Nineteenth Anniversary Post

Today is the anniversary of Antick Musings! I first posted on this day in 2005; that first post is very tentative and pointless.

In the heady first decade of this blog, I pulled out all the stops for the big anniversary post every October 4th, with long lists of links and pointless statistics that I don't think any of you actually read or cared about. More recently, I've forgotten to do the post entirely about half the time, and have (this may be psychologically important) missed or bobbled all of the round-number anniversaries - five, ten, and fifteen.

This year, this anniversary post will probably turn into something - I'm starting it over a month ahead of time, so with luck I won't forget it - but I make no promises.

History of the Blog: Links to Links

First, though, let me link to the past installments of this annual post: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth. and seventeenth.
Each of those is itself mostly a list of links, making this section the most purely blog-like thing I do regularly. (Remember: I started off in this world writing the SFBC's blog, which was a major link-fest, like so many things of that era. We spent our time pointing to things, and we were happy to do it!)

I usually try to explain that history or origin in more detail here, so maybe one or two more sentences: I started Antick Musings as practice, since the book-club company I worked for was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the SFBC. That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times and has continued to...let me be kind and say "transform;" I think a few people I knew still work there - so the fact that my personal blog has kept going, even in so ramshackle a state, is a testament to something, I suppose.

Anyway, this was...not an afterthought, but definitely not meant to be a specific thing. It turned into a book blog, which was the one thing I was absolutely sure in 2005 it would not be; I read and edited books for a day-job, so touching that more than very, very lightly here would have been a bad idea.

Such are the dreams of our youth.

I will also point out here that I'm still using the template I picked, nineteen years ago. It's not currently available in the Blogger console, and it's probably broken in at least a few ways - the blogroll, in particular, has not been touched in the slightest since about Year Three. But every time I look at the array of possible Blogger templates, I hate all of them and find them all ugly and generic. If I had a lot of energy and time (and a willingness to spend money of it), I'd port the whole thing to WordPress, refurbish from top to bottom, and have something that looked nice.

That will never happen.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

I've consistently thrown into this annual post my one random metric: the number of posts each year. It means essentially nothing, but it's a tradition, and nineteen years later, traditions are pretty much all I have. So here goes:

• 2023-2024 -- 405 posts
• 2022-2023 -- 410 posts
• 2021-2022 -- 279 posts
• 2020-2021 -- 265 posts
• 2019-2020 -- 55 posts
• 2018-2019 -- 178 posts
• 2017-2018 -- 368 posts
• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

I had another blog for a couple of years about a decade ago - Editorial Explanations, where I made fun of editorial cartoons at pretty much exactly the point when they began their own extinction event. I enjoyed doing it until I didn't, and then I stopped. It was a long time ago, and it doesn't matter now, so I've stopped adding them in to the blog-post totals. That blog itself is still available for anyone with an interest in decade-old political bullshit. (I will note that bullshit of that era feels almost quaint and homey these days.)

The Inevitable Links: Posts About Books

As I said above, this turned into a book-blog after I lost my editorial job - and I did wonder, years later, if my opinions here did contribute, in some small way, to my never getting another editorial job despite trying off and on for a few years. (Probably not: it's a ferociously competitive field, and almost impossible to get back on the horse once you fall off.) 

Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.

It's not very long, it's funny on every page, and it's true in ways that will sour bad books for you forever - which is a good thing, since who wants to waste time on bad books?

Those are the things that are assumed to be central to an American identity: what's on the left side of the "something-American" hyphen?

The mind can slip into fantasy at any moment - a stream of thought moving from what is to oh god, what if at any time.

And if you're looking for a comic strip way more centrally about cannibalism than you suspected was possible, it's really your only choice.

I really like how cartoonists are no longer tied down to linear time. In the bad old days, a comics story might have a flashback - one big one, with huge caption boxes and every other signpost the creators could think of - but that was about it; the audience was assumed to be too young and/or unsophisticated to handle complicated transitions.

Ackroyd is faithful to the religious tone of Mallory's original: they all praise God a lot and are firmly convinced that beating someone up in a joust proves that you're true and righteous, which is a comforting thing for bullies and the strong to believe in all ages.

Reader, there is nothing here you will not predict, nothing that gives a true moment of surprise or wonder, nothing that isn't entirely derivative and utterly pre-determined. This is a piece of product, an engineered jigsaw puzzle piece that slots in exactly in the middle of all of the other pieces to make a bland picture of people punching each other.

The most interesting creators are the ones you have to learn how to read. They tell stories their way, making their choices but not going out of their way to explain. And it can take reading a few books to figure that out: not all readers will want to spend that much effort.

Bagge's worlds are full of mildly updated '50s gender-essentialism: men are hot-headed and often physically violent, because They Are Men and the World Is Frustrating. Sometimes they are divided into the smart ones (effete, tentative, too weak for this world, typically wearing glasses) and the strong ones (stupid as a post, addicted to incredibly counterproductive ideas, full of zeal and energy for all the wrong things, typically wearing mullets).

You might say, "that's a mighty big topic to cover in one l'il 200-page book, now, isn't it, pardner?" (If you weren't pretending to be a cowboy, you might use different phrasing, admittedly.)

But you would think that a class of people who are often annoyed by the "where do you get your ideas?" question would be somewhat more reticent to spin complex tales of "here's how this guy got his ideas." You would think, but you would be wrong, because it happens a lot.

Today, I have a book that kicks that door open, rips it off its hinges, chops it up for firewood, burns it down, dances on the ashes, and then falls over, awkwardly, to get bruised and covered with schmutz.

The creator is Zerocalcare - apparently, that was the jingle for a cleaning product, which the guy named Michele Rech started using as an online handle and then just kept using when he started making comics. (As someone with a blog and other social accounts under the name "G.B.H. Hornswoggler," I understand the impulse.)

So this is a book about, mostly, crazy optimists who are mostly in their mid-twenties, mostly have never failed at anything in their lives, and mostly have never seen a problem they couldn't just solve by working harder. 

There might be some element of the "British phrases help sell humorous SFF to Americans" engine working here - people like me who have read a lot of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are prone to think phrases like "luck's not a wheelbarrow; you don't want to push it" are interesting and quirky rather than (as Brits I suppose might) some dull thing Uncle Rupert says every damn day.

But one weird thing about getting older is that I find it's easier to see creators at different points in their lives - that parallax of my own life making it clearer that this is a young man's book and that is from the older version.

The whole point is that people can't take it, of course. They collapse, drop out. You can't have an elimination competition without eliminating people.

It must be nice to be a world-famous and -popular writer. You can get nice little additional revenue streams from normal life stuff such as "owning a lot of T-shirts" and "talking to a guy from a magazine."

What was once a finely tuned engine of precisely drawn gags by Ernie Bushmiller had devolved into a bland collection of glurge, drawn by Guy Gilchrist as the demented spawn of Precious Moments and Art Frahm.

A baby is a wrinkled, red-faced, crying lump, capable only of wanting things. That's not inherently lovable.

Just so you know: I wouldn't pay attention to me about superhero comics. If I wasn't already me, I mean.

When I have to make a random choice of what to read next, I try to ask "what looks weirdest."

But that's always the way: no one is as radical as they think they are, no one is as fearless at confronting their real flaws as they want to believe.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I do, occasionally, post about other things. This year and last, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays - I like music, though I think I write about it substantially more awkwardly and less well than I do about books, so I try to keep my illusions very minor.

When I get new books - however I get them, after some waffling about tags and titles a few years back - I post a list here under Reviewing the Mail, a title I stole from Chuck Klosterman. I don't claim to do that quickly - lately I tend to take bigger book-shopping lists and break them over multiple weeks - but I do it, eventually.

I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and whatever Sunday is closest to Independence Day.)

