An osprey in action, grabbing a fish. In French their name is balbuzard pêcheur, but they are not buzzards.
This brass bookmark comes from Cornovia Designs in Helston, Cornwall. Which is a place I’ve never been so I’m not sure where I got it.
Book: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
And now, once your tummy starts to “show” you can broadcast pics of your baby bump on social media. Attitudes have changed.
I think with this chapter I’ll wrap things up with my posts on the good old days. In general I think we’re much better off. But I can’t help thinking that our grandparents would be disappointed and perhaps even ashamed of us. It’s not a good feeling.
A better end to this series than I was expecting. Not because it wraps everything up and answers all my questions, because it doesn’t, but because it went places I didn’t think it would go. I like surprises, especially when I’m not sold in the first place on a story’s trajectory.
As things kick off here Dylan, the red-masked avenger, is cooling his heels in a mental hospital. He seems to have escaped his demon, whatever the hell it was, and as things progress he’s come to accept the fact that he’s just a violent vigilante. Now where all that came from is anyone’s guess, because it doesn’t appear to be part of any family history. He does have family mental health issues but they seem mostly to be associated with depression. My own expert analysis is that he’s just a young man who’s angry at all the exploitation and injustice in the world. That gives him enough of a reason to raise hell.
Anyway, his murderous proclivities don’t go into abeyance in the hospital and soon he’s plotting the murder of a staffer who is sexually assaulting the patients. Meanwhile, on the outside, a copycat killer is at work, Dylan’s girlfriend Kira is still pining over him, and both the detective who has been hunting him and the Russian mob who want revenge are closing in.
There’s a bloody climax and then a bit of a twist at the end that provides a whimsical and not very satisfying answer as to how Dylan has been functioning as a narrator the way he has throughout the series. But by this point I don’t think a satisfying answer on that count was possible. Still, I thought Brubaker did his best, and Phillips came through with some nice snowy effects that give the mental hospital scenes a suitably muffled and wintery feel, a correlative to Dylan’s confused mental state. Another plus was the fact that Kira doesn’t feature as much in this volume except at the end, where she’s made to carry too much weight with regard to the vigilante theme. This seems to arise naturally from a decayed urban environment that summons and I guess empowers what are personal demons.
An interesting series then, but one I didn’t love because of the unbelievable and unlikeable main character, the just as unbelievable love interest, and the strained plot machinery, which really creaks throughout. It’s quite readable though and the action is well handled in all regards. I’ve heard rumours it may be made into a cable series, which sounds about right. It might even work better that way.
About a week ago I had someone make a series of comments on my reviews of a horror franchise over at Alex on Film. The comments didn’t come with a link to someone’s own web-page and the email seemed like a bot. They weren’t just spam though, as they were written in response to things I’d written and, more directly, to comments that others had made. They also made some relevant points. Not points I agreed with, but ones that I could shrug at and consider fair enough.
After holding them in my queue of comments awaiting approval though for about a week I decided to delete them. I don’t mind bad language (I use it myself), or even the expression of outrage, but the hostility seemed out of place. I won’t reproduce them in full, but here are how a few of them started:
“Fuck off cunt.”
“Imbecile. You don’t know shit.”
“Fuck off all you cunts . . . ”
As I say, the commenter goes on to make what are at least somewhat on-topic responses to the threads. At the same time, they just feel like someone trolling for a reaction and I didn’t want to bother. I guess this is common enough behaviour, but (assuming a human actually wrote the comments) it seemed to me like a line was being crossed.
I really don’t like deleting comments made by anyone, but at the same time I think we all have standards. I also wonder at how some people choose to interact online, and whether it’s a response to how they’re treated in real life and if it colours how they speak to people they meet in person. It would go some way to explain the increasing rudeness in behaviour that I see almost every day.
They just finished replacing all our condo decks this past month. Big project. The deck itself is smaller than this picture makes it look and I don’t use it all that much, but it’s nice that it’s there.
MAD Magazine specialized in satire, or sending up established material. So movies and TV shows. The media, mainly because they loved doing ad parodies. Political figures. That sort of thing.
