Mountain Ways
I biked to work again today. I think it's getting just a bit easier, but biking mostly uphill for four miles is still just death. I'm glad I biked the last two days, or I'd have been really screwed. Actually, it was about 45 degrees when I woke up this morning, so it was quite cool for my ride in.
On the way home I stopped by the comic book store, but the books still haven't come in. Okay, one did: The Maze Agency, which is basically a straight mystery comic book written by Mike Barr, a longtime comic book writer who is a mystery fan. This comic existed back around 1990 published by a different comic company, and popular artist Adam Hughes got his start there. This issue isn't as good as some of the older issues, but I'll stick with it for a while.
Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to finish my collection of early X-Men. The guy at the store told me that some of the earliest issues were collected in hardcover form, so I bought that (who'd have thought you could save a bundle of money by buying a $30.00 hardcover? In this case, each of the eight comics in that collection would have cost me thirty bucks in their original form), and the last two issues I needed I bought as originals. I've been a fan of these early issues (from the mid-to-late 70s) for years, and it's nice to finally finish my collection.
By the way, I pretty much stopped buying X-Men around 1984, when I felt it really stopped being any good at all. And yet it's been hugely popular ever since then. Go figure.
I should probably describe what I liked so much about the series: The late-70s/early-80s X-Men series is a seminal comics work, marking a new level of maturity for mainstream comics. The earliest comics (from the 1930s through the 50s) were largely heroic adventure stories. The comics of the 60s and 70s added some characterization in the form of ongoing storylines, and humanity-based problems (for instance, Spider-Man was a marginalized nerd in his 'real' life). X-Men featured characters with a full range of emotions and degrees of maturity, as well as one of the greatest love stories in comics, between Cyclops and Phoenix (which ended tragically with Phoenix's death). The characters grew and changed, and moved from being a group of strangers to a family. Although the outstanding artwork by first Dave Cockrum, then John Byrne, was a treat, it was the writing (by Claremont in collaboration with the artists) that really made the book.
My friend Karen called from New York this evening, and we chatted for a while. I talked her into agreeing to go see The Freddy Jones Band in concert next month (it wasn't hard; tickets are cheap and we agree on a lot of rock music; I turned her on to Sonia Dada, for instance). This band is basically a blue-collar guitar band, but they turn in great performances and have unusually strong songwriting (as opposed to being a bunch of guitar-hero-wannabes). Both of their albums are worth picking up.
Oh, yes, and I read Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "Mountain Ways", which won last year's James Tiptree Jr. Award. This award is given to an SF or fantasy story which "expands gender roles" in genre fiction. It's a pretty good story, involving a society in which marriages involve two men and two women, and each member is expected to have sexual relations with one member of the same sex and one of the opposite sex in the marriage. The story involves a marriage with one woman disguised as a man. It's slightly obvious in its execution, but has a nice, ambiguous ending.
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