But...that was pretty much it. I'm still, a decade later, surprised that my absolutely-no-chance-it-will-turn-into-a-book-blog did exactly that, but there's a limit to how surprised anyone can be by the same thing over an extended period of time. It is what it is.

Valediction

That's it. Year Nineteen is now over, and I guess I'm into Year Twenty. If I keep to form, you won't have to worry about a post like this next year, and then I'll be back at the end of Year Twenty-One with a weird apology. Or maybe noticing the pattern will stop it?

Who knows. I hope the self-indulgent things you do are equally fulfilling to you, now and into the future. Now go forth and read somebody else's blog.

Seventeen Years in the Blogging Mines

Today is the seventeenth anniversary of this blog. For most of those years, I had a long post to mark the anniversary, with statistics and links to notable posts of the past year and other foofaraw.

Now, I'm not saying I'm not going to do that this year. I'm writing my way into this post, starting more than a week ahead of the actual anniversary, and I may work my way up to something like the heights I used to hit. But these are lesser, latter days, and all has fallen into rack and ruin, so don't count on it.

What Has Gone Before: The Links

One thing I try to do each year is link back to the previous anniversary posts, so here you go: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth. You may notice two are missing: I forgot to do this entirely a couple of times, and once of those was last year. (Several others are quick and desultory.)

So last year I whiffed entirely, for the first time since the fifth year of the blog. I'm not sure if that was on purpose - I'm sure I remembered the anniversary at some point in the six months surrounding it; I'm quirky but not brain-damaged - but it happened, whatever the reasons Then-Me had. But I'm back, to at least some extent, this year.

I also tell the Legend of the Blog every year, but it's not that interesting. I started Antick Musings because my then-employer was planning to start a big batch of blogs for most of the clubs, and running the SFBC blog was going to become part of my duties. I was relatively diligent in those days, and wanted to get some experience under my belt ahead of that launch. As it happened, Antick Musings vastly outlasted a lot of things associated with me and the SFBC, including that blog. So it goes.

What Has Gone Before: The Numbers

Anyway, I'm here now. Next up is typically the dick-measuring contest {ahem!} the listing of numbers of posts by year:

2021-2022 -- 279 posts

2020-2021 -- 265 posts

2019-2020 -- 55 posts

2018-2019 -- 178 posts

2017-2018 -- 368 posts

2016-2017 -- 263 posts

2015-2016 -- 144 posts

2014-2015 -- 258 posts

2013-2014 -- 434 posts

2012-2013 -- 285 posts

2011-2012 -- 332 posts

2010-2011 -- 445 posts

2009-2010 -- 711 posts

2008-2009 -- 880 posts

2007-2008 -- 834 posts

2006-2007 -- 841 posts

2005-2006 -- 809 posts

I had another blog - Editorial Explanations, in which I would explicate the Great American Editorial Cartoon in all its tendentious and bad-faith splendor - for a few years in the middle there, and used to include those numbers for an "everything I did" total. But who cares now? Not even me, that's for sure.

Posts About Books: The Self-Indulgent Bit

The bulk of this post, most years, is the self-indulgent bit. "But Andy!" you say. "All of this is hugely self-indulgent, isn't it?" Well, yes. But this next part even more so.

So I link to posts from the past year - book-review posts, since that's basically everything I do now - by quoting sentences I wrote that I am still inordinately fond of. I hope I don't have to tell you how sad that is, but I only do it once a year. And so here are some words I wrote that I still like:

But all of life is a sequence of things you get into and can't easily get out of: relationships, jobs, places to live, family.

I have a cynical opinion: for most of us, no matter how good we are, careers last about ten years. It applies to the artists we love and the lives we live equally. That band will probably break up after a decade; that writer will put out novels dependably until the second digit of the year changes. And your job will be happy with you right up to the point where they aren't, and at that point the industry will have changed enough that you have to leap into something else.

There's nothing like a breezy book by a young person to make you feel really old.

I always want more context and cultural criticism; I always want more why and less "remember this thing?"

If there's a sequel, there has to be a trilogy. I don't know if that's actually a law, but we said it a lot in my SFBC days, and it turned out to be true almost all the time.

Frankly, the lesson I take from Wendy, Master of Art is that my vague stereotype of art students and the art world in general - formed at Vassar over thirty years ago, out of minimal materials and a dislike for the kind of people who smoke above eye level - is basically correct, and I have been right to avoid both since then. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

It took a while for me to realize, and this may be a spoiler: they are not running against each other. They are running together. I think this is important.

To my mind, if you're going to do a superhero story, or even a story set in a superhero world (this is more of the latter; Jimmy is always central, and most of the important characters don't have powers), you need to be at least halfway lighthearted. We all know every ending will be happy, all deaths are temporary, and all drama is momentary.

Corporate comics, man! They're stupid even when they don't have to be. It's like they go out of they way for it.

I don't want to be reductive here. (Well, maybe I do.) But it certainly seems to be that the central theme of European comics for younger readers is "what it the point of life, and how can you find the right path?" while the central theme of US comics for young readers is either (Big Two) "hitting people is how you solve problems" or (the YA world) "you are a unique special snowflake, and will have to overcome whatever horrible thing happened to you that you had no control over."

Don't get the idea I'm against creators taking control of the means of production! But if the only way I can get a book is to go to the guy's table at Comic Arts West Bumfuck and pay cash, I am much less likely to ever see it.

Over that scene is the tonally distinct gigantic caption "This is the story of a nameless girl...and the fearless, graceful life she led...from the postwar years...to the present day." (Which sounds like a weird Jackie O biopic, or maybe an arch Givenchy ad.) 

OK, you know how in big superhero comics, everything needs to be back at status quo ante eventually? Worlds will live, worlds will die, Ultrafellow will be replaced by a disabled teen Latina, and the entire Evil-Fighting Gang will disband for good...but only until it all goes back to the way it was before.

Memory is flawed, history is misunderstood, the past is a mystery. And demon-creatures shouldn't be completely knowable, able to be nailed down to a specific timeline.

And, most of all, it's about the questions of childhood: the things you asked at the time, the things you wish you'd asked at the time, the things you know you never would have gotten a straight answer about, and the things you didn't even think could be questions until much much later.

So the story I thought was bullshit for one reason is now retroactively bullshit for an entirely separate reason. Does that make me happy? Well, happy is a sliding scale.

Tintin is traveling, first to get into Russia and then to get out of it, while various dirty commies try, sometimes with massive military force and sometimes with sneaky sabotage, to murder him. Several times, for variety, they capture him, tie him up, and threaten to murder him slightly later.

I appreciate creators who get bored easily. I may not always love every last random avenue they go down - who likes everything? - but I love that impulse, and I strongly believe creators who go really different from project to project are the best, most exciting ones.

Most of us had "just jobs," usually when young. A job that's not a career, not on the way to anything you actually want, not a step forward on any road you care about. Something that pays money, is available to you because of circumstance or lifestage or location: something that works for now even if it won't work forever.

All in all, this has pretty much exactly the strengths and weaknesses of a book that a respected but idiosyncratic creator worked on quietly and alone for decades: it looks great, it has a lot of good ideas and moments, the characterization is excellent. But it's also lumpy, with a structure that feels like a sequence of pages in the order that the creator thought of them rather than the order that would best serve the story, and later revelations that are not adequately set up.

It's a gangster story: that's required. Blood must flow, betrayals must be swift and shocking, and most of the cast must not make it to the end.

I've had Thuds in my life: moments where everything changes. If you're old enough, you have, too. The point of a Thud is that it's unexpected, and that it's usually not happy. Something breaks, something shatters, something is gone forever.

The world demands movies from their comic books, TV shows from their novels, opera from their stories about historical figures, stage musicals assembled from random songs. And vice versa: look at the deeply incestuous "casting thread," in which random observers squee over which actors in TV-shows-based-on-books should be their favorite characters in a potential movie-based-on-a-comic-book.

