It took Alan Garner years before he turned out a sequel to wrap up the story he began in Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Moon of Gomrath. Despite my distrust of authors returning to their long-ago early successes I’ve been thinking of reading the sequel; my library doesn’t have it but searching the website turned up Garner’s 2021 novella, THE TREACLE WALKER. Reading it was ninety minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
We open with Joseph, a young farmboy in the 1930s or 1940s, lying at home with a patch over one eye to strengthen the other “lazy” eye. Treacle Walker, the rag and bone man in the neighborhood shows up and suddenly we’re immersed in a strange series of weird, surreal events. Joseph barters with Treacle Walker for a magic stone, discovers his covered eye can see things that aren’t there, falls into a comic strip and talks to a dead man buried in the nearby bog. Which is material that should add up to a fascinating story, but doesn’t. There is no plot to hold everything together, making it just a string of weird, unexplained events. It’s also way too heavy on dialog with minimal detail on setting which as with Owl Service makes it harder to figure out what the heck is going on. I’m baffled by the tons of critical acclaim this got.
THE GIRLS: An All-American Town, a Predatory Doctor, and the Untold Story of the Gymnasts Who Brought Him Down by Abigail Pesta looks at the story of Larry Nassar — a respected doctor who molested hundreds of gymnasts brought to him for help with their injuries — through the stories of some of his victims, from one who may have been his first target through to one of the last one. Pesta shows how Nassar groomed his targets, won over their parents and thrived despite repeated complaints to police, Michigan State University (he was a sports doctor there for years) and gymnastic bodies. In most cases it doesn’t appear there was a coordinated cover-up, just the ubiquity of rape culture: either the gymnasts weren’t believed or the people they reported to didn’t want to rock the boat by confronting someone so respected. The result, of course, was that Nassar operated for years longer; the fact he molested so many girls worked in his favor as many victims assumed his vaginal and anal “treatment” must be legit — all the patients they talked to had been through it. Horrible stuff but a good book.
Cover by Jack Gaughan, all rights to image remain with current holders.
GENOCIDE (1968) is the last of that Shochiku boxed set from Japan, and it’s another strange mash-up. An American military plane crashes with a nuke aboard. A search leads to the crew’s bodies but what are the strange marks on their body? The result, it turns out, of a mad scientist (driven insane from her time in a Nazi death camp) scheming to breed a race of deadly venomous insects — not, as her employer assumes, to target Americans but to destroy all of humanity. As if that’s not bad enough, the insects are sentient and want to kill us to save their own kind from nuclear holocaust.
I wouldn’t say the results are good but they are interesting. The end is strikingly anti-American: to destroy the mad doctor’s lab and the insects, the military nukes her island lab without giving the Japanese residents a chance to evacuate. “I just love insects because they never lie.”
I wasn’t particularly excited at the thought of seeing THE ODYSSEY (2026) but TYG liked the idea so I said sure. It turned out much better than I expected.
Based on Homer’s poem (which I’d think obvious, but some of the discussion here indicates not everyone knows it), this tells the story of how Odysseus (a surprisingly effective Matt Damon) won the Trojan War by conceiving the Trojan Horse ruse. The journey home has proven far longer than planned, ending up with him amnesiac on the island of the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron). The loss of memory is a change from the source as an alternative to him simply spending several years banging Calypso while Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is grieving at home.
Speaking of Penelope, she and Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Tom Holland) have spent the years fending off suitors, most notably the slimy Antinous (Robert Pattinson) from seizing both the throne and the queen of Ithaca. Telemachus heads off for proof of Odysseus’ survival; Antinous decides it would be better if he doesn’t return home. In Odysseus’ flashbacks and the stories Telemachus hears we get the encounters with Polyphemous the Cyclops, the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis and more. Also in the cast: Zendaya as Athena, Elliott Page as a doomed soldier and Lupita N’yongo as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra (she’s good-looking enough for Helen and effective as an actor in both).
