The Bend of Luck
“Luck occurs naturally in the physical world.”
This is graphic novel from 2022, and you can see from the opening line that the basic premise of the book is that luck occurs naturally in the world. What does this mean exactly? Luck is elemental here, a kind of gaseous form that dissipates in the air, but can retain its form in liquid and other materials. The novel begins with the formation of this element, taking us through millions of years of process to where eventually we center on a stream being mined for gold in the 1800s in the American West. The small blue globules of luck are discovered, initially found to be found ephemeral, but are later secured through a process of trapping them in amber, hardened and then kept personally by those that find them.
The story however involves the original miner who finds the lode, and then thinks about how to secure it for his future generations. Like most American stories, this fails.
The story itself is a little convoluted, and like all stories of this type, you kind of got to wonder about the plan itself. Luck is real, but it’s also not a panacea for everything. I think there’s a more interesting idea going on here than the story really fleshes out, but so it goes. The setting is late 1800s and then early 1900s or so, and so the magical quality of the story gets paired up with a literary context of naturalism, which is interesting. So the result is kind of like a Theodore Dreiser novel written by a fantasist.
Archangel
“Mr. Vice President please remain still as I remove the bandages.”
This graphic novel begins with the vice president having some extreme plastic surgery. If you didn’t read the back of your back like I didn’t you would immediately wonder why exactly there’s an exact replica of the White House sitting in Montana. The answer is that in this 2016, the world saw several decades of various nuclear wars and a lot of the places we know now are wastelands. Anyway, the vice president, along with some commandos, are going back to 1945 to try to change history a little by killing and then replacing the vice president’s grandfather, who happens to be the head of the OSS. Armed with the knowledge from the future, the plan is to stop a lot of the worst of it. You also get the sense that this plan is not necessarily a good thing, but it’s not clear how from the opening moments.
And of course like with a lot of time travel stories, they’re not the only ones there.
I love a guns-blazing (and this is) time travel story. I remember watching Time Cop as a kid, a bad movie, but one that begins with dudes with submachines stealing a bunch of Union gold during the Civil War, and I have to tell you, there’s a whole lot of people protecting timelines in time travel stories, and not enough just rampant carnage. If you’re into that sort of thing.
Reasons to Be Pretty
This is a play by Neil LaBute, who I know mostly from films he’s directed but he was a well-established playwright first. Though this and the sequel are more contemporary.
Anyway, the play begins with a fight between a couple that’s not married and have been together for four years. The fight is about an overheard comment from the man who tells his friend that that friend’s wife is really pretty, especially compared to his girlfriend. The comment is heard by the wife, who calls the girlfriend, and the play commences.
The play is primarily told through scenes between the couple, who of course break up, and then between the man and his friend. There’s a lot of context and undercurrent that is brought up throughout the play. For example, in the four year relationship, it’s pretty clear that the boyfriend is not particularly happy with his life, working at a factory with no real hope of a future, and reads a lot of different books. He’s clearly got dreams beyond this life, and feels stuck. It’s not really clear if he meant what he said exactly as he said it, or was being cruel and provocative instead of being direct about what he wanted. We also delve into the friendship, which is based on some kind of toxic masculinity duality, almost a kind of Apollonian and Dionysian back and forth, if we want to elevate it much higher than the play does. But the play, while being funny, is also about looking for ways for characters of emotional immaturity to work out some deeper truths about themselves.
Reasons to be Happy
This is a sequel to Reasons to be Pretty, and we’re a few years on. The couples have both broken up (at the end of the first play) and the husband, who was cheating on his wife, is now with his mistress. The wife, who was pregnant at the end of the last play, has given birth and that baby is now a toddler. As you might guess, she’s dating the boyfriend from the first play, and the marriage that was hinted at with the girlfriend is now less happy than before.
The plot here is that things are plugging along with everything, but happiness is not yet a full reality. Our former and current boyfriend is much happier being a substitute teacher, but that’s not substitute for being a full teacher is that’s your goal. It’s also clear that there are some layers of lingering feelings either between him and his ex or him and himself, and if he doesn’t figure out how to figure it all out, there’s going to be a lot of hurting happening.
The play takes on the initial questions from the first play and begins to suggest that there’s no such thing as easy answers, but that no answers also do a lot of damage.
