Monthly Archives: September 2018

September 30, 2018 · 5:16 am

From super-hero teams to bees: graphic novels and books read

THE SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY ARCHIVE by multiple writers and artistscollects the first four issues of Leading Comics, which introduced comics’ second superhero team after the Justice Society (despite the JSA’s success, Marvel’s flop All-Winners Squad was the only other attempt at a super-team back in the Golden Age). Seven of DC’s second-stringers (Green Arrow and Speedy, Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, Vigilante, Crimson Avenger and the Shining Knight, plus a couple of their sidekicks) take on the Hand, the Black Star, Dr. Doome and the Sixth Sense in different stories. Hardly the best of the Golden Age, but enjoyable, more than some JSA stories; the Sixth Sense story is tricky enough to be really good (no surprise it was written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger).

JUSTICE LEAGUE: The People vs. the Justice League has Christopher Priest (best known for his excellent Black Panther run) riding his usual hobbyhorses about how superheroes are kind of silly and just wouldn’t work in the real world and should probably be laughed at (exceptions being the few characters he likes, like T’Challa). Unfortunately this story of the League massively screwing up and people asking Hard Questions about whether Earth can allow unauthorized vigilantes running around only plows a field countless other writers have already farmed — and as I’ve complained before, this kind of thing is just meaningless posing as it won’t change anything. Art by Pete Woods.

THE CASTOFFS: Mage Against the Machine by MK Reed, Brian Smith, Molly Ostertag and Wyeth Yates, is a competent fantasy adventure (Y/A, so in fairness I’m not the target audience) in which three female mages must travel across a post-apocalyptic wasteland dominated by hostile mecha. Nothing really new, but enjoyable enough.

KIM REAPER: Grim Beginnings is a fantasy rom-com by Sarah Graley that happened to suit my mood perfectly. College student Becka crushes madly on Goth classmate Kim, only to discover Kim’s part-time job is claiming souls for Death (he has to hire extra help). Can she convince Kim a job in retail would be just as good? Can Kim convince Becka they’ll work as a couple even though she walks around with a scythe? Fluff, but enjoyable fluff.

PLASTIC MAN ARCHIVES Vol.2 shows writer/artist Jack Cole improving steadily from Vol. 1 , as the delightful splash page below demonstrates. And so does Plas launching his own magazine (#1 is included in this volume), as solo books were strictly for A-listers back then. Cole’s humor is often very black as in The Game of Death or The Eyes Have It (a remarkably dark story involving an orphaned child and some child murdering fiends), but he can turn in a comedy detective story (The Rare Edition Murders) or just be gloriously silly. A pleasure to reread.

ROBBING THE BEES: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World by Holley Bishop, is one of the few pop-science books where adding personal anecdotal touches actually works for me. Mixed in with a history of beekeeping, honey and beeswax Bishop includes her personal experiences as an amateur beekeeper and a year spent hanging with a professional in the Florida Panhandle (in a town so small it’s really surprising to see it mentioned in print). Informative and like Thief at the End of the World it makes me appreciate how incredibly important honey used to be in the world.

#SFWApro. Top image by Mort Meskin, bottom by Jack Cole, all rights remain with current holders.

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September 29, 2018 · 5:18 am

A Baghdad thief, a Danish prince, a Japanese artist: movies

THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD (1924) stars the wonderful Douglas Fairbanks as a swashbuckling thief who falls madly for the city’s princess. He connives to abduct her as one of the suitors for her hand, but “When I touched your hand, all that was evil in me died.” (if his initial scheme puts the movie beyond the pale for you, now you know to avoid it). After he’s exposed, he and the other suitors set off to find a treasure worthy of the princess, but one of them is secretly scheming to take her and the city itself.

Like Fairbanks’ Robin Hood this is a good film easily outstripped by its successors, Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and the Korda Thief of Baghdad. At 2.5 hours it’s longer than it needs to be. Enjoyable, and Fairbanks is an amazingly charming, athletic hero, but if you had to pick, Korda’s version is the one. “Allah hath made thy soul for happiness, but thou must earn it.”