This is a book about the curdled end of a particular kind of American Dream, about all the things Americans did and thought and cared about and worried about while, in the background, the Vietnam War lurched to its inevitable end and Nixon did the same.

If ever a man was born to draw tasteful living rooms and functional office suites with flat-color backgrounds, it was Whitney.

So: you know the rough plot, and you have a sense of the style: long, clause-clotted sentences that circle a thought as if they are a cavalry detachment trying to defeat and capture it.

The prospect of actual money does wonderful things to the artistic impulse; I greatly recommend it to anyone attempting to motivate an artist.

Thinking far too deeply about it, I would love to see a series with the opposite premise: dogs and cats are the villains, because they have been tainted by human evil, and badgers or foxes or opossums or maybe raccoons are the heroes. Actually, yes, raccoons, maybe with corvids as advisors: that's the one I want.

Int. Day. Berlin. Bunker.

HITLER: Achtung! Give me a report on the secret compound!

HIMMLER: Yes, Fuhrer! Early tests on the Odinspear are promising...

HITLER: Nein! Not that secret compound! The one outside Vienna!

HIMMER: West of Vienna or South of Vienna?

HITLER:  West, you schweinhund!

HIMMER: Oh, right, the Greenbaums.

What do they do? They fuck. They shit. They kill each other. Occasionally even in that order.

I like parallels; I like books to set things up and then knock them down; I like guns on mantlepieces to be taken down at just the right moment and fired. 

The title gives away the end. You may not realize how, as you dive into the surreal, dreamlike early pages, but it will all be clearer by the end. And the title gives away the end.

Reporters write about moments, about places, about the intersection of the two: what it's like to be here when it is now. Some pieces are more obvious about it than others.

She was an addict and a stormy personality, I think - the book and the introduction are more poetic about it - which didn't help, but who ever min-maxes their own life to be the most successful version of themselves? She achieved a lot. She fought hard. She died young.

This is the story of a young man with fabulous powers and a bizarrely impossible upbringing, whose interactions with the outside world are about 95% murder, but, on the other hand, he's a tall attractive man with cool clothes. And apparently that is enough to make a mass-murderer into a hero.

This is a book by a young man. We sometimes forget things like that: we think that Albert Einstein was born the old guy with the bushy hair, or that Lawrence Welk's '60s style was what big-band music sounded like when the WW II generation was young and on the make. Everyone was young once; everyone thought the world was ahead of them and they could do anything they wanted. Some of them were right.

I still think the less-used pronouns can set their users up for a lot of additional microaggression and worse in their lives, especially as them/they is actually getting traction as a singular pronoun in wide culture, but I don't get to decide those things for other people.

All the most interesting people have the least-likely careers. (Says the man who started out as a SF editor and somehow ended up doing content marketing for corporate lawyers.)

Look, Gardner is a fun, energetic writer, and he's particularly good at writing women with strong, distinctive voices. All of his strengths are shown to good effect in Gun. But the more I think about it, the more I can't fucking stand the default superhero universe. Sorry.

A collection, on the other hand, is already multitudes. It flows through your hands when you try to define it: a little more over here than you first thought, oh wait maybe it's more like this, no no I've got it now it's totally thus.

This book may make you want to sharpen your guillotine and start gathering cobblestones for barricades, which is no bad thing.

Most of us have trouble being happy, I think. Most of us want to be happier than we are, want to enjoy moments more than we feel we actually can.

Everything Else

Antick Musings is, I have to admit it, a book blog. I used to write about movies, I used to write about random things that struck my fancy. I don't anymore, in either case. So, in years long past, I would have other links in this section of the anniversary post to those other kinds of posts - but not this time.

On Monday mornings, assuming I don't forget, there is either a Reviewing the Mail post (listing new books) or a Reading Into the Past post (listing old books). I also post a Quote of the Week, originally on Fridays and more recently on Saturdays as part of an expanded content regime for 2022H2. That's pretty much everything else posted here over the past year.

I was intermittently active on the question-answering site Quora a few years back, before a flood of political content co-emergent with Our Previous President overwhelmed that site. I still read stuff there, but haven't posted in I can't tell you how long. I'm also on the usual social networks for someone my age (see standard links in the right-hand rail) and not on the ones you wouldn't expect, since I am typical and boring, I suppose.

And that was the past year. I guess I am back on the big-pointless-self-congratulatory-post bandwagon. We'll see what happens next year, I suppose.

Spirit of the Season

So I'm not saying the oddball Hallelujah the Hills "mixtape" The World Is Most Certainly Haunted and I Am One Of Its Best Ghosts from two years ago is the greatest Halloween record ever...or am I?

Maybe I am, actually. There's a lot of great stuff on it - "Highschoolvania" stomps like crazy, and "Enough Blood to Bathe a Zombie" just had me yelling along in my car only yesterday. Two fine covers, two nutty versions of great older HtH songs, and it ends with the one-two punch of "Popular Anti-Depressants of the 21st Century" and "Enter the Exit Interview."

If you're looking for something different to listen to this season, go for it.

Fifteenth Anniversaries

Yesterday, while doing something else, I realized today was the fifteenth anniversary of this blog.

Now, I was once in the habit of writing long, discursive, link-filled posts for anniversaries -- see the entries for the first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth years. But last year I dropped the ball, and (quirkily enough) I also bobbled the supposedly-significant fifth (missed entirely) and tenth (forgotten until a month later) years as well, as if some part of my brain was quite clearly sabotaging me.

I would typically list the number of posts by year after that, so...you know what? I will update that here:

2019-2020 -- 55 posts
2018-2019 -- 178 posts
2017-2018 -- 368 posts
2016-2017 -- 263 posts
2015-2016 -- 144 posts
2014-2015 -- 258 posts
2013-2014 -- 434 posts
2012-2013 -- 285 posts
2011-2012 -- 332 posts
2010-2011 -- 445 posts
2009-2010 -- 711 posts
2008-2009 -- 880 posts
2007-2008 -- 834 posts
2006-2007 -- 841 posts
2005-2006 -- 809 posts

I would previously then add in the posts from my other blog, Editorial Explanations, which ran from 2011 through 2013. But those numbers will not change now, so anyone who cares (no one) can look at one of the older posts to see the numbers.

And then I'd link back to posts of the past year, indulging myself by quoting sentences I particularly liked. Since the pickings are pretty meager the past couple of years -- not to mention the fact that my fingers are racing to get done before The Wife and I run out for the weekly grocery-shopping -- I'll leave that off this year.

But I'm counting this as not a failure this year, since I actually remembered ahead of time. It might be smaller, it might be less impressive, but it is a thing that exists, and that's good enough for me in the annus horribilis 2020.

Book-A-Day 2018 #84: Super-Powered Revenge Christmas by Bill Corbett and Len Peralta

I could make up all sorts of excuses why I read this book. Perhaps the MST3K connection, since I'm in a hotel in the Twin Cities area right now, on a business trip. Maybe I could pretend to have planned to read it at Christmas, and neglected it for a couple of months.

The answer is equally silly, but more boring. I'm on a week-long business trip, yes. I brought four books to read -- three comics and one novel. I haven't yet touched the novel, but I read one of the comics on each of the first three days of the trip. But now, on Day Four, they're all done. So I was left to rummage through one of the e-reader apps on my tablet, after an evening excursion with my co-workers, to find something to read and then write about. I've had a couple of drinks, so I might not be thinking entirely like my normal self. And this book was up near the top in the default sort in GoodReader, I couldn't remember why I had it at all, and it looked silly.

