Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness

So, we recently passed the Winter Solstice, the astronomical marker that prompts folks to announce "Yay, the days are getting longer again!" Technically true, but if the amount of daylight is your metric, you might want to cool your jets a little bit, since we're still in the bottom of the trough and will be for a while.

You see, there are other, mostly overlooked marker days between the equinoxes (when there's an equal amount of daylight and darkness) and the solstices (the longest day and shortest day of the year), and it is these days that really indicate when the daytimes are a changing. Those days happen to have old pagan holidays associated with them:

• Imbolc: February 1
• Beltane: May 1
• Lughnasdh: August 1
• Samhain: November 1

Why are these days important? Well, let's look at the conditions this year here in the City of Subdued Excitement, Bellingham Washington. On Samhain, we had 9.9 hours of daylight, over 2 hours less than that at the equinox and clearly in the go-to-work-and-get-home-in-the-dark zone. The length of the day continued to shorten until it was 8.25 hours at the solstice. Now the days are getting longer - hooray! But we won't get back to that Samhain length until pretty close to Imbolc - we'll still be beginning and ending our work days in the dark until then.

Here's a graphic representation:

This perspective, however mathematically true, can be a bit of a downer, but it does provide a more hopeful outlook in the summer. When folks moan on June 21 that the days are getting shorter, I remind them that the top of the curve lasts all the way till August 1 and there's no need to fret until then! (In fact, Coco notices without any prompting  a change in the sun every year at about Lughnasdh.)

One last odd factoid - except for Lughnasdh, we still have holidays on or near these mid-calendar days: Groundhog Day, May Day, and Halloween.

So, celebrate the solstice with all great gusto if you will, but keep those candles handy.

Disclaimer: I used the 1st and 21st of the month as a quick shorthand;  the solar calendar actually wobbles a bit, so the markers in a given year may be a few days off in either direction.

INB 2022

Well, it's December 25, so once again we bring out the apples and rainbows and celebrate Isaac Newton's Birthday! (YMMV)

We had some sort of arctic blast/bomb cyclone/winter storm/cold snap meteorological event over the past week, but it ended just in time for the holiday: temps rose from highs in the teens into the low fifties, the rain came, and ten inches of snow disappeared in a few hours. Gotta love the Pacific Northwest weather, eh? Happy (wet) holidays!

You may recall that last year and the year before that and the year before that, Godzilla movies were the centerpiece of our holiday festivities. Well, we have run out of affordable/available Godzilla movies (the only ones not in the collection are the rarities) so we have moved to a parallel track.

When I was a kid, I loved what we called in the dialect "monstah movies". I like this as a term of art, because it distinguishes from the Japanese kaiju movies (which have a vernacular and tradition all their own) those typically American (and occasionally British) films about resurrected dinosaurs or  giant creatures (usually the result of Science Gone Wrong) wreaking havoc on the landscape, with the plucky Hero (generally accompanied by The Scientist and The Girl) struggling to contain and then terminate the threat. Nothing better on a rainy afternoon.

Unfortunately, there's no Criterion Collection of Monster Movies - or any other decent collection, for that matter - probably something to do with all them coming from different studios and having different rights-holders and whatnot. In any case, thanks to the modern miracle of streaming video, here's what's on offer today:

(Full disclosure: The Fly is not actually in the category of Monster Movie, since it does not involve an oversized creature, but rather a man who transforms into something horrible. But Coco really wanted to see it, so despite my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, we allowed it. BTW, this will be the original 50s version, not the Jeff Goldblum one.)

So, whether you are singing carols or lighting candles or burning logs or taking astronomical readings or perish forbid watching Monster Movies, I hope your holiday is everything you want it to be!

Season's Greetings!

 

Operation Inner Tube

 

So, it was 26 degrees with a wind chill of 20 and freezing rain falling - what better time to go inner-tubing on the remains of the ten inches of snow that had fallen this week!

We suited up and tromped around the neighborhood, crunching through the ice-crust on the snow, looking for the perfect steep-enough-but-not-too-steep incline for slide-down. After a few fall starts, we found the perfect site, the hillside from Fourth Avenue down to the dog park trail. Coco tossed her tube down, got on at the lip of the slope, and... nothin'.

The tube just cracked the crust and sank into the soft snow beneath, holding our intrepid daredevil immobile. Conditions were not ideal, at all.

 

Undaunted (and to my surprise), Coco began dragging herself down the hill, using the inner-tube as a snopwplow to clear away the thin ice crust and the top layer of snow.