HAMLET (1980) is one of a series of Shakespeare adaptations the BBC did back in the late 1970s/early 1980s (my first encounter with many of the plays). This stars Derek Jacobi as a prince very obviously upset by first losing his father, than seeing Mommy (Claire Bloom) marry someone else immediately, and that’s before Daddy’s ghost tells him it was murder, courtesy of scheming, unctuous Claudius (Patrick Stewart, with hair!). At 3.5 hours, this is the longest Hamlet I’ve seen (I believe the Branagh is longer) and doesn’t have the spark Kevin Kline’s version did; then again I wound up watching it with lots of family interruptions, so maybe the fault was with the viewer. “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay/Might stop a hole, to keep the wind away!”

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (2013) profiles Japanese artist Ushio Shinuhara and his wife Noriko, who fictionalized their relationship in her Cutie and the Boxer ‘toons. This feels oddly familiar — Ushio is very much in the mold of multiple fictional artists who treat their partner as a footstool on the road to success — but Noriko is more interesting, putting up with him but not coming off as the standard long-suffering spouse of fiction. Interesting, but not compelling. “Sometimes there are not enough nutrients for both of us.”

#SFWApro. All rights to image remain with current holder.

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September 28, 2018 · 4:00 pm

Time hacks that work, hacks that don’t

One that works: doing my 1,000 words of new stuff first thing in the morning, rather than squeezing it in later in the day. I really got some good work done: finished the first draft of an untitled story about honey and magic, almost completed a second draft of Only the Lonely Can Slay and got a little work done on a story set in Hollywood in the 1930s.

I’m also up to 76,000 words on Southern Discomfort, which is good, but I’d really expected to get further. Time just got away from me and there were just too many robots to smash, so to speak.

The time hack that isn’t working is doing some writing Sunday evening. I thought that way I’d be ready when unexpected problems cropped up. However between making dinner and family stuff that popped up Sunday the last two weekends, that hasn’t worked out. I could do it earlier in the day, but that feels much more like it’s cutting into my weekend. And even though I enjoy my work, I like having two days not to think about it. However I’ll try that this weekend.

It didn’t help this week was full of unexpected problems. The light downstairs died and we had to replace the whole fixture. The price was great (our electrician is very reasonable) but it took longer for him to fix things than expected.

I had another class in the Alexander Technique, for better posture and body control. And because I forgot to erase a rescheduled appointment I spent part of Thursday driving to my opthalmologist when I didn’t need to. And we got a second piece of furniture delivered today, and I spent a lot of time arranging our new layout.

Plus TYG’s schedule was a mess, so I gave the dogs a couple of extra walks. And as it’s finally cooling off, lunch walks are talking longer, which adds up to more walkies-time.

And then there was the hearings. I haven’t been this distracted and pissed about politics since the election. I don’t know that I’ve ever vented this much about politics on FB, but the sight of several high-school friends declaring that big whoop, who cares if he tried to rape someone … I read a lot about how conservatives don’t care about consent, but it’s unsettling to see that view among people I know (excepting a couple I already know are rape apologists).

On the bright side, Trixie and Plushie did get to play in the yard next door with Calla, the dog there, and with Carmella, a dog from up the cul-de-sac. She’s below. I love the ears — as a friend of mine said, she looks like she stepped out of Gremlins.

That’s a much better thought to end the week on.

#SFWApro. Cover by Billy Graham, all rights remain with current holder.

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Filed under Short Stories, Southern Discomfort, Time management and goals, Writing

September 28, 2018 · 5:14 am

Covers for Friday

One by Peter Jones. I believe this was for a British edition of the book.

And what would these posts be without a Powers cover?

A good one by Veligursky

One by Schoenherr

And one by Kelly Freas

#SFWApro. All rights to all covers remain with current holders.

Peter Pan, Roy Lichtenstein, Samuel Clemens and copyright: links

The stage play Peter Pan has something unique about it: a copyright that never ends.

Judge Richard Posner presided over several noteworthy copyright cases.