So that's how I came to read Super-Powered Revenge Christmas, which by the way is a 2014 graphic novel written by Bill Corbett and drawn by Len Peralta. It's a quirky take on Christmas, with a brooding Superman-esque "Red Avenger" whose is secretly Sa'nn Tah-Kl'awwz from the planet Yoool. (Look, I said it was silly, didn't I?) RA battles an evil corporation -- HEROD, which is a silly acronym, and run by a thinly-veiled Scrooge -- and soon is joined in his battle by Caribou, a deer-man whose nose lights up when he gets angry. Then there's a snow goddess as a gender-swap take on Frosty, plus two very nice people who are going to have a baby who will be the greatest mutant of all time. Oh, and there's a frame story about a comics creator team-cum-couple who broke up over telling this story and are now recounting it to three strangers in a bar on Christmas Eve. And it apparently was both adapted from a stage play by Corbett and Kickstarted into existence in this form.

Super-Powered Revenge Christmas is deliberately designed so that it can't be taken seriously at any point; it is impregnable to all criticism in its hermetic goofiness and sprawling pop-culture Xmas ambitions. It is very, very, very, very silly. Very. It's not really funny, but it's not trying to be -- it's aiming at knowing smirks rather than full laughs.

I don't know why anyone would want to construct a story like this. But someone did. (Two someones, one of them twice.) And this now exists. I've just spent an hour or two first reading it and then typing this. None of that makes any sense. You can't explain any of it. And yet it happened. Let that be a lesson to all of you.

The Belated and Unnecessary Twelfth Anniversary Post

This blog came into existence on October 4th, 2005, and I keep forgetting that exact date as each Fall rolls around and it's time to look back on the past Year in Blogging. This year, as you can plainly see, is another example.

I decided, after only realizing I'd overrun the date two weeks later, that I'd give myself a month's leeway, instead of trying to bash out this post on the day I noticed I'd missed it. I had no idea if you folks would see any difference -- even more, how can you see a difference between this post and the one I didn't do? -- but it was a reasonable plan, and I love plans.

Then, when I overran that deadline, I figured what trouble could another month do? And when that deadline loomed, well, the end of the year was in sight, and isn't that time more suitable? Of course it is. And so here we are now, in the cold dark of late December, exactly the right time to look backwards and wonder where the hell we went wrong.

Following last year's precedent, this year's post will have SEO-friendly bolded keywords rather than headings, because we're in Internet 3.0, goddamn it. Perhaps this will aid you as you scan the trackless sea of text ahead of you and heave a sigh, or even entice you to read a bit instead of immediately moving on to that next cute picture of a cat or explanation of why {insert opposition political party} is the very worst thing that has ever existed in the world.

In case anyone out there is bad at math, let me say for the record that I've now been doing this for twelve years. And I thought I would be better at it by now, or at least managed to keep up a routine.

I always begin this post about looking back by looking back: so here are links to the previous anniversary posts: the plain first, the hoopla of the second, the hullabaloo of the third, the excitement of the fourth, the missing fifth, the razzamatazz of the sixth, the fantabulous seventh, the gala eighth, the splendiferous ninth, and the delayed and rushed tenth and the muted and melancholy eleventh. Among them, they represent a massive amount of time-wasting, which you will certainly not need unless you are the Chris Pratt character in Passengers.

Next up, always, is the legend of the founding of the blog. Long ago, in the before-time, the great warrior Hornswoggler delved deep into the Swamp of Google, seeking the Blog Template that would grant him vast fame and riches and the hand of the king's daughter. Sadly, he didn't find it, and so Antick Musings instead came to be. But that mighty warrior is still using that template that he did find on October 4, 2005, perhaps in hopes his constancy will prove an acceptable replacement for good taste and usefulness.

Then we need to get into the ritual comparing of post counts, which is exactly as much of a dick-measuring contest as you fear it will be. (I'm deeply sorry.) Since I had the bad judgment to begin a blog in the middle of a year (October 4th, in case you've forgotten), each year is substantially disjoint from the calendar.

• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Then I have to complicate the matter by throwing in my second blog, Editorial Explanations, which ran for nearly three years (February of 2011 through the end of 2013), since it started as a series of posts on Antick Musings.

Editorial Explanations:

• 2012-2013 -- 560 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 802 posts
• early 2011 -- 760 posts

And that means, when you put all of it together, you get:

• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 + 560 = 845 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 + 802 = 1,134 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 + 760 = 1,205 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

While we're waiting for the highly-paid stats experts to explain what that all means -- spoiler alert: they never will -- we can see clearly that this blog has been diminishing and going into the West. (Though there is a bit of a bounce this past year -- perhaps a dead-cat bounce, but a bounce nonetheless.) But I hope that it has remained Antick Musings and will always continue as it began: random, desultory, odd, unreliable, and defiantly un-pigeonholed.

Antick Musings was meant to be the place where I wrote about things other than books, because I did books for a living. Well, I haven't done books for a living for a while, and haven't done the books I really liked for a living for a decade now. So it's probably not surprising that it turned into a book blog along the way. I do miss writing about movies (and watching them, more than a few times a year), and I do wonder why I keep rotating the places I dump large clusters of words. (Most of the '90s were Usenet, specifically rec.arts.sf.written. Then came the Straight Dope Message Board, then here. Most recently, I seem to be typing stuff into web boxes on Quora. One might think I would keep those clumps of words here, in a place I control, but one would evidently be wrong.)

So, then, to make up the bulk of this anniversary post, here are some of the sentences I wrote about books in the past year, linked to the longer collections of sentences about those books:

I don't know if comics needs another chronicler of low-key business failure and despair, but we seem to have just gotten one.

We all know That Guy: the one who always has a plan to get ahead, a scheme to get rich, a quick shortcut onto Easy Street, and a boundless optimism that he can do it all with just the tiniest bit of help.

Um, we all know what it means when a middle-aged creator does a book-length story about a body part, right? OK, maybe it could be some thing thrillingly obscure, like body integrity identity disorder, but 99 times out of a hundred, it means The Big C.

All of these are unpleasant people who do dull things in annoying ways and are both deeply horrible and deeply boring.

The four Eltingville lads are deeply horrible people, but they're verbally horrible in that pop-culture way, all references and insults and mean-spirited trivia contests and in-group insults. Each story is draining, as it must be -- the expression of another year's worth of anger at the stupid things that comics/SF/gaming people do to each other and the world.

I like to think I'm a thoughtful reader.  Not perfect, of course -- who is? -- but good at working out metaphors and allegories and fictional schemas of all kinds. If I can see that there's a shape moving under the surface of a book, I can usually make a decent guess at what kind of leviathan lurks down there. 

There's a standard for autobiographical comics: they have to be about "you," obviously, but that "you" must be larger than life. Whatever your actual flaws are, make them bigger and funnier -- your cartoon avatar must be a cartoon, in all of the senses of that word that you can manage.

A metaphor has to become concretized in a story, to be something other than the words that make it up -- it has to mean actual things that happen in the story or underpin it.

I don't know if I completely understood it -- I'm the kind of reader who wants to know how worlds work, and this isn't a world that can be clearly explicated -- but I liked it, and respected it, and cared about the people in it.

But there may be something like an ending not too far in the future, and not just an endless stream of cliffhangers for as long as people keep buying the book. I hope so: I like stories that have endings. It makes them stories.

You might have heard that Alan Moore does not have the best relationship with DC Comics recently. (For values of "recently" that include the last twenty-plus years, and values of "not the best relationship" that include Moore hurling actual attempted magickal spells at them from his secret base in darkest Northampton.)

In every group of close-knit friends, there's always one -- at least one -- not as tightly connected as the others. That's the friend who would be thrown out of the sleigh first when the wolves get closer, the comic relief who the slasher picks off before the opening credits, the one who was always there and dependable but somehow no more than that.

Something in this world does not want you to read Miracleman stories, and each one must be snatched from the claws of that something and dragged out into the wider world.

I wish I could just hand this book to you so you could go into it as ignorant as I was.

Hellboy was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.

(Look, folks: dressing up in colorful clothes and running around beating up people is essentially silly. Please stop calling attention to how silly it is!)

