Author: Paul Constant

Hi!

Thanks so much to all the folks who wrote back with opinions about the cadence of this newsletter. Two of you wrote to say you prefer one big edition at the end of the month, the vast majority of you said you would be happy with two editions per month, and a couple of absolute sickos said they’d read as many newsletters as I could send every month. 

So I’m going to listen to the majority and try emailing two shorter (still free!) editions of this newsletter per month—one on the 15th and one on the last day of the month. I hope I don’t drive the two of you crazy with the extra email, and I reserve the right to switch back if the workload gets too heavy or it feels like the new cadence isn’t working.

In this issue, I want to talk about a movie that has been lodged in my brain since I first watched it a couple of weeks back: One Battle After Another. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to be spoiled, feel free to skip over the next section—I’ve got some great book recommendations at the end of this email. But first, let me say that you absolutely should see this movie—preferably in the theater if you can. It’s a movie that took two decades to be made, but it somehow feels as raw and as real as today’s news headlines.

As far as I know, there’s no word in the English language for a very common occurrence that many of us have experienced: An organization founded to solve a specific problem enjoys a certain amount of success and expands to the point where the organization more or less abandons its stated goal and instead becomes entirely devoted to the complex struggle of making sure that organization continues to thrive. 

For instance, when I worked as a journalist I watched firsthand as the Occupy Seattle protests gradually transformed from a campaign to increase the visibility of America’s growing income inequality into a nonstop self-referential debate about the enforcement of urban camping laws. Many huge non-profits have seen their management structure bloat and detach from the people the non-profit is supposed to help, in favor of instead developing a series of more and more ornate fundraising exercises. 

Elsewhere, corporations become so obsessed with unlimited growth that they hire expensive marketing firms to erase the thing that they’re most famous for from the brand entirely. Because there’s only so much money that can be made from the sale of chicken, Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes KFC, for example, and because health-conscious consumers are shying away from sugary fried bread products, Dunkin’ Donuts becomes, simply, Dunkin’—a name that means absolutely nothing.

We humans are easily distracted animals, and so rules are necessary in order to make cooperation possible. Unfortunately, humans are also obsessed with rules and organizations, and that meta-obsession can consume the whole endeavor if we’re not careful. I’ve asked anthropologists and political science majors, and nobody is aware of a term for this process. “Mission creep” isn’t quite right—it doesn’t capture the snake-eating-its-own-tail of it all. And “bureaucracy” doesn’t recognize the ouroboros of idiocy behind the organizational brain-death.

In any case, my favorite sequence in One Battle After Another is a perfect example of this nameless kind of crushing meta-organizational weight. When Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is trying to call the revolutionary organization that he was a part of a couple of decades ago, he’s greeted by a pedantic know-nothing on the phone who’s more interested in nagging Bob for not knowing the secret pass phrase than he is in overturning the state. 

The revolutionary group has even become so institutionalized that its phone line plays Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as its hold music—a decision that is directionally correct but obviously symptomatic of bigger problems behind the scenes. If the revolution ever does come, I’m pretty sure it won’t have hold music. 

But the best part of the scene is that while Ferguson is trapped in organizational hell, and while anti-immigrant troops are circling, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) is calmly walking around, making sure that his underground network of immigrants are emotionally and physically cared for on a personal level. St. Carlos introduces Ferguson to everyone he meets, acknowledging their personhood in ways that the pencil-necked gatekeeper quibbling on the phone with Bob has likely never considered.

In other words, while Ferguson is quite literally struggling to talk the talk, St. Carlos is walking the walk. 

Without ego or pretense he’s getting the job done, and he’s making it look easy. This happens all the time in the real world—the thankless care work that millions of women perform every day, the mutual aid organizations feeding and protecting people from the real-life anti-immigrant forces that are much scarier than One Battle After Another ever could have anticipated. The opening of the film is full of bombs and guns and car chases, but quiet, caring competence is the true revolutionary act. 

