dream - 111o26: astray in a bright wood

Icy gold noon winterlight over a slough of swampy southern forest.  Felled cedar & pine laid a maze across leaf-covered bogland.  Traveling with friends?  Family?  Faces glimpsed and now elusive.  Voices caroming through the barren and thorny expanse.  Know there's three of us, and I'm not agile enough to climb and navigate the windfalls.  Who is the third that walks beside me?  Knees & shoulder both grieving me hard.  Keep having to step from the logs to recalibrate course.  The squelching earth hiding hazards; snakes and leeches always a possibility.  Where are we going?  Destination unknown.  Doesn't feel like forests of my childhood.  Am Dante without a Virgil, in the wood of my own mortality.  At least my mother's shade is here...?  (Perhaps?)  Sense she's forced to advance without me, weeping...

Wake in pain, needing to ice right knee.  Left shoulder a little fucked from laying wrong.  Pop ibuprofen.  The light of the woods a lantern in my mind, prepared to write it down.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - November 2o26 (kirboid konfig)

The Demon #1 (2o26) - written & illustrated by James Harren w/ colours by Dave Stewart

DC Finest - The Demon: Birth of the Demon (1972-74 / 1978 / 1979 / 1981) - written & illustrated by Jack Kirby w/ inks by Mike Royers + arcs w/ art by Michael Golden, Jim Aparo, Steve Ditko, & Dick Giordiano

Gone, gone, form of fan...

So, I've got the new Harren Demon from DC, plus a slab edition of Kirby era Demon to chew on like a zesty hell-flavoured dog "toy".  No point-by-point bullets yet, because the Big Reading is happening n-o-w.  Mike Royers' inks are something else, man.  I was always a fan of Etrigan, dating back to when I was a kid, but the Kirby era stuff I never hit--  because it was never around?  Seriously.  Kirby Demon is a thing that I have never seen In The Wild, in thirty-odd years of dedicated longbox archaeology.  According to Duin & Richardson's 'Comics: Between The Panels', Kirby's inspiration was a bald swipe from Foster's Prince Valiant--  December of 1937 to January of 1938.  Val was running a con on the Ogre of Sinstar Wood, using the skin of a goose(!), quills for tusks, and webbed feet for ears.  It worked:  he scared the ogre to death.  Kirby was so taken with the design he adopted it in 1972.

So the Demon is either fifty-four years old, our time...  FOUR YEARS OLDER THAN MY ASS   ...or he's a sprightly eighty-nine years old, dated from Foster's inception.  Basically fucker is more ageless than Jason Blood--  who's had a rough time of it, if the Harren revamp is anything to go by.  And I adore the Harren revamp.  Blood is essentially Hellboy now, and what a righteous look for him:  tore-up trenchcoat heavy with arcane oddments, iron bar topped with a magical pinecone, and a pocket full of gnomes & fae friends.  I adore this shit.  Much as the Demon & Blood's appearances in Ennis & McCrea's Hitman charmed my balls off, *this* iteration feels 100% Right.  As in righteous.  It feels like there's a place for these boys on the racks.  Which I couldn't even say for the Matt Wagner iteration, a book I have encountered In The Wild, in longbox archaeology, repeatedly.  Weird, honestly.  Nobody really rolls for the Wagner miniseries.  It's competent.  But it's not Matt Wagner, to me, any more than it's Demon or Blood.  This?  This, I am hella eager to see where Herren carries us.

The first & final pages of this single issue hang in my mind like weathered tapestries from a castle wall.  Supergood to have new, current comix in my veins.  I BURN FOR MORE.

Nemesis (2o1o) - written by Mark Millar w/ art by Steve McNiven

(blink, blink)  Reading time required: ten minutes.

