27 March 2024

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration by Ytasha L. Womack

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration
by Ytasha L. Womack

I was doing some citation-checking for the academic journal I work for, and one of the essays I was editing cited Ytasha L. Womack's book Afrofuturism; looking her up led me to discover she had recently written this coffee-table book about Black Panther. Given my current project to read through Black Panther comics, it seemed like the kind of thing I ought to read, and so I requested my local library purchase a copy.

Originally published: 2023
Read: February 2024

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration is divided into seven chapters. Not counting backmatter, the book runs about 160 pages, and it reads quickly, as it is profusely illustrated; I got through it in one day. The first chapter is the longest, a fifty-page history of the comics character from Lee and Kirby through McGregor and Priest up to Hudlin and Coates. Chapters two through six each take an aspect of the character and his world and contextualize it in African culture, African-American history, and Afrofuturism, exploring concepts such as black panthers, African religion, utopia, warrior women, and so on.

It's neat but I often wanted more depth. Even at fifty pages, the history of the character just skims the surface. The other chapters are much shorter, and I often found myself thinking there had to be more to say about, for example, Black Panther and actual African religion, than we were getting here. But perhaps then this wouldn't be the book that it is—I am a hardcore comics fan and a literary scholar, and I don't think this book is aimed at either of those small audiences, much less both of them!

As a comics fan, I found some aspects of the books a little frustrating; references to specific issues don't always give dates, and there are, for example, six different issues called Black Panther #6, so clarification is pretty important. Sometimes comics are cited by story arc titles, which isn't very precise.  At one point the book says Reginald Hudlin wrote Shuri, but he did not; he wrote Black Panther vol. 5, which starred Shuri. At another, a page of art clearly from 1991's Black Panther: Panther's Prey #2 is mislabeled as being from 1966's Fantastic Four #52. Imagine mistaking Jack Kirby for Dwayne Turner! Most consistently and most annoyingly, there is a lot of beautiful cover art included throughout the volume, but this goes uncredited more often than not.

I do feel like I'm nitpicking a bit here. This book, after all, is probably not really for me, who has read (thus far) every Black Panther comic published from 1966 to 2006, but for someone who has seen the films and wants to know more about where the character came from. I think Womack's book is particularly valuable in its positioning of the character in the history of Afrofuturism and similar movements; there's a lot of good details here about the genre, and a lot of directions an interested reader could go if they wanted to know more. I found the discussion of "protopia" particularly valuable. And the book contains a lot of beautiful illustrations, both from the comics, and from the wider social world that the book seeks to illuminate. Just know that if you're an intense fan and/or an academic, there might not be as much here as you might hope for.

25 March 2024

Liberation of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 51)

Liberation of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2022-23
Acquired: November 2023
Read: December 2023

I did briefly think that I should maintain the chronology of this project; that is to say, I thought about saving Liberation of the Daleks until The White Dragon (and a hypothetical second volume of thirteenth Doctor comics) was out... but I was won over by the idea of reading Liberation while the fourteenth Doctor was still the current Doctor, and indeed, I was able to finish it the morning of the same Saturday that The Giggle debuted on Disney Plus. I doubt I will ever again read a Doctor's entire comics run while they are the current screen Doctor.

Liberation of the Daleks, from Doctor Who Magazine #584-97 (Dec. 2022–Dec. 2023)
story by Alan Barnes, art by Lee Sullivan, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge
It's DWM's longest story! By issue count, at least; I think The Glorious Dead still has it beat out by approximately ten pages. Picking up from the end of The Power of the Doctor, this leads right into Destination: Skaro... though I am unconvinced that its events really could squeeze into the sixty minutes the Doctor states have passed between the two stories in Destination: Skaro. I am pretty sure it took me longer than sixty minutes to read it!

It's a bit bonkers, and it's not very deep, but it is fun. One of Alan Barnes's strengths as a writer has always been rearranging pop culture iconography in interesting ways: here the Daleks attack the World Cup Final in 1966, only it turns out that it's all a simulation from the future, an amusement park where people go to experience Dalek wars... and the park enslaves real Daleks to make it all work. When the Doctor escapes from the simulation, he brings real Daleks with him.

from Doctor Who Magazine #590
It's not very deep, but it is deep enough; the story does some fun stuff with the disjunction between how we perceive Daleks as viewers (fun, goofy) and how they function in the narrative of Doctor Who (purveyors of genocide); probably the best of the many strong cliffhangers is the one where a bunch of tourists began chanting "EXTERMINATE," hoping to be exterminated! As you would, of course. It casts a lens on Doctor Who's own story, but also reflects the way that, say, Nazis come across in real pop culture. Alan Barnes amps it up as the story proceeds by even bringing in the TV Century 21 Daleks, contrasting their even more goofy iconography with the brutality of the "actual" Daleks.

