The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy"

1988, first edition, from Holt and Company
Brian Walker
The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy"
Bought newish for $10.95
Worn paperback
B-

I didn't grow up reading Nancy, or not so's I can remember.  As someone once noted, it's easier to read Nancy than to not read it.  Bushmiller designed the strip to be taken in without thinking, with seemingly simple artwork and writing, with strong black lines and geometric patterns.  He died in 1982, when I was 14 and "outgrowing" the comics.  But I can't recall any strips from earlier, while there is a Broom Hilda that I can still visualize because of the way the three main characters' elbows looked when they walked quickly.  I don't have any Broom Hilda collections, but I have quite a few for Nancy.

I'm going to blame The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life, because it contains a "lecture" on Nancy & Nihilism.  A decade before this book, it juxtaposed (pseudo)-intellectuals and what is often regarded as one of the dumbest comic strips ever.  As Walker shows, many avante-garde artists from the '60s onward appreciated the strip.  And in the '50s MAD found it an easy target. 

Is Nancy so bad-it's-good?  Is it a basic but satisfying comic?  I don't know.  It rarely makes me laugh, and always at rather than with.  In some ways, I think it was more intriguing when it focused on Nancy's sexy flapper/actress aunt Fritzi.  Nonetheless, we've got all five of the Kitchen Sink Press G.H.W.Bush-era collections awaiting us....

Breathing Lessons

1988, 1989 Berkley [sic] edition
Anne Tyler
Breathing Lessons
Possibly bought newish for $5.50
Very worn paperback
B

I found this equal to Accidental Tourist, which it resembles a bit.  Again, we have a long-standing marriage, almost thirty years in this case, but it's closer to the relationship between Macon and Muriel than to that of Macon and Sarah.  A reserved man and a "scatter-brained" woman, although Maggie believes that if she had married someone less sensible than Ira, she would've become more sensible.  I believe this to some extent, because I can see how I sometimes will try to "balance" out my partner.  I don't feel like I've changed all that much since my marriage, although I've grown up a bit in the last 19 years, but because he was the sensible one, he thought of me as a bit scattered, and now that I'm with someone who's less practical, he thinks of me as sensible.

Like other Tyler books, this novel is about what makes relationships work, or sometimes not work.  E. M. Forster wrote, "Only connect!", but he knew as well as Tyler how difficult that can be sometimes.  Maggie's son Jesse, who's like a nicer version of the rocker in Slipping-Down Life, was unable to sustain his teenaged marriage to Fiona.  Maggie is a meddler, wanting to fix things but making them worse.  Ira sometimes cleans up her messes and sometimes makes them worse yet by blurting out the truth.  Yet we also see why Maggie and Ira got together, and why they stay together.  Maggie's friend Serena and her recently deceased husband Max were also "opposites" who were right for each other.

The book covers just one day in their lives, although there are a lot of flashbacks.  The traveling theme returns, although here it's just a road trip with side trips.  ("Like life," you're supposed to think.)  On the way to the funeral, Maggie lies to a bad driver and then feels guilty about it when she realizes he's old and black.  She tries to make amends, but yes, it only makes a bigger mess. 

I promised way back on Clock Winder that I would discuss Tyler and race.  Mr. Otis is her first significant black character in awhile, and to some degree he's a stereotype, in the way he talks and acts, and his wife Duluth sounds stereotypically superstitious for being mad at him for something he did in one of her dreams.  But I think Tyler fleshes out Mr. Otis, and his nephew, at least as much as she does the white waitress whose shoulder Maggie figuratively cries on.  On the other hand, there are two hospital workers who seem black and are less nuanced.  (They reminded me of the maybe-racism of 1987's Nice Girls Don't Explode, which I'll discuss when I have a movie blog someday.)  On the other hand, Ira is one-eighth Native American and neither he nor his father seem to fit any stereotypes except maybe stoicism.

The title, by the way, has to do with Fiona's lessons while pregnant.  Breathing should be easy and automatic, but like so much in life, it isn't always.  This is the tenth Tyler novel for the project, and one I've read more than most.  I enjoyed the 1994 Hallmark TV adaptation, with Joanne Woodward and James Garner, although I haven't seen it since it originally aired.  Next Tyler, Saint Maybe in 1991....

Venus of Shadows

1988, 1990 Bantam edition
Pamela Sargent
Venus of Shadows
Original price $4.95, purchase price $1.50
Falling apart paperback
C+

I found this book about equal to its predecessor, although I was less drawn in.  Iris's very posthumous daughter Risa is more sympathetic a character, except when she forces her five-year-old daughter Chimene to witness the death penalty on a murderer and his accomplices.  This, along with her great beauty, apparently warps Chimene into growing up to be a deluded and deluding cult leader.  Risa's son Dyami is gay, which is unacceptable to Chimene's (hetero)sex cult.  There's a scene where a younger man that he once expressed sympathy to rapes him, as punishment for Dyami's and his own homosexuality.  I get Sargent's point but it's still disturbing, if less than it would be if I really believed in any of the characters.  Meanwhile, Benzi grows older but remains youthful, mostly offstage for 30 or 40 years. 

Sargent was then working on the final book in the trilogy, Child of Venus, but it wasn't published till 2001.  I've never read it, but apparently it's about Chimene's posthumous daughter.