Not the stupidest thing I've read this year, tho def contender for most mindless.  Mark Millar could have written this in the time devoted to his morning shit.  An appalling thing to consider, as I assume coffee factors in.  I picture the man in classic Spider Jerusalem pinup mode, laptop on his knees, his fingers an impossible blur:

"NEMESIS MURDERIZES NINETY-SEVEN PRISON GUARDS IN RIOT GEAR WITH CRUEL, EFFICIENT CELERITY.  IT WILL BE THE ONLY ENJOYABLE PART OF THE BOOK, AND EASILY THE MOST PORNOGRAPHIC.  FANS OF MY WORK WILL EJACULATE LIKE THE MEDICI FOUNTAINS OF LUXUMBOURG, ONLY THE SPRAY WILL BE MORE WATERY AND YELLOWISH, AND NO-ONE WILL EVER VISIT THEM, EVER, MUCH LESS VOLUNTEER FOR PHOTOS.  SUCH IS MY FAME.  SPEAKING OF, MAKE A NOTE TO INVEST IN HANEBISHO BOG ROLL.  CURRENT WIPES SUBSTANDARD & I NEED SOMETHING WITH MOISTURIZER."

Have now spent longer shittalking this comic than Millar did scripting it.  'Decompressed comics' were such a mistake.

Billy Bat vols 1-2 (2oo8) - written & illustrated by Naoki Urasawa w/ art assisted by Takashi Nagasaki

I don't know.   The prospect of another meander into mystery by Urasawa initially thrilled me-- I quite liked 20th Century Boys, and Monster was sick fun...  But maybe I'd rather have more Master Keaton or straight up revert to Pineapple Army.  Pluto was by far the most concise & cogent manga I've encountered from this team, but it's not something I need to re-read.  And if I'm honest with myself, the reason I drilled down so thoroughly on 20thC.B. (every time a volume dropped, I did a front-to-back re-read of the entire series w/ the newest volume as a chaser) was because, at the time, I was unfamiliar with the author's tendency to pretty much bluff everything.  I believed there was a master plot ergo nothing was necessarily insignificant.  That's not how Urasawa actually builds, though.  He has to keep himself interested & invested, so he would only have rough goals, big notes, and let the little stuff develop as it occurred.  He has to keep himself interested; and as a writer / artist, I can appreciate the desire for surprise.  Nothing grinds the joy out of creation quite so thoroughly as a watertight script.  But with this series, I just don't know.  The prospect of 24-26 tankubon, and a multi-generational saga of Who Is The True Baddie, maybe it's my recently found mortality has me impatient at the outset.  I am curious how it develops, but there isn't quite the fire to figure out the big mysteries in me, these days.  Also it feels like Urasawa is self-consciously recycling character designs from 20thC.B. here...  Though that could simply be his training with The Master, Osamu Tezuka; could be Naoki Urasawa developed his own Star System for peopling the work.  Why wouldn't he?

I'll give it one more volume to properly hook me.  But if not, no worries.  If I need to work at a jigsaw, my husband has a collection.  That's way more fun, and it doesn't toy with my faith in a finished product.  The short version is this ain't bad.  But Billy Bat ain't got me, yet.

The Demon #1-9... (1972-'73) - written & illustrated by Jack Kirby w/ inks by Mike Royers

The Demon #2 (2o26) - written & illustrated by James Harren w/ colours by Dave Stewart

Jack Kirby.  The Man, the Miffed, the Ledge's Edge.  This book is a weird thing, even as it's bog-standard, as romps go.  It's little more than a romp, but a measured, controlled romp.  Jack had done it all, by 1972.  Maybe that's why he agreed to being, well, grounded in Gotham.

Because make no mistake, that's what this book is, in all its schizo intent--  Jack Kirby working safe turf.  A book set in Batman's backyard, about a serious, conservative figure striving for respectability, pottering confidently with the occult a la Doctor Thirteen.  Jason Blood's no Stephen Strange-- for starters, he has friends, confidants, not servants, not underlings, but people who actually care for & about him, struggling to understand why he is who he is, and why he goes along with the stuff demanded of the Demon.

Perhaps there could be a closer read of these comfortably formulaic, bite-sized pieces of adventure, with their readily swiped horror analogues, with their trifling, betrayer witches, cursed beastmen & phantoms of other opera.  One's friends do tend to originate in kind needing kin; witness Blood's bud Harry, the jocular ad-man, who  looks a little (okay, a lot) like Jack Kirby doing a distorted self-portrait.  He's the doubting Thomas of this title.  There's little doubt Kirby himself had little truck with the occult; Jack could barely be bothered to research anything beyond glossing the era of king Arthur's court.  Cripes, the man could draw a horse without photo reference, why should he have to devle into a buncha hokum?