With that apparent success, I enjoined her to have the first run, but she insisted that honor go to me, since I was still at the top of the hill.

The success of the plow plan was not merely apparent, but actual! Bolstered with enthusiasm, Coco trekked back to to the starting line, and...

And with that winter activity ticked off the list, we came back inside for another cuppa.

Solstice 2022

stock photo

 Here's a little factoid:

The December solstice (winter solstice) in Bellingham is at 1:48 pm on Wednesday, December 21, 2022. In terms of daylight, this day is 7 hours, 54 minutes shorter than the June solstice.

Not to put too fine a pint on it, but today we here in the City of Subdued Excitement will have 8 hours and 15 minutes of daytime; it'll start in a little less than a half-hour at 8:00 am and end at 4:15pm.

Everyone always says "well, at least the days are getting longer now!" True enough; however, I don't think we really feel a difference until  what some people call the Seasonal Sabbat - halfway between the solstice and the equinox - in this case, Imbolc on February 2. Until then, we're still in the bottom half of the bottom half, so to speak. Until then, we're still toiling in the dark, as it were.

Of course, YMMV. Happy Solstice Day anyway.

 ***

BTW, you may have noticed there hasn't been a book club entry for over two weeks. It isn't really a dry spell; more of a shallow spell. I keep starting books but nothing lately has really grabbed me, so I put that book aside and grab a different one. I am hoping to break the streak soon, but we'll see.

 ***

my photo

EDIT: This may be the shortest day if the year, but it looks like it's going to be jam-packed with daylight! While it is a cold 13 degrees still, it is clear and crisp and sunny! Now, that's what I call a solstice!

 

Solitaire Book Club: The Spare Man

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal. The high concept pitch of this story would be Nick and Nora Charles (and Asta) solve a mystery on a cruise ship in space. The idea is charming and appealing, and Kowal pulls off that pervasive sense of sexiness, privileged egalitarianism, and brio that  William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Skippy brought to the Thin Man movies. What got in the way for me was the integration of the technology into the fair-play nature of the mystery. In a mundane mystery, it can be presumed that reader knows how elevators and train schedules and delivery vans and telephones work, and what is plausible or not in any given set of circumstances. In a science-fictional setting, the reader doesn't have an intuitive sense of how the communication "net" works or how "spoofers" work to get around detection or how the spinning of the ship to simulate gravity creates an erratic Coriolis effect on different levels, and whether or how any of these are important to the story and solving the mystery. We also spend an awful lot of time hearing how the heroine dials up or down the pain-suppressant and mobility-assistive tech within her body without it really having any effect on the story or character development.

Nonetheless, I didn't put it down, and while it meandered a bit on a somewhat bumpy trip, it certainly brought me to a satisfactory conclusion.

Special note: This is the second book in as many months that begins each chapter with a drink recipe!

Solitaire Book Club: The Six Directions of Space

The Six Directions of Space by Alastair Reynolds. This is a short book -- reading its 85 pages this morning was akin to watching  a 90-minute movie -- so this will be a short review.

I am a sucker for alternate histories, and this story has the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan not only taking over the entire world, but also maintaining control for a thousand years and discovering interstellar travel thanks to the relics of a long-gone and unimaginably alien race. All this provides a great canvas for a tale of brutal politics,  complex spywork, parallel worlds, space battles, and ponies. It sometimes feels like a short story aching to be a novel, but it has enough rewards in its own right to be worth the read.

It won't take you long, anyway.

Solitaire Book Club: Station Eternity

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. I was drawn to this book by its core premise: if you really had life of Jessica Fletcher or Miss Marple - i.e., if murders happened around you all the time, everywhere you went -  you would probably be a psychological wreck, suspected by the police, and feared/loathed by others. There's already so much to work with there, but Lafferty takes this character and drops them in a post-first-contact world with a plot that includes a shadowy government agency, a deranged sentient space station, eight or ten symbiotic alien races, a serial killer, sabotage, and a battle between a spaceship and mecha, and creates supporting characters that include an incompetent ambassador, a fugitive military mortuary specialist, a concert violinist with commando-level combat skills, a rap star, and a psychotic black ops contractor. Whew! That's a lot!

However, Lafferty takes all this and spins a ripping yarn across 452 pages and somehow manages to keep all (or most, anyway) of the plates spinning. I kept on reading, which these days says a lot in itself. Worth the time, if you have the stamina.

And it looks like this is just the first in a series. Buckle up!

