needs more demons? avast!

It doesn’t go deep. It mentions typeface classifications like “Didone” and “Garalde” without exploring the distinctions. The authors frequently discuss the mood or tone of a group of typefaces but rarely discuss the elements of the font that establish the tone; when listing similar fonts they seldom explicitly discuss the differences between them.

Although I read the second edition, updated in 2002, the section on web typography is, perhaps inevitably, dangerously out of date.

Overall this was substantially more useful than Never Use More Than Two Different Typefaces. It should help an amateur do a less amateurish job of laying out type; and it should enable a design professional without a solid typography background to talk with one who does.

My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I felt special.

A little later, I placed an even bigger order, and it happened to be while CD Baby was moving across the country. It was delayed long enough that I eventually contacted support, and I promptly got a very nice and apologetic email from Derek Sivers himself (along with the discs, in short order). Again, I felt special.

Later on I learned that everyone got the crazy shipment notice, even for ordering a single disc, and that at the time Derek emailed me, he was one of just two people in the CD Baby “organization.”

And for a little while I felt less special. But eventually I realized that a key part of CD Baby’s value proposition for customers — artists and purchasers alike — was making everyone feel special.

Which, when you think about it, is no small trick.

Reading Sivers’ story of how and why he started, grew, and sold CD Baby, I was strongly reminded of interviews with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye. Partly because they say some of the same things, particularly about not having business growth as a goal. Both describe awkward conversations with “suits” who really can’t grasp this.

But both also display an element of self-contradiction. Sivers says the money didn’t matter — an easy thing to say when your life is not severely constrained by the lack of it — but he did, after all, build a music store, not a music give-away service. Perhaps more tellingly, some of his biggest regrets are about decisions with significant cost impacts. And although Sivers repeatedly says that growth wasn’t a goal, but not only did he consistently make decisions that furthered growth, one of his most provocative epigrammatic guidelines is explicitly about facilitating growth. (It’s to try to make your business practices support double your current volume, which sounds very smart. If you, you know, want to grow the business.)

These cavils aside, this is a pretty great book. Sivers is unusually candid about his mistakes as well as what he did right, and he’s lucid and entertaining. (He says he learned to prize clarity and brevity when crafting emails to CD Baby’s subscriber list, and demonstrates mastery of both here.) You’ll probably be thinking about the contents of this brief book for much longer than the time it takes to read it.

needs more demons? no.

I’m older than Smith’s target audience, and it may be I’m judging Smith according to standards he’s not trying to meet — maybe he’s more interested in creating a nightmarish mood than a credible plot. But there are plenty of young adult novels I don’t feel any need to make excuses for; this one feels sloppy and unimaginative compared to the YA novels I usually read.

needs more demons?

It’s also a bit of a love letter from Steadman to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Miranda’s favorite book, and clearly one which made a big impression on Steadman.

I liked it a lot. It reminded me of two other books for young adults I’ve read recently: It’s Like This, Cat for its very specific sense of place and (earlier) time, and As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth for its unusual, puzzle-y structure and vivid language. I had two major hypotheses about how things were going to pan out, and When You Reach Me kept me guessing between them almost up to the end. Definitely the sort of book that left me wanting to mull over it for a bit before diving into some other work of fiction. Also the sort of book that makes me want to revisit some Madeleine L’Engle.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

Arguably, AC/DC’s story — certainly since 1980 — doesn’t afford many opportunities to dive deep. There’ve been the expected substance-abuse-related departures, some with eventual triumphant sober returns. The band earned a bit of Moral Majority outrage (although not as much as, say, Judas Priest). They’ve continued to release workmanlike albums, about which many of you can sense the contributors struggling to find good things to say. The still-living band members have a reputation for avoiding groupie shenanigans and don’t slag each other off in the press. Compared to the likes of Metallica or Pink Floyd, they offer little drama.

In 1980, of course, they lost Bon Scott, the frontman and lyricist behind all their classic seventies releases to “misadventure” (straight-up alcohol poisoning, Sutcliffe establishes, no vomit involved). After scant weeks they were in the studio with new singer Brian Johnson, recording Back in Black, an unassailable classic (not the best hard rock album, nor even the best AC/DC album, but if you’re only going to ever hear one hard rock album in your life, still the one you should chose). Sutcliffe gives no credence to longstanding rumors that Scott wrote some of Back in Black’s lyrics; Johnson credits Scott’s spiritual presence with helping him craft songs like the mighty title track and “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Those two songs have always seemed closer to me to Scott’s cheerful “gutter poetry” than anything else I ever heard with Johnson’s credits on it. (Confession: I’m pretty sure I bought Flick of the Switch in college, but it was the last AC/DC record I owned, so there are still Johnson-penned lyrics I haven’t heard.)