It does give a feeling of being made up as it went along. Mostly I don't mind this (so does, say, the original Star Beast) but it does seem like the whole story could have ended with part eight but keeps going with a whole new subplot.

Lee Sullivan does a great job with Daleks of course, but all throughout; he captures new series Daleks, classic series Daleks, TV21 Daleks, all of them. James Offredi matches him on coloring with some good work, especially on the TV21 stuff.

If you thought this would be a deep plunge into the mysteries of the fourteenth Doctor (and I can see why you might have, though the story itself discards this pretty quickly), this isn't it. But it is a solid piece of DWM fun.
from Doctor Who Magazine #593
Other Notes:
  • For those of us who keep track of such things, these fourteen strips tie Alan Barnes for the twelfth-longest run as writer of the DWM strip with Steve Parkhouse (#86-99), and tie Lee Sullivan for seventh as artist with David A Roach (#451-64). For total written, it moves Barnes from fifth to third (at 41 strips, a bit below Steve Parkhouse's total of 46), and Lee Sullivan from eighth to seventh (at 44 strips). But I believe there's more to come after this for both, so their numbers will move even further up.​
  • This is Barnes's first contribution to the main strip since #380, a gap of 204 strips! This would place him in second for largest gap (if we discount the returns for issue #500), behind John Tomlinson's record of 210... except that Lee Sullivan makes his first contribution since #317, setting a new record of 267!
  • I'm given to understand that the conceit of TV Century 21 was that it was a news magazine from one century after its time of publication. Because of that, the humorless pedants of the Tardis wiki have counted all sorts of weird stuff as "valid" because it was printed in TV21 alongside the Dalek strips. Like, they'll count Thunderbirds... but (up until recently) not Scream of the Shalka or Death Comes to Time!? Anyway, if they are paying attention to Liberation, they need to take all that stuff back out, because Barnes establishes the TV21 comic strips are an in-universe 21st-century children's fiction.

This post is the fifty-first in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The White Dragon. Previous installments are listed below:

22 March 2024

Woo! Spring Break!

View of Louisville, Kentucky from Jeffersonville, Indiana. Unknown Artist, ca. 1865.
As an academic, I do of course get a spring break, but as an academic, I spend my spring break doing exciting things like grading annotated bibliographies and cleaning the house; it never feels like a real break from anything even if I do get to take it easier.

This year, I've been saying that my real spring break is NCSA, the annual conference of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Usually in mid-to-late March, NCSA is my opportunity to be away from home and kids (I do love my kids but I don't love the bedtime routine), to do something fun (i.e., go to panels), and to hang out with my friends.

I have three grad school friends who do nineteenth-century stuff, but I don't know that all four of us have ever made it to NCSA at once since I first attended in 2017. But this year we managed to make it happen, and not only that, but two of them brought their spouses and children! So we were able to get in some good socialization; in particular, some of the kids I had never even met. While the four of us would go to panels, the spouses would take the kids to do fun things around the city.

But of course the panels are fun things. I say it a lot, but it bears repeating: I wouldn't be in my line of work if I didn't think listening to smart people say smart things was a worthwhile use of time. Some academics can sneer about conferences, but I always secretly suspect those people are self-centered narcissists, the kind of person who is smart but doesn't believe anyone else can be smart. But I always learn about such interesting things at conferences!

NCSA in particular is the best, and I don't just say this because my friends go there and I get to hang out on my employer's dime. The conference is interdisciplinary, so there are presenters from literary studies, history, art history, and more; it's also transnational, so there are people who work on British, American, German, Italian, and so on. Sometimes this has its downsides, of course (people who work in different disciplines and fields can be interested in things you just are not), but often you get to learn about some neat things that overlap with your own work... or even don't and are just interesting!

