A leaf bookmark. But I don’t know what kind of leaf. I believe the morphology is known as “falcate.” I asked the person who gave it to me what it was and she said she didn’t know, she picked it up at an estate sale. So there you have it: a botanical-bookmark mystery!
Book: Poor Things by Alasdair Gray
They’re always thinking of something clever to do during a night on the town. I just wonder how long this cart is going to stay up there. I walk by it every day so I’ll let you know.
First stop on my road trip was at Toronto’s Union Station, which is where I had to switch trains. For such a big country Canada has really poor rail service, especially in the Windsor-to-Ottawa corridor. You should be able to just blast right through without an hour lay-by.
Union Station, however, is a grand building, even if it’s really easy to get lost there. Luckily there were plenty of people I could ask directions from. And right across the street is the famous Royal York Hotel, which I think I stayed at once, years ago.
The basic story here is meat-and-potatoes stuff. It’s World War 2 and an elite force of Nazis headed by the Red Skull, Baron Strucker, Master Man, Warrior Woman, and Armless Tiger Man are off to Wakanda to steal some of that awesome vibranium stuff to power their secret weapons. But the African kingdom is protected not only by its reigning Black Panther (T’Challa’s grandfather), but some (very) paleface visitors in the form of Captain America and Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos.
What follows is a lot of fighting as the good guys kick Nazi ass in a manner a little bloodier than usual. The Wakandans decapitate an advance party of Nazis and stick their heads on stakes as a warning. Armless Tiger Man is a cannibal with sharpened teeth who tears into people mouth-first (since he doesn’t have arms, you see).
I actually liked this better than I thought I was going to. There were a couple of places where it seemed like a page was missing though, as the story kept skipping around different parts of the battlefield. And I wasn’t sure what Black Panther was using to take out Master Man and Warrior Woman. Vibranium? Perhaps I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.
The other thing I could have lived without was the lecturing from Black Panther about how post-war America will have to live up to its ideals of freedom, meaning civil rights and all that. “The true test of your ideals will come when the war is over. A nation at war has an enemy to unify them. A nation with no enemy often looks for one within its own borders.” The Panther was becoming a mouthpiece for stuff like this around this time, and it just sounds stiff.
Still, if you want a violent shoot-‘em-up you get it here. Also included as a bonus (since the Flags of Our Fathers storyline is only four issues) is Rise of the Black Panther #1 but I thought this was dreadful. Nothing at all happens, as it’s just backstory about T’Chaka, leading up to the point where he’s killed by Ulysses Klaw. And boy is the action ever talky! Now to be sure Black Panther has often been a talky comic. The Christopher Priest years were thick with text. And he’s always been political too, again in the Priest years but also going back to his fights with the Klan. But the talk here is really dull, just reciting biographical material I mostly already knew, and the art wasn’t working for me either. So that finished the book on a down note.
Been laid low, or laid flat on my back, by the flu but I plan to be up with regular postings starting next week!
So I finally got around to adding an Index of Indexes. You can access it from the link in the header, or here. I’ll keep adding to it as I go along, but this is a start.
Another ‘Sixties superhero start-up, this time with Daredevil finding his legs.
It took a bit of time. He started out with a yellow uniform that had a black vest with a single red D on the front. It would later turn into the all-red outfit he’s best known for wearing, with the iconic double-D on its chest, but it’s never explained why they made that change. I mean, his name isn’t Dare-Devil.
The other issue they had trouble sorting out was his blindness. Championed (especially in recent years) for being a superhero with a disability, it’s actually nothing of the sort. In fact, the one thing the “man without fear” admits to being afraid of is having surgery to get his sight back and then losing his super powers. You see, the accident that caused Matt Murdock’s blindness involved being hit by a truck carrying radioactive material, resulting in his compensatory senses being jacked up to god-like levels. Because we all know that’s the way radioactivity works. You don’t just die a slow, lingering death from cancer but turn into a superhero. Or villain. Or expire right away in agonizing pain, like Dr. Van Eyck in issue #9.
