Readin’

Time to clear out the little book-case of stuff I read in 2022…

I read 89 books in 2022, according to Emacs… Not that many, but I was really busy until October, and then suddenly I wasn’t busy at all, for some reason or other. Anything interesting about the selection, in hindsight? Probably not, but that’s never stopped me from bloviating.

I’ve read a number of books by Lawrence Block and Ben Aaronowitch, and that’s all because of Lois McMaster Bujold. Because I decided to buy all the books she recommended this year, and she recommended one book from each of these authors, and I ended up reading them all. You’d think that recommendation algos would be a solved problem, but nope — any time Amazon (or whatever) has recommended a book to me, the books have sucked. A prime example is after I read a couple well-written, fun mystery books that happened to have characters that owned cats in them. This led Amazon to recommend me mysteries (ok) that were heavy on cats (no). I mean, I love cats, but primarily on my lap, and not in my books, but because there are people who fanatically buy all cat-related mysteries, that’s the population I was counted in. And all the books Amazon recommended were 100% pure unreadable dreck.

So I thought I’d just do a Bujold experiment, and it’s been going well — none of what she’s recommended has been awful, and most of it’s a hoot. OK, we’re not talking Literature here — but that’s the point, really. Finding good literature is easy; finding well-written junk is very difficult.

The Block books (the Burglar series) is very repetetive, but entertaining. The Aaronowitch books are a lot of fun, but he introduces more characters and concepts in each book, and the recaps everything in the book after, so the books grow progressively longer. He’s now up to recapping all the previous books in the first 100 pages in the most recent book, and that’s really really unnecessary.

I haven’t read a lot of science fiction this year, unfortunately. Because it’s just hard to find stuff that’s readable. This one — Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod, was super exciting… and the dumbest book I’ve read in quite a while, and that’s including all the cat-related mystery books. You can go through absolutely all the concepts and situations in the book and poke holes in them, because it’s just so… dumb. Take one example: A killer robot throws a little bomb in a 1km diameter space station that’s floating around Venus, and this makes the computer do a fail-safe on the reactor, so it shuts down. And it’s impossible to get into it, because safety. So the station falls to its Venutian death, because there’s no backup reactor (and we’ve explained that these reactors are really cheap now), and there’s no life pods (in such a huge station; no room?), and… they’re in the atmosphere, for heaven’s sake, so they could just have popped into balloons with some nice suits and some oxygen and wait to be picked up, or…

I wonder whether MacLeod made everything as stupid as possible in this novel to make the brain shut down completely, and just enjoy the ride? It worked for me, because it was a thrilling read.

BUT DON”T SIT DOWN AFTERWARDS AND THINK ABOUT IT

I started reading P G Wodehouse chronologically, and I now know more about cricket that any human should. Just by osmosis. Bowl a century, will ya? But what I wanted to say what that the Everyman Library published these handsome editions of all the Wodehouse books a couple decades ago, and it’s these I’ve been reading. They use the first published British edition as the source, and have been meticulously proof-read (which is really important with Wodehouse, because of all the word play and innovative vocabulary), and the binding and typesetting is just really… nice? They feel satisfying as objects, in addition to being a great delivery mechanism for Wodehouse’s nonsense.

But the reason I’m mentioning the books at all is that they’re now falling into the public domain — everything from before 1927 is now public domain. (I’m up to 1924 in my reading.) Which is nice! I’m all for good books being even more generally available, but it’s a two-edged sword: Would nice editions like this even be possible now? With cheapo editions being possible now, would Everyman have been able to do such a handsome book series without losing money? (Everyman did this book series just before any of the books landed in the public domain.)

So I took a look at the latest book I just read, Bill the Conqueror, which now in public domain:

OK, it’s available on Kindle, but not super cheap, really. And what’s it like?

Yeah, somebody has run it through OCR and pushed it to Amazon.

Without spending any effort on it.

Because why would they?

Whoever takes the effort to produce an accurate text will immediately have that text copied by numerous other sellers, who will then list their editions at $0.02 lower, until they’ve raced all the way down to 1c each. So doing a good ebook version is a mugs game.

