcharts, etc. The goal is to make it go faster by making it go the same way every time (this is also a hedge against incomplete or low-quality interactions). But of course clients' lives and problems aren't scripted, and might need more time or a different approach than has been allotted to them. 
 
Counting refers to various forms of data collection. It's meant to track what's being done (especially useful for billing purposes) and to demonstrate that it's being done well. Customer satisfaction surveys and standardized tests for students are two common examples. Counting imposes its own problems - it's time consuming, it can focus attention away from things that are important but difficult to quantify, and it tempts workers and bosses alike to focus on getting the right number rather than doing whatever the number is supposed to represent.
 
The social theories we use as the basis of sociology were all about changes in the way people interact, know each other, and form communities in the wake of mass urbanization as people moved into cities, and about the ways they were affected by industrialization and the reorganization of work. Pugh is very much addressing those same topics, as they are relevant in the contemporary context.

The Tea Dragon Tapestry

 
 
The Tea Dragon Tapestry

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2021

 

  

The Tea Dragon Tapestry is the third and last of K O'Neill's tea dragon books. O'Neill has grown quite notably as an artist and a storyteller across the trilogy, and I think this is their best work. Tapestry is a direct sequel to the original Tea Dragon Society, although these's a brief cameo by a couple characters introduced in the prequel Tea Dragon Festival.

 

In each of the the tea dragon books, O'Neill pairs someone who's young and getting ready to move into a more professional stage of life with someone who's burned out from too much work, who's trying to heal and reconnect with themselves. O'Neill sees friendships between these two types of people as mutually beneficial, the younger one reminding the older of what they used to be like, the older one helping the younger navigate the confusing first steps of a career. The fussy little tea dragons play a role in this relationship by forcing both parties to get out of their own heads, to engage with the world, and to take care of something that needs them.

 

In Tapestry, we rejoin Greta who wants to be a blacksmith and Minette who used to be a prophet and now works in a tea shop. Greta has learned blacksmithing from her mother and gotten pretty good. She's ready for a new teacher to help her continue to grow. One of the retired adventurers who runs the tea shop sent one of Greta's spoons to the master blacksmith who used to make their adventuring swords. Now he's come to town to test Greta to see if she's ready.

 

Minette found a tapestry she started but never finished when she was a prophet, and starts having strange, symbolic dreams. I think probably for anyone who's had one career, and had to leave it, there's a sense of shame or failure around what you left behind and why you left it. Minette's task will be to accept that chapter of her life, and to recognize that she's happy where she is now, that she has friends, community.

 

Greta needs to decide what to make to demonstrate her skill. She's also worried about her tea dragon, Ginseng, who is not actually fussy, but instead in mourning after the death (from old age) of its previous caretaker. Meanwhile, the master blacksmith reveals to his old friends the tea shop owners that he's been burned out at work, hasn't taken a new student in awhile, and is thinking of just shutting down his forge. For the test, Greta makes a present for Ginseng to let it know she'll wait as long as it needs to recover from its grief. The gift also touches the heart of the master blacksmith, who sees something he hadn't thought of before, and feels inspired to keep smithing. He also decides that, instead of asking Greta to return to his forge, he'll settle here for awhile and reconnect with his old friends.

 

Across all three books, O'Neill has offered a defense of working slowly, making things of quality, making time to spend with friends and pets, and being patient with oneself because all these things take time. This isn't just a list of different tasks; O'Neill clearly sees them as interconnected. Artisan work is a way to avoid burnout, because it's a way of working that lets you savor what you like about your job without using you up. New friendships need not only be with people at the same stage of life, but can be between people who are in some sort of transition, and can support each other, no matter what they're moving from or to. And as I said, that thesis is expressed more clearly in Tea Dragon Tapestry than I think it has been before.

The Case of the Missing Men

 
The Case of the Missing Men
Hobtown Mystery Stories 1

by Kris Bertin
art by Alexander Forbes

Conundrum Press

2017 

 

 

The Case of the Missing Men is the first of what promises to be a series of Hobtown Mystery Stories, set in a very small fictional town in Nova Scotia. This is a graphic novel with black and white pen drawings. The backgrounds and scenery are quite detailed and realistic. The people are drawn in a way that shows all their human imperfections, especially on people who are dirty, injured, or have been shaped by a harsh life. The mystery here starts out like a typical case for teen sleuths, but very quickly becomes stranger and darker, so that by the end it feels more like a horror story.
 