The Money Shot
Another Neil LaBute play, this time taking place in Hollywood at the house of a slightly aging star. The star is hosting a brunch to hash out the details of an upcoming shoot between her and another aging star which will involve, if they go through with it, realistic sex. With them is his wife, and her wife. The conversation in play is about a lot of things, mostly talking around the subject lot, and we get a lot of the character development in the play as we see what they end up talking about while avoiding what they came here to talk about. He’s clearly a bigger star, but his star is fading, and primarily seen as an action star. It’s also obvious that he doesn’t know very much about the world, and is sensitive about it, mentioning several times how sensitive he is about it, and demonstrating how much he doesn’t know about the world by being confidently wrong. His wife is much much younger than him, and trying to become a star, and is clearly sensitive about the likely transactional nature of their relationship. On the flip side, our female star is the “breadwinner” in her marriage, mentioning that she bought the house, and spent a lot more of her money securing it. Her wife is an editor and also trying to get pregnant, with the implication that is then confirmed, so the star won’t gain weight and threaten her career. This is the backdrop to having a very adult conversation about a relatively silly and not super important topic. It’s much funnier in more obvious ways from the other LaBute plays I read, and it seems like it would be a lot of fun to be in given how dumb and mean you get to be respectively.
The Playboy of the Western World
This play originally came out in 1902 or so, and was immediately popular and controversial because of its more or less libertine plot. The play involves a rural Irish town where a stranger comes up one day apparently on run from the law for accidentally killing his father, and it hiding out in the town.
I can’t say I know all that much about Irish literature except Ulysses, Yeats, and a few others, but so much of Irish literature is produced through an English colonial gaze like Oscar Wilde or Iris Murdoch, that it’s not entirely simple enough to sort it out in terms of “origins”.
Steel Magnolias
This is one of those movies (but here the play) that we had a tape of in a time when we had limited numbers of tapes, and as a consequence, I’ve seen it so many times over my early life.
The play begins in the beauty shop in a small Louisiana town. I would say a white beauty shop and certainly this town would be pretty segregated de facto in this way, but I imagine you could easily retool this play for an all Black cast as well or a modern mix. But in 1987…well.
Anyway, it’s the morning of Shelby’s wedding and things are abuzz. There’s a new stylist in the shop, everyone needs their hair down, the father of the bride is shooting guns at birds to get them to go away, and a lot is happening. The play is mostly built on the conversations and interactions in this opening scene, and then through two follow-up scenes later: about a year after the wedding, and about a year after that. It’s pretty much only the women, but with some reference to various of the men in their lives. It holds up in a lot of ways and is probably a lot of fun to act in, almost regardless of the roles you might take on.
The Helmet of Horror
This is a short novel written by Victor Pelevin as part of the mythology series for Canongate. These books have generally been a miss for me, and this one is too, with some exceptions. Well, I do really like the Margaret Atwood one.
The myth here is Theseus and the Minotaur, and the Minotaur, as seen through the title of the book, is re-imagined as a computer simulation that allows users to place themselves within any reality or any version of reality. The story takes on this idea and mostly involves user interfaces, inner-office memos, and other corporate communications as it primary storytelling. This is a myth that has been retold many times and especially successfully with Mary Renault.
Boy meets Girl
Another mythology series book from Cannongate, and one of the more successful of them. The story here takes on the lesser known myth of Iphis. Wikipedia says this “In Greek and Roman mythology, Iphis or Iphys (/ˈaɪfɪs/ EYE-fis, /ˈɪfɪs/ IF-iss; Ancient Greek: Ἶφις Îphis [íi.pʰis], gen. Ἴφιδος Ī́phidos) was a child of Telethusa and Ligdus in Crete, born female and raised male, who was later transformed by the goddess Isis into a man.”
And so the story plays around with the mythology a little in the guise of re-imagining gender roles. It would be easy to imagine a 2023 version of the story involving trans folks, but that’s not exactly how it goes here in the hands of Ali Smith.
From Here to Eternity
Another book from Caitlin Doughty, whose books address death and funeral rituals and the mortuary trade in general. Specifically this book takes a cultural relativism approach to death rites around the world based on her personal experience travelling and viewing them. The approach itself makes a lot of sense, and like her previous book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, the American Way of death is a little in the targets not because we do anything especially galling, but that the concept of death has mostly been eradicated from our consciousness. What this means is that there’s so much distance put in between Americans and death. Physical distance in terms of the ways in which bodies are handled and processed for burial. Financial distance in the sense of how money is extracted from people for nonsense products that are not only usually unnecessary, but gruesome in their own special ways. And emotionally as well with all the other forms of distance interacting. I also would put lingual distance as well as Americans employ every euphemism they can think of to hide the fact of death and hide the facts about the deaths. It’s not so much that we need all the details, but sometimes the language we use makes it incredibly dehumanizing that it’s easy to forget a death has actually occurred. I do like the change in media to say someone dies or has died, as opposed to the alarming phrase “dead at….”. But other language creeps me out like passing etc.
The book takes her interest in death rites to places where you might see a sky funeral, or something like Japan with a near 100% cremation rate or to funeral pyres or even a village where preserved bodies are kept, in situ or framed as living for sometimes years after some one has died until the right ritual is able to be performed.
