nearit's reviews
1150 reviews

Happy! is an obvious attempt to sell an idea to a bigger market, and a successful one at that. The job of making something light enough to carry out of the pitch meeting doesn't allow anyone involved to show what kind of comic they can make on a good day, but both Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson manage one magic trick while trying to close the sale. 

For Morrison, it takes the form of a scene on a commuter train, where the writer flexes their love for overheard dialogue and works it up into a symphony of human misery. For Roberston, it's in the design of Happy himself. This winged equine grotesquerie has the feeling of something that is being seen too close to the eye at all times - fitting for a childhood fantasy lost in a world of rote murder and callous laughs.

SIDENOTE:  While the TV version of Happy! isn't perfect, its improvements on the comic are so comprehensive that it was a little disorienting to come back and realise how little there was to the crime plot here, how much Richie Coster brings to the role of Blue, and how much further Morrison was able to push their psychotropic ambitions once the sales meeting was over. 

Over the course of two seasons, Christopher Meloni revealed himself to be one of Morrison's most enthusiastic collaborators. As soiled detective and scarf-clad hitman Nick Sax, Meloni moves like a cartoon creature unleashed on an unsuspecting reality. The rules of physics do not seem to apply to him, but at various points he convinces you that sheer misery might kill him where an anvil to the head would fail.  

Ideas enough to fuel a handful of short story collections, strung together with the light, toxic wit that defines Swanwick's work.  This might not be my favourite trip I've taken in his company but it was transformative all the same.

I do love to blaze through a music bio but here as in so many other cases I found myself wishing that a slower and more methodical edit had been carried out before I got started. The usual pet peeve is that the author will repeat anecdotes or bits of information like a nervous conversational gambit, and there's plenty of that here, e.g. the repeated mentions of having dinner with John Peele when he was in town to film Sound of the Suburbs, most of which are framed as though this is the first time we have presented with this information.

Another funny thing about books like this is that the balance of detail tells you a lot about what parts of a musician's career are considered commercially interesting.  Again, Spaceships Over Glasgow is typical in this regard, in that we spend most of our time on Mogwai's earlier, messier days, where bad decisions and audience nostalgia mix most freely in the page.  I'm not quite as sad to have missed Braithwaite's reflections on life as a label boss and member of a workingband as I was to not spend more time in Bob Mould's sexy bear era, but I would have been up for more recent history all the same.

Regardless of these gripes, Braithwaite is a funny guy with a healthy amount of perspective on his gobshite years, and his commitment to art that tries to draw moments out to eternity is contagious and commendable. As someone a few years younger than Braithwaite who also grew up dreaming of New York and Metropolis while living just outside of Glasgow, the early chapters made old feelings vivid again, but I couldn't help but feel that there was a better version of the book trying to get out of this draft, one that wound a couple of threads from those early days through the late 90s headonism with a bit more clarity.

A comedy of manners with murder at its heart, The Secret History is giddy on its own poisons.  Tartt is at her best when she is at her worst, ripping eager students and ordinary people to tatters. There is enough in those descriptions to point to what they leave out, just as the more romantic elements of the book suggest their own unmaking. In the end, the author's way with a cutting detail overpowers her ability to make you feel like you're in the club, and the pacing of both halves of the book - somehow both urgent and relaxed, hyper-observant yet avoiding as much as it exposes - makes a fine sport out of this tension.

There is a stranger lacuna where the characters of Henry and Julian are concerned.  Given their centrality to the book's action and themes, I need to spend some more time thinking about whether this absence helps or hinders the narrative. Elsewhere, my own scholarship (five minutes on Wikipedia) suggests that Jake and Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to adapt the novel so they could play the twins, which suggest it's not just the classic classics that may lead us into questionable choices.

"I don't know if there's that much to think about," I said.

Now here I am, thinking about it.

Dante's Paradise is an elaborate mechanism that aims to replicate that which claims to be beyond replication. 

Gray's replication of Dante's work is always fresh, often amusing, sometimes profound and reliably curious.  If we find ourselves squinting when he subs in references to "Whigs" and "the Kirk" while preserving the social and theological content, perhaps this is helpful, lest we get too dazzled along the way.

A poetic novel in the Orkney dialect, with English proseglosstranslation that repulses the reader, directing them back to the poetry time and again.

The plot is science fiction: homecomings and attempted reinventions on a space-borne community that fishes for light.  The plot is centrifugal, a great machine designed to mix up your sense of where attention lies.  The dual languages serve the same purpose: the line "I doot they'll be needan fock" hits my ear differently from the English equivalent, "I expect they will need people".

When you first clock this stuff you feel clever. When the central (???) romance climaxes in conflict between how two characters from different places hearsay what's going on, you realise you weren't the sharp one just as your fingers start to bleed.

As with many of these biographies, whoever edited this stole a wage - people and concepts are introduced then reintroduced, and obvious segues are ignored to no benefit.

Otherwise, a fine read for the rap dads that make up Raekwon's 21st century audience. About 70% of the book is given over to Rae's childhood and career up to Cuban Linx, which suggests a realistic assessment of what people are interested in.

The voice of the book is fine, generic. The raps on those records, meanwhile, are wild and specific and true, even at their most far fetched.