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson says that del Toro basically came up with the character of St. Carlos and his underground immigrant railroad on his own, and I’d argue that means del Toro deserves, at the very least, a credit as co-writer of the screenplay. St. Carlos is easily the most memorable character in a movie crammed full of memorable characters. 

I could go on for thousands of words about this movie. Sean Penn ’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw is what happens when you shove the entirety of the Trump Administration into a leathery human-sized sack. Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson doesn’t make herself fully known until the movie is two-thirds of the way through but she never loses the conviction that the movie is entirely her story. And on and on and on. But for me, my thoughts always go back to that one scene depicting a kind of heroism that you rarely see in the movies: Kind, unassuming, brilliant, and competent. 

I’ve Been Writing

I wrote about the most intriguing (and scariest) paperback releases of October for the Seattle Times. 

I’ve Been Reading

I will always buy any book written by Patricia Lockwood as soon as it’s released. I loved her memoir Priestdaddy and her poetry collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. This month’s Will There Ever Be Another You, a fictionalized account of her experiences in the depth of the Coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of Lockwood’s previous book, the semiautobiographical novel No One Is Talking About This and it’s full of the same surprising images and latticework of carefully constructed sentences. I’ll probably re-read both of these novels together back-to-back because they feel of a piece—but I’ll probably wait to re-read both books until after Lockwood reads with David Sedaris at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, November 16th, so that her reading voice is fresh in my mind. I can’t think of any other writer who is so perfectly distilling the internet’s informal and absurd language into something so personal and profound. It almost makes all the doomscrolling worth it.

I was sideswiped by an amazing novel earlier this month. Anna North’s Bog Queen is the story of a forensic anthropologist who, in the process of investigating a murder, uncovers a 2000-year-old corpse. The novel intertwines the modern-day story of the discovery and its aftermath with flashbacks to the young druid’s life in Iron Age Europe, in the weeks leading up to her death. It’s one of the most engaging and interesting novels I’ve read all year. 

I liked the form of Catherine Lacy’s The Möbius Book more than the content. It’s a flipbook with two front covers that can be read from either side, and the narratives—one told in first person, the other in third person—braid together in different ways, depending on which one you read first. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel as though the narrative earned the interesting format of the book. If you’re going to play with the form of a book like this, your story needs to make that form absolutely essential. I didn’t feel like this one met the challenge.

Vulture, by Phoebe Greenwood, is a novel about war correspondents. It’s a deeply cynical story of the kind of people who charge into war zones for the sake of their bylines. I enjoyed the insiders’ view into the world of war reporting, but it was a little too dark for my already-dark state of mind.

The Bus on Thursday is a novel about a woman who is diagnosed with breast cancer and promptly loses her mind. The novel follows her as her world unravels, putting her teaching job on the line and potentially throwing her into the middle of a murder investigation. It’s a manic, bizarre little book with a fascinating off-kilter narrator—you never know where Shirley Barrett’s protagonist is going to take you on the next page. 

That’s All, Folks

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back in your inboxes at the end of this month. 
Take care,
Paul

Hi!

When I was younger (groan,) summer was the season of pop culture. All the catchiest pop songs tumbled out of the windows of passing cars, all the expensive blockbusters popped off in movie theaters like a months-long fireworks show, and all the grabbiest books by the biggest-name authors weighed down the new arrival tables at local bookstores.

Part of the reason I associate summer with the season of grand pop entertainments is because I was absolutely soaked in the culture of magazines when I was growing up, and all of my beloved magazines published thick summer preview issues full of breathless blurbicles describing all the confections coming our way. And I bought into that enthusiasm with every inch of my being. Every summer, it felt like the world was straining desperately to entertain me, and I was eager to be entertained. 

The pop-culture schedules are still roughly the same. The structures of entertainment industries still favor summer for the release of the crowd-pleasingest cultural artifacts. Podcasters squabble over the songs of the summer and movie theaters still try to entice audiences with big names and bigger CGI spectacles. But something—some urgency, some wildness, some fun—is missing

Maybe now that I’m older, it’s just as simple as the fact that none of this is aimed at me. But based on my limited peer group, I don’t think people between the ages of 13 and 30 have the same enthusiasm for pop-culture summers that I did back then. Everything feels a little smaller and more fractured now than it did when the monoculture was drawing its last breaths at the end of the 20th century. 

