getting a bit out of my media slump it seems. a few new things to check in about
cuckoo by joe sparrow: this is graphic novel i've actually had a physical copy of on my shelves for years; i pledged the kickstarter for it while having no previous familiarity with the artist or any of his stuff, which is pretty rare for me, but i was so instantly enamored by the art he showed and figured it would be gorgeous to look at if nothing else. it definitely was! here's a few of the sample pages from kickstarter
really great style. fantastic color use, great shape language, super geometric but also rounded and playful at the same time, some banger compositions.
the premise of this one is that dorothy, an anxious and aimless 19 year old in an illustration course, starts awakening to some sort of psychic powers that seem to connect to an evening years prior when she found a strange meteorite in her family garden. she meets another girl at her school, ellie, who is experiencing the same phenomena and the two strike up a fast friendship, which sees dorothy leaving her comfort zone and beginning to really reevaluate her life for the first time.
there's only so much character work you can do in 200ish pages of not particularly text dense graphic novel, so i'm not sure it's the right fit for the reclist. but i think it told the relatively simple story it was trying to tell well and the friendship between the two girls was fun, believable, and made very good use of the space it had.
cries and whispers (1972): this week's film for my weekly movie group. loved it. directed by ingmar bergman; it's the third of his movie's ive seen and i've enjoyed all of them. also something that has been consistent between all of them is me being impressed by the quality of writing for and narrative focus on the female characters involved. i don't know much about bergman as a person and may be projecting based on an extremely small sample size of his larger body of work, but one gets the sense that not only does bergman have a lot of consideration for women, hes got some pretty scathing opinions of men. i definitely want to watch more of his films so we'll see how this holds up
this film has a pretty simple premise. a woman named agnes is dying of illness in her family home. her sisters, maria and karin, alongside their family maid anna, are there to be by her side when she finally passes. all 4 of these women are extremely different, and extremely interesting. the movie is hypnotic and mesmerizing to watch, and almost unbelievably dense for its rather humble 1:30 runtime. the movie is absolutely simmering with heavily repressed yet barely restrained emotion and sensuality everywhere. i found it profoundly difficult and upsetting to watch at times, which was great.
death of the author by nnedi okorafor: this is the first book i've managed to read in a little while. i did not like it. i did not like it at all. i tried so so hard to like it but i just did not click with it at any point. i spent a long time trying to hash out what it was i did or did not like about it at dinner with some people the other night and the thing i feel like i landed on was it had a real glossed over class angle that i think would have needed more substance for me to connect here.
this book follows a paraplegic nigerian-american woman named Zelu through the humble beginnings and immediate takeoff of her science fiction writing career. the least successful member of a family descended from nigerian royalty, her confrontational personality finds her fired from a creative writing position at a university and moving back in with her parents while she works on her novel, Rusted Robots. Parts of this novel are intersperesed through the book. Rusted Robots is a post-apocalyptic book about a humanoid android ("hume") named Ankara who travels the world in search of stories, and comes to know of an impending threat to earth in the form of of sun-crazed spacefaring robots set to nuke the planet. Her journey to deliver this information to the right people sees her code becoming entangled with a NoBody, disembodied AI who are at war with the humes.
I think rusted robots would have been a much more interesting book to read than death of the author. the speculative, fantastical sci fi with elements of african folklore in the ankara segments felt far more compelling than the contemporary Tech Firm sci fi elements in the zelu segments.
i guess i feel like sci fi that doesn't, imo, try and figure out which people are left behind by the version of the future being presented, is just sort of fundamentally failing at doing what sci fi does. it's strange to have a book about a disabled character whose life is changed by access to cutting edge experimental accessibility tech that lets her walk again, and have a bit where an interviewer brings up the fact that there are other people who aren't famous enough to have people offering them those opportunities, and have it not really be a question the book actually seems curious about interrogating. the character views the question as an attack, because its part of an aggressive, hostile interview, so i dont blame the character for feeling that way. but i do blame the book for seeming to not have any larger interest in that idea
a plot point in this book is that at the premier of the movie adaptation of rusted robots, zelu crosses paths with The Literal Richest Man In The World who is a pretty obvious bezos/musk figure. he eventually offers to send her on a civilian trip to space. she refuses the first time, due to the invitation's proximity to the death of her father, and then ends up taking him up on it later. it kind of blew my mind that there was in no point in the novel where this guy was presented as anything other than like, a chill dude who totally #got it and was willing to do her a good turn.
i just kept thinking like. how many people got disabled working in the rare earth mineral mines where the high tech alloy for her prosthetics came from, or the space ship components. how many workers got disabled doing backbreaking manual labor so her cool friend that sent her to space could become the richest man in the world. at one point there's an attempted kidnapping while she visits nigeria, and she livestreams herself fleeing while she makes her way to the airport to try and get help. during the livestream she's navigating with the help of her boyfriend's AI assistant app, which she makes sure to give a shoutout to. this results in his AI startup company getting more investment and i guess we're supposed to like, care, about that development. eugh.
basically just a complete disinterest in any critiques of the modern tech sector and how that may intersect with disability justice, and a sort of gushing about the importance of storytelling i dont think the book earned (ankara's plotline resolves with her Writing A Novel to save the world. that novel? Death of the Author. Wooaahh. Mind= BLOWN) that as a result made the whole thing feel vapid and masturbatory.
