Book Club 2025: Parade by Rachel Cusk

I don’t read reviews of book I might read, but I’ve seen some mutterings about this book — well, first of all, that’s it’s not as good as Outline, but then again, very few things are. So I was approaching this with some trepidation.

Front-loading books with the most “difficult” material seems to be a common technique with authors. For instance, I attempted to read Gravity’s Rainbow when I was like 21, and struggled through the first 50 pages before I gave up. Then I tried again a couple years later, and started anew, and it turns out that after the first er 70 pages, the rest of the book is a breeze. Well, comparatively. It’s like the author is going “well, now that the wimps are gone, I’m bringing out the tea and ginger snap cookies”.

This is kinda like that? This is allegedly a novel, but it’s four stories, and the first one is definitely the most abstract one, while the remaining three are totes gripping.

‘s good stuff.

Parade (2024) by Rachel Cusk (buy new, buy used, 3.58 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep by Lawrence Block

I quite enjoyed Block’s later Bernie Rhodenbarr books — they were repetetive, but well-written and amusing. So I went ahead and bought all of his earlier Tanner books, and this is the second of those I’ve read.

And as before, he’s got the patter going, and it’s amusingly written.

But the book has the structure of suet pudding. Tanner meets one person, then flees the location, then meets another person, then flees the location, and that’s how it goes.

And that can be fine! It’s like a road movie kind of structure. But this one just wasn’t any fun. I got to page 150 and decided I didn’t give a fuck and put the book down, even if there were just 50 pages to go.

I see I’m not the only one:

I sort of lost interest toward the end and stopped caring.

Which leaves me with the problem of what to do with all the other Tanner books I bought. Should I just drop them without even giving them a go? Hm… yeah, that other Tanner book I read was also pretty dire, so out they go.

The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (1966) by Lawrence Block (buy new, buy used, 3.75 on Goodreads)

Comics Daze

It’s time to read some comics. And for the music, I’m trying to recreate the order of Bowie albums I used to use when I was a teenager and reading comics. Let’s see if I get it right this time…

David Bowie: Diamond Dogs

10:09: Distant Ruptures by CF (New York Review Comics)

This is a very handsome collection of shorter CF pieces — most seem to be from around 2000-2008-ish.

It’s really cool. I’ve read some of this before, but not a lot.

Heh heh.

Hm! That looks familiar.

Ah, yeah, I’ve got a print of that on the wall.

And a lil CF painting.

David Bowie: Aladdin Sane

10:50: Tante Kos by Katarina Storalm

This is fun!

It’s a kind of wish fulfilment thing, and if only…

10:58: Horses #1 by Alexander Poljansek

This is fun, too. Hm… “Hack”? IS HE MAKING FUN OF CHARLI XCX THE NERVE OF SOME PEOPLE

I like it.

11:12: Dogbo by Jon Chandler (Breakdown Press)

Another short book…

It’s intriguing and pretty funny.

David Bowie: Hunky Dory

11:18: Fearless Colors by Samplerman (Kuš)

I got this from here.

This book samples old comics and puts them together in kinda psychedelic ways.

Is that Fletcher Hanks?

It’s pretty wild, and while each piece is groovy on its own, it kinda seem to grow into something larger, too.

OK, I think I’m gonna take a nap now.

13:35: Scener fra et samboerskap

It doesn’t really say anywhere who made this?

This is slice of life autobiography about a baby, and it’s super duper cute — and also very original, which is difficult with a theme like this. It’s really good.

13:44: La comète by Maxime Gillot (Blow Book)

This is when having a 20mm lens that can focus just a couple of centimetres in front of the lens is useful — this book is very small.

It’s wordless, but it’s narrative.

I’m a bit vague on what the story is, though. It’s about a fight and a guy walking through a city and possibly a comet and possibly a rebirth or something?

I really like the artwork.

David Bowie: Space Oddity

13:57: Light It Shoot It by Graham Chaffee (Fantagraphics)

OK, this isn’t my kind of thing. It’s like an annoying movie set down on paper — so much drama in every scene.

And naturally, it’s about a Roger Corman type involved with some mobsters, but that’s not enough — there’s also relationship drama and a pyromaniac.

All the scenes are like this — there’s a primary and a secondary conflict, just like some drama teachers preach. I find this approach exhausting to read, and tedious as fuck.

It does pick up a bit towards the end… but then again, the actual ending isn’t very satisfying.

David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

14:51: Lifeline by Alicia CL

This is more like it.