The book's trade dress is clearly a homage to the Nancy Drew books, and the leader of Hobtown's after-school mystery solving club is a logical, confident blond girl named Dana Nance, who I think is supposed to remind us of Nancy Drew, even if she's not a direct stand-in. The other club members are non-identical twin brothers Denny and Brennan, who might be reminiscent of the Hardy Boys, and Pauline, who is intuitive, maybe psychic, and who doesn't seem to have a direct teen detective inspiration that I'm aware of. The case starts because new kid in town Sam is looking for his missing father. Sam and his dad look a lot like Johnny Quest and Mr Quest. I could be wrong though - the twins also remind me of the twin brothers in A Wrinkle in Time, Sam might be meant to evoke Tom Swift, or each could combine several inspirations, or what I think is a pattern might be a coincidence.
 
Dana and her friends meet Sam when she's assigned to be his study partner at school. Sam's been skipping class and acting out because he's stuck in a town he doesn't live in, his dad's been missing for weeks, and the local police don't seem to care. Dana and the others do care, especially when they learn that several other men have gone missing, though the others are from the margins of society, and Sam's dad is the wealthy owner of an aviation company. They check around town, looking into the last places the men were seen, while repeatedly being warned off by the police and Dana's dad. Then a teacher is murdered at school in the middle of the day, and the search uncovers the hidden corpse of a town councilwoman.
 
What started out seemingly straight forward keeps getting weirder and weirder. The teens spot some of the missing men, but their behavior is feral, inhuman. The solution to the mystery turns out to involve two separate groups committing murders, for reasons that reach deep into the town's history, with a number of prominent people implicated. The pace of revelation is good - the things we learn are strange, some are even supernatural, but each discovery helps things make more sense instead of becoming more confusing. What we learn is really dark, involving not only kidnapping and murder but also torture and brainwashing. By the end, the teens have learned some very heavy, adult stuff. This is not the sort of story where everything is okay at the end.
 
One story-telling device I'd like to note is that at a couple key points in the book, we switch from closely following the teens in linear time to a more distant perspective, with events related in flashback and under police questioning. The discovery of the hidden body, and later catching one murderer in the act are both depicted this way. The effect is like a chorus of narrators, with these important moments shown through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints - in fragments, from many angles. 

Two Serious Ladies

 
Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

Ecco

1943, reprinted 2014 
 
 
Two Serious Ladies was originally published in the 1940s, and has been kept alive since then by what appears to be a mix of historical curiosity and truly passionate fandom. From a historical standpoint, author Jane Bowles' husband Paul was an author and composer. I'd never heard of him, but apparently he's moderately famous in the literary world - he was friends with Gertrude Stein and her circle, one of his novels has been made into a movie, etc. So for someone interested in Paul Bowles specifically, or that literary milieu more generally, reading Two Serious Ladies could provide some extra context.
 
I don't remember exactly how I found the book, but it must've been a tip from a true fan. If you go looking for Two Serious Ladies online, you won't find a lot of stand alone reviews, but it shows up over and over in lists of recommended titles. Its cult following seems to be large enough that if you go looking for someone to tell you about their lesser-known faves, you're sure to find somebody trying to press a copy into your hand - especially if you're interested in "forgotten" women authors or books about women living unconventional lives. It was an interesting read for me, but I won't be counting myself among its evangels.
 
Two Serious Ladies follows two middle-aged women, Miss Goering and Mrs Copperfield, who are acquaintances but not friends in the same set of New York WASPs, as they each spontaneously and independently embark on a personal experiment to live differently, no longer bound by tradition or the norms for women of their social class. 
 
The first chapter introduces us to Miss Goering, who lives alone in a big Victorian mansion. The sister of her childhood nanny shows up one day, they get along well, and Miss Goering invites her to move in. Later she goes to a party, briefly chats with Mrs Copperfield, and allows herself to get picked up by a guy who still lives with his elderly parents.

