The Forager has some comments about Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark series.

A detailed look at the technology by Dawn Eden.

What I want to know is, where’s my disposable iMac?

I’m not sure what to say about this book. I’ve read and reviewed it
before; you can go see what I thought about it then.

What it is, is a satirical heroic fantasy. Apropos of Nothing is a
bastard child of some nameless knight who forced himself upon Apropos’s
tavern wench mother–nameless because, in fact, there were a crowd of
them. He’s clever, quick, and lame in one leg. He despises most people,
including himself, and including especially the heroic Tacit, a stalwart
fellow who befriends him one day when he’s about to be beaten up by the
local bullies. He’s crude, nasty, dishonest, lewd, and nicer than he
thinks he is.

He lives in a fairly typical heroic fantasy world–kings, knights,
dragons, peasants, thieves, the whole nine yards. The kings are fools or
villains, the knights are glory-loving scoundrels, and the peasants would
steal your clothes or burn you for a witch as soon as look at you. This
is because it’s a satire, right?

The whole thing is full of goofy puns. Apropos is apprenticed to Sir
Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions (an area of great volcanic
activity) in the service of the king of Histeria; later he is chased by
the Harpers Bizarre. He flies on a phoenix, is nearly killed by a
stampede of unicorns, steals the story from the hero (!), rescues and
beds the princess, and on and on.

It’s crude, vile, funny, clever, and pessimistic by turns, which isn’t
the best combination; and the tone is patchy; the author seems unsure of
whether he’s trying to write a serious fantasy or a farce. Or, rather,
he knows he’s trying to write a farce, but he keeps getting too serious
about it. It should be a souffl´, but it’s more like a pound cake.

So, not a success…but not entirely a failure, either.

Don’t laugh. It’s actually a pretty good book and I’m not a big Western fan.
When I was in high school, I stumbled across Owen Wister’s The Virginian
and fell in love with it. That was followed by Vardis Fisher’s book Mountain
Man after Redford made the movie “Jeremiah Johnson” out of it. And a few
years back I read a few of Ivan Doig’s stories about Montana, particularly
“Dancing at the Rascal Fair.” But the Louis L’Amour type westerns have never
interested me much. However, at my book group we were talking about
Westerns as a movie genre—we tend to digress from topic occasionally—and
one of the guys recommended this book. He’s got pretty high end taste in
books too, so I was surprised.

It is good. In some ways, it’s better than the classic movie they made of
it. After reading it, I don’t see Gary Cooper as Shane though. He’s not
dangerous looking enough to be true to the character in the book.

I read it as an allegory. Shane is the old west of gunslingers and outlaws
trying to adjust to the new settled west of the homesteaders. He’s the
classic hero—-tall, dark, handsome, straight, soft-spoken, dangerous and
conflicted. Joe Starrett, the little boy’s father, is the new
west—-hardworking, independent, proud, earthy, honest and striving. The
conflict is between the old way of working the land in the west with open
range and long cattle drives and the newer, more settled way of breeding and
feeding fewer cattle but doing it more land intensively.

Of course, it also a pretty well-told adventure story. Shane is the perfect
good/bad guy. You want him to win his fight to give up gunslinging and yet
you know that for him to remain true to who he is, he can’t. Telling the
story thru a young boy’s eyes only makes it more dramatic. It also gives you
the great line he keeps repeating “and he was Shane.” Only a kid could
accept someone at face value and then, growing up, imply the deeper meaning
in the story.

It isn’t great literature but it is a good story well told and certainly
worth the reading.

Via Mirabilis, we have the amazing story of an astrologer and rascal whose career was destroyed by bogus astrology. The pen is mightier than the Zodiac!

This is hardly topical, as it took place in 1708, but it’s still funny.

I was getting breakfast for the kids this morning, as I’ve been doing since Mary was born, and had this conversation with my seven-year-old.

Dave: I want some chocolate milk.

(Note: he didn’t say please.)

Me: And what makes you think you deserve chocolate milk?

Dave (surprised): What?

Me: And what makes you think you deserve chocolate milk?

Dave (in disgust, as though I’d misheard him): REGular milk.

Me: No, you said you wanted chocolate milk.

Dave (with an air of resignation): OK, I’ll have chocolate milk.

It was a genuine Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck moment. I laughed loud and long, and got Dave his chocolate milk.

Gosh I’m glad I don’t live in Dave Sim’s head.

I was extremely tempted to let that first line stand as the entire
review, but I suppose I should elaborate.

Jaka’s Story is the next installment of Sim’s epic comic book
series, Cerebus the Aardvark; I’ve previously reviewed
Cerebus, High Society, and Church and State.