Just some presentations (not by my grad school friends) that I particularly enjoyed (no slight to anything I saw and left out, I saw a lot!):

  • Reilly Fitzpatrick from Baylor University on the rights of women in Middlemarch (I had never thought about the pregnancy plotline in Middlemarch before... of course there are so many things happening in Middlemarch it is impossible to think about all of them)
  • Celeste Seifert from the University of North Carolina on vivisection in Arthur Machen
  • Shelby Lynn Jones from Purdue University on General Lew Wallace (author of Ben-Hur) and his time as ambassador to the Ottomon Empire
  • Danielle Nielsen from Murray State University on the depiction of academic disciplines in H. Rider Haggard's She (which I have not read but clearly need to)
  • Antje Anderson from University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the early short fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (which is usually taken as being about white people who she thinks can be read as mixed-race; she is working on a new critical edition of Chesnutt's fiction)
  • Meoghan Cronin from Saint Anselm College on U.S. adaptations of Dickens novels for children (I asked a question about Cranford... more evidence that I am turning into my advisor)
  • Laura White from University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the now-forgotten-but-then-popular British children's author Mrs. Molesworth (Laura is working on a project about children's fantasy, and I enjoy getting to hear about a new piece of it every year)
  • Lillian Durr from Missouri State University on Frankenstein's creature as nonbinary
  • Corrie Kiesel from Louisiana State University on the depiction of folkways and gossip in The Ring and the Book (which I read the summer after graduating college and have not thought about since!)
  • Alyssa Culp from Illinois Wesleyan University on how Bavarian morgues were made scientific and professional in the nineteenth century
  • Sarah J. Reynolds from the University of Indianapolis on eclipses in the nineteenth century
  • Victoria Russell from Keele University on the influence of Erasmus Darwin on nineteenth-century radical movements (as someone who worked a bit on Charles Darwin and nineteenth-century radical movements, this was super-interesting)

My own presentation this year was about George Gissing's Born in Exile, one of the novels in the chapter of the book manuscript I am currently working on. The conference theme was "thresholds" and I discussed Born in Exile as a novel about the threshold of professionalization—I think it's the first British novel (by a significant writer, anyway) about what we would now called a professional scientist, and the novel explores how that would change science from the earlier era of the "devotee." (A typology I am greatly indebted to Robert Kargon for.)

One of the other things I like about NCSA is its integration into the local community. The conference is always three days; the second day always has a keynote by an historian who works on something relevant to the city in which the conference is being held. This year that was Emily Bingham, who wrote a book about "My Old Kentucky Home," the minstrel song that is still sung at the opening of the Kentucky Derby, with some mild sanitizing. It was a topic I didn't know anything about but found very illuminating. (The composer of the Kentucky state song never visited Kentucky; another fun fact is that he also composed what is now the Florida state song, and he also never visited Florida.)

Then in the afternoon of the second day there are no panels, but the conference does organize official excursions; this year my friends and I went to Oxmoor Farm, a farm in Louisville that was occupied by the same family from the 1780s to 2005! It was expanded several times over the centuries, and was a great window onto the history of the area. (I think the tour guides in these situations are always excited to have a group of experts come along, ready to nerd out over Zachary Taylor or whatnot. Actual quote from one tour participant upon hearing what the site archaeologist had uncovered in the slave residences: "Half-dimes!? Are you shitting me!!?")

I returned home tired but excited. And also energized to actually work on my book. Will this summer be its summer!?

Next year's NCSA will be in New Orleans, with the theme of "Fusions." I will be there, of course!

20 March 2024

Monsters Unleashed! by Cullen Bunn, Jay Leisten, David Baldeón, Ramón Bachs, Justin Jordan, Andrea Broccardo, et al.

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2024

Monsters Unleashed!
Monsters Unleashed!: Monster Mash
Monsters Unleashed!: Learning Curve

Writers: Cullen Bunn, Justin Jordan
Artists: Steve McNiven, Jay Leisten, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu, Gerry Alanguilan & Michael Jason Paz, Salvador Larroca, Adam Kubert, David Baldeón, Ramón Bachs, Andrea Broccardo, Francesco Gastón, Bachan, Alex Arizmendi, Alberto Alburquerque 
Color Artists: David Curiel, Michael Garland, Marcio Menyz, Chris Sotomayor
Letterer: Travis Lanham
 
Monsters Unleashed! was a five-issue miniseries that was then followed by a twelve-issue ongoing series, collected across three volumes. The main character is Kei Kawade, a young monster fan who during a worldwide invasion of monsters from outer space discovers he has the power to summon monsters by drawing them. He is eventually recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. and Damage Control and becomes known as "Kid Kaiju." He is mentored by monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone, and I read this as part of my working through her key Marvel Comics appearances.
 