In chapter 2, we follow Mrs Copperfield on vacation to Panama with her husband. (I'll admit this caught me by surprise; I'd presumed the new housemate was the second serious lady, and that we'd continue following the characters we'd been properly introduced to.) Mrs Copperfield is very anxious, and doesn't seem to enjoy going outside or being on vacation, while her husband is very energetic, wants to walk the whole city and then hike the jungles, and basically ignores his wife's discomfort. While he's out exploring, she ends up in a hotel in the red light district, where she befriends the elderly madame and one of the young prostitutes. She keep staying there even after her husband comes back, and tells him to leave without her at the end of the trip.
 
In chapter 3, we return to Miss Goering. She's abandoned her big house in the city and moved into a shack outside a small town on one of the islands near New York. Her housemate and the guy she met at the party live with her, though they both seem unhappy about it. The guy's dad abandons the city to move in with them too. Miss Goering takes a ferry to a slightly larger town, meets a guy loitering on the street, goes drinking with him, and then comes back the next day to move in with him. Her other housemates are pretty shocked that she's leaving them. She lives with the guy for a week, then dumps him in favor of a gangster, who presumes she's a prostitute. The gangster takes her home with him, then out to a nice restaurant where he has a business meeting.
 
While Miss Goering is bored at the restaurant, she calls Mrs Copperfield, who is coincidentally back from her trip for a few days, with her new prostitute friend tagging along, before moving back to Panama permanently. Mrs Copperfield shows up at the restaurant wildly drunk with her friend in tow. Miss Goering is appalled by her, and then the gangster leaves to go do business, abandoning her. The end.
 
The plot of the book is very odd, because neither Miss Goering nor Mrs Copperfield seem to be acting on any kind of plan or ideology. They each have an inchoate sense of wanting to do something different, and enough money to basically do whatever they want, and so they both advance toward their unseen goals over the objections of the people around them. 
 
Most of what happens is just people talking, just chitchatting, or talking about how they live or what they want to do, or trying to convince someone to go into business or on a date. It all seems pretty prosaic, not like anyone is the embodiment of any particular viewpoint. Our two serious ladies listen, then say vague things about how they think it's nice to do this, or they don't want to do that. They're impervious to persuasion or browbeating. But they don't really espouse any viewpoint of their own. If there's a genuine philosophical argument about how to live hidden in this dialogue, it's couched in terms we might think of as vaguebooking or subtweeting. I'm not sure it's there at all. Also everyone in the book drinks heavily, pretty much constantly. A lot of the dialogue sounds like what you'd hear a bar.
 
Bowles's writing deals almost exclusively with what people say and do. There's almost no interiority, no mention of what anyone thinks or feels, beyond someone occasionally saying something to themselves, like an aside to the audience during a play. It makes the women's already sort of mysterious actions seem even more opaque. I say sort of mysterious because what they're doing doesn't especially seem to make them happy, and we don't really learn any other motive or goal.
 
Another thing I read in this style was the short story "An Hour of Last Things" by George P Elliott, who is best known for having almost the same name as a much more famous author. In that, a woman's husband dies, she goes out to buy an expensive stereo system, and throws herself a big party, and like Mrs Copperfield, it's implied but not stated that the widow is attracted to a younger woman. Barbara Comyns' book Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is similarly almost Behaviorist in its refusal to depict interiority, but is a much stronger book overall, in my opinion. I'd happily swap it for Two Serious Ladies on any list recommending short, strange midcentury novels by overlooked women writers.
 
Just because it's not for me though, doesn't mean it's not for anyone, and women breaking with convention in pursuit of their own pleasure are certainly having a literary moment right now. There's even another new reprint of Two Serious Ladies, with a new intro and new cover art, out just last year. I'm certain the cult following will continue. If you're in the mood, I'd suggest sipping gin during Mrs Copperfield's chapter and whiskey for Miss Goering, perhaps starting off listening to Helen Kane sing "I Want to be Bad" to set the mood.

DIE 3

 
 
DIE 3

The Great Game

by Kiren Gillen

art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2020 

 

 

In the first volume of DIE, six teenagers in England in 1990 found six magic dice, and disappeared into the fantasy world of Die, an Earth-sized planet shaped like an icosahedron, a d20. They were trapped their for years, living out fantasy adventures in their roles as the mind-controlling Dictator, the lucky Fool, the emotion-powered Grief Knight, the cyberpunk Neo, the God Binder, who trades favors with supernatural entities, and the Master, who runs the game. Eventually the group learned a magic ritual that would let them leave and return home, but when they left, Solomon, their friend who'd first found the dice and acted as the Master, was seized by the evil Grandmaster who ruled the whole world of Die.
 