Solitaire Book Club: The Thursday Murder Club

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. The first few pages of this book made me think it was going to be a witty, frothy meringue of the "cozy" murder mystery genre; that impression was bolstered when I realized I knew the author from his work on various British quiz shows (which are more about the wit and humor than the quiz). Well, the book is clever, for sure, but it is much more than that. Osman presents an intricately detailed, complex, and multi-layered set of interlocking mysteries, the resolution of which plays out like a clockwork mechanism., and the ending to which is both surprising and inevitable, as Aristotle would have it.

But even more impressive is that the novel is not peopled by the stock characters so common even in well-crafted cozies, but by fully-realized human beings with all the depth and contradiction and doubt and fear and courage that we all carry. But it is still very clever.

A wonderful, rich work that transcends its origins.

Solitaire Book Club: Exhalation

Exhalation by Ted Chiang. This collection of short stories is simply one of the most rewarding books I have ever read.The prose is straightforward and unpretentious -- dare I say not very "literary"-- but every page is captivating. What Chiang does best, though, is bring the reader to a deeper consideration of ideas -- fate, free will, entropy, sentience, sapience, choice, consequence, truth -- trying to make sense of what it means to be a human being in a complex universe. Chiang may be the spiritual heir to Kurt Vonnegut in both style and depth.

I simply cannot recommend this book too highly - go read it.

Solitaire Book Club: Ministry for the Future

Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.  This is a formidable tome, comprising 106 chapter over 563 pages, with shifting points of view and narrative approaches, but it is finely craft and tightly fitted, like dovetailed carpentry, and the reader is never lost in its complexity. The novel - and at is core, it is a compelling novel, albeit with many other layers - presents a model for how we - humanity - could actually survive the coming climate change disaster, which will be literally apocalyptic unless we do something. Robinson outlines the technological, political, and economic changes that would be necessary for us to mitigate and even reverse the degradation of the environment, and they are all completely plausible - with one big if. 

In the novel, forces are brought to bear to curb the currently unfettered greed of the oligarchs, robber barons, captains of industry - the 1%. Some incentive is given by carrot, but an awful lot by stick. So countering the hopefulness created by the discovery of a potential escape route is the overwhelming sense when the book is closed that the billionaire class will never let any of it come to be, preferring their fantasy of being able to bunker down and ride out the end of the world while only the little people suffer.

Here's hoping that I am wrong.

Solitaire Book Club: Eversion

Eversion by Alastair Reynolds. This is a solid sci-fi adventure and then some. The reader moves through a succession of adventures in seemingly separate eras and milieus, each one echoing the others in theme but differing in detail, until an underlying truth is revealed and the real story can begin. Reynolds's prose is both engaging in and of itself as storytelling and also fashioned into an intricate structure that both conceals and reveals the underlying narrative. If ever the term page-turner applied to a novel, it fits here. I couldn't put it down and cannot recommend it ti highly enough.

I will be looking for Reynolds's other work.

Solitaire Book Club: The Bartender's Cure

The Bartender's Cure by Wesley Straton. This is a story of young woman, Sam, overcoming personal challenges and finding her way through life as she works as a bartender in hipster Brooklyn. If I were to pursue some Aristotelian categorization of this book, I would waver between calling it popular fiction or a literary novel. Straton uses an engaging conceit: each chapter begins with a drink recipe, and the character development and plot itself both progress in a way reflecting the drink and the story behind it, which we learn about along with Sam as she becomes more proficient behind the bar. The device never seems forced or awkward, so enmeshed are Sam's personal and professional growth; we move with her on her journey in a fully realized context, deep in the milieu she is moving through.

I have spoken before of my negative response to authors who eschew quotation marks; Straton has busted that bias wide open. Sam tells us a lot directly, addressing the reader as if relating an anecdote to someone at the bar; when she narrates a conversation, she tells us (the reader) what she is thinking, and then in the next instant we realize that it is what she has said aloud to her companion. The immediacy of the story-telling is sustained for the whole novel and it works.

Straton has not only created an engaging character and a story that carries us along, but she demonstrates a deep talent for the craft of writing. I will be looking for her other work.

Honored more in the breach

So, I was feeling a bit obligated to run a birthday post this morning, having the sense that it was a bit of a tradition, but when I went looking for actual evidence to confirm that, I found that I have done a birthday-centric post only in 6 of the prior 14 years.  Doing something 43% of the time is certainly considerable but it by no means qualifies as institutionalization. Nonetheless, I am here now, so I might as well get on with it.