So while Daredevil is blind that’s not a disability because his “atom-induced radar sense” can accurately judge the precise size, speed, and location of any physical body. His sense of smell is so advanced he can trace an individual, hours later, through the streets of New York City by the scent of their “unusual hair tonic.” Hair tonic, for Daredevil, being as distinctive as a man’s fingerprints, he can pick up a scent at any point “approximately within one city block of his quarry.” He can sense the heart rate of individuals standing anywhere near him and tell if they are lying or experiencing any stress. He can read books, not in braille but “merely by feeling the impression of the ink on the page!” He can tell what people are wearing by the sound the fabric makes when they move. He can detect (by radar, not by touch) whether someone is wearing a ring on their finger, and what sort of ring it is. Flying in a jet over the petty European state of Lichtenbad he can “sense a walled city” thousands of feet below . Then, once inside the castle of the Lord of Lichtenbad his radar senses can “see” through several stone floors “as though it’s [the castle’s] made of glass.” That’s some radar!
You can tell by this that they were winging it. Effectively, Daredevil isn’t blind at all. Anything he needs to be able to do, he can do. Just like that billy club of his can do everything, including allowing him to swing through the streets of the city like Spider-Man.
If you put all that aside, what you got here was still a really enjoyable comic in the grand Marvel manner of the time. For the most part Daredevil is taking on B-list baddies who are nonetheless a lot of fun. People like Killgrave the Purple Man, the Matador, the Stilt Man, and the animal cos-players of the Organization. But when he goes up against Namor (in what is a genuinely funny adventure) he’s beaten up pretty badly, and this in his own comic! Even Iron Man got to knock out the Hulk in the pages of Iron Man.
Most of the titles here were written by Stan Lee, and that includes the usual good and bad. Fast-paced stories that don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining things. Colorful characters. Relentless boosterism. Item: the issue that has Daredevil’s “epic battle” with Electro “may well be remembered as long as literature endures!!” Right on the first page of issue #1 the lucky reader is congratulated for having purchased “another prized first edition! This magazine is certain to be one of your most valued comic mag possessions in the months to come!” Well, maybe not in the months to come. But if you held it for seventy years . . . in 1964 it had a cover price of 12 cents and now goes for between $1,500 and $5,000. That’s a decent return. Smilin’ Stan didn’t tell many lies. He just ran away with the hyperbole.
On the downside, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s his hopeless portrayal of women. The love triangle going on between Matt, his law partner Foggy Nelson, and their secretary Karen Page is just an annoyance. This was a day when women really knew their place, and had no shame in delivering such self-deprecating lines as “I guess I’m just a silly female!”
I was never a fan of Daredevil when I was a kid but I enjoyed this book a lot more than I was expecting. In later years he’d go through some “adult” makeovers, especially highlighting his Catholic faith, but for sheer entertainment value these early adventures stand up well. I even love the “Here Comes Daredevil” titling, with its in-your-face promise of “get ready for fun!” And as for disabilities, they’re no handicap at all.
The last couple of posts have been of bookmarks that my friends brought me back from China. This is the third and final one, and is of blue-and-white pottery on a blade-style bookmark.
But it also comes with a special engraving: 郝好. This is pronounced “Hao Hao” (or something like that), and a few years back we came up with it as my “Chinese name.” The first character is a surname. The second basically means “good,” as in the greeting 你好 (ni hao: hello). I don’t think there are many people with the name Hao Hao, but it’s kind of fun. And a great bookmark!
Book: China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower by Frank Dikötter
Sherlock Holmes’s second outing (that is, in terms of publication) takes a lot of the themes introduced in A Study in Scarlet and etches them into the standard model a little deeper. The police, here in the form of Mr. Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, are even bigger bunglers. Holmes’s eccentricity is more developed, as he is presented as even more of a manic-depressive drug addict: either intensively engaged in the hunt or zonked out on his seven-per-cent solution. And finally the structure is much the same, with the criminal spilling his guts in a long-winded flashback after he’s been caught, filling the reader in with all the details of how and why he dun it. “The Strange Story of Jonathan Small” isn’t quite the anchor the Utah melodrama was in A Study in Scarlet (or even, possibly, as exotic to a British audience), but Doyle was on his way to cutting this part of what I’m calling the standard model down to a size that would fit better within a short story.