Why does The Demon title itself pretend to?  Because Blood doesn't do most of the real work of explaining magic to the whitefolk, he lets his best friend-- Randu, of the U.N., with his inexplicable psychic facility  --whitesplain to all the rubes in the room.  The occult investigator thing's just a cover for Blood being bound to a curse (a contract, one might infer) with forceful, arcane influence on the minds of men.  Blood regularly vanishes, either transformed or subsumed, dragged into stories he has no actual part in.

There's something to this reading, even as, perversely, there's also not much there.  Because did Kirby have a Randu in his life?  Or is Randu meant, a la our normie jobber Harry, to be an externalized manifestation of Kirby's daydreaming Other?  Kirby, the sometime mystic & metaphysical speculator who'd seen too much of war to worry about Satan, carving off a bit of himself in Randu: working as a translator (whose occupation is never seen, only spoken of, same as Harry) when-ever he's not working to yank Blood back from whatever mishigas he's gotten caught up in.  Because these stories constantly need Randu to do the thankless task of whitesplaining what Blood's been up to.

And what of glamourous Glenda?  Is she Roz?  Is she hell.  Roz might could resent that read, and with reason.  Glenda's a good-time girl with a healthy curiousity about Blood but a grudging investment in the curse he carries.  She's not dissimilar to Harry in her role, keeping the show going, showing up for parties, getting abducted when the role requires a damsel to be distressed by all the hazardous ephemera attached to Jason's scholarly "self"-- she wonders about the gallery of cosplaying self-portraits lining his walls, what they say about the mere mortal she's interested in.  She's harder to convince than Harry, that any of the sturm & drang Means Anything, Glenda's a material girl in a material world, brooks no bullshit, just wants to get the men around her to cut loose & maybe cut a rug once in a while...  Yet still gets caught up in a role that's more greek chorus than gal about town.

And our Demon:  What is Etrigan?  A powerful servant, at the beck & call of some vizier of a once-powerful, now legendary (read: crumbled) kingdom.  Etrigan's a badass straight outta hell, summoned & dispatched on scattershot missions as Carmine Infantino uh I mean Merlin, demands.  Is any of this a reach?  C'mon.  The original Demon, the one Kirby stole from Hal Foster, was a masque for hoaxing marks!  This book existed to yank Kirby away from completing his original reason for BEING AT DC.  And Jolly Jack totally resented it.  I don't doubt he felt the whole mission was at its heart some kinda satanic prank.

But bless him, he worked hard to make it happen.  He accidentally, against his better judgment, created a top-seller.  Because the occult was what the kids were into, the hollywood monsters & their expies were what was making money at Marvel, ergo tired tropes were the order du jour.  Literally, Jack was Following Orders.  So he did as he was asked and ground this thing out on a monthly schedule for two years.  It doesn't feel like any accident how, after Kirby ended his time with Etrigan, the curse that cackles uh I mean infernal I.P. gets assigned to a slumming Steve Ditko...

Blood's big internal conflict, the HEART of this book, is really just a guy trying to remember who he is & rationalize why he's not in control of his destiny.  He has no reason for being in Gotham beyond being placed there.  But he has buds who help him out, and that's good enough, as things go.  They don't go much of anywhere besides introducing villains & bugbears.  So it's kind of wild that James Harren has mined such visual (& thematic) riches from the 13 issues Kirby hacked out.

Because don't mistake me.  Etrigan's interesting.  Alan Moore thought so, as every generation of DC writer who had been a reader does.  Garth Ennis found him intensely amusing, particularly that internal conflict, of the alternate identity who wants to carve a little self-determination away from his host.  The Demon wants to cut himself free of his fetters to the immortal (and entirely too moral) Blood.  He serves; but does not want to serve, in hell or here on earth.  What place has he in Gotham, where magick is at best hoary hoax, criminal cover for gangster schtick?