25 years after they returned, the now middle-aged friends got pulled back into Die. In the intervening years, Solomon had killed the old Grandmaster and become the new one. He wanted the game to resume, and the others couldn't leave without changing his mind or killing him. He holed up inside his fortress in Glass Town, protected by the armies of Little England and besieged by the armies of Eternal Prussia. The group has long since decided that although strange, the planet Die is real, and its inhabitants have the same moral worth as people living on Earth. Despite this, they also agreed to help Eternal Prussia break the siege and crack the giant bell jar protecting Glass Town so they could kill Sol and go home. The plan succeeded, but then not everyone was ready to leave yet...
 
So then in volume 2, the group split, then recombined, and split again. Initially, two members wanted to stay for awhile to avoid their problems back on Earth, while the others wanted to return immediately. With time to settle in though, everyone starts to feel guilty about what they did to Glass Town and worried about what Eternal Prussia might be doing in there. When they split up again, it's basically a disagreement about tactics instead of goals.
 
Now in volume 3, Dictator Ash and God Binder Izzy are co-ruling the nation of Angria, which is based on the fantasy world the Bronte siblings created together as children. The WWI-era hobbit army of Little England arrives at Angria's capital to demand Ash's surrender for her role in the fall of Glass Town. She arranges to meet with the Master of Little England, who turns out to be HG Wells. He explains that the German inventor of the original military wargame, Kriegspiel was drawn to Die, and his game formed the basis of Eternal Prussia. Wells blamed Kriegspiel for emboldening Germany's military, and wrote his own Little Wars game to try to discourage actual warfare. Ash disillusions him by revealing that WWI happened anyway, and Wells sets off in his time machine to do ... something. But the meeting succeeds in forging an alliance between Little England and Angria.
 
The others are all headed for Glass Town directly. Along the way, they meet a Fallen version of Neo Angela's daughter. The Fallen are like zombie orcs. When Sol became one after they killed him, they realized all the Fallen are former players who died on Die. They wonder how any Fallen could've already been there in 1990, if they were really the first players to arrive. (HG Wells and Charlotte Bronte are Masters, not players.) They also wonder how Angela's daughter could be there, and why she's years older than when Angela left. 
 
They learn from some helpful dwarves that Sol actually created the 12 toy soldiers that inspired the Brontes to write their Angria stories. Eventually the meet some Fair (robot elves from the future) who reveal that Die itself is from the future, but that it draws in people from the past to help ensure its own existence. It sent the toy soldiers back to recruit the Brontes, and the magic dice back to recruit Ash, Angela, and the others. What Eternal Prussia is making in Glass Town now, almost 30 years after their first visit, are the dice that will bring them here. If the dice are made and sent, the Die will merge with Earth in 2020. So Angela's daughter, and the other Fallen, are like the ghosts of people who haven't died yet, but will. Or they could all be saved, if the group can interrupt the creation of the magic dice...
 
Because Gillen is giving us a close-up view of these characters, we really only see three faces of Die - Angria, Little England, and Eternal Prussia, plus the Grandmaster's Realm on face 20. I can't help but wonder what would be on the other sixteen sides! 
 
Planet Die is an interesting villain. Like Roko's Basilisk, it's a malign intelligence from the future that's manipulating the past in order to ensure its own creation. Normally I wouldn't think if a planet as being a villain, but several characters who would know have suggested that Die either has or is being controlled by some sort of evil mind. I'm not totally sure how the Fair fit into this; maybe they're from further in the future, after Die merges with Earth. Ordinarily, in comics, I'd expect the good guys to win, but this is a dark enough fantasy that a downer ending seems possible. 

Physics for Cats

 
 
Physics for Cats

by Tom Gauld

Drawn & Quarterly
2025
 

  

Physics for Cats is the most recent collection of Tom Gauld's comics. All of these were originally printed in New Scientist magazine, and basically all of them are about academia or scientific research. Gauld draws comics to about the same dimensions as classic newspaper cartoon strips, although he usually draws them as just one big panel, only sometimes splitting them up smaller.