Sticking with this just a bit more, you could say the debt to Poe’s Dupin is also deepened, with the regrettably racist figure of Tonga cast in much the same role as the orangutan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Tonga is at first mistaken as a Newfoundland dog, but when he stands upright he transforms into a “savage, distorted creature”: “Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury.” Yes, this was a work of its time, but by 1890 such a caricature was in bad taste.
But back to Holmes’s eccentricity. He’s both more than human and less. Without a case to solve, pressed into inaction, he becomes an invalid. In today’s parlance he would be diagnosed as bipolar, switching from being in “excellent spirits” to “fits of the blackest depression.” He describes himself as having a “curious constitution”: “I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.” Though Watson himself feels the same black dogs, and when he gets depressed thinking of his own single status he has to banish such “dangerous thoughts” as come into his head by plunging furiously into the latest treatise upon pathology. That’s his seven-per-cent solution.
Holmes isn’t bothered by being single though, as he doesn’t trust women. This is his machine quality I mentioned, and it’s a point that Watson expands upon at the beginning of his next Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” There’s no romance about him, at least in so far as it relates to his association with other people. “Women are never to be entirely trusted – not the best of them,” he warns Watson. Who, in turn, bridles at this “atrocious sentiment.” But then Watson is just too good to be true. He even delights in Miss Morstan being denied the Agra treasure because he wouldn’t want to be thought a gold-digger. That’s nobility.
The wit and wisdom of Sherlock Holmes is cut down a bit, though we do get what is perhaps his most famous pronouncement or precept on his method. Unfortunately, it’s one I’ve always had a big problem with. “How often have I said to you,” he tells Watson, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Emphasis in the original.
There are two complaints I’d make about this precept. First of all, how useful is it? Eliminating the impossible would be an endless task. Even narrowing down what finally is possible (however unlikely) as opposed to impossible would take a long time. But more than that, it just seems to me that the claim being made isn’t true. Does it not mean that everything that is possible, even if just in theory, must be true? Who believes that? And what practical application does it have? In the case presented in the book, it gives us the answer to the “locked room” mystery we’re presented with, but even there can we be sure that Holmes had exhausted every possibility? How could you ever be sure you had managed that?
A much better precept is one Holmes has drawn from his reading:
“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”
This is an observation that, in the age of Big Data, could be said to have become something of a sacred text. Though I don’t think there are many people alive today who can say they’ve read The Martyrdom of Man. Or anything else by Winwood Reade. If they had, they’d find that Doyle had tweaked Reade into something maybe a little different. What Reade actually said was this: “As a single atom, man is an enigma; as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent; as a species, the offspring of necessity.”
There’s a nice historical aside that I don’t find gets a lot of attention, at least from the annotators. After they find the treasure is missing the police inspector is particularly disappointed. “There goes the reward!” he exclaims gloomily. “Where there is no money there is no pay.” This reminded me of the description of policing in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century given by Daniel Stashower in his book The Beautiful Cigar Girl. Back before NYC had a professional police force, private rewards made up a large part of the pay the police received. Was something like that still the case in the 1880s in London? What the inspector says seems to suggest so.
I don’t think there’s any question this is a better book than A Study in Scarlet. Doyle was still finding his way and learning to economize, but there are some great descriptive passages and the climactic chase down the Thames is thrilling. The natural home for Holmes though was going to be in the short story, which is where he would find himself next.
No looking back, and not much looking forward on this New Year’s Day.
Over the past year I spent a lot more time on this site, adding a bunch of semi-regular features like showcasing my bookmark collection, doing puzzles, and posting thoughts on true crime, mysteries, and comic books. I’ve been spending less time watching movies at Alex on Film and reviewing other books at Good Reports, and that’s likely going to continue for most of 2025. There have been two big time-killers that have been working against me: renovations I’m doing and a legal squabble I was forced into. Both will be finished up sometime next year, but I wouldn’t want to say when. Until I’m clear of those two hurdles though updates are likely to continue on a reduced schedule.
But of course you never can tell what life has in store for you. You can’t take anything for granted, so be thankful for what you have.
Thanks to everyone who has dropped by any of my sites over the past year. I hope you’ll stick around and maybe find something worth your while moving forward!
Alex Good 