book review: dialogue

At some point I’m pretty sure I read Robert McKee’s Story. I imagine it was at a time when I still thought writing would be the thing I’d do (as opposed to whatever it is I do now). Last week while I was on our main floor desk I was faced with McKee’s 2016 book Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen on our “Interesting Nonfiction” display and I took it home.

It’s fine. I enjoyed the breakdowns of dialogue in screenplays, scripts and prose. There was good stuff about the way scenes build through speech, and the construction that goes into building a satisfying scene. I was also reminded of Adaptation and how these forms can make crap as easily as they can make art.

book review: norse mythology

Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology translation is a fine little basic sampler book of tales about Thor and Loki and Freya and all that lot. I realized reading it how much the Marvel Comics versions of Asgard have warped my brain around this mythos, but yeah. They’re fine stories. There are bits where the Gaimanish language pokes through more than others, which I liked even if it felt a little anachronistic. This felt more like Fortunately the Milk… Neil Gaiman rather than American Gods Neil Gaiman, if that makes a difference to you.

If I had a lot of Norse myth stuff I might have stronger opinions on which stories were included and which weren’t but like I said, most of my knowledge comes via Kirby so I’m no expert. I didn’t have a book of Norse myths on my shelf before and now I do. eems like a win.

book review: towards a new manifesto

Towards a New Manifesto is a dialogue about Marxist philosophy between Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. They are important in Marxist critical theory and are the kinds of theoreticians I did not read enough of in my undergrad and then took “professional” graduate degrees that fled even the notion of critically examining the ways our professions think about what we do. Or I just slacked off in those classes.

I don’t have a lot to say about this book. It was a very fragmented dialogue that I felt I was missing a lot of context for. I did not feel very smart while reading it, but if bits of it got lodged in my brain somewhere for the next Marxist theory book I read, then I think it’s succeeded.

book review: ocean

Ocean is a great little scifi story about a UN weapons inspector who heads out to Jupiter’s moon Europa because a scientific team there found a shitload of billion-year-old alien coffins. There’s another corporation out in orbit of Europa too and they’re interested in the weapon potential of these alien devices.

The book is full of good Warren Ellis dialogue between bitter cranky people trying to save the world. The evil corporation guys have all had personality replacements for the length of their contracts so they’re full on corporate drones, while the heroic real people make terrible food and talk about sex a lot. There are some cool ideas about weapons in space, a great fight sequence using manipulation of the space station’s gravity, and Ellis’ old-school rocket fixation (transferred to the main character) helps to save the day.

I really enjoyed the book and it’d make a great movie.

book review: pax romana

I loved the concept behind Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana, but the execution was kind of lacking.

The idea is that in the future a couple of scientists figure out a way to make time travel work, but their research has been paid for by the Vatican who use it to make history better. They send a team back to Constantine’s time to get the Holy Roman Empire set up correctly, with enough advanced technology and wealth and foreknowledge of the future and science to ensure some form of success.

It’s a great idea for a book, and the characters who are sent back in time are excellent, in theory. The way the book is done though, really distances you from any of the characters. That’s part of the point (the story is being told as a history lesson to a new emperor in a space ship) but it feels like they left out a lot of the bits that would make it an insanely cool story. You see characters doing very little. Each chapter has two page dialogue scenes that have a small picture of the people involved, and that’s where the majority of the interesting stuff happens. Everything else is interesting layouts and use of whitespace, but not a lot of storytelling.

Jonathan Hickman used infographics really well in The Nightly News, but by the time you get to the end of the book and see the cool timelines of how history went between the timescales of the story, I was disappointed that those events weren’t told as dense little one page comics instead of sentences on a line.

The story we got was good enough and the pages were laid out prettily, but everything was so sparse it became a little frustrating to look at everything left untold.

book review: lost at sea

Bryan Lee O’Malley (best known for Scott Pilgrim) drew and wrote a high school road-trip book called Lost at Sea, and it’s fucking excellent.

The story is about four young people heading back to Canada from northern California. The viewpoint character is a quiet girl who doesn’t quite fit in, and she narrates how the difference is that she has no soul. I loved the inconsequential and the really important dialogue, the out-of-the-blue things that happen that follow the kind of road trip logic you abandon yourself to. It’s a different feel from Scott Pilgrim, much more realistic. And I love that the story ends before the road-trip is over. It just ends when the important stuff is over, and all the rest is what turns into road-trip inside jokes.

I think the thing I really appreciate about this is how so many road stories seem to be about guys going off to find something in themselves, but girl road-trips seem a bit rarer. In any case, this is a definite YA recommendation.

book review: goldfish

I completely thought Brian Michael Bendis’ Goldfish was a true crime book (like Torso). I was reading it all amazed at how cinematic this real-life escapade had turned out. And then I realized that similar covers don’t mean identical format. Selah.

So Goldfish is about a grifter who comes back to town after ten years with revenge on his mind. It’s nice and twisty and violent. I had a slight problem telling a couple of characters apart, design-wise but that was more than compensated for by the great panel design. No simple grids going on here, especially in the biggish action sequences. And there’s a huge conversation in the middle that pretty brilliantly deals with the Talking Head problem in comics by doing the conversation as straight prose dialogue with a couple of illustrations to keep us up on the visible emotions. I liked it a lot.