This is the thing about AC/DC that’s struck me as a bit sad for the past three decades. Johnson’s a capable singer and front man, but for me the enduring magic of AC/DC is split roughly half between those miraculously simple, dense, and catchy riffs, and Scott’s demented, puckish, persona. I can’t imagine Johnson ever coming up with anything as off-handedly brilliant as “Problem Child”’s slurred aside, “even my mother hates me,” or making violence as funny (or alliterative) as “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” does. I think it’s telling that the nicest thing the essayists find to say about the several “comeback” albums is that some of the songs have a spirit similar to one of Scott’s songs (or something from Back in Black).

The book definitely delivers on the “ultimate illustrated” score, with plenty of album sleeves, tour ads, backstage passes, ticket stubs, and promo items to accompany the many, many live shots of Angus Young grimacing, and of the rest of the band too. (You might wonder if there’s a Dorian Gray-styled picture of Angus Young squirreled away somewhere, although excluding his hair.)

needs more demons?

I liked it enough to read more from Smith.

Since I wondered: Moist, published in 2002, uses a plot element that the The Sopranos first explored in 2000 (and then largely dropped until Season 6). Given what I know about the incubation period of novels and screenplays, it seems unlikely that one influenced the other.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no.”

A sextet of short stories by D. Harlan Wilson opens the collection. Wilson is big on present tense, and characters with attributes instead of names: “the man in the silver handlebar mustache”, “the little boy”, “a bodybuilder in a purple spandex G-string.” He favors dream-like illogic over anything resembling coherent plot. His prose is often very concrete and mechanical: “[He] sniggered, then began moving his tongue around the insides of his mouth so that his cheeks poked out.” Wilson claims Kafka as in influence to the extent that he titled a short story collection The Kafka Effect, but nothing drives these stories the way Kafka’s paranoia and the tension between the individual and society/The State drove his. None of them really grabbed me.

Bizarro first came to my attention via the impressively lurid titles of Carlton Mellick III’s novellas, here represented by The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. It’s probably not a bad litmus test: the titular object is not a molded toy-in-the-shape-of, it’s an actual clone of the Savior, and if this seems simply too offensive or too mechanically improbable, then Mellick is probably not for you. The shock-for-its-own-sake aspect leaves me cold, but beyond that the obvious metaphor of (ahem) internalizing belief systems and its consequences on a couple whose beliefs become disparate is explored with something approaching emotional resonance. Meanwhile the nightmarish milieu doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems to make sense to Mellick’s narrator; there’s something approaching internal consistency. I might cautiously experiment further with Mellick.

I didn’t enjoy Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals while I was reading it, but its grotesque imagery has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. And I have to admit that while marrying the hoary last-man-and-woman-in-post-apocalyptic-wasteland cliché with the popular notion that cockroaches are the critters most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust struck me as a tad obvious (not to mention really gross), I had never read anything quite like it.

Kevin L. Donihe’s The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports was for me the anthology’s first clear win. It has some weak spots — the back and forth between a pair of news commentators seemed trite, but on the whole it was surprising and held my interest. I may have a soft spot for it in part because the “sport” is cycling (and not, as the title might have led you to expect, copulation).

Gina Rinalli’s Suicide Girls in the Afterlife seemed a bit too familiar — a bit of Neil Gaiman, a dash of Kelly Link, a dollop of Beetlejuice — but if it’s maybe too indebted to obvious sources, I like those sources. Promising.

Andre Duza’s Don’t F(beep) with the Coloureds goes in quite a different direction than its inflammatory title might suggest. It reminded me a lot of a 1988 film, only (naturally) darker, and grosser. I liked the story-in-story structure (although I would have liked to see it pushed a little further) and thought some of the expository chunks could have been more smoothly integrated, but give it a qualified thumbs up overall.

Vincent Sakowski offers up one two short-shorts, one of which feels a bit like a Robyn Hitchcock song rendered in prose, and one which is tired and vile, and the pretty nifty long short story “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok.” Its embittered modern couple, Vogue and GQ, have just enough depth to be more than tropes, and the intrusion of mythic elements offered a few interesting twists. The mood reminded me a bit of Leslie What’s “The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City,” only (naturally) darker and grosser. I may seek out more from Sakowski, although the story I really disliked leaves me somewhat distrustful.

I was a little annoyed by a persistent tic of Steve Beard’s Survivor’s Dream: it uses a boatload of definitive articles, maybe to evoke a childlike narrative voice: “She was hiding in this ship”, “It had a domed roof held up by these thick white pillars,” et cetera. It seemed excessive, but afterward it occurred to me that plenty of writers from the lit’ry side of the street play with not dissimilar tactics, e.g., Kathy Acker or even Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” (Of course I’m sometimes annoyed by those, too). Other than that, Beard manages a kind of impressive balancing act between multiple, contradictory narrative threads tied together by a pervasive mood and Beard’s flat, unmusical prose. I would have liked it better if it had been shorter.