These are Real Questions, and I do believe Harren's the man to answer them.

We'll soon find out.  Be here next month, for more...

WUXTRY! WUXTRY! BLEED INK? -OR- DOUBT SHIT?

Jonah Hex & the Shadow of Death #1-2 (2o26) - written & illustrated by Michael Walsh w/ colours by Toni-Marie Griffen

dream - 11o826: hypnogogic voice

Reading Peter Arshinov's 'History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918-1921: Solidarity Black & Red' in bed.  Mind whites out in abrupt fade; vision goes the colour of the paper in my hand.  A voice.

"So it's going to snow again."

Fade up to the book still vertical on my chest.  Tell Sig it's time for me to go to sleep, mentioning the audio, and he smiles.  It's a positive forecast, is his reaction.  I snuggle up & fade for real.

lode runners, tech chasers, & looking forward to looking back (with fondness, rather than resentment)

Is this worthy of a blog post?  Perhaps not.  Anyroad.  I was a gamer, once, in my adolescence & teen years.  Didn't really escape into my twenties & on with the real Drive or Desire to be a gamer.  I like a game.  My dad worked for Bally Arcade Company, in Dogwater, Alabama, and once smuggled out the various components & boards necessary to build his own tabletop Galaga at our house.  We also had a Bally Old Chicago pinball machine, with the hand-painted glass backboard.  These items lived on our screened-in front porch, and I'd go fuck around on 'em anytime I pleased.  Which was often.

Unlike most kids in Dogwater, Alabama, I spent a hot minute growing up in an arcade, and could play whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.  Tempest, Centipede, Crystal Castles--  you name it.  I didn't Tron often, because I sucked at light cycling, which we all know was the best bit.

Of course dad didn't work there forever.  Dogwater didn't have much in the way of gang shit, but there were some small-time crews who tried to lean on the arcades.  Dad quit Bally after some heavies showed up with a sawed-off, looking for a cut, as I understand it.  Sometime in the mid 80s he decided to partner up with a drug buddy (read: coke fiend) who was an audiophile and they started one of several electronic repair businesses.  This would, in fact, become the pattern:  the business would rock awhile, and then somewhere along the way the drug buddy-cum-business partner would flake out or fuck up the books and then it would be time to start fresh, with some other connection dad had made.

Honestly, I didn't know the coke was around.  Dad liked weed more than anything.  (I remember once he was on peyote & managed to fall off the roof of our house...)  But there was a little coke, I realize, now, and that maybe explains some of his more temperamental glitchouts.  Not all of them.  But more than could be laid at the feet of capitalism & a deep fear of Planned Obsolescence, which he attempted to embed in me.

This chasing of technology would persist, and extend to computers, naturally.  So when the first home computers rolled out, we would adopt the first of whatever.  There was an Atari, of course, ergo I played the notorious E.T. that seems to have become legendary in its unutterable bugginess.  I don't remember much about the Atari home system apart from Frogger, honestly.  Then we made the leap to the early Apple systems, and I wound up inheriting the Apple IIc from them when they got the first Mac.  Along the way I became, well, addicted to certain Broderbund games.

Namely Lode Runner.  It became my favourite.  Next to Below The Root and Cosmic Osmo, and, yes, Prince of Persia.  Games involving lots of running & climbing & eventually dead-end exploration were pretty much my cozy zone.  "What's that over there?  Why can't I reach it!?"  But there's a certain sadistic pleasure to Lode Runner in the fuckedness of blowing holes in the floor and trapping your pursuers there, which none of the aforementioned can equal.  It's right up there with blowing up all the humans on the ground on Defender, so one may rocket endlessly through the vacuum, zapping youfoes.

My inner bastard rearing his ugly head.