I’m sure somebody will eventually do it out of love for Wodehouse, but they won’t get any money from the effort.

So these triumphant articles about works entering the public domain… I mean, it’s good, but it’s not all good.

Erasure by Percival Everett — it’s the most gleefully nasty satire.

I’m mentioning these two books by Julie Hecht not because they’re fabulous — they are! — but because I loved reading the reviews on Goodreads afterwards:

People hate reading books where they can’t “relate” to the characters, and I find that hilarious. As if the point of reading a novel is to see yourself, and not read about new things.

John Waters wrote a novel! Well, sort of. Liarmouth is less a novel and more a series of deranged tableaux that I’m sure will be fun to watch in a movie, but it was exhausting to read. A typical scene is… one of the characters is hitch-hiking, she gets picked up, she finds a severed head under her seat, she bashes the leering driver with it and his head explodes, the car crashes, she exits the car and steals another car.

And that’s two thirds of a single page. And all the pages are like this. I’m guessing Waters was cackling like a lunatic while typing, but it didn’t end up being an actual novel.

Fortunately, he’s gotten money to film it, and I’m betting it’ll be awesome as a film.

I’m just noting that 70% of recent literature uses this design template pioneered by Rachel Cusk for their covers.

And… that’s it. I have nothing more to say about books. I promise!

Comics Daze

I got a whole bunch of comics from various places before the weekend, and I’m raring to get some comics reading done, even if I’m kinda sorta theoretically busy this week. Let’s see how this day goes — I might have to cut it short and actually, like, do stuff. Let’s hope not! Doing stuff sucks!

And for music… only old favourites. That I haven’t listened to in a while.

Marianne Faithfull: Broken English

05:43: Camp Pock-a-Wocknee and the Dyn-o-mite Summer of 77 by Eric Glickman (Black Panel Press)

OK, let’s start off with something easy on the brain before diving off into the more er er the other stuff.

Huh, another comic book about summer camp… I’ve read so many of them by now — it’s one of the Major Subjects of autobio comics. But this time there’s a twist: The author actually liked it at camp! That’s unusual!

As is the artwork: This big-nosed style is pretty unusual to see these days, especially for stuff like this.

The cover says “this is not a book for kids”, but who is it for?

Barbara Morgenstern: The Grass is Always Greener

There’s an excessive amount of minutiae here — I think somebody could recreate an entire camp based on this book. But… while sometimes amusing, it’s not very exciting. It’s like reading a blog in book form. OOPS!!! I.e., it’s all navel gazing and 90% is stuff that a sensible editor would go “well, is that interesting for anybody but yourself, though?”

I started skimming after a while… the author is relentlessly pro-camp while describing various batshit hazing rituals and horrifying mishegas of this eight week (!) camp thing. Where did I leave my pearls? I need something to clutch!

Polmo Polpo: Kiss Me Again and Again

06:44: Baby Boom by Yokoyama Yuichi (Breakdown Press)

*gasp* We had a new Yokoyama book just a couple months ago, and now there’s another one? It cannot be!

This is from the Desert Island Mystery Mail this month. *slow clap*

This is very different from Yokoyama’s previous books — he’s usually super meticulous, inhumanly precise (and in black and white). This is more like sketchbook drawings. But still gorgeous.

And the stories are different, too. I mean, in his other books, it’s sometimes pretty obscure what the stories are a lot of the time, beyond propulsion — here it’s mostly very straighforward. Here, for instance, we have the two characters (an adult and a kid, I think) cleaning the apt.

A couple of the pieces are more like (say) Garden — where we get an enormous number of characters dushing around in odd landscaped.

It’s a really cool book, as always, although I can understand that this wouldn’t be the first book to show to somebody new to Yokoyama. It’s more accessible in some ways, but it’s also even more overwhelming in other ways.

Fantastic book.

Coil: Black Antlers

07:34: Sunk a Dink #1 by Max Huffman

Also from the Desert Island package…

This is a collection of odds and ends mostly published before in various venues?

It’s very funny.