The first thing to know is that this isn’t a story about Cerebus at all.
It’s primarily about a dancer named Jaka who appears as part of a gag in
one of the early episodes. Cerebus has been slipped a love potion by
some bad guys; things don’t go quite as expected, and he becomes besotted
with the dancing girl at a tavern. She returns his love, or so she says,
but by the end of the episode the potion has worn off, and Cerebus is
gone. Being, after all, an aardvark, he’s not likely to fall in love
with a human no matter how lovely she is.

Jaka makes a number of short appearances in High Society and
Church and State, during which time Cerebus has gotten over his
disdain for human women, and they have a number of bittersweet passages.
This, however, is the first volume in which she plays a major role. And
in fact, she’s center stage–Cerebus isn’t even present for most of it.

The first two-thirds are quite interesting, despite Sim’s penchant for
filling whole pages with four or six or eight panes of nearly the same
image (I suppose it’s supposed to be cinematic, and sometimes it works;
there are a number of pages on which one character is having writer’s
block, where it’s quite effective; but mostly it just seems like he’s
trying to get through an issue with as little writing as possible.)

But as I say, the first two-thirds are quite interesting. The volume
contains two narratives side by side. The first tells of Jaka’s childhood in
the Tavers Family Residence in Palnu from when she was five years old
until she left Palnu and began earning a living as a dancer. The second
follows on from Church and State, and features Cerebus
(briefly) visiting with Jaka and her shiftless husband Richard. The two
stories are converging into what’s looking to be a really dramatic climax
when — BANG in steps the Cirinist Inquisition. The Cirinists are
a matriarchal sect of the Church of Tarim; it seems that dancing has been
outlawed. All and sundry (except Cerebus, who stepped out in boredom
sometime earlier) are shipped off to the Cirinist dungeons, which is
where the last third of the book takes place.

I really don’t know what Sim was trying to achieve, but what ever it was,
he completely blew it with that last third, in both narratives. I won’t
say how the story of young Jaka ends–but the horrible, traumatic event
that is supposed to send her fleeing her patrician birth to become a
dancer in low dives all over Estarcion is too absurd for words. As for
the present day narrative, the ending is truly horrific…but the only
thing I gather from it is that Sim doesn’t much like women and doesn’t
much like religion. I also gather from his introduction that he has no
concept whatsoever what a healthy marriage looks like.

Anyway, I’m disappointed, just as I was with
Church and State–the book’s got an excellent build-up, and
some truly beautiful story-telling, and then the ending fizzles. It’s
really rather pathetic.

I don’t have much to add to Will’s review of this book. When I was reading
the Vlad Taltos series in January, this was the only one I couldn’t put my
hands on at the time and so, moved on without it. I wish I had waited. The
following books would have made more sense and been better for knowing what
was in this book, I think. If you haven’t read Brust’s Taltos series, start at
the beginning and work your way thru them. They’re a gas.

One of the truly surreal parts of having a newborn in the house is that they grow. They never do it while you’re watching–you come down for breakfast, and you look at them, and….they’re bigger than when you last noticed.

That’s what happened this morning. I looked at Mary, all comfy and relaxed in her carrier (she’s on the table next to me as I write) and suddenly realized that her head was just a little bigger and more rounded than it was yesterday.

“Jane,” I said, “Her head’s bigger.”

“It could be,” she said. “She wanted to eat all night long.”

The kicker was her hair. She was born with a lot of dark hair, but it looks thinner this morning. Analysis: the follicles are farther apart.

I was expecting this–Mary is our fourth, after all–but I wasn’t expecting it quite so quickly.

The very day after I write a review of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, a book in which Lewis argues for the notion of “objective value” or “natural law”, I read this post on Banana Oil. The post is a hodgepodge of linkage; the second entry down deals with Leon Kass and the president’s Council on Bioethics.

I don’t really want to talk about cloning here, as I’ve not thought much about it. What I find fascinating are some comments made on both sides. Ian quotes a post which says, in part,

[Leon] Kass [Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics] has written in the past about how we should base our moral judgments in part on what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance.” In other words, the feeling you get in your bones that something is wrong is a reliable guide to what really is wrong.

Ian’s response:

It is genuinely sad that both left and right in the US now believe that feelings trump facts and reason. There can be no productive argument in such a situation. One side feels one way, the other side another, both say so, and then the name-calling begins.

I don’t know to what extent the quoted post is an accurate description of Kass’s belief….but if it is, it seems to me that what Kass is saying is that some things are objectively wrong–wrong on the face of it. His mistake is in using the language of emotion, rather than the language of natural law.

In my experience, I might add, the feeling in my bones that something is wrong is always worth listening to. In technical matters, it’s called the voice of experience; in moral matters, it’s called the voice of conscience. Please note, I don’t say that this voice is invariably correct–sometimes the problem is in my understanding, and sometimes I’m simply confused. But it’s always worth listening to.