Sure, eventually I wound up with an NES and the Apple IIc became a dust magnet.  I had a text adventure game phase, same as all of us, but when graphics became The Thing, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Zork and all that were in the rearview forever.  It was me & Mario for a damned long time, because I was frankly bad at speedrunning but insisted on trying no matter what.  I was addicted for quite a while, and eventually bought a secondhand Playstation (& Metal Gear Solid, natch) from a co-worker.  But by the time we entered the 2000s and my art partner became one of those asshole who rejoiced in trouncing you at GoldenEye, a lot of the joy of gaming had left me.  Gaming was, in fact, part of why I stopped working with Josiah, because he became one of those insufferables who'd rather gloat over your fragged digital corpse than collaborate.  There was no teaming up in the game realm with him, and that dynamic backwashed into our art.  I got turned off games, more or less.  It was worse than watching someone turn into an addict to network teevee.

Anyhow.  Games left a bad taste in my mouth for a very long time.  And since I was never great at them, I left them behind.  But lately I have been bitten by the nostalgia bug.  And the Internet Archive has that stuff, in vast quantities.  So maybe I'll git gud again.  Or maybe I won't.  But what the hell, right?

Maybe it's 'cause my husband is a gamer.  One of the nicest you'll ever meet.  <3

slutshaming isn't altogether a social evil

dream - 11o526: rough terrain

Thrasher night.  Kept waking, tossing, turning.  No real specifics or standouts.  There was, however, one bit where I wasn't sleeping & wasn't awake.  Had to adjust my right arm; was afraid I was going to knock Sig with my elbow.  Turn left and close my eyes again.  It's a pretty dark bedroom so even without having light exposure my visual cortex is firing away and I perceive patterns projected over everything-- so close it's like examining cross-stitch, but also akin to an elevation map, as cartographers use.

Ever seen the front covers of Brian Eno's 'Ambient' series, 1-4?  Extremely similar, only instead of close-up ben-day dot moires the imagery is expressed in >~X+|_\=x<s everywhere: ochre, violet, viridian & reds...  The patterns are amorphous, shifting, of no particular consistency.  The vision lasts mere moments, maybe minutes, the dial of my mind turned between stations, then I'm asleep again.

not to go full pinko or anything

but sometimes reading is required

good morning

The dream, I can't bore you with details.  It was a classic emotional blockage thing.  I wanted to make peace with my father.  Was trying to make art.  He initiates a fight, it gets physical, but I'm adult and can actually defend myself, so end up taking him down.  Which makes me miserable.

Wake with my chest muscles knotted and my ears ringing.  Sit up, gasping, and the next thing I or my husband know am sobbing.  He reaches out, asks if I'm okay, what happened.  "Emotional blockage," are the actual words that float out, unbidden.  Even in my sleep I'm trying to problem solve.

I tell Sig the essentials of the top paragraph, specifically, "I wanted to make peace with my father."  Which is a hell of a thing to utter.  As it's impossible.  It's like believing in capital-G deus, for me.  It's irreal.  He tried to strangle me when I was four years old.  Which is what I confronted him with, in dream.

I've always been vague on the date, consciously, but clearly my psyche keeps a calendar.  We moved back to Alabama in late 1979.  So it was 1980 when everything happened.  Fuck, I might as well blurt it here as anywhere.  The last three hours have been spent walking, trying to think everything through.

My mom was trying to give me a bath.  I was too young to totally behave, so I thrashed, I guess.  Fighting taking a bath, who knows why.  Someway I kicked, caught her in the solar plexus.  She doubles over, and my father, in the next room, rushes in, asking what happened.  Mom manages to say, "Kicked me" and dad was immediately on me, hands around my throat, throttling me, drowning me.  Screaming my dad's name (my name too, by the way) Mom manages to pull him away, and it's reality reset.  She tries to calm him, and I guess they do their best with me, and put me to bed.

The next bit is less clear, but at some point I wake and see a thin strip of light from the hall, where the bathroom is.  Mom's in there, crying, and my father's trying to calm her.  Because she miscarried.

The next thirteen years, you might gather, are hell.  I was raised in relative isolation (i.e. no resources, no close friends, only seeing family or friends of family outside of school) by a semi-rational man with a tendency to try and enforce his will with a hand to my throat, or a belt to my back, etc.  He flew into rages.  I didn't know why, consciously.  Didn't know I was going to have a brother.  No-one talked to me about it.  We've still never talked about any of it.  It's something I eventually pieced together, as repressed fragments of memory eventually drifted back into configurations resembling a whole.