Overall we really liked this though TYG was put off by the loud soundtrack (it didn’t bother me at all). I was disappointed they didn’t use more of Odysseus’ trickster skills, such as the story of how he tried to avoid going to Troy by pretending to be insane (I’m fond of tricksters — they seemed much more someone I could aspire to be than musclemen like Hector and Achilles). The effort to make the destruction of Troy (this goes with the theory it was all about control of trade routes) a symbol of civilization falling apart didn’t quite work, though it didn’t wreck the movie. If you have three hours to spare, this is worth catching in the theater. “It was the song of all the promises I’d failed to keep.
Another week where I had a hard time concentrating on anything. And without even the excuse of contractors working or multiple appointments. I keep trying to find my focus but somehow I just keep wandering through a maze of distraction (hence my choice of this Jack Kirby cover for an illustration. Steve Ditko inked).
Part of it is undoubtedly that TYG’s slammed schedule has kept me doing lots of extra dog care. That’s not a criticism — she’s the big breadwinner so if she needs me to watch the dogs so she can concentrate, that’s fair — but it does erode my sense of personal space over time and I know from experience that affects my concentration. Plus the cats have been downstairs a lot during the day this week. Even if they’re not asking for anything, I’m conscious of them and that adds to the distraction.
Is it anything beyond that? Maybe, but I don’t know what. Not exhaustion — the dogs woke me up a couple of times this week but I slept great the rest of the time.
The end result? No fiction this week, or this month. I hate that! I did get work done but it proceeded at a snail’s pace compared to what I’d have managed were I in the zone.
The biggest thing was that I answered all those questions McFarland sent me about my Watching Jekyll and Hyde manuscript. Now I just have to wait for them to send me the galleys for the final proofing.
I also edited my friend Kat Traylor’s story for Become the Sky, the follow-up anthology to The Ceaseless Way. “Surviving Dr. Bloodflask” is a really fun story about a supervillain’s son getting dragged back into his family’s schemes. Kat’s improved it considerably since we critiqued the first draft so all I had to do was copy editing.
I submitted an updated story on the Triangle area’s ongoing drought. Rain this month has eased the stress but not eliminated it. The story will be out next week.
I’ve blogged multiple times about the misogynist horror of women having sex “without consequences.” Using birth control, in their eyes, is slutty and irresponsible. Having sex while using birth control is loveless, no different than rape, and traumatizes your children (one right-to-lifer wrote years ago that showing your children you don’t want more implies they’re a horrible burden — you should prove your love by having lots and lots of kids!).
None of this has anything to do with the supposed goal of the forced-birth movement, saving fetuses from the “American holocaust’ of abortion. Nor do arguments that if women choose to use birth control, they’ve already committed to not having a baby, therefore they’ll have more abortions. The stats show birth control and good sex ed cut the unwanted pregnancy rate and the abortion rate. What it’s really about is right-wingers’ absolute horror at women becoming sexually active before marriage, let alone without any risk of pregnancy. To be sure, there’s a slut-shaming strain in the rest of society but like most misogyny, the right wing takes it and makes it a fundamental principle.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that along with enthusiasm for teen marriage, the Toddler’s administration is refusing to issue grants to sex-ed groups unless they go abstinence-only (if the gift link is dead, click here). Abstinence-only education is ineffective — Texas clung to it for years and had the country’s highest teen pregnancy, teen abortion and teen STD rates — but it sends the message that sex is bad and icky un less you’re married. At which point anything goes, including marital rape.
Here’s another bit of bullshit that was equally predictable. When the No Trans Girls In Sports bullshit kicked off, several feminists pointed out that the sudden rush to “protect” women’s sports was coming from people who didn’t give a crap about it — the kind of sexists who are the reason Title IX, guaranteeing funding for women’s sports, exists. Unsurprisingly, they came for the trans girls in women’s sports, now they’re coming for women’s sports. Misogynist whiner Scott Yenor wants schools to switch girls out of competitive sports, which he imagines conflict with their real nature — their “gentle, graceful, cooperative tendencies” and being “oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.”