 

Gauld's humor tends to be gentle and absurd. We get jokes about competition among scientists, like a researcher who's jealous that his rival's failed experiment exploded more spectacularly than his own, or a lab that can't do any research because they spent all their grant funding on really cool looking scifi doors. There are other jokes about failed research, the risk that you might devote years to studying something that turns out to be less impressive than you hoped, or to trying to accomplish a task that proves to be impossible. Gauld's humor doesn't mock so much as it commiserates.

 

We get comics where the humor comes from applying scientific language or attitudes to another context, like when a scientist details their method of study before revealing that yes, they do know what they want to order, or when we experimentally vary the length of Rapunzel's hair and the height of her tower to observe the effect on the outcome of the fairy tale. There are also several comics where characters realize they're in a drawing.

 

Because they were all originally published in one place, and had a consistent topic to fit that publication, the comics here have more thematic unity than you usually get from Gauld. He's always had recurring subject matter - often about books, authors, and tropes of fiction - but this ends up being a more cohesive collection than previously.

The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife

 
The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife

by Premee Mohamed

PS Publishing

2024

 

 
The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife is a novella that blends science fiction and horror to tell a new version of a classic tale about human sacrifice meant to bring good weather. But unlike in "The Lottery", for example, there is a true supernatural threat here, not solely the indifference and cruelty of one's mortal neighbors.

 

In the post-apocalyptic future, twin brothers Lucas and Kit live in a farming village that ekes a living from the parched landscape. Once every seven years, the town gets absolutely deluged with rain, which heralds the arrival of a pair of hungry ghosts, the Rider and the Wife. Each time the heavy rains come, the ghosts appear and place a mark on their prey. The next morning the hunt begins. If the prey can survive until sunset, supposedly they'll be free, but if not they'll become the next Rider. No one is allowed to help; anyone who interferes will be killed immediately.

 

When Kit is chosen though, Lucas isn't willing to let his brother die without trying to help. They make a plan. Instead of running toward the river as people usually do, Kit will run to the distant city, abandoned when civilization fell. And Lucas will meet him there.Together, perhaps the can out-run, out-hide, out-think, and maybe even out-fight the Rider and the Wife. Of course it's not really that easy, and what they find in the city is much stranger and much older than they possibly could've prepared for. Almost the whole book is devoted to the chase, with only a little scene setting before it starts, and a glimpse of the aftermath after it ends at sunset.

 

Author Premee Mohamed maintains a frantic pace as the brothers try to keep ahead of undead hunters on horseback and their horrible, monstrous hounds. Just as she did in The Butcher of the Forest, she describes the otherworldly in language that's visceral and immediate, making her ghostly creatures feel disturbingly lively. If I have one complaint, it's that the worldbuilding is so expansive that the tale seems dwarfed by the world it's set in. There might even be a connection to the otherworld of The Butcher. That's much better than the author having too little imagination though, and the unexpected sprawl of the scenery never detracts from the urgency of the pursuit. 

A Fantastic Woman (2017)

  

A Fantastic Woman

directed by Sebastian Lelio
written by Sebastian Lelio, Gonazlo Maza, and Eliseo Altunaga
Sony Pictures Classics
2017
 

 
In the early 2000s, I read a law review article where my takeaway was that the main reason trans rights varied so much from state to state in the US didn't have much to do with local politics. Instead, it was because trans rights were decided by court cases brought by the other surviving relatives of a dead person, trying to stop the transgender spouse (nearly always a trans woman) from inheriting anything.

 
In one state, the first case like this might be a about a trans woman who was married to another woman, perhaps someone she married before her transition. In that state, trans women will be legally considered women, and because both spouses are women, their marriage will be nullified. In another state, the spouse who died might be a man who married a trans woman after she transitioned. In that state, trans women will legally be counted as men, the marriage will again be classified as being between two people of the same sex, and again, it won't count. The article's claim seemed to be that what decides the rights of trans people in each US state is which family got to the courts first, and set a precedent that affects everyone who comes after, in order to leave their particular widow with nothing.

