HM Sloop Hotspur

Alison Bechdel, Spent: A Comic Novel (2025)

The Dykes to Watch Out For cast returns, absent Mo, who is replaced by "Alison," a neurotic graphic novelist who is suffering (not very graciously) through the indignity of her bestselling graphic novel about her father's death, Death and Taxidermy, being made into a hit TV show. Meanwhile, Alison is struggling to write $UM: An Accounting, a graphic memoir about the role of money in Alison's life.

(...which is, presumably, Spent itself. Spent does talk a little bit about Alison's finances, but I didn't think it had much to say on the subject that was terribly insightful.)

Mo always annoyed me back in the day, and I don't like her doppleganger "Alison" any better. In fact, "Alison's" griping about the success of Death and Taxidermy leaves me wondering if Alison Bechdel resents those of us who loved the musical Fun Home? Idk, it all just left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

However, I loved getting to hang out with the core the DTWOF squad: Ginger, Lois, Sparrow, and Stuart. Sparrow and Stuart's offspring, J.R. (they/them), is college-aged now, and absolutely steals the show. They are so righteous and black-and-white and angry. The kid believes that the older DTWOF generation are all bourgeois sell-outs, and everything the older generation says only confirms it. J.R. is aces at pushing all the DTWOF crew's buttons, and I love the kid to pieces.


Neil Sharpson (illus. Dan Santat), Don't Trust Fish (2025)

Children's book riffing on the cladistic incoherence of "fish" and launching from there into a full-blown conspiracy theory. (After all, every conspiracy is fueled by a seed of truth, is it not?) I note, however, that this conspiracy theory serves a second purpose as pro-crab propaganda, and internal evidence suggests that the book may even have been written by a crab! (The author's bio strenuously denies this, but the book's pro-crab agenda cannot be denied.) Those of us well up on our evolutionary biology, however, note that "crabs" are also cladistically incoherent, and thus no more trustworthy than fish. Hmmm...

Moral: trust neither fish nor crabs, and most of all, do not trust this book.


Jonathan Green, The Vulgar Tongue: Green's History of Slang (2015)

Less a history of slang, and more a history of lexicographer's sources for slang. Beginning with beggar books of the fifteenth and sixteeth centuries, Green traces the ever-expanding sources for English slang up through the present moment. Early on, sources mostly consist of moralizing glossaries serving the dual purpose of titillation and warning; later on there were lexicographies for lexicography's sake; eventually, however, slang expanded into plays, novels, lyrics, and newspapers. There are dedicated chapters for the slang of Cockneys, Australians, Gays, African-Americans, the military, and other groups, as well as a dedicated chapter on (hetero)sexual slang. Most chapters give a smattering of newly coined words from each source, plus a discussion of how the source (and its description or use of slang) fit into its societal moment. For some topics, he'll also discuss trends, influences, and evolution in the slang itself.

( Random notes )

Anyway, it was a fascinating read, lots of good gossip, learned a ton of stuff, nice multi-century tour of the underbelly of Anglophone social history, and you could build a suggested reading list from this that would keep you going for the rest of your life, easily.