Most of the burthday fuss came, of course, from Coco, who, even though she is recovering from the Covid and was at her first day back at her internship after missing a week, wanted to make cure the occasion was marked. 

Kicking off with the official commemorative photo (above), the day was marked with a Zoom call with family and phone calls with friends and texts with all kinds of folks and a bike ride to get some art supplies.

After Coco was finished for the day, we headed to Canada for dinner but a big accident on I-5 put the kibosh on that plan. I jumped off the freeway just before getting trapped in the backup and we had a wonderful dinner on our own local waterfront, during which Coco showered me with graphic novels. I will have plenty of reading (and instructive art models!) for some time to come.

And we can't forget the  other significant gift, from my Uncle Sam:

And there we are. See you next year. Maybe. There's now a 47% chance.
 

Hot Air Update

 

Just to let you know that after more than nine years since I first found out about it, the World Sky Race still hasn't happened. 

But big, big news: about two weeks ago, Prince Albert II, His Serene Highness of Monaco, announced that the race will commence in London on September 27, 2024!

AlI can say is: we shall see.

May 12, 2013.

October 18, 2014.

November 7, 2021.

Solitaire Book Club: FAME

FAME by Justine Bateman.I finished this book a few days ago but it has taken me some time to sit down and write this post, perhaps because the book is a bit confounding and I had a hard time getting a handle on my response. In fact, FAME is pretty much a hot mess, but in the best way, if that makes any sense. It's partly a memoir of a famous person, although Bateman opens by saying she  "fucking hate[s] memoirs". It's partly an analysis of how being famous affects an individual, complete with citations from scholarly sources. It's partly a cultural study of the role fame plays in modern (western, although this is left unspecified) society. And it seems it is partly a visceral, foul-mouthed, vibrant catharsis of a life fraught with challenges that are all artifice but nonetheless real. 

All I can say is that I was never bored and Bateman's self-assessment that she became a more interesting person as her "fame temperature" came down is spot on. I'll be reading her next book.

Solitaire Book Club: The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions

The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions by Kerry Greenwood. I have watched a few of the Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on some some streaming service or other, so I thought this collection of short stories about the Twenties-era Australian flapper-sleuth would be a nice way to dip into the written version of Phryne Fisher.

Greenwood clearly distinguishes between TV-Phryne and Book-Phryne, but I found that difference mostly in the supporting cast and continuity details; the spirit of Phryne herself seemed to carry very well from the page to the screen: self-assured, competent, stylish, and unapologetically libidinous. Greenwood describes creating her as a sort-of female version of Simon Templar or James Bond, with the same verve and drive, and in that she has succeeded. Phryne Fisher is a woman to be reckoned with, for sure.

What is less successful is the short-short mystery genre (the 17 stories in the volume average 14 pages). The mysteries are either too easy, leaving one to wonder why Phyrne was needed to solve them, or too oblique and relying on a bit of information not revealed to the reader. But I guess it was not really about the well-crafted whodunit it here - it was more a chance to spend some time with this formidable woman and be immersed in the Melbourne of  century ago. And that was a delight.

 

Solitaire Book Club: Mexican Gothic

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I am usually not a big fan of the horror genre, but I was captivated by this novel's protagonist, a sort-of mid-century Mexican Miss Fisher. Instead of investigating mundane murders,  Noemi Taboada is trying to uncover the secrets of her cousin's illness, her cousin's charming but vaguely menacing new husband, and his family home, which resonates with a history of acts that are perhaps both unnatural and supernatural. Although it threatens to veer into literary territory from time to time, it is mostly a straight-ahead melodrama, peppered with moldy rooms, misty graveyards, taciturn servants, a sympathetic but weak mycologist, and ancient rituals. Good stuff.

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is that I intend to look up Moreno-Garcia's other fiction.

Solitaire Book Club: The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse

The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse by Charlie Mackesy. I have never understood folks who spend a lot of their time writing negative pieces about stuff from art or popular culture that they don't like. I mean, if you don't like it, just put it aside and move on to something else. With the exception of my exploration of Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, these book reports (do you remember doing book reports?) have concerned books which I liked well enough to finish and so are generally pretty positive. I am going to break that streak here.

I got The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse because one of the blurbs on The Council of Animals referred to it. It is a short fable of a boy who keeps company with the three eponymous animals, but beyond that superficial structural resemblance there is little similarity between the two books. The Council of Animals was complex and sophisticated and it raised as many questions as it answered; The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse is naive, simplistic, and full of vapid observations and empty exhortations, about as deep as All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. If that's your thing, well, you do you, but for me it was all fluff and no substance.