This is very charming — it’s got a scrapbook feeling with tons of illustrations and comics randomly. I like it.

15:02: Ballpark by J. Collier

I guess I bought some of these comics from Wig Shop.

I really like the art here… the style is like early undergrounds… via Lewis Trondheim, sort of? It’s really appealing, anyway.

The stories are pleasantly bewildering. Class.

David Bowie: “Heroes”

15:12: Moon Trax by Tiger Teteishi

This is a very elaborately printed book — several paper stocks, etc.

Some of these are pretty er clever, but this is really not my kind of thing — it’s surrealism that frequently descends into visual puns.

I do like a good printing job!

Oh, and there’s lots of lots of essays that explain just how great these paintings are. Some of theme even allude to *gasp* comics!

But to me, this is just kinda lame. Sorry!

15:28: Damned #1 by Eric Haven (Fantagraphics)

Ooh, is Haven starting a more regularly-occurring comics comic at Fantagraphics? I hope so.

I guess Haven is drawing on the computing machine nowadays? Kids these days!

Anyway, this first seems like unrelated stories, and then it all ties together. It’s brilliant! And very funny. I hope the issues keep coming, but I guess it’s unlikely these days…

15:37: Anguesângue by Daniel Lima (Kuš)

I wonder whether this is influenced by Samuel Beckett, but that might be because I read L’innomable the other week (bragging).

It’s kinda abstract while being concrete, which is intriguing. It’s got a nice flow.

David Bowie: “Heroes”

15:48: Dandadan by Yukinobu Tatsu (Viz)

I got this because it was one of TCJ “best of” lists (as was the Jaffee book above).

Which reminds me: I wrote the following exegesis about comics typically found on these lists last week, and since this may be one of the last ones I’m catching up with, here it is:

After reading the books from the Best of 2024 lists that I picked up, there’s a certain pattern that emerges. People have a tendency to mention books that have certain, er, qualities.

1) Heft. Quantity has a quality all of its own. Books that are big and heavy land on these lists more often than smaller books. Of course, bigger books might make a bigger impact on the reader, but they also seem more respectable, don’t they?

2) A limited colour palette. Now, there’s full colour books on these lists, and there’s black and white books, too, but it seems like using a limited range of colours has become an ever more dominant signifier for seriousness.

3) Mid range format. Most of the books are somewhere in between the width/height of a manga book and a magazine, but avoids being exactly the same size as a US comic book. I guess if they’re too small, then they’re too manga like, and if they’re too big, they seem like children’s story books?

4) An emphasis on story. Many of these books have pretty rudimentary artwork. Or rather, artwork that doesn’t draw attention to itself, is probably more accurate.

5) Strictly narrative. There’s virtually no comics on these lists that tend towards the more abstract, or more playful approaches.

6) Semi-autobio-like. Most of the books have a tight focus on a single character that goes through some drama. So not “autobio” as in Dirty Plotte, but as in Fun Home.

7) Major publishers. It’s natural — books that have a wide distribution, or that have been sent to lots of reviewers, crop up on these lists more. And major publishers are the only people who are able to finance these hefty books that might take years to do.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of these things. Some of my best friends are major-published semi-autobio-like strictly narrative books with and emphasis on story in a mid range format and using a limited colour palette going on for five hundred pages. But man, reading many of these one after another, it starts to feel oppressive.

Fortunately, reading these comics over the last few weeks, I’ve been able to mix things up with a lot of more experimental, wild, self published comics, and that helps a lot.

OK! Back! All of that probably doesn’t have anything to do with this book, though.

Well, this is drawn better than most Japanese comics for teenagers…

And I guess it’s kinda funny?

It’s very horny.

Eh, I guess it’s fine — certainly better than many of these comics. It’s memorably bizarre? But eh.

David Bowie: Lodger

16:31: Litterpig 1 & 2 by Evin Collis

Wow!

This is really propulsive — it’s wordless, and we follow this boar through a day in the life, I guess. It’s all violence and aggression. Now I regret not buying all the issues when I visited Gosh Comics, because I want to know how this ends.

David Bowie: Low

16:37: Airport Love Theme by Hamishi Farah (Book Works)

The artist (who’s Australian) was denied entry into the US for unknown reasons in 2016, and ended up being held for half a day before being returned to Australia.

The notes say that it’s a fictional account of real events…

… but it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be fiction and not — there are sequences that are clearly fantasy sequences, and there’s many that are ambiguous.