I like to think I'm good at talking about narrative -- I was an editor for a long time, and have been deconstructing stories in my head since I learned those tools. I'm not necessarily right, or even in the right neighborhood, since no one ever is. But I'm usually plausible, which is what talking-about-narrative game aims for.

(And "near the end," for a strip that ran fifty years, still means there were four years to go. And four years, as we're all about to learn, can be a really long time.)

In a world overrun by dirty hippies, grubby hicks, P.C. killjoys, sickos, ex-wives, and today's angry teens, we all need someone to tell us what is right and true.

I've been giving the various Hellboy books a pass from one of my core reading rules -- I don't like to read books that murder me or my family just to make a dangerous background for the heroes to wander through -- but I'm having less and less patience with each new story.

Friendly comedy is "look at what a goof I am," while hostile comedy is "look at those jerks over there."

If you're looking for the usual superhero fare, where violence solves problems...well, you probably should read Plutona, because that's not what violence actually does.

In retrospect, this set the tone for a lot of writer Grant Morrison's later work: portentous superhero operas, with characters emoting in high style, skating by on charm and flash and eye-candy to distract from the fact that the moments of the story don't entirely track and that sensible human beings would never actually act in these ways.

But it does seem to me that every Moebius epic inevitably ends with a big-nosed Everyman on the run from a totalitarian strongman in a dream world, pursuing the image of the perfect woman, who is not so much a character as an idea, even if she's supposed to be a real person.

It was as weird and exhilarating as it sounds, and if it made it difficult for anyone to follow, well, that's the problem with metafiction. It's difficult to step back down to plain old fiction afterward.

I do not think I'm doing a good job of making this book sound appealing. Maybe I should come in at this from a different direction.

If Jim Ballard had mellowed into a gentle wryness in his extreme old age, he might have provided a script for a book like Mooncop, the story of a man left behind by a now-fading space age, one guy left to do a pointless job in a place beautiful and hard and cold and alien.

This is not a story about the interstellar war, or the unlikely economy, or the sail-powered globe-trotting ultra-luxury cruise liners that are nevertheless repeatedly attacked and conquered by murderous pirates.

If you're not willing to deeply believe in this neurotic young woman, and insist along with her that blogging about clothing is a serious and worthy pursuit for an adult, you will be left cold, grumpy and entirely outside the story.

And, since time wounds all heels, I'm chagrined to realize that Akiko ended a good decade ago, and that Crilley, who I thought of as a young guy, is actually a couple of years older than me (and so is young slightly less than I am, which is already not much at all).

This is no way looks like a step forward from what she used to do.

There are times when you can't merely resign, for whatever reason. No, you have to make the bastards kick you out.

At some point in your life, you either realize that punching people is not the solution to problems, or you become a full-blown psychopath.

I really do not want to be that guy.

His world is more Phildickian, if you want to reach for a prose SF equivalent: full of people just scraping by, slaves to their obsessions and circumstances, capable of love but often hobbled by it, human in the most basic and humbling ways.

Forty years in the MU has ground him down enough that he can appear in Secret Wars, or whatever bullshit crossover it is this year, and make a few more cents for his corporate masters.

The great thing about life, though, is that it's never too late to read a good book as long as you can read: any book that is worse read later is not that good to begin with.

You goddamn asshole, P.J. O'Rourke.

So the fact that any one of us is not diagnosed with autism doesn't mean we're "normal" -- it just means we think in ways that haven't caused this particular kind of problem yet, or that our differences are less diagnose-able, or just that we're functional enough that it's not worth the resources to investigate us.

I've tagged this book as "Fantasy," but I don't think it really is. But it's a book about the fantasies that we have, and about how fantasy creatures can make real life bearable.

That's just one example: death and pain and destruction lurk around every corner, and the people who are responsible so often skate on blithely while the people around them pay the price.

It's good to know our limits. If this is outside yours, good for you.

But, still, the spectre of English Fascism in 1937 is a creaky, anachronistic thing to read a long screed against, and Wigan Pier is more than 50% screed by volume.

It's important to check your assumptions against reality regularly: we often find that what we think is true actually has very little do with with what really happened.

If you're the kind of American whose conception of "comics" is entirely filled by people in bright colors punching each other, this is very much not the book for you. I hope there aren't actually that many of you, but -- since I'm a pessimist -- I tend to assume you're the majority, you thick-knuckled vulgarians you.

In Murderbot, Wells has created the first slacker killer-robot, which I deeply love.

There are immediate meanings, the implied history of this world, deeper satires of academic life and the foibles of humanity in general, plus silly pictures that have circles and arrows pointing to places where a dragon is lurking unseen.

Every so often a reader needs to take on a masterpiece. You can only bump along with decent or pretty good books for so long: once in a while you need to open the floodgates wide and let a writer at the full tide of his powers wash over you.

The great thing about history is that it never stops being history. It might technically get older, but, realistically, a hundred years is the same as a hundred and twenty. Old is old, dead is dead.  

As I noted above, this has basically turned into a book blog. One major part of the book-blog is the criticism of what one has read; I just listed far too many examples of that. Other major parts of a book blog are the author interview (but I don't like talking to people), the book giveaway (which, again, requires talking to people), and the regular Presentation of The Swag (which I can actually do). In my case, I call those posts Reviewing the Mail and run them every Monday morning. I used to make a rigid distinction between books I got for free, which went into that post, and books I bought, which went into different posts, and books from the library, which I mostly neglected to mention until I read them, and books given to me as gifts, which...yeah, it was too complicated. Everything is now going into the same Monday-morning post, for my own sanity. 

I have mostly avoided writing about politics here, for which forbearance I'm sure you thank me. But when politics wanders into places where I used to live, such as the publishing world, I sometimes toss out some ill-informed opinions. And so I did back in January, about Milo Yannopolous, who we've probably all forgotten about already.

I wrote about the record Charming Tales by the Brooklyn-based musical act Charming Disaster back in April, and I'm still listening regularly to songs from that record. And I'll repeat that their densely allusive lyrical style and often-genre subject matter is just the kind of thing that a lot of people who read the kind of books I read would also enjoy a lot.

I had an annoying computer issue with my work laptop this year, and complained about it. (The alt-tab switcher would default to the older, less useful style after sleeping.) After that post, I figured out how to fix it: use Task Manager to kill and restart Explorer every time it happens. The solution to every computer problem, I think, is to stop something and restart it.

That was what I was nattering on about during the Twelfth Year of the Blog. Look for a similar post covering the thirteenth year on October 4, 2018...or possibly somewhat later than that.

The Muted And Somewhat Melancholy Celebration of Eleven Years of Blogging

Hip hip...hooray?

Yes, I have been doing this for eleven years. No, I didn't expect to. Yes, I did expect it would either go away or turn into something more interesting -- or, rather, stay something more interesting, when I worked in the fields of skiffy. But this is what I got.

(There's only one thing that I know how to do well, and I've often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well, and that's be you, be what you're like, be like yourself. And so I'm having a wonderful time but I'd rather be whistling in the dark.)

Anyway, here's what I wrote on previous anniversaries: the plain first, the hoopla of the second, the hullabaloo of the third, the excitement of the fourth, the missing fifth, the razzamatazz of the sixth, the fantabulous seventh, the gala eighth, the splendiferous ninth, and the delayed and rushed tenth. Between them, they contain the whole history of this blog, suitable for wasting a day at work when your boss is off at a conference.

Once again I ruefully note that I missed the day of two of my anniversaries so far, and those were the "big" ones -- the fifth and tenth. I'm enough of a lapsed Poe scholar to recognize my own Imp of the Perverse, and to salute him -- with one finger of each hand, as appropriate.

You may have noticed that this year I am eschewing old-fashioned headers for my sections in favor of bold, shareable-content-like bolded passages, which a speed-reader will pick up and directly apply to his or her business career for untold riches. I do this because it amuses me, and it seems to be the state of the art for blogs in this fallen era. (And it saves time doing that rather than the annoying headlines.)