Good thing some of the monsters are on our side!
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 2 #4 (script by Cullen Bunn, art by Salvador Larroca)
 
The original miniseries and the first eight issues of the ongoing are all written by Cullen Bunn and feature eleven different artists. I really did not care for any of it. The opening miniseries is in particular tedious, with umpteen different superteams (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, &c.) fighting monsters again and again and again. Too many characters, too many artists, no interesting character work or plotting. After that, the series just focuses on the ongoing adventures of Kid Kaiju and Elsa, but I still found little to latch onto or be interested in.
 
Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2024

Actually, that's not quite true. There's some okay stuff here—I particularly liked the appearance of the Mole Man, the original nemesis of the Fantastic Four, who kidnaps Kid Kaiju to get his help resurrecting his army of monsters. It's always a neat move to make an old, somewhat pathetic, villain into a figure of sympathy, and Cullen Bunn does it well here. But the big conspiracy of monsters, and the two different Fin Fang Fooms largely left me cold. Elsa is present, but contributes little, and seems pretty watered down from her characterization in Nextwave and Marvel Zombies (though I did like the bit where she becomes queen of some insect monsters). Some of the artists are pretty bad; Andrea Broccardo in particular can't seem to decide if Elsa is twelve or sixty-two years old.

One other big issue is that Kei summons five monsters into existence to be a team of his own... but while five big monsters might look okay (I don't think of the series's myriad artists ever had the knack of making me interested in monster fights), their lack of meaningful characterization (they are, after all, monsters) means you have a lot of characters that it's just not possible to actually be interested in.
 
Am I just biased in favor of fellow Mole-Men?
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 3 #4 (script by Cullen Bunn, art by David Baldeón & Ramón Bachs)
 
Thus, I was really not looking forward to the last four issues. Whenever a series comes to an end and a new writer takes over for the last few issues, I think every comics fan knows that whatever you've been reading, it's about to get worse as a couple extra issues are cranked our regardless of quality in order to fill up a trade. In this particular case, I was dreading it even more because I knew writer Justin Jordan only from the execrable Team 7, and the book abandoned all attempt at artistic consistency, with four different artists on four issues.
 
It's my favorite food, too, Scraggs.
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 3 #9 (script by Justin Jordan, art by Francesco Gastón)

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017-18
Read: February 2024

But... to my surprise... with those last four issues, suddenly the series became really good! Instead of attempts at big Marvel-spanning epics, Jordan gives us four done-in-one tales, each teaming Kid Kaiju up with one of his monster team, allowing us to finally get to know them as characters—not to mention him. Suddenly the book is fun and funny, exactly the kind of thing I would have liked all along. But four issues of it were well worth it (though perhaps not worth reading the previous thirteen). We get colonies of giant bees and Cthuloid menaces worshipped by loser cultists and Transformers expys on the loose in New York City. (One issue is about the Inhumans, but I guess you can't win them all.) I was suddenly able to tell all the monsters apart from one another, and I didn't even mind that Elsa—ostensibly my whole reason for being here—was written out after issue #10. Good stuff, and I wish Justin Jordan had written the series from its beginning.

This is the fifth post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers The Death of Doctor Strange and Marvel Action: Chillers. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
  2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 
  3. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. (2006-07)
  4. Marvel Zombies: Battleworld (2006-15)

18 March 2024

Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor

The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

My wife was into Nnedi Okorafor before, as the hipsters say, she was cool, and thus she owns a first printing of the first edition of The Shadow Speaker, one of her earliest novels, from 2007. (It's about to be rereleased along with a sequel.) I borrowed it from her earlier this year and gave it a read.

Published: 2007
Read: February 2024

I think I am coming to realize that Okorafor just doesn't work for me as much as I want her to. I have read the three Binti books, the three Akata books, some of her comics, and just none of it clicks. (Except for the second Akata book, which I liked.) Most of her books are ambling, with character just kind of moving from place to place without any kind of clear throughline from an emotional or plot standpoint. This is more of that. It clearly works for lots of people, but I think this might be it for me and Okorafor.

15 March 2024

Reading The Magical Mimics in Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Magical Mimics in Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

After John R. Neill died, the Oz series took a rest for a couple years, but it returned in 1946 with The Magical Mimics in Oz, by the series's fourth author, Jack Snow, and third artist, Frank Kramer.