Samuel Clemens, advocate for copyright rights.

What can you do if your books are pirated and sold as ibooks? Not much.

A woman criticizes her homebuilder in a blog post. Someone copies and pastes the material, then demands the original post be taken down for violating copyright.

Before the Internet, before DVD and VHS, there was still film piracy.

Roy Lichtenstein became a pop art star by turning images like Irv Novick’s panel above into (supposed) high art that “he” created. How did the original artists feel about this?

A possible breakthrough in a longstanding digital-music rights dispute.

On the merits of registering copyright.

Potential problems with Europe’s new copyright laws.

Speaking of new laws, the CLASSICS Act gives artists who recorded before 1972 a share of digital royalties. Some like the idea, some hate it.

Drawbacks to the right of publicity as currently conceived.

The creator of a Forest of Light exhibit tried and failed to derail an imitator with a trademark claim.

A music professor posted some public domain Beethoven recordings to YouTube. Google’s infringement-spotter insisted they were copyright protected and demanded he take them down.

#SFWApro. Image by Irv Novick, all rights remain with current holder.

Doc Savage, dunderhead: Mystery on Happy Bones and The Mental Monster

This months two novels are good evidence for Bobb Cotter’s thesis that Doc became increasingly human during WW II. Beyond human, really; he comes off as a tough, but extremely fallible guy.

THE MYSTERY OF HAPPY BONES (the last paperback before Bantam switched to doing two Doc novels per book) reminds me a lot of Mystery on the Snow; it’s a mundane adventure focusing on control of natural resources, enlivened by a formidable female character. In Mystery the resource was a new metal, benlanium, for use in aircraft manufacturing; here it’s a tungsten vein the Nazis want to mine.

The story opens with a mysterious messenger dropping off a parcel at Doc’s tied up in wire; the wire is actually an unwound spool from a wire recorder, a way to get a message to Doc past watching Nazi eyes. The messenger is a cross-dressed Hannah, descended from a line of pirates ruling over a small island in the Caribbean (an island of dark-skinned natives, something that hasn’t aged well). Hannah is a truly memorable guest character, up there with Toni Lash and Retta Ken. At one point she knocks Monk unconscious; when Doc tackles her, she proves almost a match for him in combat. It turns out, fortunately, she’s on the good guys’ side; Happy Bones, the island where the Nazis are digging up tungsten, is right next to her own island kingdom. The US plans to set up an air base on Happy Bones, which could throw a spanner in the Nazi mining works. Their efforts to prevent this kick-started the whole plot.

Doc, as I said, comes across a lot more fallible than usual. Hannah holds her own with him in a fight not because she’s Michelle Yeoh but because Doc isn’t being written as his usual invincible self. Later in the novel, Doc’s hiding in an airplane’s cargo hold when he’s suddenly caught. He simply got careless and dropped its guard.

The end result isn’t horrible, but it ain’t memorable, except for Hannah.

THE MENTAL MONSTER shows once again Lester Dent’s lack of interest in continuity: Doc’s already encountered mind-reading technology in The Midas Man and a telepath in The Mental Wizard but the story treats the mind-reading device here (actually closer to a polygraph that works by EEG readings) as if such a thing is impossible.

The story opens with Bill Keeley, an engineer friend of Renny’s, telling Doc someone seems to have targeted his employer, a company developing synthetic rubber production (finding a secure rubber supply was also the McGuffin in The Flaming Falcons and The Land of Fear). Then Bill spots a white bird flying through the restaurant where he’s meeting Doc, panics and runs out. It turns out the bad guys (in it for money rather than the Axis) have a nasty germ concentrate and use the white birds to deliver it, or simply as a threat.

This is a minor adventure, and Doc’s even more of a screw-up here. In one scene, he walks right into an ambush without spotting the threat. At the climax he’s trying to free a tied-up Monk, but realizes he didn’t think to find a knife for cutting the rope; this Doc, it seems, doesn’t have the muscle to just tear them.