I usually turn here to the ritual discussion of the origins of this blog, which is pointless. So I'll leave that off this time, and instead note that I'm still using the template that I chose on October 4, 2005, which might be some kind of record. (Not a good record, mind you, but a record nonetheless.) I do periodically look at the blog, dive into Blogger's interface, and search for a new template, but always get distracted and give up. So this likely will be what this blog looks like forever and ever. But I've learned not to try to predict what I'll do in the future, so who can tell?

At this point in the blogaversary proceedings, I get into the historical number of posts, which is both boring and pointless, and so a particular favorite of mine. Since I had the bad judgment to begin a blog in the middle of a year (October 4th, in case you've forgotten), each year is substantially disjoint from the calendar.

• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

But I also had a blog called Editorial Explanations for almost three years (February of 2011 through the end of 2013), which started as a series of posts on Antick Musings. So it needs to be included in the full accounting of Hornswoggler blogging:

Editorial Explanations:

• 2012-2013 -- 560 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 802 posts
• early 2011 -- 760 posts

And that means, when you put all of it together, you get:

• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 + 560 = 845 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 + 802 = 1,134 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 + 760 = 1,205 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

So the peak of Antick Musings was in the depths of the financial crisis, when I'd been at the fine house of Wiley for about a year. (And the asterisked peak of both blogs was two years later.) The nadir is....well, right now. So things can only get better, he said brightly, ignoring the fact that sentence is never literally true.

That, along with about five dollars and a loyalty card, will get you a flat white. (Note: your blogger has no idea what a "flat white" is. Please don't ask him to explain himself.)

Antick Musings is now a book blog -- that surprised me when I realized it, but it's been obvious for years now -- as the other things I wrote about have mostly withered and died. I will try to link to them below, but the book-blogging is clearly the main event, as much as anything is.

So here are some of the posts about books -- you could call them reviews if you wanted to, and that would be basically accurate -- from the past year, linked from sentences that I'm particularly fond of on the day I assemble this post. Because that's the way blogs work, the quotes are in reverse chronological order.

What was so enticing that they could die doing it?

Everything can be turned into a Batman story. Everything can be turned into a Lovecraftian story.

And didn't the Inhumans used to be a family that lived on the moon? I miss those Inhumans; these road-show mutants are dull and derivative by comparison.

Writing an autobiography the normal way is just so boring -- a tedious forced march through the details of a bland childhood, early struggles, and then the inevitable grand success.

Being of the moment can be a big advantage -- but only so long as that moment lasts.

I can't say every family goes through something like this -- some have it much worse, and some have enough money and privilege that hard choices never come into the picture.

Gather 'round, children. I'm going to tell you a story of the dark days Before the Internet.

Luckily, I can't remember what that book is, so I'm not even tempted to name it. But any book can be The Wrong Book if you pick it up the wrong day, or are in the wrong mood, or just come to it after the wrong lead-in.

I feel guilty about my reading pretty regularly.

If I knew more about the history of Japanese publishing, I would pontificate here on their place in literary history and try to connect them to the modern "light novel." But I have no idea about any of those things.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this excellent graphic novel, but I don't know if I should point it out to you. Perhaps I can hint at it.

Against those nightmare horrors stands mostly government bureaucracy: underfunded, neglected, full of misfits and time-servers and the odd competent person, organizations that are at least as dysfunctional and soul-destroying as the place you work.

It's a Powers novel, so it's about love and regret, families of blood and circumstance, old secrets and obligations, and, inevitably, about doing the right thing even when that is the hardest thing to do.

And his story is about no less than free will and control, freedom and necessity, and of course the struggle against a cruel imperial power.

And Little Dribbling is thus the "all the stuff I used to like is gone, you rotten younger generations you" book that inevitably must follow the "all of this stuff is wonderful" book.

But he's still the same writer, with the same concerns: the man who said the happiest humans are bare-assed is always going to be most concerned with the poorest, the most marginal, the ones on the edges and margins.

The latter would be particularly useful if, as I assume, one purpose of Contact! is to induce the reader to buy more books by Morris.

One of the biggest potential dangers of working at home out of your own head all of the time is becoming a crank from lack of interaction with normal people on a regular basis.

The bad news is that there's just this one book, and that the world has not provided more opportunity for Brown to make her great comics, as it was supposed to.

We will never get away from the image of the killer robot, despite all of the hard work by Isaac Asimov during his long career.

So the book I was hoping for -- a clear-eyed look at death and how we deal with it in the modern world -- only appears in The Undertaking in flashes, interspersed with sub-Thomas Merton thoughts about the meaning of life and how we'll all be enfolded in Jesus's hand and lovingly placed in sunlight uplands to live forever.

This is the book that broke me, broke the Vintage Contemporaries reading series, broke it all to hell.

The flourishing of self-publishing over the last decade or so has brought a lot of those stories into print, if not into the marketplace, as a thousand family elders write down their memories in hopes that the grandkids will actually read them. (Spoiler: they mostly don't read them.)

Because if there's a girl running around ripping off other girls' clothing and spraying them with various thick viscous substances, the thing to do is declare the closest man responsible, right? This series finds new and different ways to fail feminism on nearly every page -- it's quite breathtaking.

Zenith supposedly is a slacker superhero, and these stories are old enough that Generation X (my generation) was the one filled with young lazy layabouts who couldn't be bothered to work -- whereas now we know that really describes millennials, who have the bad grace to be young now, when so many of us are sadly no longer so. (We may all know different in another twenty years, but we'll need to think up a new derogatory nickname for yet another generation first.)

Perhaps so you can have it out while feeding your infant, and wipe it clean when the strained peas go awry.

I don't think Hall has really identified anything specific here; his book is so full of caveats and qualifications and explanations of the levels of particular elements in particular books that there are no rules here.

Any prediction that contains "and then it goes on just like this for a long time" is bullshit.

No, this time Chaykin is closing things down -- this is the story of the Shadow's last case, in 1949, as he decides to give up on the harvesting-bitter-fruit business entirely and disappear.

If you say something is necessary, and then don't do it, you undercut your own argument.

Miller tells this story in the best example of '80s style I know of, all stream-of-consciousness narrative captions from multiple points of view and overlapping screamed dialogue. He throws hints into the air to have them hit targets perfectly sixty pages later, and weaves it all together seamlessly. And this is Sienkiewicz at the height of his visual ambition, right before Stray Toasters, painting like a demon and shifting from photorealist to a child's scrawl to slashes of color instantly to support Miller's equally quick changes of mood.

In short: Langridge! Weird vaudeville-inspired comics in a variety of quirky modes, about various things that used to be pop culture a long time ago, drawn impeccably. Go get it.

Superhero comics have been a friendly home for purple prose since at least Stan Lee, with captions cluttering up pages to declare things that we should be able to figure out by looking at the pictures.

Speaking of books, this year, like all of the years of this blog, I posted at dawn on the first of January about my favorite books of the prior year. Feel free to insist my tastes are horrible.

(Even more self-referentially, I also posted that morning a set of links to the first and last sentences of the posts of each of the months of 2015. It was a meme once, and I have a hard time giving up "traditions.")

I've also written about other things on this blog. No, not often, but I have done it. Some of those things follow.

The most common post here is the Reviewing the Mail series: each Monday, I gather up the books that came free in the mail the prior week (I know! for all my grumping, blogging has some excellent perks) and try to talk about them mostly positively without having read them.

Somewhat related -- in that they're long lists of books that I haven't read, with covers to illustrate them, is the series of Incoming Books posts, which lists stuff I paid for. I keep these two categories separate because I have a mind devoted to keeping things excessively tidy in usually less-than-useful ways. (Note: books I bought sneak into Reviewing the Mail all the time, usually because I'm too lazy to do two posts. And there may be serious disagreements about how tidy is excessive.)