I bought this copy at a used bookstore here in Vancouver (I just moved here so I’m trying to scout out the good ones.) and at the counter the owner of the store was all “Why are these things so expensive?” I said something about drawing being a lot of work, and she said “But your time to dollar ratio as a reader here isn’t very good.” I don’t know why she was denigrating her product and prices but I compared the value to that of a movie and it mollified her somewhat. “I guess it’s better than spending it at Starbucks,” she said.

life saving information

A guy comes into our branch fairly regularly with a monkey or something that has a cheap electronic squealing laugh. He sets it off and leaves it at the circulation desk. Today after having his fun little interaction with them, he came to our desk holding a book about Humane Pressure Point Self Defense.

“I’d like to suggest this.”

“Suggest or donate?” I was a touch confused, since he handed me the book as he spoke.

“I don’t know. I think your library should have this book. It’s important.” He looked insistently at my female coworker. “So you can go to the grocery store and not have to worry about walking home with your hands full.”

“Okay,” I said tapping away at the keyboard. “So are you giving it to us? Because it looks like it’s not in our system so I can’t just add it.”

“I just want you here at this library to get this book without some bureaucrat in City Hall with a belly out to here who’s never done a day of work in his life having to make a decision three months from now.” The intensity had built as he spoke but then it fell off a cliff for his next bit. “But I want to let my neighbour’s daughter read it before I give it to you.

“Oh. Okay,” I said. “I’ll fill out the suggestion form then.” I got his library card and he extolled the virtues of this book and being safe to my coworker.

As I handed back his card, having made the request, he leaned in conspiratorially. “And here’s something you should know. You’ve got to keep this quiet but I’m telling you because the library taught me. You know that book on Columbine? That’s where I learned this.”

I smiled quizzically.

“This isn’t funny. It’ll save your life. The other day there was a guy standing with his boot on the neck of another guy and he was holding a pipe and his buddies were coming to beat the shit out of him and I called 911 and you know how to get the cops there fast? With no bullshit?”

I shook my head.

“Just say ‘Shots fired’ and hang up. They’ll be there faster than anything. Now you can’t tell anyone this but remember. It’ll save your life and I learned it from the library.”

Then he picked out some books and left. My coworker’s only comment was “That man, he has some problems.”

script from the man’s own hand

A big vaguely-Viking looking guy with an open winter jacket and shaggy black hair surrounding his face comes up to the desk. He’s got a small duffel bag (almost a valise?) in his hand. “You got any signatures of Lincoln in here?” he says with an aggressive tone. Not dangerous aggressive, just like he’s forestalling interruption.

“Signatures, like examples of his autograph? His handwriting?”

And thus launches his tale. “Yeah. I’m from Wisconsin and this nigger [flinch by me] I know he found an envelope on the ground. And it’s this thing that back before Abe Lincoln was even a lawyer he’d borrowed some money and gotten a receipt from the bank and this envelope it’s got the receipt. Signed ‘A. Lincoln.’ What do you think about that?”

“That sounds pretty amazing,” I say as I’m looking up what kind of Lincoln ephemera we might have and figuring out if I have to ask the large aggressive man to stop saying nigger.

“I know! And the historian I talked to said this thing’d be worth 20 million dollars! This little nigger’s [flinch] got $20 million in his jacket pocket. So I told him, ‘You don’t tell anyone about this. You got it?’ And then this big guy comes up, ’cause we’re at the Salvation Army and he says ‘What’s the problem here nigger [flinch]?’ I think fast and say I’m learning how to fix a truck, cause you can buy a van for $500, and if you can fix it then you’re set and we were just talking about that. “Cause you know when those guys start saying nigger [flinch] that means they’re ready to cut your throat. But it was okay. So you got any signatures?”

“I don’t actually.” And I don’t have the balls to ask him to stop using a word he’s obviously very comfortable with. “Nothing listed in the catalogue for famous people’s handwriting at all.”

“No letters?”

“Nope. Maybe if he was from around here we might in the Local History room, but…”

“This is Abraham Lincoln the president!”

“I realize that. You might have better luck at an American library. Or you could go upstairs and ask for an inter-library loan…”

He’s walking away from the desk, lost interest trailing behind him. “I’ll be back in Wisconsin in March. Get that guy set up. Twenty million dollars.”

“Good luck!”

i get pitch by pitch updates for the postseason games while at work which is nice

Work goes along. On Saturday I managed to save a woman’s horrible weekend. There was more to the weekend and the series of events that got her to this point, but when I came in her time was almost up on the computer and she was applying for a job and it wasn’t letting her paste her resume and the job closed tomorrow and and and… Through careful application of two keys on the keyboard (“Ctrl” + “V”) I saved her day. She was almost crying in thanks. It was kind of weird.

Last week I managed to piss off beard lady a couple of times by disagreeing with her. She was angry about how the university paper won’t run her ads anymore and to prove her point she pulled out this issue: “What word do you think of when you look at this?”

“Upside-down” I said.

“No. Gynecology.”

“No. Gynecology is not the first word anyone other than you would think of.”

“Gynecology. And they put this on the cover….”

At this point she’s about to go off on one of her pornography rants and I try to intercept. “No. There is nothing to do with gynecology on the cover of that newspaper.”

So she folds the paper until the tiny strip showing the hem of the girl’s shirt is the only thing visible on the page. “Look. Gynecology.”

“Beard Lady,” I said (using her real name instead of Beard Lady), “That’s all you. You just folded everything to make your point. No one else is doing that. You are wrong. Gynecology is not the word for that cover.”

And then she got all in a huff and left after telling me that my cowrkers said she shouldn’t ever listen to anything I had to say. A couple of days later she was back and I printed off copies of the DVD cover for National Treasure 1 and 2 because she didn’t know which one she’d seen in the theatre. She was kind of testy with me then but we made it through all right.