I’ve previously looked at their take-offs of famous detectives. This book, written and illustrated by Don “Duck” Edwing, does something similar with superheroes. Some of these also-rans are parodies of recognizable heroes – Ms. Wonder Blunder, Fat Bat, The Macho Hunk, Superdud – while others are new inventions. Or at least they seemed like new inventions to me as I couldn’t identify any originals. In this latter camp we get Captain Trivial (“The superhero for the minor annoyances!”), Ragoo of the Jungle (“The gourmet of all comicdom!”), and The Masked Bernard (“Follow the adventures of this wonder dog of the mountain tops in his never-ending search for a fire hydrant!”).
The humour is that of the gag, running for three or four pages with a quick set-up and then a punchline. Aside from the long Ms. Wonder Blunder story, which is also the weakest piece in the book, that’s how everything is presented here. There’s a breathless structure to it, with each new gag being introduced by a quick bit of table-setting: “Meanwhile . . .” “As you remember . . .” “Suddenly . . .” “Later . . .” Different plot lines are adverted to, but they’re left unexplained. The Blue Blowfish is trying to save Buddy and Sue from being turned into jumbo shrimp, or anchovies, or French fries by Doctor Froglips, and I guess he’s successful some of the time, though we never see any of these other characters. It’s always just on to the next gag. You flip through a book like this in a single sitting, and I mean that in a good way. I don’t think I laughed out loud, but I had a goofy smile on my face through all of it.
You may not have heard of ghost jobs. If so, consider yourself lucky. A relatively new phenomenon, a ghost job is a fake job listing. Either no such job exists or, more likely, the position has already been filled. Companies do this for various reasons, like making it seem as though business is booming or to have a file of prospective employees at hand should they ever decide to start hiring.
I thought about ghost jobs when reading “The Stockbroker’s Clerk” because it’s another Holmes story where the plot hinges on someone being hired for a phoney job. The connection many people make is to “The Red-Headed League” but it’s also related to “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” It’s a device that seemed to stick in Doyle’s head.
A Cockney clerk with the wonderful name of Hall Pycroft realizes something is fishy about the job he’s offered in Birmingham, but as in the other cases I mentioned he’s willing to play along, just as long as he’s being paid. He contacts Holmes, however, to investigate his suspicions, which turn out to be well founded. The job was just a distraction, used to further a robbery scheme.
As it turns out, Holmes doesn’t have to do much. The London robbery is foiled by the police (on their own!) and Holmes only has to deal with the Birmingham side of the operation. And even then the bad guy has already given up. It’s not one of Doyle’s more inspired efforts and you could be forgiven for thinking he was tiring of things already.
A year ago I posted a pic of my struggling hydrangea. This year we’ve been getting a ton of rain so it’s doing better. Still has quite a way to go though!
There’s not much new to report in this review. We begin with our anti-hero Dylan shooting up the brothel run by the Russian mob, which is exactly how Volume One kicked off. And again our narrator is aware of how roundabout he’s been in his duties, leading us to think that “this entire story has been the longest flashback in history.” Some readers, he says, may have “been thinking about that the whole time.” Guilty as charged!
Even so, it’s going to take us nearly another hundred pages before we come back to the brothel and are finally “caught up.” “I know, I know,” he’ll say then, “I’m the worst narrator in history for actually getting to the point” (in history again!) But “it can’t all be action . . . right?” Sometimes there’s a need to fill us in with “some stuff you have to know before the action gets going again.”
So when I say there’s not much new to report here, that’s really a comment on the fact that this story has been spending most of its time running in place and not going anywhere. Which means the things I like are all the things I’ve liked so far, and the things I don’t like are the same as well.
Unfortunately, I wish things had been all action, or at least more action, because Brubaker and Phillips do that well. I really love those star-shaped gun blasts and the way the outbreaks of violence are set up and choreographed. The filler is either dull (Dylan’s love life with Kira) or confusing (the business with the demon).
Still, with only one volume left to go some resolution beckons. Dylan has, singlehandedly, taken out the boss of the Russian mob, an improbability that’s credited to his belief in some wisdom he picked up from the movie The Edge: “What one man can do, another man can do.” Which is absolute bullshit and made me think that getting rid of the demon was actually making the rest of the story even more unlikely. But we shall see how things wrap up before delivering a final judgment.
Alex Good 