Twice in the past year, I've complained here about my commute. (My wife gets it much worse; you should pity her.) There's no reason you should care; this is a blog, so it's about what annoys or interests the blog-writer on a daily basis.

Speaking of my commute, a series of drug-war hysteria posters I see there have been annoying me for some time. There's actually a worse one than the one I photographed, but life is too short to complain about the same things too many times.

This invites infinite reflection, like two mirrors set up facing each other, but I've been posting on Quora (an Internet site, optimistically designed to increase knowledge, in which people ask and answer questions with varying levels of expertise and honesty and objectivity) for a little more than a year, and linked to some of my answered questions there from this blog. The second time I did so was even in this blog-year.

You still have the opportunity to help Send My Boy to Europe. Donate now!

I post about music inconsistently. This year, I remembered Pink Floyd's great "When the Tigers Broke Free" in time to post it on Memorial Day. And I posted the Pogues's "Tuesday Morning" on a dreary Tuesday morning in mid-Spring.

In a textbook example of one's work bleeding into what one cares about, I engaged in a Twitter rant about the ownership of law firms, and posted the result here. I'm as surprised as you are.

On a related note, I had a badly informed opinion on attorney-client privilege, as well.

I provided a remedial social media lesson with I Will Not Add You On LinkedIn If.

I had a now-rare commentary on the SFF world when I weighed in on the clamor to change the World Fantasy Award statue.

When bad theme-park rides have their last day, I and my sons will be there. Well, we were there, once.

And those were the things I blogged about in 2015-2016, the tumultuous eleventh year of Antick Musings. Will we ever see their like again? Well...probably so. It looks like I'll keep blogging, most likely about the same mix of things.

The Delayed and Rushed Tenth Anniversary Lead Balloon

So it was the tenth anniversary of this here blog back on October 4th, and I missed it. I'm going to blame my (still fairly new) job and commute for that, rather than laziness, video games, or alien mind-control rays, but good cases could be made for any of the above. (Get your tinfoil hats, people! They're coming for your SPLEENS!)

Anyway, this is the post I should have done then, full of the things that happened in this blog over the prior year.

The Long-Winded Introduction:

First up, I need to bore you with the Story of This Blog, which you don't care about and isn't that interesting to begin with. You see, back in the year 2005, blogs were really, really cool. As cool as putting bees on strings and walking them through flower-beds, which is about as cool as you can get. So I wanted one for my own, and, after fighting my way through the Blog Lottery and killing the tributes from all of the other Districts, I was awarded Antick Musings as my reward. (Or maybe I wanted some practice before the SFBC blog had its planned launch in early 2006. You can believe the story you like best.)

I've been blogging here in a desultory manner -- and without ever changing the template, which must be some kind of a horrible record -- since then. Some years there's a post basically every day, and some years (like this one) not.

The Anniversary Linkages:

Amusingly, I've now missed both of the "big" anniversaries of this blog's birth, which makes it look like a weird plan. (It wasn't: life just got in the way, both times.) But here are the links to the prior gala anniversary posts: the plain first, the hoopla of the second, the hullabaloo of the third, the excitement of the fourth, the missing fifth, the razzamatazz of the sixth, the fantabulous seventh, the gala eighth, and the splendiferous ninth. Click those if you have a lot of free time, or are even more fond of my Internet voice than I am. (Though I warn you: that would be hard to do; I like my own voice far too much.)

The Presentation of the Numbers:

Sure, I've been blogging for ten years. But what are my metrics? I've been a marketer for most of that time -- and that makes me feel old and tired and out of my element, since I was a SF editor when I started blogging, and wanted to be one for the rest of my career -- and so I have KPIs in my blood and measurement in my soul. Antick Musings posts by year look like this:

• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

But the great thing about metrics is that they can be manipulated, so let me throw in the fact that I also had a blog called Editorial Explanations, which ran from February of 2011 through the end of 2013, and which started as a series of posts on Antick Musings. So I consider it something of a failed brand extension -- my New Coke, if you will -- and it should be included in the totals.

Editorial Explanations:

• 2012-2013 -- 560 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 802 posts
• early 2011 -- 760 posts

And that means, when you put all of the Hornswoggler bloggery together, you get:

• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 + 560 =  845 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 + 802  = 1,134 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 + 760  = 1,205 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Clearly, Antick Musings has been in a slump since some time in 2009, which has accelerated since then and was only slightly papered over by a bout of Book-A-Day in 2014. Even the rise and fall of Editorial Explanations didn't inject any more energy here; some may say that this is a dying blog. (But, if so, it's taking a really, really long time to die, like a hammy actor in a bad Western. And I can live with that. Besides, isn't "the blog" itself dying to begin with?)

Here, I should re-devote myself to working harder and doing my best, as if I were the hero of a crappy shonen comic. But I'm not and I won't; life gets in the way far too much. But I'd like to type more thinky things into this box, and perhaps that will be enough to make it happen, next year or some time after that.

The Flood of Self-Indulgent Linkage:

Now is the time in The Antick Musings Anniversary Spectacular where I link to blog posts about books -- this has turned almost entirely into a blog about books, if you didn't notice -- with a quote from those posts. It's an overly cutesy idea, but I keep doing it, because I don't have a better idea. This year overlaps with the tail end of the 2014 Book-a-Day string, and overlaps more strongly with the one-two punch of unemployment and a time-demanding new job, which has slowed my book-blogging to a trickle. So these quotes may be from round-ups more often than in the past, and may be fewer in number as well.

You pays your money and you takes your chances -- as I always say.

Those sound like small things, and I suppose they are. But all lives are made up mostly of small things, and the greatest art is the art that can work from the stuff of regular lives.

He can also talk to cats -- they talk back, I mean: anyone can talk to cats -- which seems like it should be important to the story but never is.

The moral of a wish story is always this: the world as it exists right now is the very best thing we can ever hope to have. Any change will make things worse. Trying to escape any aspect of your life will make things worse. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

The thing about a tour de force is that it can only be done once. Or, at least, that's supposed to be the point.

The air of effortlessness can only be achieved with a lot of hard work and careful planning: the breeziest, lightest entertainments always require a massive effort behind the scenes to hold them up and the frothiest souffles only happen after painstaking care. It's the Ginger Rogers Effect: if you don't even notice the effort, it's only because there's twice as much effort as you'd expect to do the thing and keep you from noticing it.

Call it the Alien from LA rule: if the civilization in your SF story doesn't make at least as much sense as the worst movie Kathy Ireland ever made -- if the city in your SF world is less plausible than an underground '80s style boiler-room called "Atlantis" and populated mostly by Australians -- then you've got a problem.

Hardly anyone interesting will admit to having a happy childhood: that's the marker of stupidity, conformity, and the boring. We were all outcasts, rebels, loners, burnouts, stoners, band geeks, ordinary geeks, losers, poor kids, from the wrong side of town or stuck wearing hand-me-downs during those important years.

I've seen Finder described as a far-future story, but I think that's by people who don't understand just how much future there will be. It's set on a planet named Earth with mostly normal biological humans, and I doubt it's more than four or five thousand years up the line at most. (For me, you don't hit far future until our sun has noticeably changed in size or demeanor.)

I don't think men have actually gone mad trying to review Jim Woodring's books -- but if I said so, you might well believe me: that's how phantasmagorical and elusive those stories are. Usually, we just point at a Woodring book and make appreciative noises, like the apes around the monolith in 2001: we know it's an impressive object, carefully constructed for a specific and complex purpose, but all we have are bones and our poor brains to make sense of it.

In literary fiction, there's a strong tradition of the magnificent asshole: the guy so charismatic and interesting that the reader mostly ignores that he's an absolutely horrible human being.