Originally published: 1946
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud:
February–March 2024

Jack Snow was the first person to be a bona fide Oz fan to write an Oz book, and you can tell; it's the kind of book where characters do things like say, "Oh, wasn't the Forest of Burzee where Santa Claus was raised?" so that you know the writer has read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (Although, weirdly, he gets the Guardian of the Gates confused with the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. Rookie mistake!) He was also specifically an L. Frank Baum fan; while Neill built on what Thompson had established, Magical Mimics doesn't reference any characters or concepts from after Baum; you could go straight from Glinda of Oz to Magical Mimics without missing a beat. And actually, it would read pretty well; Baum always included some minor characters from the last couple books in his most recent book's celebration scenes, and Lady Aurex from Glinda shows up in this book's. But if you are reading in publication order, Glinda was twenty-six years ago, so the odds are very much against you remembering her! A lot of minor characters that Thompson and Neill hadn't cared for pop up here in minor roles, like Button-Bright and Cap'n Bill. (I did add in a reference to the events of Runaway when reading aloud though; it fit quite naturally into one of Scraps's scenes.)

The premise of Magical Mimics is on the darker end. As always, someone is trying to take over Oz, but it's one of the more successful attempts, like Thompson's Wishing Horse. The Mimics are shapeshifters who want to invade Oz, but can't because of a spell of protection cast by Queen Lurline when she enchanted Oz. What they figure out, though, is that they can replace people who came to Oz after the spell was cast, so when Ozma and Glinda leave Oz on state business, they sneak into the Emerald City and replace Dorothy and the Wizard. Dorothy and the Wizard wake up in prison in Mount Illuso, the Mimics' home, while the residents of the Emerald City go increasingly concerned about Dorothy and the Wizard's strange behavior.

To be honest, I kind of wanted something more creepy and more complex, with Mimics slowly replacing Oz character after Oz character, while some other characters desperately tried to figure out what was going on. As it is, the book is pretty simple: the Mimics replace Dorothy and the Wizard, the other Oz characters wonder why they're acting weird but don't really make any progress or discoveries, meanwhile the real Dorothy and the Wizard meet a fairy who explains everything to them, she takes them back to Oz, and she defeats the Mimics. But perhaps Jack Snow knows his audience better than I do, because my five-year-old kid was totally on edge and nervous even with this very limited threat posed by the Mimics. They did not like that the Mimics replaced Dorothy and the Wizard, and did not like the tense chapter where the Mimic horde invaded the Emerald City and replaced everyone. So I guess it had enough jeopardy for the target audience!

Overall, I thought it was fine. I wish there had been more clever problem-solving by the Oz characters. Much like a Thompson novel, ironically, this one mostly sees the main characters stand around while a previously unknown powerful magic user takes care of everything for them. Dorothy and the Wizard don't do anything interesting to get away from the Mimics; the Emerald City characters don't do anything clever to figure out what the Mimics are up to. Toto turns out to be the real MVP of the novel, instantly realizing Dorothy has been replaced, evading capture by the Mimics, and striking at the Mimic King and Queen when everyone else is paralyzed by indecision. (The Scarecrow also shows some minor cleverness, admittedly, delaying the Mimics until Ozma and Glinda return to deal with them.) Thompson never did much with Toto, so it's nice to see him do some interesting stuff. Snow has the kind of languid pacing Baum often did, as opposed to the frenetic pacing of Thompson and Neill; Oz may be in danger, but Dorothy and the Wizard can still spend two chapters looking at a garden! Snow also captures a lot of Baum's sense of whimsy; both Pineville and the Story Blossom Garden feel like the kinds of places he might have thought of, not Thompson.

I'm sorry to say, though, that not only is Frank Kramer in third place for Famous Forty artists (thus far), it is a very distant third. There is an occasional nice picture (the one of Toto as Sherlock Holmes is fun), but overall most of his illustrations seem to aspire to competent at best. Baum hit gold with both W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, so it's sad to see the publisher scrimping this time around.

Next up in sequence: John Dough and the Cherub

13 March 2024

Marvel Zombies: Battleworld by Simon Spurrier, Kev Walker, et al.