It is almost a graphic novel with many wonderful gestural drawings in ink that were a pleasure to look at, which is why I finished the thing; if only one could ignore the words.

Starting to fall

So, I looked at the weather page today and the extended forecast takes us right up to the equinox.

It looks like we're going to have one last gasp of summer weather and then the long slide into the gray season begins.

I am trying to not be regretful and to just appreciate the good summer that we had - reliably good weather, no heat domes, and no smoke emergencies. We need the wet to keep in green, right? But besides the weather, we also have the change in daylight looming.

As I write this, it's about 5:40 am. I have been up for an hour - a bit of an early start, thanks to Selkie, but not that much. I have been doing my usual first-thing-in-the-morning business at the computer and just went back into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. It looked like this:

I was honesty surprised at just how dark it was, so I checked and sunrise was still almost a full hour away.

Now, I am not going to rail against the astronomical inevitability of the seasonal change in the LOD (length of day), although it does seem to surprise us every year; rather, I am beginning to wonder whether I need to be getting up this early. When I started my work day at 7:00 or 7:30 am, it was nice to have a couple hours beforehand for the aforementioned business as well as breakfast and whatnot. But I no longer start work at 7:30... or at any specific time. So why am I still getting up early?

The cat? He certainly contributes, but I could probably figure out a way to manage that. Habit? That certainly plays into it, but I am not sure whether it is just psychological accustomedness or if it is actually a circadian rhythm thing. I do get a lot done while Coco is asleep, but I get plenty done while she is up as well - over the pandemic, we've have gotten pretty good at staying out of each other's work-from-home way.

So, I dunno. I do know I need to start leaving some lights on.

Laboring

 

So, growing up I can remember reading copies of The Butcher Workman. This newsletter / magazine was in our home because my father was a proud member of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America.

In my own working life, I have literally sat on both sides of the table as both labor and management, and as a long-time public employee I have been a union member in several of my jobs.

It's easy to look at the numbers and see that since the eighties, with the ascendance of neo-liberalism, American workers have been losing ground constantly. The current increase in pro-unionism seems to be an enough-is-enough response to that.

Today is Labor Day, the one day set aside for capitalists to pretend they care and to honor the American worker. But we would do well to remember this:  the holiday was established by unions. 

You could look it up.

So maybe instead of just saying Happy Labor Day...

... we could remember the source...

... and continue to support the struggle.

Solitaire Book Club: Portait of an Unknown Lady

Portrait of an Unknown Lady by Maria Gainza, translated form the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. A quirky art aficionado, inspired by tales from her eccentric art appraiser friend and mentor, investigates the life of a mysterious art forger, who copied the works of a legendary painter. As the story unfolds, the measure of desire and the texture of the ineffable is revealed through the lives of these four exceptional women. Magical realism without any magic, the book is lyrical and poetical in its celebration of both the sublime and mundane.

Solitaire Book Club: The Council of Animals

The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell. I don't know if it's just me or the zeitgeist of the entire publishing world, but this is another novel set in a post-apocalyptic world. This time, humanity has caused an unspecified Calamity (an extinction-level event, at least for people); the few survivors, mostly under-prepared for subsistence living, are clinging to a tenuous existence; and  representatives of the different animal groups meet to decide whether to kill and eat these remaining humans. What follows, through episodes of debate, diplomacy, subterfuge, and misadventure is a lesson in trust, compromise, creative problem-solving, and tough-decison-making. McDonell imbues the animal protagonists with enough relatable intelligence and personality to fully anthropomorphize them but never loses their purely animal instincts, perspectives, and behaviors. The result is a narrative that is both real and fantastical, both instructive and entertaining, and always engaging.This was a read-in-one-go book.

Closing the circuit

So, in regard to this previous announcement, the SAWgust Project has ended early (for me) and details can be found in this post.

Solitaire Book Club: Clean Air

Clean Air by Sarah Blake. So, on the surface, this book is a post-apocalyptic novel set in a world where pollen has become deadly, self-driving cars and remote-controlled farming equipment are ubiquitous, and humanity lives in air-filtered homes, masking for any brief forays outside. That would be enough for most typical sci-fi novels, but Blake goes further to mix in mediums and seances, ancient Japanese spirits, and a no-nonsense cop on the trail of a serial killer - and it all works. But beneath all this cool and complex context is the story of woman struggling to figure out who she is and what she wants and where she fits in the world.