Someday, someone will write the true history of strip cartoons, and will describe in precise detail how the complex alternative-paper ecosystem of the '90s was destroyed and replaced by an equally complex ecosystem on the Internet that included (as far as I can tell) exactly none of the same cartoonists.

To answer the question no one actually asked: of course a series of steampunk detective thrillers in graphic novel form, set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, would eventually have a Christmas episode.

But just because something is good doesn't mean it can't be problematic, or that it couldn't be better somehow.

We think we know how comics work: panels are placed in sequence on a page, and the eye tracks from one to the next. Each panel is a moment in time, and the moments connect to each other to show a sequence of events. There can be flashbacks or flashforwards or fancy page layouts, but there are always panels in a sequence, right?

Originality is a sliding scale: it depends entirely on context. In the world of fine art, after a century of conceptual and site-specific and performance and found, it would take a whole lot to be original. In superhero comics, though, a Muslim teenager with the powers of Elongated Man is a blazingly new concept.

France has played only a small part in that war: in real life, as in Weapons, they tried to be the sensible adults and were ruthlessly attacked by American fools and charlatans for their reward. So this is yet another story of a campaign that failed: valiantly fought, certainly, but completely lost.

Evil is such a loaded word. Axis of Evil, Evil Empire, Doctor Evil. Most of the time, what it really means is "those guys on the other side of this current battle" -- it's a way to keep the lines clear between Us and Them. Everybody is somebody's Ultimate Evil, somebody's Great Satan.

I personally am mostly in favor of porn, though it can be disconcerting to come across it unexpectedly while reading on a train

People have been eavesdropping on each other ever since the invention of language, but it took the Internet to make that a business model.

Lemony Snicket is an enigma wrapped in a mystery and then double-dipped in bitter chocolate.

One of my favorite quotes from comics is "The valuable lesson is that you can get what you want and still not be very happy." It's not a usual sentiment for adventure stories about thickly-muscled fellows and the psychotics they pummel, but it's deeply resonant with those of us who live in the world that really is.

Being a teenager is the worst thing that everyone has to live through. And if being one weren't bad enough, inevitably teens have to live among and with other teens, who are at best half-socialized animals on their way to actually becoming human beings one of these days.

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but I've never been all that impressed with the supposedly awesome tales of great explorers. Most of the time, they seem like bull-headed men who tried to do something just this side of suicidally stupid, and are lauded for either managing to barely succeed at that stupid thing, or for dying in the process. None of that looks to me like behavior I want to encourage.

Maybe all we previous generations know is that you don't get what you want, or what you're aiming for, or even what you hope you won't have to settle for. You get what you get, every minute of every day, and it's a surprise more often than you'd ever expect.

If Newt Gingrich is famously a dumb guy's idea of what a smart guy sounds like, then Chuck Klosterman is a shallow guy's idea of what a profound guy sounds like.

Doesn't every grown man secretly want to be Calvin's Dad? Oh, sure, we know we should be good role models and teach kids things that will be useful in the real world -- but isn't making up crazy stories and tricking kids just that much more fun?

Like everyone else, I want the things I like to be better than the things I don't like: to be blunter, I assume that's the case anyway, so it's flustering and depressing when reality doesn't conform to my model of it.

One of the most unsettling feelings for an experienced reader is that insecure unsureness that strikes at the end of a highly-lauded novel that fall flat.

So, if there are any authors out there contemplating putting together a book of funny stories, my big advice would be to use several jokes.

There is a particularly resilient and ubiquitous lie about the creative life: that it can only be done in splendid isolation, far away from the corrupting everyday world, because creative people are special snowflakes who must be coddled and swaddled and carefully kept away from the hurlyburly of commerce and real life. And they must especially be kept away from things that are similar to their creative muses: novelists must never write ad copy, painters will be destroyed if they do advertising layouts, symphonic composers risk their sanity altogether if they deign to write a jingle.

It definitely has its strong points, but it also manages to combine the most audience-alienating aspects of both the adventure story (a complete lack of women and domestic life) and the literary story (deliberately difficult-to-understand dialogue and unpleasant characters).

An irregular heartbeat can completely freak out doctors, and doubly so if the patient seems to be perfectly normal while the expensive machines are beeping like crazy. And I think my heart reacts badly to beeping machines, so there's a whole unpleasant feedback loop thing going on there.

Books, like any artform, are about all of life, and you can't arbitrarily cut yourself off from life. You have to embrace it, in all its wonder and surprises.

There's a kind of literary novel where antecedents don't follow proper names the way you expect. In a normal book, if the first sentence of a paragraph has a character speaking, and the next sentence begins "He," the reader knows its the same guy.

If I wrote a similar book, I'd want to talk about reading Raymond Chandler at thirteen, sitting beside a pool in a Florida summer that I could squint and pretend was LA in the hot '30s. I'd want to admit to reading piles and piles of junky SF and fantasy in the early '80s, Piers Anthony and Jack Chalker and many more -- and to turn and argue that Thieves' World, coming right out of the middle of that milieu, was actually something much stronger and more exciting. I'd want to talk about discovering Gene Wolfe and "The Book of the new Sun," and how I'm sure I still haven't gotten to the bottom of those wondrous books. I'd want to mention Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny and Kurt Vonnegut and the early cyberpunks and boatloads of private-eye novels, Lawrence Block in both noir and funny modes, Donald E. Westlake in ditto, dozens of Hugo and Nebula and Asimov and Silverberg anthologies. I'd probably want to write about books I was forced to read -- discovering the wondrous language of Shakespeare and the joy of saying it out loud from memory, the corny charms of Our Town, the depth and breadth of Huckleberry Finn, how three or four books would be dull misfires and then one would be perfect, the precise right book at the right time, like Trollope's The Warden. I'd have to mention The Science Fiction Book Club, obviously, but because it introduced me to Mikhail Bulgakov and Haruki Murakami. I don't see how I could possibly condense down a decade or more of reading into a few small examples, and hang so much development and thought and reading on barely a dozen books.

I found it very slightly disappointing -- it has a deflating ending rather than a bang -- but it is bright and crisp and dangerous, like a day sailing in pirate-infested waters.

No, this will be a poorly informed review, quick and slapdash and lazy, written more than two months after reading the books.

Young women, in the first three or four decades of the last century, standing outside in their nice or everyday clothes, squinting or smiling or glaring, posing or just standing there, as someone unseen clicks the shutter and saves that image forever.

Nightwork is the kind of book that makes you wish you'd worked harder on math and science early in your life, so you could be the kind of person who does things like this. (Or, maybe, quietly proud that you are that kind of person.)

The Thin Attempt to Pretend This Blog Has Other Subjects:

Other things I wrote about here over the last year include...well, hardly anything, really. I do still pump out a weekly Reviewing the Mail post, with all of the books that showed up the previous week. (In the increasingly anachronistic way of old-fashioned print publishing.)

This was the year a pack of various Puppies made a mess all over the floor of the SF world, and I wrote about that twice: once right when the nominations came out, and again to point out that it was the Rabid strain that actually "won" that nomination process.

In related news, I also proposed several Hugo Categories We Probably Don't Need.

I discovered that a lot of people were Doing Reading Wrong, in a post I had to call What The Hell?

I realized I was typing words someplace else and not linking here, which is antithetical to the idea of Antick Musings as the one true home of all things me. So I posted about my newfound dalliance with Quora.

About once a year, I run a bunch of song lyrics under a pretentious blog-post title. This year, it was Things Linell & Flasburgh Have Taught Me.

The Floundering Gesture Towards Closure:

That was the tenth year of Antick Musings; I'm already more than two months into Year Eleven, because time just will not stop, no matter our hopes or desires. So, even if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, there has already been a Year Eleven. Is that uplifting or depressing? I really don't know.

But good luck with all of your endeavors in the next year, and remember that you can always pretend that you're going to get back to that thing you haven't done in a long time, or that you're going to start that new thing Real Soon Now. It might even happen.