So in the spirit of the listicles in my beloved magazines of yore, I thought I would compile a little list of my favorite summer entertainments—the pop culture that has distracted me from the ongoing collapse of the United States of America.

First up, it will probably surprise no one to know that I absolutely loved Superman. I’m aware it’s not the best comic book movie, but it might be my favorite just because it nailed everything that makes me love Superman: David Corenswet was earnest and not at all corny, Rachel Brosnahan nailed the prickly brilliance of Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult understood that Lex Luthor is motivated by envy. Around the time the heroes in the movie were (minor spoiler alert) fighting their way through a rainbow river of negative protons or what the fuck ever that emptied out into a black hole in a pocket universe, I realized that James Gunn was trying to capture the joy of being a kid picking up a comic book from a drug store spinner rack. You don’t always have a clear idea of everything that’s going on in the comic you just bought, but you are desperate to learn everything about this weird and colorful universe in your lap. The Fantastic Four movie was one of the best Marvel movies since the pandemic began, but it doesn’t even feel like it’s playing in the same league as  Superman. Superman felt like it had something important to say about goodness and kindness and living in a cynical world, and I appreciate that kind of investigation in a blockbuster.  And in maybe the biggest surprise, KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix was far and away the most fun animated movie of the summer. In fact, it could potentially be the best animated movie of the year—not earth-shattering, but artful and fun, with catchy original music all the way through. 

The two songs I’ve enjoyed most this summer blend pop with a little bit of melancholy that suits the time. Miley Cyrus’s “End of the World,” which urges us to “pretend it’s not the end of the world,” is exactly what I’m thinking as I go for a long walk in the sunlight and try to momentarily stop thinking about the human rights violations that are probably happening within a couple of miles of me. Reneé Rapp’s sexy, snotty “Leave Me Alone,” with its chorus of “Can I tell you a secret?/I’m so sick of it all,” reminds us that there’s a very fine line between copping a bitchy attitude and falling into a deep depression. And the purest fun of all is Kesha’s “Boy Crazy,” whose video is decidedly NSFW. It’s so good to have Kesha back.

TV has not been particularly great this summer. The fourth season of The Bear recaptures most of the mojo that the disastrous third season squandered. It felt good to see these characters work together again after a weird season where everybody felt detached and mopey—in fact, I think I’d advise new Bear viewers to skip the third season entirely and instead jump from the superlative second season straight to the fourth. And probably the best single episode of TV I saw this summer was the final episode of the second season of Poker Face, which cleverly builds on previous episodes of the season and adds to the show’s mythology in a satisfying way.

Now we’re entering August, which is traditionally a little bit of a pop culture purgatory. Every so often a fun genre flick will break free from the sludge of misfit movie releases, and occasionally one final audacious pop song will escape containment, but for the most part the fireworks show is over, and Serious Autumn is about to begin. Based on how things in the news are going, I imagine I’ll be yearning for the distractions of summer by the time September 30th rolls around. 

I’ve Been Writing

I wrote about July’s best paperback releases for the Seattle Times, and I also wrote about the excellent Long Bros. Books, a fine antiquarian bookstore and bar in Pioneer Square. This is a remarkable shop that every Seattle book-lover should frequent, owned and operated by a true character who knows more about Seattle than just about anyone.

I’ve Been Reading

I took a short trip to Maine earlier this month, and while walking around Portland I pulled a signed paperback of John McPhee’s book The Headmaster out of a Little Free Library. I never would have thought to pick this book up while browsing a bookstore, but I’m so glad kismet dropped it in my hands. It’s a profile of a longtime headmaster of a small New England boys’ school, and the whole time I read the book I was picturing it as directed by Wes Anderson—a whimsical, quirky, colorful sketch of one man who accidentally devoted his whole life to creating an institution that helped transform boys into good men.