Solitaire Book Club: Severance

 Severance by Ling Ma. If you mashed together SylviaPlath's The Bell Jar, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, and Steven King's The Stand, you might get something like Ling Ma's novel about a millennial New Yorker trying to come to grips with career choices (or lack thereof), romance (or what passes for it), family relations, and her Chinese heritage, all while being swept along in a growing - and eerily macabre - global pandemic. The narrative alternates between pre- and post-apocalyptic settings, juxtaposing "normal" life with the new world disorder, throwing differences - and similarities - into harsh relief. In these Days of Covid, the book (from 2018) seems positively prescient in its depiction of pandemic conditions and response. A great read.

One quibble: what is it with modern authors eschewing the use of quotation marks to identify dialog? C'mon, they're not that complicated, and they do help. I blame Frank McCourt...

Solitaire Book Club: The Price of Salt

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. Reading this classic novel of romance between two women in mid-century New York was like watching an old black-and-white movie: not only are the conventions and artistic techniques different, slower, more thoughtful, but the quotidian details of life, the zeitgeist, and the social mores are also so unlike our own. And yet, beneath all the dissimilarities, the totally familiar universals of human longing, desire, love, and hate course through veins of the characters. And in the end, the characters are the core: the reader cares more deeply about them the more is revealed by the narrative. Seventy years on, the story still compels.

 

Bonus feature: The image above comes from the copy I borrowed from the library. The "major motion picture" referenced on the cover is the 2015 Cate Blanchett/Rooney Mara feature called Carol.

The book was originally published under the name Claire Morgan because Highsmith did not want to be pigeon-holed as a "lesbian-book" writer. It was later re-issued as Carol, and is often published under both titles and, of course, with Highsmith's true name.

Solitaire Book Club: How to Take Over the World

How to Take Over the World by Ryan North. So, if you wrote a book that was just a series of silly plans for world domination a la comic book supervillains or James-Bondian evil masterminds, it might be just a little over the top. And if you wrote a book that was just a series of factoids and summaries of the latest engineering and technological advances in the fields of transportation, housing, agriculture, energy, and so on, with a little historical perspective, it might be a bit dry. Ah, but if you pretend to be writing a manual for taking over the world but are in reality educating the reader about specific scientific principles and possibilities - well, I guess you get a NYT bestseller. This book was a lot of fun and as informative as any PBS documentary, and I was enjoying immensity until I had to return it to the library unfinished because someone else had it on hold. Curses, foiled again!

Solitaire Book Club: Other Worlds Than These

Other Worlds Than These edited by John Joseph Adams. I have waxed enthusiastic elsewhere about my love for the science-fiction anthologies of my youth, and while this latest collection is only ten years old, it held that same power to transport me. I am a big alternate-history fan, and this book's theme is counterfactual-adjacent: portal worlds and parallel worlds. (Think Narnia for the first and the Star Trek Mirror Universe for the second.) The selections lean a bit more toward the SF than fantasy, which was fine with me; in any case, there are 30 stories told over 548 pages so there's plenty of variety and you can even skip one or two if they are not to your taste. It is a great choice for summer deck time reading, with stories ranging from lighthearted and clever to deeply disturbing, written mostly in a span of ten years before and after the turn of the millennium.  The book does close with a Robert Silverberg story I am sure I first read in high school fifty years ago, so for me, that was the cherry on top.

Hi-ho, hi-ho

So, if you have seen Talent Not Guaranteed or followed my "art" Instagram, you know that I have been ramping up my cartooning practice as I settle into semi-retirement. Well, we're about to accelerate the ride just a bit.

I have been participating in a number of online activities sponsored by the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) out of Gainesville, Florida. Joining a community of folks interested in comics and cartooning as been a great help in establishing a consistent practice, and I have benefited from several specific instances of sharing in a very tangible way.

Some members of SAW have spearheaded a project called SAWgust. It is essentially a comics version of NaNoWriMo - participants take one month to complete a project that stretches them. The prose "novel"that is the goal of NaNoWriMo is pretty clear - 50,000 words in a row. This definition also makes it easy to track daily progress, individually and communally.

SAWgust is a little different. Since comics, cartoons, and graphic novels/memoirs/whatevers can take many different forms, and since creators work in many different modes (pencil the whole thing/ink the whole thing vs. pencil a page/ink a page and digital vs. analog, for example) it's a little more complicated. So all the players are identifying their goals pretty explicitly and tracking progress (or not) however they like. After all, the goal is not to build metrics, but to do the art.