The book does have another competent woman, Bill’s girlfriend Carole, though she’s not quite in Hannah’s league. And it does offer one funny moment, when some of the crime ring brag that they’ve just killed Doc Savage. One of the other crooks gets up, announces he’s quitting and joining the Merchant Marine and walks out. He clearly knows that when Doc Savage is declared dead, he never is.

#SFWApro. Cover above by Bob Larkin, below by Emery Clarke. All rights to covers remain with current holders.

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September 25, 2018 · 7:22 am

Why didn’t she call the cops? Rape cases and rape culture.

I see people still arguing that Christine Ford has to be lying about Kavanaugh or she’d have reported it to police at the time. Let’s look at some rape/assault cases (sorry, I’m pressed for time, so almost no links).

Brock Turner sexually assaults an unconscious woman. His father tells the judge Turner shouldn’t have his life ruined for a few minutes of bad judgment. Sentence: three months in county jail.

Larry Nassar, a gymnastics doctor at the University of Michigan molested and felt up his patients for years. Patients complained to the university administration, repeatedly. The university does nothing.

In Alaska, Justin Schneider was charged with kidnapping and assault in a rape case. He pled guilty to one assault charge. No jail time. Prosecutor and judge say losing his job and spending a year on house arrest with his family is enough punishment, so he gets a free pass. But he’d better not do it again, by golly!

A rapist in Maryland some years back choked his victim before the actual sex act. Cops conclusion: he wasn’t choking her at the moment of penetration, so he wasn’t really using force. No charges.

A man in Colorado leaves an answering machine message telling a woman that yes, the sex they’d had the night before was rape. Prosecutor (now congressman) Ken Buck told the woman it still seemed to him like “buyer’s remorse.” No charges filed.

Elizabeth Bruenig, in a recent WaPo article, writes about how there was a rape case in her home town. The victim reported it, and got villified, with graffiti popping up everywhere suggesting she should be raped some more (FAITH, for “Fuck Amber In Three Holes”).

Multiple Protestant churches have covered up for rapists. As, obviously, does the Catholic Church. And mosques. And some Jewish communities).

A Brooklyn cop a couple of years back said that he wasn’t worried about the uptick in rape cases in his precinct because they were all acquaintance rape, which isn’t as bad as stranger rape (men who rape strangers, they’re the evil ones!). For some reason that eluded him, a lot of the victims decided not to cooperate with the police.

Cases like these tell rape victims they won’t be believed. And even if they’re believed, there won’t be charges or a trial. And that if there’s a trial, the court won’t want the rapist to suffer or see his future ruined. His redemption, and being sincerely sorry, is taken as a given. Conversely, rapists learn the risk/reward ratio favors them (as one guy put it after the election, Trump winning demonstrates you can commit sexual assault and not suffer any consequences). The system’s on their side. Bystanders learn that only losers get raped. Rapists are winners; siding with them and judging the victim (as in the Bruenig case, or Steubenville) makes you one of the cool kids. If you’re part of a college/church/organization, you learn you’re expected to shut your mouth at a minimum, at a maximum to provide cover.

Rape culture isn’t an organized set of beliefs. It’s dozens of individual acts, individual cases, all of which combined tell us what’s acceptable and what isn’t. What’s a crime and what’s just boys having a little fun. And until we root it out, women will continue not to come forward.

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September 25, 2018 · 5:10 am

Story Behind the Story: Not In Our Stars But In Ourselves

As I’ve mentioned before, my protagonists in Atoms for Peace are a lot less racist than they’d probably be in the real world. In some vague gesture of realism, one of the leads in Not In Our Stars, Not in Ourselves, is a good deal more bigoted.

L.G. “Elegy” Walker was born in East Jesus, Kentucky, grew up poor white, but by 1958, he’s a mid-level official at Cape Canaveral. The space program, a joint US/USSR effort, is about to launch humanity’s first lunar mission (reverse-engineering alien ships has jump-started space flight). Walker has remade himself into a calm, accomplished professional. He’s shrewd about who to kiss up to and who he can safely ignore, and intensely career focused. Like a lot of people who know what it’s like to have nothing, he’s a little intense about not losing what he has, hence security officer Valentina Eisenstein nicknamking him Elegy.

