A quiet Saturday at my end. I’m writing this from my parents’ home, where I’m tending to dad while my mother has a day out. The cat is sitting on my lap as I write this – he hasn’t had this much alone time with me in a good while, and he’s very happy.
I wrote a few different things about the situation in Palestine here, but all of them felt either wrong or inadequate – I’m just a random person sitting in India, who knows as much or less than anyone else. Instead, here are a few things I’d like to point you to before we move on.
- “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” – an essay by Arielle Angel, the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents.
- “No Human Being Can Exist” by Saree Makdisi.
- “Lying Eyes” by Séamus Malekafzali, on malignancy and myopia in the Western media.
- Protean Magazine has been posting messages from Gazans translated by the Institute of Palestine Studies – “Letters from Gaza” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
- In case you’d like to do more reading on this history, Verso Books has made its library on Palestine and Israel available for free, along with a reading list.
- It’s currently unclear how one can help materially, but the UNRWA is taking donations in its Gaza Emergency Appeal.
This Thursday, Image Comics announced two new series – The One Hand, by Ram V and Laurence Campbell, and The Six Fingers by Dan Watters and Sumit Kumar – and … there’s something odd about them.
Firstly, the two series share the same colourist (Lee Loughridge), letterer (me!), and designer (Tom Muller). But also, these covers …
Tom must have been in a rush, I guess.
Also, Ram and Dan have clearly been chatting too much, because they’ve accidentally used the same name for the setting for both series? Neo Novena? (I must’ve missed that while lettering. Oh crap, I just realised I used the same lettering style for both series. Fixing this now, BRB.)
Laurence and Sumit each did alternate covers for the other series and …
Hmm. There’s something weird about this. You’ll find out in February 2024.
In other work stuff, I’ve been quite busy this week. I’m going on vacation from 2-12 November (the plan is to sit on a beach in Goa, take long walks and, optionally, write a bit), so I have to wrap up a bunch of stuff before I leave.
As I was telling K, you rarely have a vacation in comics as a letterer, you have a vacation-ish. So I’ll probably be called on to do a few revisions, maybe deliver a book, but there’ll be no lettering during the vacation. Trust me, this used to be much worse when I was actually busy. I remember one “vacation” in 2018 where there was one day with zero work. This time, I have maybe an hour of cleanups to do, if that.
Anyway, I finished up w0rldtr33 #6, 32 out of the 56 pages for the short stories project, and did a bunch more work on OGN A. Before I leave on Wednesday, I still have to finish Hellblazer: DIA #2, plus the remaining 24 pages of the short stories. It’s a bit, and I’m trying to be careful that I don’t mess up my back or my hip doing this. We’ll find out together.
New on the blog: I reposted my essay “Why You and Nobody Else?” that was originally posted to this newsletter a few editions ago.
I finished reading The Devil All the Time, finally. This is a very intense book, and it’s also very well-written and dense, so after every couple of chapters, I needed a break. But I enjoyed the whole experience. It’s probably one of the bleakest horror novels I’ve read, despite not having an ounce of the supernatural.
If I had to boil down how this book feels, I’d say that it’s crime fiction that is so grimy that it becomes horror, or that it’s a slice-of-life novel set in hell. There’s a certain strand of Christian person I’ve heard saying that earth itself is hell, and I don’t think I’ve read a book that exemplifies that feeling any better.
The characters – from our protagonist-by-default Arvin to his father Willard to the serial killer couple Carl and Sandy – are marvellously drawn, first in broad strokes and then in smaller, deeper ones. The dense writing adds to the atmosphere and alludes to things outside of the story that are just as fascinating as the story itself.
Pollock has a great facility for worldbuilding through detail, and if there’s one complaint I have against the film adaptation (below), it is that it loses that – in fact, the film medium itself can’t possibly replicate it.
I also read Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. I’d bought this in 2020 on the recommendation of a few friends (and because it’s a Fitcarraldo Editions book). It remained unread till I dug it up recently when, in a baffling decision, the Frankfurt Buchmesse decided to cancel the ceremony for the LiBeraturpreis that was to be awarded to Shibli.
I don’t know if Shibli set out to portray the self-hypnosis that a settler power has to undertake to elevate its own humanity and deny that of others, but she manages to do that, mostly through absences. If a delusion is big enough and involves enough people, does it stop being a delusion? We have seen this writ large many times in history, but Shibli is concerned with what it is like to live inside the mirage and know something is wrong.
Both her protagonists focus on small things while big things happen in the background. The narrator of the second half, in particular, gives the impression that the reason she keeps thinking about trivialities – like cleanliness, routine and a strange obsession with boundaries – is that looking at the truth head-on would be like looking into the sun – it could break you.