My own goal is pretty ambitious: I want to create a 24-page (printable/publishable) zine about Selkie, the cat who has shared our lives for the past 16 years. I have the whole thing scripted out and thumbnailed...

...and I have been working on some of the trickier bits and identifying which panels will need to be lightboxed for consistency.

I am anticipating that the project will require a solid six to seven hours a day at the drawing table. Luckily, Coco has two all-day weekend workshops,which will give me some nice chunks of uninterrupted time to plaster over any cracks.

Hopefully, we'll have a nice product at the end of it all.

It all starts tomorrow morning - wish me luck!

Solitiare Book Club: Cuban Quartermoon

Cuban Quartermoon by Ann Putnam. There's something about tropical climes that invites drama; in the background, beyond the poolside cocktails and seaside views, the sultry heat arouses long-denied passions and the glistening sun illuminates feelings better kept hidden. In Putnam's story of Laura, a Hemingway scholar visiting an embargoed Cuba for an academic conference, the protagonist finds herself ill-prepared for the poverty and struggles the locals face on a daily basis, and her attempts to help her new maybe-friends result in the collision of memories and desires stemming from the loss of parents to children, of children to parents, and lovers to each other. By turns lyrically magical and brutally real, we cannot help but be swept along in Laura's journey, from touring Papa's house to visiting a santería priest to confronting the darkness within herself. Putnam has been to Cuba several times and creates a sense of place that is as palpable as the narrative is emotional.

(Full disclosure: Ann is my much-beloved mother-in-law.)

Solitaire Book Club: Meet Me by the Fountain

Meet Me by the Fountain by Alexandra Lange. So, I heard Lange on two different podcasts talking about the history and significance of shopping malls and was immediately captivated by her take on the subject, which deftly combines some shared nostalgia, clear explanations of design features and trends, social analysis, and a critique of capitalism. Her book covers the territory in great detail; her exuberant energy gets lost in a few litanies of which malls were built in which years by which design firms, but when she is talking about the capitalist idealism of the fifties, the racism embedded in suburban development, the attempts to recreate the organic energy of real downtown, or the mall as both a reflection and shaper of cultural trends, she provides thorough, thoughtful, and cogent critique. Love 'em or hate 'em, malls have been and continue to be a big part of the American lifescape, and Lange helps us to understand the hows and whys.

Solitaire Book Club: Secret Identity (+ recap)

 Previously on Solitaire Book Club:

One of the great things about borrowing books from the library is the freedom to not read something you have borrowed. There's no specific investment in a particular volume, so a reader is free to follow Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50 (Amended) totally guilt-free. And I have done, to wit:

Overdue by Amanda Oliver: I am a sucker for deep-dive non-fiction and have a special affinity for libraries, but this memoir-cum-history just couldn't grab me.

These Truths by Jill Lepore: I was totally engaged by her chronicle of Wonder Woman, but this overarching history of the U.S. was a little too stilted.

Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch: I love the concepts but I guess I am just not post-modern enough for the prose.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt: Ditto. Plus, I am not a big fan of writers who eschew quotation marks in any case.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley: If I am still reading exposition at page 50, I am going to stop reading (unless the author is Nicholson Baker).

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao: I think I have read one fantasy novel in the past few years that seemed to have an original voice. Unfortunately, this one was did not join that club.

Now, to the present:

Secret Identity by Alex Segura. So, I have to admit a strong bias toward this book from the get-go, because (a) its context is the world of comic book publishing and (b) it is set in the bleak and desperate New York City of 1975, the time and place of my coming of age, as it were. Segura accurately captures the essence of both the world I have read so much about and the world that I inhabited as a young man, and does so in a classic style that is not so much a  murder mystery as a noir adventure. Even if you have never read a comic book or set foot in the five boroughs, it is well worth the read for the compelling characters and complex plot.

Three more for the road

So, this likely could have gone on He is a Thark, especially considering this prior post, but given the uncertain nature of the Walakanet Blogging Empire, I thought I'd throw it up here.

In any case, it's just a short video of cool three-wheeled vehicle I saw here yesterday; I am not sure, but I am wondering if it might be an old Morgan.

Of course, it's being driven an old hippie, because Fairhaven.

Solitaire Book Club: Dress Code

Dress Code by Veronique Hyland. So, who knew I would find one of the smartest writers I have ever read in a book about fashion? 