Instead of competition, why not give girls ““cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, recreational intramurals”? Which sound great as options, not as replacements. And they should be options for boys too — I’d have been happy to join a yoga club in school. Instead Yenor wants schools to protect and expand sports for boys — men’s soccer could be world-class except the feminazi Title IX requires spending money on chicks playing soccer! To be fair, he does talk about providing sports-alternatives for boys; however if schools don’t do that — boys get sports, women get yoga and cheerleading, end of story — I can’t imagine such a raging misogynist will fuss about it.
Yenor brings up that sports can affect women’s fertility; Mother Jones says the research isn’t conclusive. But we know school sports can inflict harrowing damage on men, too, from broken bones to brain injuries. I doubt Yenor’s going to the mat to protect them. It’s about the misogynist view that the female body is just a support system for the precious womb.
The boom in girls’ sports isn’t because they’ve been shanghaied into them. A lot of women enjoy playing sports and a lot of women can be as cutthroat as any man. Mia Hamm, Serena Williams, swimmers such as Esther Williams and Annette Kellerman And lots of men have objected, as this screenshot from the book Swimming Pretty shows:
I forget what exhibit led us to pick the Nasher Museum for a recent date. As usual we had a great time; it’s smaller than the NC Museum of Art but still cool.
Death Wish by Walter Quirt
Kenny Rivero’s “Self Portrait With Atom.”
Barkley Hendricks’ “Take All the Time You Need”
Damian Stamer’s “Playhouse.”
Helen Lunderberg’s “Persephone Returns.”
I didn’t get the artist credits for this one but I think it’s cool. Though marred by reflections in glass.
The ever vapid right-wing windbag Newt Gingrich, for instance, is shocked and appalled that Mamdani is asking New Yorkers to voluntarily keep their a.c. turned up high to conserve power. Other Republicans pile on.
As I’ve said before, it shows how strongly rightward the Overton window extends that Mamdani is controversial — he’s a millstone around the whole Democratic Party for doing things like bringing food to food deserts. Meanwhile conservative Democrat and former senator Joe Manchin, whose opposition sunk a lot of legislation, was never considered a handicap. Now Manchin is launching a political group intended to push Democrats further to the right — okay, technically he says it’s to “bring our country and the people who are participating in politics today more towards the center” but I’ve yet to see any group like that focus on pushing MAGA into stances akin to 1950s Eisenhower Republicans. It’s always the Democrats who have to shift.
For an unrelated note, here’s LGM looking at why Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear won’t and probably shouldn’t be replacing Mitch McConnell right now.
I posted this 1955 Lu Kimmel cover back in June. It occurred to me last week that I had more to say about it.
First, of course, we have the Sex Sells aspect — just how much is the protagonist seeing? Then there’s his body language: obviously focused on her but clutching the satchel defensively (though the Amazon synopsis makes me think it’s a safety deposit box). She’s sending an invitation; he’s not sure it’s a good idea.
The cover copy gives it context. It tells us he’s a thief and a womanizer, not some innocent. That suggests to me he was walking out with his prize when he discovered he wasn’t alone in the house. Maybe not, but it does inject some added drama into the scene. I don’t see lines like that on covers any more but there’s something to be said for them.
We don’t know anything about the woman from the cover art. However any woman whose posing in front of a man like that qualifies as a bad girl by 1955 standards. Typically in a paperback thriller she’ll be part of the conflict — love vs money, wanting a woman he shouldn’t have, etc. I don’t have the urge to hunt for more information but if I saw it cheap in a used bookstore, I might pick it up.
The point of the “undead sexist cliche” label is that sexist and misogynist beliefs shamble on, refusing to die no matter how often they’re disproved. Case in point, the idea that being a dick to women — or a dick, period — makes you cool.
I also wrote about an economist defending his colleagues talking sexist smack about women: “There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex. …” Dude, I stand by what I said then: “Just because academics are told they shouldn’t be sexist pigs, that doesn’t make being a sexist pig an act of rebellion. Being a sexist pig is just … being a sexist pig.”