A novel I brought on my trip to Maine, Grifter’s Game, was about the exact spiritual opposite of McPhee’s good-hearted character study. It’s the story of a con man who falls in love while pulling a scam, and the ending of this book is so dark, so mean-spirited, that I kind of had to just set the book down and let it wash over me in silence for a while. If you’re in the mood for a quick and dirty Jim Thompson-like crime thriller, this one’s for you.

The Last Bookstore on Earth is a fun genre story about a young woman who runs a bookstore in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. It’s not world-changing, and I actually might have appreciated more bookselling in the plot. But this is a fun vacation distraction for bookish types.

The Anthropologists is an airy piece of literary fiction about a married couple trying to find an apartment in a foreign city. They develop a few friendships, and their relationships get more complicated as they learn more about their new friends. It’s one of those books where we never learn anything concrete about the characters—where they’re from, where they’re going—but this is one case where that literary vagueness actually pays off by evoking a very particular emotional journey at a certain kind of uncertain period of life. It’s a tone poem about feeling estranged from reality, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Ginseng Roots is a book-length graphic memoir by Craig Thompson, author of Blankets, about growing up in a small Wisconsin town that happens to have the world’s best land for growing ginseng. Much of the book is made up of Thompson investigating the global trade of ginseng from Wisconsin to Asia, and I wound up enjoying the non-fiction parts of the book more than the memoir itself—though it is interesting to see Thompson reinvestigating and atoning for the one-sided way he portrayed his family in Blankets.

John Scalzi’s latest, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, is a novel made up loosely linked chapters about what happens when one day the moon suddenly and for no reason turns into cheese. Scalzi seriously explores the physics of the situation—it turns out that a giant ball of cheese the size of the moon would almost immediately start collapsing in on itself—and then wrings every cheese pun imaginable out of the situation while featuring a huge cast of people whose lives are transformed by the situation, from astronauts to politicians to billionaires to ordinary folks. This one is pretty much just a thought experiment run wild, but I had a lot more fun with it than I did with Scalzi’s last couple of books.

The Disappearing Middle-Class Author

I’ve been thinking a lot about a post that local author Cherie Priest wrote on her blog. In theory it was supposed to be a post celebrating the release of her latest novel, a haunted house thriller called It Was Her House First. 

But Priest, as she explains, is going through it right now and so her post is kind of an extended explanation of how hard it is to be a non-superstar author in the year 2025. It’s the first public airing of many complaints and observations that authors have shared with me off the record over the last few years, and I think anyone who cares about books should read it.

This one sentence is the thesis statement: “Publishers spent less and less on promotion (and there were fewer and fewer venues to spend it), and authors were expected to do more, and more, and more.”

Too many people still have the mistaken belief that publishing a book is shorthand for Making It Big—once that book comes out, you become a Published Author and your career has forever changed. But publishers do very little in terms of publicity these days, and very few media outlets devote any time to books. The reality is that most authors are lucky to sell a few hundred copies of their books, and they’re pretty much expected to sell those books by themselves.

I’m not going to pretend that the publishing industry ever treated writers fairly. It’s always been exploitative and exclusionary. But there used to be a few middle-class novelists out there who managed to make a modest living from writing, whereas now it feels like you have one Stephen King and you have ten thousand authors with day jobs trying to find the time to do promotional podcast interviews that they had to schedule themselves. 

The middle has been cut out of the publishing industry. You’re either a blockbuster hit or you’re a nobody. It’s probably not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that the economy is getting hollowed out, with fewer and fewer Americans landing comfortably in the middle class. 

Call me crazy, but I would much rather live in a world in which hundreds of authors are able to make a decent living than live in a world where one billionaire author is able to launch a franchise and then spend a chunk of her fortune to try and wipe out the civil rights of a minority. And I’d rather live in a world where millions of Americans are able to afford homes, healthcare, and retirement than live in a world where one Nazi with an electric car company is in the headlines all the fucking time. 

Anyway, it seems to me that the publishing industry isn’t a legitimate business plan anymore. It’s a pyramid scheme that bets everything on one big name breaking out per season while thousands of other suckers take the fall. 