It sounds like a harrowing situation, but I’m not sure the book is altogether successful — I mean, it’s understandable that he’s depicting these assholes in the way he does, but it also feels like he’s posturing? Tough guy shit.

David Bowie: Station to Station

17:12: Solace County by J. Marshall Smith

Hey, this is really good! Expressive artwork and excellent pacing and storytelling. And a kinda moving, pensive story.

There’s also more sketchbook-like stuff in here…

… and a shorter mysterious story. Good stuff! I got this at Gosh Comics, but I see that he has a web site and two more volumes of this out, so I’ve now ordered those.

I should make dinner soon, but just one more comic first.

17:31: Ride At Your Own Risk by S. Maloney

This is good.

I really like the page to the right there, where the captions and action alternate.

17:38: The End

I didn’t get as much reading done as I’d hoped, but reading lots of shorter comics is even more exhausting than reading a few longer comics.

Is it possible to take screenshots of web sites these days?

I was thinking about writing some code for older posts to check broken links and do screenshots of where links points to, as explained here. But before starting that, I thought it might make sense to explore a bit first to see what the options are. So I’ll just be nattering on randomly here and using this post as a log of various experiments…

So: My plan is to point a script towards old blog posts, and then for each link, do a screenshot of the web site. If it doesn’t exist any more, then substitute a Wayback Machine URL for the link instead.

By the way, did you know This One Weird Trick with Wayback Machine URLs? These look like https://web.archive.org/web/19991129021746/http://www13.google.com/. And that bit in the middle is indeed an ISO8601-like time stamp. But the Wayback Machine will give you the closest valid URL, so you can say https://web.archive.org/web/1/https://www.google.com to get the earliest version. Or for my use case, if I wrote the blog post on April 1st 2012, I can just say https://web.archive.org/web/20120401000000/https://www.google.com and it will give me https://web.archive.org/web/20120331235755/https://www.google.com/ instead. See? Easy peasy, and you don’t have to mess with an API to get at this stuff.

I’ve been using the cutycapt program for the actual screenshots for years. It’s a bit long in the tooth, so I thought I’d check out what the results were when using a more “real” browser for the shots. cutycapt doesn’t use a fully featured browser (it uses Qt HTML rendering, if I understand correctly), but things like shot-scraper does use a full Chrome behind the scenes.

So let’s look at some random sites and compare:

shot-scraper with Chromium.

Bookshop.org uses the Cloudflare “protection” against nefarious stuff like doing a screenshot if you’re using something that looks like a real browser…

… but not if you’re using shot-scraper with Firefox!

It allows the less real browser through — but as you can see, cutycapt renders in a quite different way.

comics.org blocks shot-scraper outright (with Chromium).

And again, with Firefox it allows it.

I’m gonna just throw out a wild thought I have no data for: Perhaps Cloudflare blocks in this case is because they have a lot of data saying there’s legitimate Firefox-like traffic from my IP address? Because that’s what I normally use? They probably have a “fingerprint” of every IP address in the world by this point, so they can easily decide whether the traffic looks normal or is “an attack”. Sounds stupid, but you know… I use Cloudflare myself, and the report always says “and this month we protected your site against 4232 attacks!” and it was probably some poor soul trying to use curl.

comics.org works fine with cutycapt.

Slate slaps up a cookie blocker using shot-scraper…

… but not with cutycapt..

Salon slaps up a cookie blocker both with shot-scraper…

… as well as with cutycapt.

So… cutycapt actually performs better on many sites, but it’s not actually, you know, all that good because I’m getting all the helpful EU cookie banners that are there to protection my preciouses cookieses informationeses.

Here’s an idea! I’m a genius! What if I just get a Digitalocean VM and ssh over there to do the screenshots!

*time passes while I’m setting up an San Francisco VM and stuff*

Well, bookshop.org gives identical results from as when I do it from Norway. When I try to access Slate.com, both from cutycapt and shot-scraper, they just hang indefinitely.

And Salon?

Yeah, blocked by Cloudfront.

I’m guessing lots of sites are blocking the Digitalocean IP range or something? Yeah, I’m getting the same with curl, so it doesn’t really seem to depend on the User-Agent or browser fingerprinting, unlike the Cloudflare blocks from home.

So! Nothing worked better from San Francisco, and many things worked even worse. Presumably if I were in a residential IP range, things wouldn’t fail quite as badly, but I hadn’t expected things to be this bad from Digitalocean.

I guess my best option here is to use shot-scraper with Firefox from home?

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.