Despite the changes in him, the racism Walker grew up with is alive and well in him. He’s able to accept that a few blacks can be as good as a white man (there are black astronauts in the program), but they’re the exception. When ‘s framed for murder, the horror isn’t the murder but the supposed motive: he had a black lover, she got pregnant so he killed her to avoid scandal. The thought that people might think he’d crossed the color line, the thought that his parents or the other folks back home might believe it … his brain pretty much shuts down with horror.

Fortunately Eisenstein’s brain is working. A WW II Soviet sniper turned security officer, she identifies with Elegy in a way; they’ve both had to work and fight to get their present position. She knows he wouldn’t take a black lover, or one who was bottom-drawer of the working class (that’s what he’s running away from). But can she prove it? And given that he’s not really anyone important, what possible motive could anyone have for the frame?

I really like Eisenstein. She’s smart, capable, smokes a pipe (it keeps men off balance, which is useful for a security officer), and hates life in Florida with its head, humidity and lack of culture. I’d love to use her in Brain From Outer Space but I doubt I can work her in.

This was the first story in the series I wrote after moving to Durham, and the writer’s group helped a lot, straightening out some plot points. Thanks, y’all!

#SFWApro. Cover by Zakaria Nada.

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September 24, 2018 · 5:10 am

Rape, predators and prey

As several bloggers and pundits have pointed out, it’s creepy that the response to Brett Kavanaugh saying he totally did not assault Christine Bresley Ford is to declare that even if he did, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Given the chance to pretend they don’t tolerate predators, that they protect human prey — something that’s part of government’s police function — the right wing picks the predator’s side. When a second accuser spoke up against Kavanaugh, the Republican response was to speed up the vote.

And we’re not talking incels and other creeps venting online, we’re talking the Republican mainstream. Of course, they’re not always pro-predator: if the predation is black-on-white, or hispanic on white, then they want the hammer dropped. Even after the Central Park Five were cleared, Trump kept insisting they were guilty. But white man praying on woman? No big!

This isn’t unique. Communities shit on rape victims. The religious defends in-church predators just like the Catholic Church. Paige Patterson, the former Southern Baptist leader who told women to stay with their abusers, is preaching again; some supporters say firing him for not reporting a students’ rape wasn’t Biblical. At this point, part of Kavanaugh’s appeal is that appointing him is a triumph for sexism: ” It has to be this guy, now, because he has been accused, credibly, of attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl in 1982—moreover because people believe this should be considered a disqualifying blight on his record. The thing that must happen is that those people must be defeated.” It’s a nastier version of owning the liberals, but it’s also about reinforcing male supremacy: men can do whatever they damn well please to women without consequences.

As I’ve said before, that’s the nature of patriarchy. I suspect it’s one reason court evangelicals are comfortable supporting Trump (or Roy Moore). Men are free to do what they want with women, it’s up to the women to find a way to restrain them. If not, the men are entitled to prey. Those who aren’t comfortable saying that aloud just lie: Bible-thumper Franklin Graham’s response to the allegations has been to lie that Kavanaugh stopped as soon as Ford said no. The stuff about him covering her mouth, turning the music up loud? Look, crickets!

Dennis Prager explains it’s taking the charges seriously that will damage “America’s moral compass” and the proper way to deal with sexual assault at work is to hide: “When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.” No, it’s survival. I’m sorry your wife is married to you, dude.

A White House lawyer says that if Kavanaugh can be brought down by these accusations — “brought down” meaning going back to his current job as a lifetime-appointed federal judge — “every man should certainly be worried.” Well, no, only men who’ve held a woman down and covered her mouth to prevent her screaming. As Lili Loufbourow says, the underlying message is that boys do evil things and we should just accept that’s the way of the world (not a new right-wing insight).

An alternative theory is that it happened but Ford misidentified the attacker. Right-wing think-tanker Ed Whelan actually accused another man by name; Kathleen Parker tried the same tack without naming anyone. This seems like a split-the-difference tactic (nobody’s lying, someone’s just wrong!) but as noted at the first link, it’s not getting any traction. And possibly Whelan came up with it after talking with Kavanaugh.