That’s a lot of complaining, so here’s what I want to do about it: I think for my part as a reader, I’m going to try to focus more on reading books from small presses and try as hard as I can to step away from the big five publishing conglomerates that have hollowed out the creative class. And if you have any ideas on how to establish a literary middle class, I’d love to hear them, too.

Enjoy your purgatorial August and I’ll see you next month, when the days become noticeably shorter.

Paul

Hi!

Sometimes the summer solstice leaves me feeling a little depressed. I’ve always seen the solstice as a time to celebrate and luxuriate in the long warm days, but also a time to mentally prepare for the dark days ahead. I think it says something about the way I see the world that my innate response to the longest day of the year is not to think “how pleasant that the days are so long,” but rather, “it’s only going to get darker from here on out.”

Weirdly, because this year’s solstice was cloudy and gray in Seattle, I didn’t experience my usual sense of joyous dread. The solstice could have been any other day, and the summer is still tentative, like it’s stuck in dress rehearsal mode. Maybe the 4th of July will make it all seem real.

Or maybe the world is so insane that it’s hard to focus on something as ephemeral as the seasons. For a child of the Cold War 1980s, all this talk about nuclear weapons and bunker-busting missiles has been nightmare-making. It appears that Elon Musk is one or two meme-able moments from getting away with going full Nazi without facing any major repercussions. And Donald Trump is even more Donald Trump than he used to be.

All of this is to say that I could use some buffoonery in my life. All the art I’m reading and watching and listening to right now seems too serious and afraid to take risks. The internet has been algorithm-ed to death and even the very nerdy subcultures I used to frequent on social media now feel formulaic and prone to interference by bots and trolls.

The fad diets right now are obsessed with protein and meat and maximizing muscle. Every piece of tech news is about how AI will destroy the world. A shocking number of celebrities and influencers are using steroids, and gambling has become normalized in public spaces. Both political parties are obsessed with slashing budgets and cutting anything humane and decent out of government. Everything in the culture feels at best mean and at worst unnecessarily cruel.

So here’s a question that I’ve been rolling around in my head for a while: What if the way out of this doom loop isn’t through resistance and being more joyless than the opposition, but instead through dicking around and having fun?

Anyway, what I do know is this: It’s been a Harsh Year and a Grim Winter and a Serious Spring and a Dour Summer. If I don’t have a Goofy-Ass Fall in my future, I might just pop a blood vessel.

I’ve Been Writing

I visited East West, a religion and spirituality bookshop that used to be in the Roosevelt neighborhood but now is up in Edmonds.

I looked at the best paperback releases of June.

And while my boss Zach Silk was out of town, I contributed an essay about the evils of private equity for the weekly Pitch newsletter. Basically, any failing chain store you can think of (Toys R Us; Red Lobster; Bed, Bath & Beyond) has either already been or is about to be sucked up by a private equity firm looking to dump a bunch of debt into the company, sell it for scrap, lay off all the employees, and then leave the chain for dead.

I’ve Been Reading

A few of you reached out after last month’s issue about my long walks to recommend books about walking meditation. I read one of those recommendations this month: Hiking Zen by Phap Xa and Phap Lou. It’s a short, straightforward guide to being more mindful while you walk and incorporating walking into a meditation practice. I already do box breathing at certain points of my walks, but this book offered several other suggestions that I can’t wait to try.

I’m a sucker for an Oulipian book, and I recently found one titled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books by Marcel Benabou in a local Little Free Library. It’s basically an attempt to write a book about the meta experience of writing and reading a book. If, like me, you enjoy reading books that are extended exercises to explore the limitations of literature, this is a good one to put on the shelf alongside Raymond Queneau.

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian who was famous for telling the wealthy elites who gather at the Davos conference that they had to pay their taxes if they actually want to improve the world. (He was not invited back to Davos.) His new book Moral Ambition is an attempt to do the same for working professionals—it’s basically just a book-long pitch intended to convince middle managers and corporate drones to quit their jobs and go do work that actually improves the world. I don’t know if I buy the book’s premise, exactly, but I enjoy being directly challenged by a book and I appreciated the way it forced me to investigate my values.