John Edward Lawson’s Truth in Ruins is one of the most hyperbolic entries in the entire anthology. In Lawson’s grim future humanity is divided into serial killers and profilers, with genetically engineered “Humanzees” poised to take over after humanity’s failure. It’s self-consciously, cartoonishly, uber-violent, and narrative chunks are jammed together in ways that emphasize their incongruities, like a movie made of nothing but jump cuts. I sort of liked it, although I had to skim over some stomach-turning bits.

Three of Bruce Taylor’s short stories, “The Breath Amidst the Stones” and “A Little Spider Shop Talk,” and “Of Tunafish and Galaxies” are perhaps the most conventional entries in the collection: weird, for sure, but coherent, reminiscent of Leiber and Lafferty. I liked them. I thought the last, “City Streets” was less successful.

needs more demons? maybe kinda sorta

I think near-future satire of social technology is very hard to pull off right now: if Where The Ladies At? is real, how can you exaggerate it to a humorous extreme? Some of Shteyngart’s concepts read more as bluntly predictive than satiricial; a few already sound almost passé. (I first heard one of his supposedly edgy future slang terms in the eighties.)

Shteyngart fundamentally failed for me to deliver on the novel’s title: if it’s going to be sad, I need to be emotionally invested in the characters. I couldn’t manage to like Shteyngart’s primary narrator, Lenny Abramov, enough to care about his career struggles or his May-September romance with the Eunice Park, the other protagonist/narrative perspective. I found Park’s character (and voice) even more problematic than Abramov’s — she sounds way too much like a forty-ish man’s idea of a how twenty-ish woman would think, feel, and act (with a hefty dose of into-schlubby-older-men wish fulfillment).

But there was one dimension in which I thought Super Sad True Love Story really shone: as a cautionary fable about the risks of international debt. Shteyngart’s vision of a United States beholden to its creditors, a nation stripped of superpowerdom and emphatically not “too big to fail” rang more true than any of his characters. I thought it was all-too-credible in spirit if not in specifics.

needs more demons? “Demons” is the wrong metric, but it’s lacking something. It might have worked better for me if it were either substantially more or less compassionate to its characters.

I expected clunky prose, and found plenty of it (with all the ultra-this and super-that occasionally becoming unintentionally humorous) — but I didn’t expect it to be so rough I actually couldn’t tell what was going on. In First Lensman’s mining disaster sequence, Smith mixes wholly invented (I’m sure) miner’s argot with (I think?) some real-world-but-unfamiliar-to-me mining terminology such that I had only a vague idea what the characters were doing.

It was way more bloodthirsty than I was prepared for. I expect space opera to have a high body count as a rule, but I also expect the baddies (colorful evil leaders and direct henchmen aside) to largely be as evil and faceless as Star Wars‘ stormtroopers. Smith’s Lensmen cheerfully toss off remarks like, “In emergencies, it is of course permissible to kill a few dozen innocent bystanders,” which is probably pragmatic, but not exactly heroic or noble. They’re also pretty hard on combatants who are not actually evil or villainous, and may even become staunch allies a chapter or two later. In Triplanetary, Conway Costigan employs tactics against civilians that would be labeled terrorism today.

They were racier than I expected them to be, including descriptions of skimpy outfits, lurid (if unspecific) threats of fates-worse-than-death at the hands of sadists and/or sex-obsessed aliens, an instance of implied bisexuality, and a smidgeon of actual smooching.

But on the other hand:

• I was struck by how un-xenophobic these novels are. Alien races are often described as having “monstrous” appearances, but still worthy of inclusion in the ranks of civilization’s defenders — even, sometimes, if they have decidedly un-human mores.
• You couldn’t by any stretch call these novels “feminist,” but they’re not quite as sexist as I expected — several of Smith’s women are intelligent and self-directed, not just props for men to wrangle over, or insignificant background characters.
• I found it positively eerie to read about First Lensman’s slim poll margins, electoral dirty tricks and counter measures here in the twenty-first century — Smith is almost spookily prophetic.
• It really is astounding how much even modern science fiction draws on Smith’s tropes. I totally buy Lensmen as a key inspiration for Jedi, and Smith’s rays-vs.-shields space battles use the same fundamental rules as everything from Star Trek to Star Wars — and this before the invention of the laser. Star Trek’s plethora of inscrutable super-advanced alien races also seem to owe a debt to Smith’s Arisians.

needs more demons? I wouldn’t presume to say so. But it does help to bring some historical perspective.