 

The US legal landscape is completely different by now, partly because of the Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage, and partly because state legislatures have deliberated and passed laws instead of leaving it to probate courts to set policy. But I thought of that article while watching A Fantastic Woman because, while there are no courts involved, it's all about a rich Chilean family trying to box out dead Orlando's new girlfriend Marina, taking back, within days, the car she drove, the apartment she lived in, her dog, all the while never giving her a chance to grieve, and telling her that she's a monster for interfering with their grief.

 

(I recognize that this can happen to cisgender women too, whenever a young woman befriends or cares for an older man, whenever she doesn't have the protection of a legal marriage and a new will, as in Knives Out. But Marina has no Benoit Blanc, nor anyone else to advocate for her. And there's a larger critique of transphobia and homophobia at work here.)

 

A Fantastic Woman is a film of cruel ironies. When Orlando has an aneurysm in the night, Marina drives him to the hospital, but the police treat her first as a suspect, then as a potential victim who might've killed in self defense (though even this seems more like a pretext for the detective to force Marina through a physical examination to look for nonexistent injuries). They can't imagine her as an equal partner in her relationship, rather than as someone hired just for sex. Orlando's family takes everything from Marina, while accusing her of being a thief. She's assaulted by Orlando's son and his friends while they call her gay slurs. When she tries to sneak into the funeral, she's thrown out, and told she's ruining the others' ability to grieve for their loved one.

 

The only thing Marina has left from Orlando is the key to his locker in local sauna. To find his last, accidental gift, she makes a visual descent into hell, entering on the women's side, sneaking through the staff areas, then passing through the men's baths to their lockers. What do you think she finds inside? There's nothing that could make up for everything she suffers leading up to this moment, and the film doesn't pretend there is.

 

Although the story is realistic, the visuals are tinged with expressionism. There are maybe more mirrors and reflective surfaces in this film than in any other I've seen, and they're always used to emotional effect. The lighting is moody. And Orlando reappears many times after his death, like a ghost accompanying Marina, until he finally leads her to privately watch his cremation after the funeral.
 
 

Originally watched February 2023. 

The Best American Comics 2019

 
 
The Best American Comics 2019

edited by Jillian Tamaki

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2019

 

  

The Best American Comics 2019 ended up being the last one in the series. I sort of assume it was cancelled for reasons nebulously related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil, but that's really only a guess on my part. The series editor announced the publisher's decision in late 2020, but he didn't give any reason. He might not know it, or might not be allowed to say.

 

Jilian Tamaki picked 2019's comics. I think she chose fewer short comics than in the past. There are only a couple 1-2 pagers. Her excerpts from longer works feel particularly well-chosen to tell a complete sub-part of the larger story, which is something I've been critical of other editors about. I haven't been systematically counting, but I think Tamaki may have chosen a few more women artists than in the past, and I think the majority of her picks are nonfiction, mostly memoir.

 

Among the graphic nonfiction, we get Joe Sacco reporting on the petroleum industry at the oil sands in Alberta, Canada (the same region Kate Beaton wrote about in Ducks). Sophia Foster-Dimino has a harrowing account of her accidental pregnancy and abortion when she was in college and in an abusive relationship. There's an excerpt from Vera Brogsol's memoir Be Prepared about attending a Russian culture summer camp in America when she was a kid. And one of my favorite pieces in the book, Angie Wang writes about trying to find her favorite Chinese food in American restaurants, prepared the way she remembers it. Wang's piece was drawn for the cellphone, intended to be viewed by scrolling down and downward.

 

There were fewer fictional pieces. We get an excerpt from Nick Drsano's Sabrina about two strangers who are drawn together after both witnessing a murder, while omnipresent right-wing radio casts doubt on what happened in the background. I especially liked Unihabitable by Jed McGowan, a complete comic told from the perspective of a swarm of billions of nano robots attempting to terraform an alien world, then making peace with their failure. Like Angie Wang, McGowan (digitally?) painted his comic, making it look very different from the many black-and-white pen drawings that were the most common style earlier in the series.

 

I'll miss the BAC books. I've found a number of artists I like by reading them. There are a couple other comics anthologies I want to read, although they actually precede the Best American series.