Marvel Zombies: Battleworld

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2006-15
Read: January 2024

Writers: Simon Spurrier, Robert Kirkman
Artists: Kev Walker, Sean Phillips
Inker: Jason Gorder
Colorists: Frank D'Armata, June Chung
Letterers: Clayton Cowles, Randy Gentile
 
I almost didn't even notice this existed, but while I was reading Nextwave, something I read clued me into its existence, which claimed that it was a really good Elsa Bloodstone story. I normally would be doubly skeptical of a story tying into both Secret Wars (ugh) and Marvel Zombies (double ugh), but then I saw it was by Simon Spurrier, who was one of the contributors to Titan's excellent The Eleventh Doctor: Year Two series, so I decided to give it a chance.
 
I read the Ms. Marvel Secret Wars tie-ins back in the day; I only have the foggiest notion what it was about. I think a bunch of timelines got smushed together into the same planet? You don't really even need to know that to understand this, as long as you're willing to accept 1) Elsa Bloodstone is commanding an army against a horde of zombies, and 2) it's possible to run into multiple versions of the same character.
 
This isn't high art, but it is surprisingly enjoyable and well done for what it is. Spurrier and artist Kev Walker take the post-Nextwave version of Elsa Bloodstone, but treat the character more seriously than Ellis and Immonen did. What would it be like to grow up with all this trauma? How would it affect you as an adult, and how could you relate to others after it happened? Spurrier explores this with a mix of horror and humor, and I wouldn't say I loved it, but it's much better than it needed to be. Walker impressed me as an artist, too; good with both character and action. At one point, I thought, "wow this guy should draw Star Wars"... later I realized he was the artist for Marvel's Doctor Aphra series, and I was probably subconsciously remembering some of the art I'd seen for that.
 
Don't mess with Elsa in any timeline.
from Marvel Zombies vol. 2 #3 (script by Simon Spurrier, art by Kev Walker)
 
The collection also contains one issue of the original Marvel Zombies series as a bonus, but no one's tricking me into reading that shit.

This is the fourth post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers Monsters Unleashed! Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
  2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 
  3. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. (2006-07)

12 March 2024

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Finally... the end!

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installment read: March 2024

No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)
I wish I could say this whole novel was worth it for the scene where the elder Martin Chuzzlewit whacks Pecksniff with a walking stick, knocking him to the floor. It did make me laugh and want to cheer. Unfortunately, getting to see an annoying character whacked with a stick doesn't quite make up for having to read over seven hundred pages about that character... but at least Dickens himself knew the guy was annoying.

I also think Dickens himself clearly recognized that Martin Chuzzlewit was a failure of a protagonist; the last few chapters are far more interested in Tom Pinch and how he ends up than Martin Chuzzlewit and how he ended up. He's the one who gets what is clearly the protagonist's wrap-up, not Martin, with a whole chapter spent on his future happiness. The up- and downside of the serial novel, one supposes. If your protagonist doesn't work out, you can get a new one (shades of a tv show shifting who its lead is), but... but if your protagonist doesn't work out, you can't go back and make someone more interesting the protagonist from the beginning, all you can do is pack them off to America!

So, overall, did this work as a way to read Dickens? Well, I did not (as you can tell) like Martin Chuzzlewit much... but I think I would have liked it even less had I attempted to read it straight through! Hopefully next year's Dickens is better (but I doubt it).

This is the last in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
  2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
  3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
  4. No. VIII (chs. 18-20)
  5. No. IX (chs. 21-23)
  6. Nos. X–XII (chs. 24-32)
  7. Nos. XIII–XVIII (chs. 33-50)

11 March 2024

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 4: Barrayar

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

My fourth Vorkosigan novel (third in chronological sequence, eighth in publication order) picks up right from the end of the previous one, Shards of Honor. Indeed, Bujold's very interesting afterword discusses how originally Shards was going to be longer but she realized she was introducing new complications instead of wrapping up existing ones, so she went backward and found a spot where it could stop, orphaning several thousand words that she'd written. It was another five years or so before she went back to that orphaned material and realized it could form the beginning of a second novel about Cordelia, one about—as the title is very clear about—her new life on the planet Barrayar.

I had actually read Shards and Barrayar before; over a decade ago my friend Christiana loaned me an omnibus edition of the two. Rereading the review I wrote at the time, it's almost hilariously lukewarm:

It has some adventure narrative tropes I find uncomfortable (the "other" being simultaneously more dangerous and more interesting than the home society), some slightly strange gender politics (the woman must give up her society utterly for the man she loves, who never seriously considers it), and some stuff that's just plain weird (everyone reveres one character who is a rapist), but overall I enjoyed it. It gets off to a rough start, to be honest-- there's a lot of journeying through a dangerous landscape, which I find tedious, and our protagonist Cordelia has a tendency to be rescued by other people a lot.  But at the one-third mark, she finally starts making her own decisions, fleeing her home planet in a fantastic sequence, and then traveling to Barrayar, where she marries Aral Vorkosigan and is forced to navigate her way in a strange society.  At this point, I was completely absorbed, and I loved all the political maneuvering and civil war stuff, and Cordelia herself shone quite well.