I killed my brother.  My father tried to kill me.  Everyone in the family knew what had happened, and was happening, and no-one did anything to help.  Failing to murder, he did the next best thing and turned me into one of the countless billions of broken and generally fucked humans who drift through life, a little half-there.  I could have become an alcoholic, or a fiend, or an abuser.  I could have become any species of monster.  And did not.

Instead, you get this.  A blog, with occasional art, and much maundering over things beyond my grip.

Hell of a start to the day, hunh?  Sorry 'bout that.

the lit bit - october 2o26

Breakfast In The Ruins (197o) - by Michael Moorcock

A weirdly cozy one.  Maybe it's a cis-het pop trash artist exploring his inner queer that draws me in.  His use of genre & popular form as a means of examining class divides, mayhap.  Or it could simply be that there's a part of this book which Knows The Gutter, as a creature of cities, and from such earthy vantage is clear-eyed enough to see up our collective trouser leg.  This is a book that knows what's what-what & when's never quick enough.  Lost track of the number of times I've read it.  Like its deadened (dead-end?) narrator, I'll keep coming back.

A Million Betrayals (2oo7) - by Michael Moorcock [essay, in 'London Peculiar & Other Nonfictions']

The Third Policeman (197o) - by Flann O'Brien a.k.a. Brian O'Nolan

More comfort in dislocation.  A deeply queer text.  Perhaps merits a closer reading on the homoeroticism of hell, as conceptually present here.  Also deadly earnest in its circular humour & wit.  My first read, back in 2003, was disquietingly uncanny; the book's prose struck me as clammy as stained glass in a bombed-out church, but its absurdity & prosaic beauty wooed me, too.  By the end I was determined to own a copy for myself.  Essential.  Read every other year.

The Fourth Policeman (1997) - by Hugh Kenner [essay, in 'Historical Fictions']

The Condition of Muzak (197o) - by Michael Moorcock

Ahh, Mister C, Mister C.  Not a novel so much as a technical triumph.  Doesn't stand alone the way the other books in the Cornelius canon can...  But it does speak to me, personally, profoundly, as a little kid lost in a world that could care-- and chooses otherwise.  I never wanted to be a rock god, magic christian zillionaire, or silver screen diva.  Dandy messiah to the age of science, tho?  A tastily craven condition indeed, and this book's a shot in the arm against it.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (2o23) - by Ian Penman [essay, booklength]

Obsessions & methods, methods & obsessions.  A lovely sprawling meditation.  About the only questions I had that it didn't answer were RWF's performance & wardrobe in Kamikaze 1989.

Death Is No Obstacle (1992) - by Colin Greenland, interviewing Michael Moorcock

More methodology.  Alternated this with Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors for a few days.  If I read this at least twice more all Moorcock's methods will probably be engraved on my forehead in reverse for ready reference.  Worth reflecting on, if you're like me and a dumbass autodidact.

Unstrung:  Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist (2o21) - by Marc Ribot

Funny.  Anecdotal.  Educational.  Bite-sized essays.  Still nibbling.

Der Sandmann (1816) - by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Let's write this bit first, then circle back to capsule thoughts about the rest of my reading.

Opening para:  Ever slept on an author?  To, like, a historical degree?  That's me, last night, realizing that 'The Nutcracker' is based off a Hoffmann short story.  Hoffmann's been on my mental radar since Grant Morrison was on Doom Patrol-- not because of a direct citation, mind, but because my magpie mind never throws any reference out!  Someway I conflated the title of 'Tales of Hoffman' (Doom Patrol #50) and the opening of  'Anyhow Stories' (D.P. #44) to suggest Morrison was using his classical education to browbeat me into reading E.T.A., someday.

Second paragraph:  I don't know Lucy Clifford's work from a gap on a shelf, but I have a strong suspicion her Anyhow Stories, published in 1882, owe no small debt to E.T.A.'s fucked up little horror parable about schizoid psychosis & the fear that we could be, are being, replaced by machines capable of every human falsity including "love".  Glossing 'The New Mother' this morning, I note motifs of stolen eyes, weird prosthesis, and mechanical simulacra.  The influence must be there...  But is influence the point?  Or is influence just the flu?  A nightmare you catch, a hiccough you can't quite shake free?