The Story of My Teeth

 
 
The Story of My Teeth

by Valeria Luiselli
translated by Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press

2013, reprinted 2015
 

  

The Story of My Teeth is a kind of rollicking first-person narrative telling the life story of Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez. Gustavo has a larger-than-life personality. He's a former security guard, an auctioneer, a collector of knickknacks, a raconteur, a teller of tall tales, a man about town, a storyteller but also a bullshitter. As a character and the book's narrator, he's fun to read. The book was originally written in Spanish, and it's set in a suburb of Mexico City.

 

The Story of My Teeth is divided into a handful of chapters, and moves across the unpredictably. In the first chapter, Gustavo tells most of his life story. He grew up poor, got a job as a security guard at a juice factory, eventually got a promotion to crisis manager. He met a rich woman and lived as her kept husband, learned auctioneering, got divorced. As an auctioneer, he made his own money, bought a house and a collection of curios, including a supposed set of Marylin Monroe's teeth, which he paid to have implanted in place of his own.

 

The next chapter shows a single auction, where Gustavo sells off ten of his own teeth while claiming they each belonged to a different famous historical figure, from Plato to Virginia Woolfe. We get to read a vignette for each one. At the end of the chapter, Gustavo meets his long-estranged son, now an adult who works at the art gallery adjoining the juice factory.

 

In the third chapter, Gustavo wakes up drugged and disoriented in an art gallery. His son has removed all his teeth and stolen all the collected tchotchkes out of his house. Gustavo meets an aspiring young writer and makes him his apprentice; we learn that the first chapter was written by the apprentice taking dictation.

 

Chapter four has another auction! Gustavo and his apprentice break back into the gallery to steal back his teeth and some other things to resell. Gustavo makes up entirely fictional stories about the origin of each object to tell at auction, and we get those vignettes too.

 

The fifth chapter is a posthumous retelling of Gustavo's life by his apprentice. Seen from the outside, and without Gustavo's grandiosity, it all looks a bit smaller and sadder. This one is illustrated with photos of the real neighborhood where the book takes place. The sixth and final chapter was written by the translator, not the author. It's a timeline that covers Gustavo's life, key events in Mexican history that overlap with it, and anniversaries of events in the lives of the famous people Gustavo references in his tale telling.

 

Gustavo is an enjoyable narrator, and via his fictional auction catalogs, we get a collection of very short stories within the larger narrative. A running theme is the question of how much the value of objects depends on the objects themselves and how much depends on the stories we tell about them - and relatedly, how much depends on the truth of those stories. Gustavo freely quotes and tells anecdotes about real philosophers and other thinkers, often claiming them as his uncles or cousins. Jean Paul Sartre becomes cousin Juan Pablo Sanchez Sartre, for example, a whiny brat who yells at the other relatives that spending time with them is hell. There's also a fair number of quotes and anecdotes specifically about teeth.

 

The story of how The Story of My Teeth was written, explained by author Valeria Luiselli in the afterward, is nearly as interesting as the book itself. Jumex is a juice factory in Ecatepec, Mexico. Ecatepec neighbors Mexico City, and the way it's spoken about in the text makes me think it's a bit like the Jersey City to Mexico City's NYC. Some of the profits of the factory have been spent to amass a contemporary art collection in a private gallery next door. Luiselli got a commission from the gallery, and wanted to write something about the connection between the factory workers and the collected art. After she wrote each chapter, a book club made up of factory workers met to read and discuss it. She incorporated their ideas and feedback into her revisions and used them as her basis to write each new chapter, making them true collaborators. Some even took the photos that appear in the book.

Aperitif

 

Aperitif

Cocktail Hour the French Way

by Rebekah Peppler
photos by Joann Pai
Clarkson Potter
2018
 

  

Aperitif is an invitation to enjoy a French style happy hour, an apero, with friends. For author Rebekah Peppler, an American who lived in Paris for awhile in her 20s and 30s, this means drinks made with sherry, vermouth, and other fortified wines, and savory snacks to accompany them before dinner. 

 

Peppler starts of with an introduction to vermouth (plus its cousin quinquina), sherry, and a few recommended liqueurs like Suze, St Germain, and creme de cassis. Most of the ingredients she uses are bittersweet, which definitely gives the drinks she builds from them a consistent palate. 