Law professor Amy Chua, who knows and supports Kavanaugh’s nomination, also told female students who wanted to clerk for him that “it was no accident” his female clerks look like models.

By the time you read this, I may already be a couple of developments behind. So to end on something a little more upbeat, here’s advice on consent: don’t make people drink tea.

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Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches

Tagged as unsafe in any station

September 23, 2018 · 5:24 am

Women, rubber, luck, Hitchcock and ‘toons: books read

I’ve been meaning to reread THE MISMEASURE OF WOMAN: Why Women are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex or the Opposite Sex by Carol Tavris as research for Undead Sexist Cliches and finally did so. Tavris looks critically at the assumptions men are the default normal setting for homo sapiens, and that women are a defective copy, so when women do it differently, they’re doing it wrong. Tavris doesn’t deny women and men are different, but sees the differences as rooted in different life experiences rather than fundamental biology, and she shows how the explanations shift constantly; brain science, for example, “proves” men are superior because their brains are bigger, or more specialized, or particular parts of the brain are bigger, depending which theory is currently popular. Despite coming out in 1992, still timely; even though sociobiology seems to have vanished into the trash can of science, evolutionary psychology has filled the same place.

THIEF AT THE END OF THE WORLD: Rubber, Power and the Seeds of Empire, by Joe Jackson, shows why several Doc Savage novels such as The Flaming Falcons revolved around the USA getting its own rubber supply. Starting in the 19th century, rubber became as vital as oil would be to the 20th: waterproofing, insulation, molding into plastics, and as a cushion wherever mechanical parts in engines had to smash up against each other. The only source was South America, in part of the Amazon, until a Brit named Henry Wickham smuggled some seeds out, a shining triumph in an otherwise unsuccessful life. Complicating his efforts were Brazilian authorities interested in stopping such acts of biopiracy, and the classism and bureaucracy of the British government (collectors such as Wickham were considered lower-class, less scientists than gardeners). Overall, very good.

CITY OF LOST FORTUNES by Bryan Camp caught my attention because of his discussion on John Scalzi’s blog of the roles luck and trickster figures play in the novel. In practice, it’s a fairly standard urban fantasy set in New Orleans and being the demigod son of some Trickster doesn’t make the protagonist any snarkier or more anti-authoritarian than, say, Harry Dresden. So not for me, but if you like urban fantasy more than I do … One thing I do notice is that the power level is notably higher than most urban fantasies I’ve read; Dresden took a lot longer to actually start squaring off against gods.

THE HITCHCOCK ROMANCE: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films by Lesley Brill argues that far from being cynical, Hitch’s films hold up love and marriage as the ideal end game for his protagonists, though not necessarily an attainable one. Brill divides much of Hitchcock’s output into Romances (true love triumphs over past tragedy [Marnie] or current obstacles [North by Northwest]) and Ironic which uses the same tropes and elements, but the lovers are dragged down (Vertigo). Heavy academese made this a slow read, but Brill’s persuasive enough I’ll keep it handy if I ever go through a Hitchcock rewatching cycle.

THE FIFTY GREATEST CARTOONS offers a nice range of viewing between #1 (What’s Opera Doc?) and #50 (Felix in Hollywood), including UA, Warner Brothers, Tex Avery, Disney and assorted indies. The picks (based on a survey of professional animators) include the landmark Gertie the Dinosaur, the unconventional The Old Mill, Tex Avery’s classic Northwest Hounded Police (“Don’t look now/use your noodle/You’re being followed/by Sgt. McPoodle.”) and weirdies such as Bambi Meets Godzilla. I’m not sure this list is one for the ages — would anyone my niece’s age get the parody elements of The Dover Boys and does it work without them? — but I still enjoyed this. The book includes a listing of various collections containing the ‘toons, but it’s a 1990s book so they’re all videotapes.

#SFWApro. Cover by James Bama, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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Tagged as alfred hitchcock