I met Seattle author Danya Kukafka at a literary function a little while back and that chance encounter reminded me to read her novel that had been on my to-be-read shelf for a year. Notes on an Execution is a literary exploration of a serial killer and the women whose lives he forever altered. I really enjoyed how the book picked apart some of the most enduring cliches about serial killers and our true crime culture. (Fun fact: Kukafka is also a literary agent, and I have loved many of the books that she’s represented.)

John Muir: To the Heart of Solitude is a graphic novel by someone apparently named Lomig, and it’s a biography of the great American naturalist. I appreciated how this comic incorporated the appreciation of nature into its rhythms—there are panels and pages that just consist of beautifully drawn trees and plants, encouraging us to take in the same nature that drove Muir to go on his epic walks around and across America. It’s spare, but it’s an affecting comics biography—one of the better examples of the form I’ve encountered lately.

And I also read Alison Bechdel’s fictionalized memoir Spent, which also serves as a continuation of the characters in her long-running alt-weekly soap opera comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel is one of the best in the business when it comes to pacing out comics about interpersonal dynamics—she’s incredible at juggling a large cast and investing the reader in every single character. But this one did feel self-indulgent in the same way that some of the middle works of literary figures like Philip Roth and John Updike used to feel. There comes a point in the career of the most-lauded artists that they can only see to the edge of their own writing desks. I read this book, and I was entertained, but I came away from it liking Bechdel a little bit less as an artist.

Tell Them While You Have Them

If you asked me in my teens, I probably would have told you that Peter David was one of my favorite writers. He wrote comics including X-Factor, Spider-Man 2099, and a 12-year-long run on The Incredible Hulk that was probably my favorite monthly read when I started buying comic books with my own money as a child. David also wrote a bookshelf’s worth of Star Trek novels and a few original novels including the monster farce Howling Mad, about a wolf who turns into a human after being bitten by a werewolf.

I liked the way that David always made room for humor in his fiction—he’d slip a pun or an allusion to a raunchy joke into virtually every scene he ever wrote, because he understood that making a reader laugh is the best way to make a reader care about a story. But he wasn’t afraid to write about violence and war and other serious issues, either. In many ways he struck a perfect balance for a writer of commercial fiction—he knew how to keep a story moving but he was never happy just advancing a plot for the sake of advancing a plot. He wanted his books to mean something, and they did.

Peter David died on my birthday. He was 68 years old, which is too young. And his family had to run several crowdfunding campaigns in the final years of his life–first to help him with some tax trouble, and then to pay for healthcare after a stroke and kidney failure in 2022.

I want to say plainly that it’s downright shameful that David created so much value for Marvel and DC Comics, for Star Trek and other intellectual properties, yet in the end his family had to ask fans for money to pay for healthcare. Concepts that David created were used in billion-dollar-grossing movies, but none of those companies stepped in to even help make his last days more comfortable.

David himself wrote many times about the shabby ways that comics publishers treated their creators as they entered old age. I recall him encouraging fans to send money and support to other writers who had fallen on hard times. So it’s likely that he knew what he was probably in for. But it’s disgusting that this is the kind of world we live in—where a man who wrote hundreds of thousands of pages of prose, non-fiction, comics, and screenplays can wind up with nothing to his name. Our priorities as a culture are all wrong, and they’re not likely to improve anytime soon.

When I heard about David’s death, I tracked down six of his books online—a serialized collection of paperbacks under the series title “Psi-Man,” which were originally published under the pen name “David Peters” but were eventually republished under his real name. They’re a sci-fi twist on the men’s adventure serials of the 1970s and 80s, about a pacifist named Chuck Simon who has psychic powers. Simon (Psi-Man, get it?) must go on the run to evade the shadowy government and criminal forces that want to harness his powers for evil, and he is aided by a sardonic telepathic German Shepherd who served as both the comic relief and the muscle.