To be fair, the book really isn't about fashion. Instead, Hyland, an Elle editor, uses fashion as a lens to reflect on important aspects of our culture - generational perspectives, gender politics, police militarization, classism, and the patriarchy, just to name a few. She does so in a series of clear and cogent essays, supporting her arguments with citations from Michel Foucault to Tina Fey, and peppering her analyses with both thoughtful insights into social issues and incredibly delightful turns of phrase about every other page. Hyland is no lightweight - fashion journalism may be her vocation but she could easily sit at the table with any public intellectual you could name.

Blogging about blogging is still a sin...

... but I am going to do it anyway.

We used to have a whole personal blog ecology. And by "we" I mean all of us native or immigrant digital citizens, as well as the nerds in the comicsweblogosphere, and even more specifically my own personal community of peeps, to wit:

That ain't even all of them - it seemed like everyone blogged, at least for a while. And each blog was different, presenting not only its creator's experiences and opinions in its content, but also manifesting their cultural touchstones and artistic taste and design sensibility in its very layout. Every morning we could cycle through our bookmarks and see who had posted, moving from one unique voice/experience/preoccupation/obsession to another.

We all know what happened -- Bookface, Tweetybird, and the almighty Insta have taken over the social media landscape, and even setting aside the ads and sponsored posts and robots and endlessly reposted memes, we are all squeezed into little homogenized boxes, with only a banner and icon and maybe a screen name to represent our quirkiness, if anyone ever even goes to our actual "home page", which they usually don't. We're all just mircobloggers on an endless feed, popping up and being swept away by the current, like rubber ducks in the rapids.The heyday of the great, idiosyncratic personal blog was over.

I still blog; that is self-evident; but my posts are announced on Twitter by a robot and I manually cross-post to Instagram to make sure my legions dozens of followers get the message, because no one is cycling though blog bookmarks each morning anymore. Sometimes it feels like shouting down a well, but I persist.

And instead of just wailing and gnashing about all this, I'd like to point to two stalwart bogs that have roots back in the glory days and still continue on, their continued existence defying the conventional wisdom I just put forth.

The Luna Park Gazette: The personal log of Rob Lenihan, a pal since sixth grade, which has been published pretty much once a week since January 2005. In his trademark telegraph style, Rob explores current events, pop culture, and politics, but mostly his own inner struggles, challenges, and successes. Relentlessly honest, sometimes painful, and always witty.

Blogging by Cinema Light:  Jim Wilson, who I just realized has been a friend for two-thirds of my life, has been running this blog since January 2014, but it is the follow-up to his Let's Not Talk about Movies blog, which I know was running in early 2008, at least. If you just want a "two-thumbs-up" movie review, this is not the blog for you; but if you want critical film analysis, deep dives into cinema theory, and explications of classic movie scenes, there's no better place. No extra charge for the clever wordplay.

So, they may be two of the few stars remaining in the previously bright constellation of blogs, but they shine no less bright for that, and you should check them out.

And think about (re)starting your own!

Solitaire Book Club times two

So, we should all know the drill by now, so let's get right into it.

Made to Kill by Adam Christopher. The trouble with writing an hommage to Raymond Chandler is that it is too easy to slip into a bad parody of Raymond Chandler - it is a very delicate balance to capture Chandler's voice without going over the top, and I have to say that Christopher's prose misfires once in a while, especially at the beginning of the novel. But the world he creates - an indeterminate-era alternate Hollywood seen from the perspective of the last robot on earth - was so engaging that I stayed with it, despite a bit more amorality in the protagonists than I would have preferred. The mystery and adventure click along to a satisfying climax, the Right Things are done, and there is the hint of Things to Come. Christopher has given us two more books in this series, and I will be continuing.

 

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette. Eight years ago (!!) I wrote about the challenge of creating a sense of wonder and freshness in a genre that has seen so many treatments: can characters in a zombie story respond as if they haven't seen a dozen zombie movies? And more to the immediate point, can characters in a post-apocalypse novel act as if they have never seen an apocalypse movie?  Doucette leans right into that challenge and shows us how it's done. His story of seven survivors of a mysterious cataclysm is grounded in the different responses each one has to their circumstance, creating a richness that is cliche-free - on top of which, his apocalypse is sufficiently complex in nature to avoid the standard tropes. I guess the best recommendation I can give is that I picked this book up at the library yesterday and I finished it the same day - it is a ripping (and gripping) yarn.