Cult Movies 3

1988, undated later edition, from Fireside (Simon & Schuster)
Danny Peary
Cult Movies 3: Fifty More of the Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful
Possibly bought newish for $14.95
Worn paperback with stains
B-

Maybe I've mellowed in the last few months, but I found this to be the best of Peary's "cult" series.  Even the movies I don't want to see were more interesting to read about, even when I disagree with him, as on Blue Velvet, his most recent choice.  Over a third (eighteen) of the movies are from 1977 to '86, but he does include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919).  And there are two back to back movies from '47.  (He's still going alphabetically, so it's Miracle on 34th Street and Monsieur Verdoux.)  It's arguable that this book is better because of the previous entries, so you can compare movies with related cult followings (as with Plan Nine from Outer Space earlier, Glen or Glenda? here). 

More so than in '81 or '83, the impact of cable and home video is seen in the late '80s, as midnight movies became less common, and some films found their cults via home-viewing.  This probably led to less of an in-person aspect to the "communities" of fans, which the Internet would further weaken.  On the other hand, it's probably easier to find even obscure movies now, given luck and opportunity.  So my guess is that there may be more cult movies now but less of the "midnight mass" feel that Hoberman & Rosenbaum discuss.

Democracy for the Few

1988, fifth edition, from St. Martin's Press
Michael Parenti
Democracy for the Few
Original price $18.00, purchase price $8.00
Good condition paperback
C

If Howard Zinn's People's History is not particularly earth-shattering these days, this book is even less so.  Parenti writes about the "plutocracy" that runs the U.S. and like Zinn he does have some "good news" passages, but much less so.  Occasionally, there's mildly interesting information, but not enough.  Also, the illustrations are weak, the original ones especially, like the cover by Eldon C. Doty, although Herblock is unremarkable as well.  In fact, the best of the lot is the well-known "Golden Rule" strip of The Wizard of Id, and that's more for the writing than the art.  Skip this book unless you're really curious about late '80s leftism.

Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988

1988, possibly first edition, from Houghton Mifflin
Jane Mayer & Doyle McManus
Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988
Original price $21.95, purchase price $12.95
Hardcover in good condition
B-

The "landslide" of the title is a pun, both that Reagan won a landslide in '84 (although not really that many of the eligible voters' votes) and that he was sort of buried by the Iran-Contra scandal.  Well, yeah, not exactly.  True, Reagan's credibility was shattered, and his very high approval ratings dropped.  But he's still highly thought of by many.  Not me, as you know.  And that's part of the problem I had with this book.  It's not that the authors entirely let Reagan off the hook, but they seem to see him as kind-hearted, more concerned with the rescue of the hostages than with the law or Congress's approval.  They also accept some of Reagan's premises about Nicarauga.  So they make it seem like Reagan meant well.  This is a far cry from Schell and Lukas's analyses of Watergate, where even when they showed sympathy for Nixon, they never denied his bad intentions.

I was just as sickened reading this book as I was by Iran-Contra (and related matters) at the time.  Yes, there's more distance, but I didn't know then how it would work out, that the Teflon President would survive relatively undamaged (especially in terms of his "legacy"), or that his Vice President would overcome revelations of his own knowledge about the arms shipments and monetary diversions, and go on to pardon McFarlane and five other officials involved.  Reading the book for the first time in a long while, I couldn't decide if I was more disgusted by the dishonesty or the stupidity, to say nothing of what an immoral plan it would've been even if it had worked, even if Congress had known and approved.

Then and now it seems like there are only four possible conclusions:
a) Reagan was too easy-going and "delegated" his own responsibilities to people who couldn't be trusted;
b) Some combination of North, McFarlane, Poindexter, and Casey deceived Reagan, who may or may not have asked the right questions at the right time;
c) Reagan knew what was going on but didn't see anything wrong with it;
d) Reagan knew but couldn't "recall."

Whatever the case, this is a book with no hero, although ironically Nixon survivor George Shultz comes closest to seeming like a decent human being.  (Don Regan probably comes off the worst.)

Feminist in the Dark: Reviewing the Movies

1988, possibly first edition, from The Crossing Press
Kathi Maio
Feminist in the Dark: Reviewing the Movies
Original price unknown, purchase price $5.49
Worn paperback
B-

More than a dozen years after Haskell and Rosen's feminist criticism of movies from the silents to the '70s, Maio takes a look at movies from what seems to be 1985 to 1987.  (Unlike Kael, she goes thematically rather than chronologically in this collection, and then omits the dates most of the time.)  I recall reading her Popcorn and Sexual Politics first and always preferring it, so we'll see if that holds true when we get to 1991.  Here, as she admits in the Preface, she was getting her bearings as a new film critic.  Although she's generally thoughtful and insightful, including upon reflection her own blind spots, she does have some annoying tics, like the use of "womanist" (Wikipedia says it's Alice Walker's term for "black feminism," but Maio doesn't define it), and occasional wrong word choices, like "reprieve" for "reprise."

The only movie review here that influenced me to see a movie, and to read the original book, was Compromising Positions, although I think Kael's equally positive review (in her collection Hooked, coming up in '89) probably weighed more.  It is interesting to read Maio on Fatal Attraction, before not only Kael but Faludi.  I still haven't seen the movie, not just because it sounds incredibly misogynist (anti-single-woman in particular), but because I don't like horror movies.  Still, I probably will at some point, and it'll be good to reread Maio for that, as well as her appreciation for, of all things, Madonna's Who's That Girl.