Coil: Black Antlers

07:40: An Honest Performance by Will Dinski (2d cloud)

2d cloud is back! Most important news of the year! They’ve got four new books out later this year, and I also picked up this little thing that I’ve missed when shopping before, I think…

It’s absolutely wonderful.

Coil: Black Antlers

07:45: Hands by Una Jongenelis

I’ve been shopping from the web shop and got this lovely little book…

It’s about love and stuff.

But I also got socks, a scarf and lots of other bits and bobs were included in the package. Class!

Wildbirds & Peacedrums: Retina

07:58: Epoxy by John Pham

I’ve got #1, #2, #4 and #6 here, and then there’s one I can’t find an issue number in, so I’m missing one issue? Darn!

The first issue is traditionally printed, and is from all the way back in 2000.

This must be where Brian Vaughan got the idea for Paper Girls from?

Anyway, it’s a nice book — it’s three somewhat enigmatic vignettes. I’m not altogether convinced that Pham just ran out of story a couple of times, and that’s why they end kinda abruptly…

Oh! The second issue continues two of the storylines from the first issue. I didn’t expect that, for some reason.

Anyway, the second issue is in a smaller format and… is it riso? I mean, I guess it has to be, but it looks quite odd for riso printing…

The second issue is stronger than the first, and the boxing storyline gets really tense.

I think I’m missing the third issue? Boo! I wanna find out what happened to that boxer guy… anyway, the fourth issue is riso for sure, and has a little booklet and postcards and puzzles and stuff included.

And Pham’s art style has changed completely, as well as his subject matter. There’s no publication date anywhere that I can find, but I’m guessing this is a lot later than the first two issues?

It’s like a fractal of booklets and stuff. This must have been so much work to put together…

The Jay & Kay booklet this time around (about gloompires) is a lot of fun. I think I’ve read all that stuff before, though — there was a collected edition recently, I think?

Heh, the sixth issue even includes a cel…

Hm, perhaps what I thought was the fifth issue was really the third and I’m missing the fifth instead?

Anyway, these books are a thrill to read. The obsessive intricate physical formats paired with funny/moving/wistful stories (and attractive, unique artwork) makes these books lovable objects.

Gang Gang Dance: Eye Contact

09:05: Family Fun by Jesse Simpson (Mansion Press)

Anyway, I got the Exposies from Mansion Press, along with a number of random books…

Such transgressive.

There’s some comics towards the end of this book, but it’s mostly one atrocity after another (with some interspersed sex bits).

It’s kinda dull.

Bob Hund: Stumfilm

09:15: Dream of the Bat by Josh Simmons & Patrick Keck (Mansion Press)

There’s been rumours about this thing for decades, it seems like, but the collected edition finally here… a very non-licensed version of Batman, if I understand things correctly.

Such transgressive.

It’s a surprisingly substantial book. But… it’s like… it basically just a standard Batman book. You can’t even say that it has more torture than normal, these days — didn’t The Joker spend several years with somebody elses face stitched to his own or something?

So it’s… eh.

Boris with Michio Kurihara: Rainbow

09:51: Om by Andy Barron (Mansion Press)

This is… like… spiritual and stuff? These are wordless stories about the cycle of life and er enlightenment and I don’t know what.

But, since it’s Mansion Press: Such transgressive.

This is totally not my kind of thing, and one vignette after another like this is… OK, I ditched the book halfway through.

And, oops, I really do have some errands to run, so I have to cut this Daze short. *pout*

The Best Albums of 1994

Feeling a bit nostalgic, so I thought it might be vaguely diverting to look at some old albums, and look at specific years. I remember much of the 90s being kinda boring, music-wise, so let’s look at, say, 1994.

Here’s a mixtape I made at the time:

I don’t have data that says what music I actually listened to at the time — but when I started using an Emacs-based music player in 1997, I eventually (around 2002) made it note which albums I was playing, too.

So below is a “top listens” list — saying which ones of the albums released in 1994 I’ve been listening to the most since 2002.

Confused? You should be!