It’s something else, something related more to that inability of mine to identify borders between things, and evaluate situations rationally and logically, which in many cases leads me to see the fly shit on a painting and not the painting itself, as the saying goes. And it is possible, at first glance, to mock this tendency, which could compel someone, after the building next to their office at their new job is bombed, to be more concerned about the dust that was created by the bombing and that landed on their desk than about the killing of the three young men who had barricaded themselves inside, for instance. But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.
Minor Detail is a very short book – barely a hundred pages – but it gets so much done. Each sentence layers over the last one, building the picture Shibli’s heroine has spent a lifetime avoiding but now somehow can’t. Yet, the quest for truth is pointless. One person can’t break the mass psychosis of a world, especially when the world is intent on destroying anyone who sees through it.
I also read Richard Kadrey’s cosmic horror novella The Pale House Devil, and it was … fine. It’s a functional book, and an enjoyable yarn, but after reading the last two books, it was a comedown to be reminded that most books aren’t that good.
Other than that, I’m still slogging my way through Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. I say that because after an energetic and informative first half, it’s turned quite repetitive in the second. I’m not sure what Klein’s trying to do by this point – there’s a lot of words and they’re not saying much, but I’ll read a couple of more chapters before I decide if I’m done with it.
After I finished the novel, K and I watched the film adaptation of The Devil All the Time. It’s a well-made film, but after the near-perfection of the novel, I think perhaps it was too soon for me to watch it with the book still fresh in my head.
Most of the performances are strong, even if some accents get a bit janky, and the script does an admirable job of compressing a very dense book into a manageable timeframe. But I think most of where the film stumbles is its inability to translate the novelistic aspects of the book visually.
Much of the book is about making connections – over time, over distance, between characters who don’t yet know one another – and putting that on screen in its immensity would read as far too experimental. The film has a voiceover to convey characters’ thoughts, but once again, nowhere close to the intricacy of the novel.
One well-written negative review on Letterboxd condemns the film for being stereotypical about the American South and for being pointlessly nihilistic. Neither, I’d say (though I don’t have much experience with the former, I should admit) is a problem with the novel. The novel continually excavates beyond clichés, and its nihilism is pointed. The book isn’t saying that the world and all the people in it are horrible, but that the world is cruel enough that even the best people can be ground down and find it difficult to be good and kind.
I think while the film captures the letter of it, it’s not entirely able to convey the spirit. I enjoyed it, nevertheless (the music is excellent, in particular, as is the late-in-the-film decision to portray a particular set of photographs in their negatives, adding to their uncanniness), and K liked it enough that when I read out some relevant bits to her, she wanted to read the novel to see how the same story could be painted differently.
We also watched Creep 2 as a “fun” palate cleanser. Both of us enjoyed the unpredictability of the first film, and thankfully, Creep 2 is a very strong followup. Like the first film, it keeps wrongfooting you without tiring you out (I think the 80-minute runtime of both films helps a ton there), and while I liked the first film a bit more for just how long it lets you go without telling you what it’s actually about, this followup is as surprising and strange as one might like it to be. It’s also, I have to note, funnier than the first film. Mark Duplass continues to be admirably baffling as the title character, and Desiree Akhavan’s Sara is a great foil for him – a character nearly as unpredictable, but in very different and very human ways.
I also discovered as I was writing this that Desiree Akhavan herself is a director and has made two films and a sitcom, and I’m going to try and find them. Also, there’s a final Creep film coming, and I’ll definitely be watching.
This update’s just a titch shorter than usual – mostly because I’ve been working a lot and therefore I’ve read less and watched fewer movies.
I have been thinking about my work situation for next year, and what kind of balance I’d like to strike between work and everything else. I plan to use the vacation to lay out next year’s spreadsheet (it feels like only yesterday that I was doing this year’s!), and then stare at it intently till I know how I should proceed.
I listened to this podcast with Louis Theroux, and it was sobering just how much I identified with the work-related dysfunction he described, starting from the title of the episode “The thing that makes me great at work makes me bad at life” (though I’d substitute “great” there with “good” for myself). I think I’ve just about managed to pull myself back from the worst excesses of it, and just in time, but there’s a bit where he talks about how many projects he said yes to simply because he wanted to get along or he liked the people involved or he wanted their approval (I don’t know if he said all of that – I might be projecting), and that hit hard.
As I was telling a friend today, I love my work and it fulfils me emotionally and gives me a sense of self-worth, and that’s not healthy, and not just because it messed me up physically – I should be able to have a healthy sense of self-worth because I am a person and not conditional to how well I’ve done at my job, or more generally, how much use I’ve been to other people.
But that’s a journey, and not something that I can fix in a day, so you can rest assured I’ll probably tell you far too much about it sometime in the future.
Next one will be from Goa (or I might just skip it if I feel lazy). Bide well, gang!