 

Vermouth is made from wine that's fortified with a spirit like brandy, then infused with herbs, including wormwood, from which it draws its name. Quinquina is very similar, except the bittering agent is quinine instead of wormwood. Sherry starts similarly but gets its flavor from aging in oak barrels rather than infusing herbs. Peppler picks a few brands to mention by name - Byrrh, Dubonnet, and Lillet - but largely treats the various vermouths and quinquinas as interchangeable aside from grouping them as rouge, blanc, and rose, which is honestly what I do at home too.

 

Next there are four sections of drink recipes, grouped by the weather at the time you're drinking them - warm, hot, cool, and cold. Peppler says this is partly seasonal, partly based on time of day, and whether it's been rainy or sunny. The drinks are all relatively low alcohol, what Dinah Sanders calls 'shims'. Because of Peppler's limited ingredient list, and because many of her ingredients are categories with several options for how to fill it, a lot of the recipes seem like flexible templates. Others are oddly specific. There's a Kir drink in each season, for example, always with the exact same ratio, just changing the mixer, always blackcurrant liqueur (cassis), just with sparkling wine, lager, cider, or red wine.

 

There's also a section with recipes for snacks, various puff pastries, crackers, and seasoned popcorns you can make yourself, along with spreads to smear on them, tapenades and pates. There's a bit of advice for doctoring olives or preparing cheese to share, but the emphasis is on things you prepare more than things you might purchase directly.

 

I have a suspicion that Peppler's vision of l'apero has as much to do with the nature of her friend group in Paris (and her nostalgia for those friends, after she moved back) as it does with what's customary in France, but I think that's inevitable. Imagine what a French woman who lived in New York as a young adult might write about American happy hour, for example! But I do feel inspired to try out a few more vermouth drinks this year.

One Week in January

 
  
One Week in January

New Paintings for an Old Diary
by Carson Ellis

Chronicle Books

2024

 

  

I think it's just a thing that happens, in your 40s, to find old diaries and letters and things. I found a bunch the last time I moved. Over the past few years, I've heard from several old friends from college, because they found something like that and thought of me. Artist Carson Ellis made a discovery of her own, a diary she kept for a week in 2001, at the beginning of the new year, starting on the first day she moved into her new apartment in Portland. 
 
One Week in January is that diary, with the addition of illustrations showing the people and sights from that time in Ellis's life. If you don't otherwise know her (she's the author and illustrator of several children's books, for example), Carson Ellis is married to Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists. 

 

In January 2001, Ellis and Meloy were best friends and neighbors living in tiny studio apartments on a converted warehouse. The Decemberists had self-released their first EP, were starting to play their first live shows, and Meloy was writing 'Grace Cathedral Hill', a song that would go on their first full album, Castaways & Cutouts. 

 

Ellis had a crush on Meloy, while he was going on casual dates with several other girls in their social circle. She was trying to support herself as an artist, working on a couple big paintings, and getting smaller gigs making posters and flyers and the like. Already, she was making all the promotional art the Decemberists needed.

 

In January 2001, I was halfway through my first, very lonely year of college. I didn't get the courage to tell anyone I was trans until the start of my sophomore year, that fall. Later, in my senior year, I lived in a studio apartment about the same size as the one Ellis describes, although my building had private bathrooms and only the kitchen was shared. I went to a Decemberists' concert while I was in college, so only a couple years after Ellis wrote her diary, when they were still a small enough name to play at a bar instead of a larger concert venue, (though large enough that I'd heard of them).

 

image by Carson Ellis

 

Ellis's diary is surprisingly detailed and specific, and (in her own judgment, stated in the introduction) kind of boring. He diary captures her sharing meals with friends, trying to get work as an artist, checking her email to find nothing new, dealing with the hassle of getting her phone line set up, and on the last few days of the week, going out on the town and trying to have a good time with her friends, despite everyone's lack of spending money.

 

One Week in January is the kind book I think you can probably only make and have an audience for if you're already famous. The paintings Ellis made for the book do a lot to elevate a concept that would otherwise probably only merit a zine. I say this, but I am in fact glad I read it. It reminds me of a similar time in my own life, especially my last year of college and first year couple years of grad school, a time that was emotionally fraught and painful, but also full of nights out and fumbling attempts to create an adult identity. Ellis's paintings show the kind of scenes I used to take photos of, friends I was hanging out with, views of the city I encountered during the day and wanted to hold onto. It's a good book for starting a new year.