Originally published: 1991
Acquired: January 2022
Read: November 2023

On this read, it was pretty obvious to me that the books are interrogating the things I found uncomfortable, and I'm not sure why I didn't know that the first time; these books are all about that contact between cultures and danger of being fascinated by the "other"; the gender politics of Barrayar are continuously scrutinized. And when on Earth was Cordelia ever a victim who needed to be rescued!? What I do think is fair is that I clearly liked Barrayar more than Shards. While Shards is good, I definitely think Bujold got better as a novelist in the interim; Shards is like three linked novellas while Barrayar has a unity of plot and, especially, theme.

The other really interesting tidbit the afterword brought into focus for me was that this was a book about parenting. I just don't think I saw that at age 24, and even if I had, it would not have resonated the way it does as a 38-year-old father of two. Most of Cordelia's emotions and decisions are driven by the fact that she's a parent. This is obviously the case when it comes to Miles, but it's true almost everywhere in the book: the way she thinks about the boy emperor, Gregor, for example, or her ability to figure out what the emperor's mother Kareena is thinking. I definitely liked the book before, but this time through I felt it, there was a real intensity to it. The book is filled with great moments, some of them funny, some of them grim, all of them thoughtful and considered. I won't list them here, but if you've read it, you'll easily bring a number of them to mind.

Science fiction can sometime feel like a young person's game: young people doing epic stuff like fighting empires. But Barrayar is science fiction for the middle aged. Yes, there are evil empires, but it's about the struggle to be a good parent in all its myriad forms, the right you keep up every day, not always because you want to, but because you won't be yourself if you give up.

I know there are more Cordelia-focused novels in the saga's "main" sequence, but it's a shame there aren't more of these books about her younger days on Barrayar, because in some ways she's an even more interesting protagonist than Miles.

Every five months I read a book in the Vorkosigan saga. Next up in sequence: Cetaganda

08 March 2024

Screen Time

At a certain point, my wife and I began to use the removal of "screentime" (watching tv and tablet use) as a punishment. "I'm going to count to five, and if you're not brushing your teeth..." I don't think this was terribly effective—as any parent knows, the "counting to five" technique just lets your child draw it out when you don't want them to draw it out. What you really ought to do is a time out as soon as the child doesn't listen, but of course that makes things take even longer in the moment, even if in the long run it will supposedly have a better pay off.

It also had the problem of creating an expectation of screentime. Whereas screentime had been a thing for lazy weekend afternoons and the occasional after-school pre-dinner moment, once you are threatening to take it away, that implies the default is the existence of screentime. Furthermore, it also decouples the moment of punishment from the moment of the action, and in three- and five-year-old cognition, it's still pretty important for consequences to immediately flow from action. Not getting the screentime in the afternoon because they didn't brush their teeth promptly nine hours earlier isn't very effective. And finally, the moment of taking it away often makes things worse; now they aren't brushing their teeth and they're mad at you.

So I had an idea: could I flip screentime around? Could I make it a positive reward instead of a negative punishment?

I got an Etsy seller to make us a bunch of wooden tokens with "SCREEN TIME 30 MINS." engraved on them. So no longer do we threaten to remove screentime for negative behaviors; instead, we reward them for positive behaviors. If the morning routine is executed with a minimum of cajoling, then they get a screentime token. This also lets us reward other behaviors; Son One did a chore with no fussing the other day as soon as I asked, so I gave him one for that.

I think overall it's been to the positive. There are now firmly established limits on screentime, which is also a positive—something we had lost over the past year or so. A couple days ago we did have a situation where, having spent all his screentime tokens over a three-day weekend, Son One became quite upset in the afternoon that he hadn't gotten one that morning. He hadn't been terrible for the morning routine, but I had felt like he had required one too many reminders. This prompted an hour of whining!

We'll see how it continues. Son One in particular does well with systems; the main issue I have right now is if I say things like, "You're moving too slow, so you don't get a screentime token," that puts us right back where we started, so it's a little tricky to create that association between the behavior we don't want and the consequence.