As Andi Zeisler put it during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, 1980s pop culture was all about the glories of being a sexist pig, “modeled, with varying degrees of malice, the notion that good, clean teen-boy fun isn’t just about objectifying women. It’s also about laughing at them and mortifying them in a sacrifice to the larger cause of male bonding and group identity … So many of us either knew that girl or were that girl, which makes me consider that perhaps Kavanaugh is telling the truth when he professes not to recall these alleged incidents. In the rarefied milieu of elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges that nurtured him, jokes like these wouldn’t have been shocking or even particularly remarkable. They were the unacknowledged collateral damage of male bonding, blithely enacted on young women who didn’t have the luxury to forget about it.”
As a regular movie watcher back then, I can say Zeisler is absolutely right about how spying on naked girls or putting them in their place was a common theme in pop culture. At Atomic Junk Shop, the late Greg Hatcher makes the same point (I’ve linked to his column before, I know). Writing now, it strikes me it’s simultaneously treated as good, clean fun and as edgy rebellion. Rape apologist Camille Paglia, for instance, once wrote that “feminism with its solemn Carrie Nation repressiveness cannot see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.” Of course feminists do grasp that men find rape fun and erotic — they just don’t think that’s an excuse, or that rape is any less of a brutal crime because the rapist enjoys it.
As I wrote back in December, “there’s nothing edgy or daring about supporting patriarchy or defending rape — it’s evil, but it’s trite evil. The New York Times spent far more column inches discussing men’s fears of #metoo ruining their lives. than what it was like for women to face less harassment.” Our culture gives rapists a free pass and judges frequently do too. Feminists are not running the show; they are the insurgency rebelling against the system. Just consider that anti-feminist hacks such as Katie Roiphe can get articles in major media complaining that if feminists stamp out sexual harassment, office life will be drab and beige: “Maybe it’s better to live and work with colorful or inappropriate comments, with irreverence, wildness, incorrectness, ease. Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from the risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal?”” A woman who won’t accept Mr. Creepy’s comments on her boobs is setting herself up for heartbreak! Why can’t she see Camille Paglia was right and enjoy the “wild, infectious delirium of guys ignoring her boundaries!
Recently we had bro-type leftwingers gushing about Graham Platner and how his adultery and edgy drunken behavior made him edgy and authentic — not one of those “smoothgroin” guys who never put a sexual foot wrong (even after the rape allegations, some pundits are outraged his authentic working-class campaign crashed and burned). Other leftwingers think Democrats appealing to the manosphere appeals to the working class which is the key to winning elections — never mind that lots of the working class are female. And that women are the bedrock of the Democratic vote; somehow consultant, centrists and left-wing bros never consider appealing to the female side of the electorate important.
Showing again the undead nature of this bullshit, a year ago, the NYT offered an explanation why Dems were losing young men: they avoid saying things like “retard” or “faggot” which means they’re not authentic! “If there’s one issue that unites the bro-casters — beyond the need to find three hours of content — it’s a disdain for wokeness.”
Being woke and not calling people slurs is, apparently not authentic, just like Platner wouldn’t have been authentic if he’d been a faithful husband. “Modern bro-caster culture emerged in part as a response to the enforced sensitivity of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which left many young men feeling vilified for their purported privilege.” Criticizing the bro-casters validates their stance as spokespeople for the oppressed! Erik Loomis, despite being liberal, grumbles that the right-wingers are indeed “cool and funny and hip” so maybe the way to beat them is not fuss about language and not worry about offending people (though he’s also argued that offending people who buy into traditional gender stereotypes is a mistake and we should meet them “where they’re at”).
In another post on Platner, I pointed out how very gendered this idea of authenticity is. A woman who ran wild like Platner wouldn’t have a shot at the senate; woman aren’t supposed to have wild sides. When women call out men for being rapists or rape apologists, that’s not seen as daring, edgy or challenging the status quo, even though they are. No, when they do it it’s “enforced sensitivity.” Nor do they get any plaudits for being willing to offend men by speaking out. Edginess, in this worldview, is something only men get to do. When women do it, it’s a variation on Margaret Atwood’s old line: women’s greatest fear is that men will kill or rape them, men’s greatest fear is that women will criticize them. And a large party of our society accepts that as normal.
For more on misogyny and how stupid it is, pick up a copy of Undead Sexist Cliches. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.