Concluding para.  'The Sandman', surprisingly to me, has rather incisive insight into the shit women put up with from men, particularly lust-addled men.  The character of Clara is the sanest figure in the entire tale, and has the most clear-headed attitude.  She's basically a psychologist, compared to the protagonist, who's a total fucking freak.  The events of the story might not actually be Nathaniel's fault, it must be said; he might have contracted some sort of brain-damaging illness in his youth, as there's reference to a childhood fever...  But whether his brain's gone soft or not, he's all in for bangin' automata, and he seems only too ready to kill & maim to get his rocks off. *

* Couldn't help wondering whether Hoffmann was aware he had syphilis, at the time of writing.  According to the timeline he was diagnosed in 1907.  Semirelevant footnote...?

Paranthetical coda:  there's a structural curio here in that the story starts off in epistolary fashion, with three letters, then descends into the voice of a minor character to start the story anew and recount events with an omniscient eye.  There's a tidy device introduced at the opening of this middle third, to explain things, essentially saying that "The Sandman would be an interesting story, told normally, but it's more edifying to explain events out-of-order," arguing how informality & unfamiliarity should be enough to draw a reader in, the way someone in a heightened state of emotion should be interesting to the casual observer.

To wit, reading this short hot on the heels of Moorcock explicating the mechanics of his storytelling was choice.  Totally forgot Todorov wrote about Hoffmann's 'Sandman' in 'The Fantastic', too.

The Little Friend (2oo2) - by Donna Tartt

It's been two years since I finally read 'The Secret History' (1992).  Overdue.  Cracking it now.

it's boner. james boner

Spy shit is something I can't quite quit.  Spy-fi is maybe my coziest zone, particularly if there are actual spy plot mechanics, and the "spy" part of it doesn't get glossed over in favour of big fancy gimmicks.  I suppose that's why I keep re-watching Tenet, despite feeling it to be a deeply flawed & alienating thing-- it's not Inception!!!  Inception is pure gimmick, whereas the gimmick of Tenet directly informs & sculpts the spy elements.

The problem with all this is being a north american cold war baby.  I'm gen X.  Our understanding of espionage is almost wholly sculpted from birth by bad (satirical, or absurdist, or entirely too self-serious) television and James Bond.  The realities of it, the Tinker Tailor Spyworld Sucks of espionage, that stuff doesn't trickle down to us unless our parents were turbonerds or spooks.  It took me half my life to learn to like James Bond anything.  And if I'm honest I'm only into the Daniel Craig ones because my flavour of film dork appreciates 'em.  I like the Craig Bonds because my people like Craig Bond.  As a whole?  Bond is unredeemable, as characters go, about as sexy as saltpeter.

But the villains...

Raoul Silva is super sexy to me.  Him feeling up Bond and discovering 007 being perfectly willing to fuck him was a delightful moment.  Imagine 'The Americans' only instead of our heroes enduring a depressing & joyless Russian sexwork programme as part of their training, it's 007 realizing his inner Frank Boothe:  Bond will fuck anything that moves.  Because nothing means anything except his loyalty to his handlers, and in espionage the shortest distance between two objectives does tend to be sex.  That's not a terrible premise to start from...

Which is why I was charmed by Desolation Jones, by Warren Ellis.  It's about the spy community cannibalizing itself.  Most of the big shit spy yarns I'm into are about that specific thing.  Technically that's all the BBC's o.g. 'The Prisoner' is about.  Just spies being absolutely awful to one another in every way they can, and being massive pervs in the bargain.  I'd like to write & draw something along those lines, someday.

Sure, at the end of the movie you still have to explode the houses of Parliament or something.  But instead of onerous rooftop chases or basic-ass car-on-car violence or trying (& usually failing) to reinvent Bond being tortured in a chair, it's just bumper to bumper boning.  Mm.  Yes.