Arthur Russell

Another Thought

Joni Mitchell

Turbulent Indigo
Joni Mitchell - Yvette In English

Golden Palominos

Pure
The Golden Palominos - Pure

Dead Can Dance

Toward The Within
Dead Can Dance--Don't Fade Away

Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft

Nightsong

Aphex Twin

Classics

Bob Hund

Bob Hund
Bob Hund - Mer än så kan ingen bli

Stina Nordenstam

And She Closed Her Eyes
Stina Nordenstam - Hopefully Yours

Lisa Germano

Geek the Girl

Team Dresch

Personal Best
Team Dresch - She's Amazing

µ-Ziq

PHI*1700 [U-V]
µ-ziq - summer living

Consolidated

Business of Punishment

Sidsel Endresen

Exile

The Wolfgang Press

Funky Little Demons

As a year, it’s not particularly amazing, is it? Many of these albums are from the tail ends of band’s careers (Arthur Russel, Joni Mitchell, Golden Palominos, Dead Can Dance, Wolfgang Press and Consolidated), and aren’t their strongest ones. But Aphex Twin and u-Ziq are part of a new wave of music, and Bob Hund and Lisa Germano do some of their best stuff. And, of course, a new bright superstar — Stina Nordenstam, who unfortunately didn’t really have that long a career.

Perhaps I’ll do a few more of these — navel gazing is what blogs is for, eh? Eh? Now that I’ve got the code to hook everything up all written and stuff, I mean. Coding up something to search Youtube automatically for tracks from these albums that I’ve mixtaped took just, oh, five hours, which is a totally rational thing to do. So I guess I have to reuse the code. So… er… perhaps a weekly? monthly? series or something? We’ll see.

PX82: Sexy Politzei

Sexy Politzei by Bruno Richard and others (215x305mm)

I thought this blog series was over now for sure, but then I happened onto this book while spelunking the interwebs, and I thought it looked pretty interesting, so I finally scored a copy.

The book is, according to all sources, by Bruno Richard, but I can’t actually find his name anywhere in this pretty hefty tome.

But it’s a pretty moot point, because it certainly looks like Bruno Richard.

This is a very high concept book, I guess you could say — on each left-side page, there’s a photo of some cops, and on the right-side page, you have Richard’s version of that photo. And the renditions are sometimes oddly faithful to the originals…

… and sometimes it’s wilder. But then again, some of the original snaps are already pretty wild.

But what’s the point of all this? The book has over 90 of these drawings (which means the book is about 220 pages long, and ends with an appendix which details the origins of each image).

Is Richard just fascinated by cops? Or loathe them so much? Are the drawings just exercises in a sketchbook, collected here for our amusement?

He even replicated texts from the original pictures. It’s obsessive and it’s pretty fantastic.

There’s a handful of crime scene pics, and a couple of them are really gruesome (I’m not including any of those here).

And in many of the drawings, the politzei aren’t that sexy, but then some are.

But! The reason I’m snapping this book at all for this blog series is that Gary Panter makes several appearances! On the left page here, we see a collaboration between Richard and Panter, and on the right-hand page, Panter does the same image on his own. (According to the appendix, but I’d have goessed the opposite, really.)

And here’s more Panter.

Pascal Doury does a couple of pages, but is less faithful to the original compositions than Richard and Panter are.

And then we get a further break from the concept with several pages from Tomeo Cabot, which doesn’t really seem to feature cops at all?

And finally, the book ends with a bunch of two-page spreads…

… drawn as two-page spreads.

Richard also does a panel from a Hulk comic.

… in his way.

So that’s a really odd book, even for an art comic book of its era. The book itself says it’s published by Imprimeurs Libres, but according to the Internet, it’s really published by Futuropolis. Is the lack of information about who created the book (i.e., Bruno Richard) and an appearently misleading colophon (Imprimeurs Libres) because they foresaw some kind of controversy around the book? It doesn’t really seem like a book that would cause any kind of scandal (especially not in France), but then again, 1982 was a different era.

And is this the book Black Cab was singing about?

Black Cab - Sexy Polizei

So many questions!

Anyway, it’s an awesome book, and my copy is very well-thumbed, so it seems like the previous owner(s) were also fascinated by it. (Or perhaps it’s been on the shelf of a used bookstore for decades without selling.)

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.