SIX CRIMSON CRANES by Elizabeth Lim is a Y/A whose protagonist, Shiori, is princess in a fantasy analog of China. Magic is banned so it’s a shock for Shiori to realize not only does she have powers — she’s able to bring a paper bird to life as her sidekick — but so does her stepmother. And those powers may be why Shiori and her six brothers all love stepmommy so much …
Stepmother is, of course, not happy with these discoveries and takes steps: turning the brothers into cranes, exiling Shiori and putting an added curse on her, that if she speaks her brothers will die. Now the princess has to find her brothers, find a cure, break the curse on her and settle with her stepmother.
Although one big reveal was obvious from the first chapter, this worked for me. However the characters come off awfully contemporary — make Shiori and her brothers rich kids from Beverly Hills and it wouldn’t change much. Still, I’m up for reading more in the series eventually.
CANNIBALISM AND THE COMMON LAW: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which It Gave Rise by A.W. Brian Simpson recounts how in 1884, Captain Thomas Dudley and two crewmen were rescued from a lifeboat after the wreck of the yacht Mignonette, which they’d been crewing for a trip to Australia. Recounting their ordeal, they freely admitted they’d engaged in “the custom of the sea,” killing and eating the fourth member of the crew. They had no reason to think this would be a problem for them; as Simpson shows, it happened a lot in the 19th century and the British simply shrugged — tough situation, tough choices, “doctrine of necessity” applies. And for much of the century, the British court system had little say in what happened at sea, though by 1884 that had changed some. The only real objection to the trio’s cannibalism was that according to some versions of their story (they retold it several times) they hadn’t drawn lots to pick the victim but had just killed the weakest link.
What was also changing was that the government was increasingly uncomfortable with a legal doctrine that said killing was okay if it was necessary. Having tried a few years earlier to make a case against cannibalism and failed (it bogged down in imperial bureaucracy) they decided this time they’d succeed. To the surprise of Dudley and his men, they were charged with murder and sort-of found guilty (the judge put his thumb heavily on the scale) so the case could then be kicked up high enough to get a definitive ruling. Everyone involved did this with the intention of getting the trio pardoned — the goal was to establish a principle, not to punish them for their actions — but there was less enthusiasm at higher levels of government. The men ended up serving six months, then went free.
Unlike, say, the book Honor Killing, this is surprisingly lacking in drama. Simpson is approaching this as a legal historian covering a landmark case, not as a true-crime writer. It is not, however, lacking in interest. The book covers the rise of recreational yachting in the 19th century, multiple earlier cases of cannibalism, legal theories as to when cannibalism was justified, land-based cannibalism cases (I learned more about American cannibal Alf Packer than I ever did before), the frequency of shipwrecks (I can see why the Titanic being unsinkable made it such a big deal) and the complexities of the British legal system. Obviously not for everyone but it fits my particular tastes in nerdy reading.
DC Comics continuity has been in disarray ever since the Crisis on Infinite Earths, or more precisely, the endless reboots that followed it. Back in the 1990s, Dan Jurgens tried stabilizing it with the Zero Hour crossover event but reboots kept happening, both system wide (Infinite Crisis, Flashpoint, Convergence) and individual (John Byrne had the Doom Patrol’s history erased so he could start them over from scratch). With THE NEW HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE, Mark Waid and multiple illustrators are giving it another shot.
This gathers the various additions and retcons that have accumulated over the years and turns them into a single timeline. As many of them occurred in the last 15 years or so, and I haven’t been following comics closely (precisely because endless reboots make it hard to get attached to a character), this was interesting to see. Waid also has to account for the multiple reality resets since Infinite Crisis rebooted the post COIE world but explains that the disruptions have finally ceased and stability has been achieved. I’ll be delighted, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
This is obviously not something to read unless you’re seriously curious about this stuff; like Cannibalism and the Common Law this is a book giving you information, not drama. I was glad to have read it, though — and like I said, I hope this does set the stage for a DCU where continuity is no more tangled than it always is.
All rights to images remain with current holders. COIE cover by George Perez.
