I’ve spent much of this week filling out visa renewal forms, which involves answering questions like, “Have you ever committed an act of terrorism?” and, “Have you ever been involved in war crimes or genocide?”
I can’t help but wonder what happens if you say “yes.”
Anyway, I’m also trying to read every Hellboy comic.
Recommendation: Shrinking the Heroes
Minister Faust is a cultural fixture of my hometown. I first encountered him and his work at Pure Speculation, an Edmonton-based sci-fi/fantasy festival which, tragically, doesn’t seem to have survived the pandemic.
Shrinking the Heroes (originally published as From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain) is my favorite novel of Faust’s; it’s a story about superheroes going to group therapy. It’s also about 9/11. It’s also about endless wartime and the military-industrial complex. It’s also about race in America. It’s also about privilege and the ways in which the misery of institutional oppression is pathologized. It also contains so many superhero name puns that a full readthrough is guaranteed to inflict mild-to-moderate psychic damage. You should read it.
This Week’s Links
ClassicPress
A stable, lightweight fork of WordPress. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising for anyone who just wants to run a website without all the bloat and plugins. Or anyone who’d prefer not to use a product associated with Automattic, for various reasons.
Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: Please stop hurting journalism
Josh Jackson was shocked when he found out what term, if used in the music publication he co-founded, could automatically strip an article of ad revenue.
Review: JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE by Naomi Kanakia
The book, like its protagonist, exists in a minefield. It’s too much, it’s too sad, it’s not nice. Tara’s behavior is hyper-scrutinized both by characters within the book and by the reviewers that picked Just Happy up expecting it to be—quite frankly—vapid fare typical to the genre. They want a story that’s simple; they want escape; they don’t want this book’s ambiguity about who’s good and who’s bad.
Speaking of my hometown, Edmonton just got hit with about 18 inches of snow. There are some things I don’t miss.
-K
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