I’m reading my way through the Psi-Man books right now and David’s writing is just as fun and well-structured as I recall. I don’t know if I could recommend these books to anyone who doesn’t have experience with David’s writing or serialized men’s fiction like Doc Savage or The Destroyer series of novels. But it’s been a wonderful experience to go back and experience the writer who made such an impression on my youth with adult eyes. Reading these books has filled me with gratitude for the life of a man who I never met.

So anyway, here’s a gentle suggestion: If a writer who meant a lot to you as a kid is still alive, maybe you should write them a fan letter while you still can.

Hello!

On the first Saturday of this month, I did my annual(ish) walk around Lake Washington. 

Let’s start with the stats that people most frequently ask about: I left the house around 4:30 in the morning and got home around 10 pm. According to my Pedometer++ app, it was 109,284 steps, and 60.4 miles. I walked from the Chief Sealth Trail to Beacon Hill, then over to 23rd Ave, up to the Burke Gilman Trail at Husky Stadium and along the Lake Washington Trail around the top of the lake. I took the Kirkland Connector Trail south and then got a little lost amid the construction south of Bellevue and fumbled my way through the neighborhood of Woodridge until I picked up the Lake Washington Trail south in Factoria again, then looped up and over to the Chief Sealth Trail home.

And to the frequently asked physical questions: My feet were not blistered, I’ve never lost any toenails while out on any of my walks, and while I was a little stiff the next morning I was totally fine by about 10 am the next day. I didn’t sit down or really stop for breaks aside from waiting in line for coffee, the bathroom, or groceries. And rather than stopping for meals, I ate a steady rotation of protein bars. I also drank a lot of Gatorade and once I got home I ate a lot of bananas and guzzled some pickle juice. 

In terms of equipment, I swear by my Brooks Cascadia 18GTX trail runners and my Danish Endurance socks. 

As to the more philosophical matters: I am the kind of person who enjoys rituals, but I’m also the kind of person who is deeply suspicious about whether rituals are a good thing in and of themselves. I enjoyed taking part in National Novel Writing Month, for instance, until I began to suspect that the exercise wasn’t improving my writing at all, and that I was instead just getting good at writing 50,000 words in the month of November. 

Similarly, this tradition of walking around Lake Washington has caused me to wonder if maybe, rather than improving my health and testing my physical limits, it’s just making me very good at the very highly specialized talent of walking around Lake Washington in a single day. I’ve learned, for instance, where all the bathrooms are and I’ve timed my breaks for coffee and hydration to fit perfectly within those prescribed stops. The walk now runs like clockwork, which almost flies in the face of the challenge of an all-day walk. 

These walks also used to leave me completely flattened. One time, I was lying on the floor swearing that I’d never walk around the lake again. The last time I did the walk I added an extra few miles to the loop and I was so exhausted that I couldn’t see straight. But at the end of this month’s walk, I wasn’t particularly tired in any meaningful way—in fact, I walked an extra half-mile past my house because I was at 59.5 miles and I wanted to break the 60-mile barrier. So if the point of the walks is to go as hard and as long as I possibly can, I guess this year’s walk was a failure.

But the real point of these walks, I think, is to hit a mental and physical point that I wrote about in the Seattle Times a few years back: 

“I do them to chase a magic moment that often arrives sometime around the 30-mile mark, after I’ve listened to all the podcasts in my phone. There’s a point where the volume on everything — the traffic noise, the pink and purple sprays of wildflowers, my nattering thoughts — turns way down, and then goes completely silent.
“In those moments, I’m not even myself. I’m just a pair of feet measuring my brief journey through the universe, one step at a time.“

I think of this state as a kind of ego death: All the countless worries and random thoughts and observations that make up what I believe to be me—those ambient traffic sounds in my brain of thoughts darting to and fro—just sort of fade away. There’s nothing to think about aside from the next step.

Using that metric, this was my most successful walk yet. I was in that state of walking meditation for roughly three hours, from Renton to home. It’s never been that sustained for that long. Even more unusual, I felt weirdly high from the experience for the next three days. 

I walked the me right out of me.

I’ve Been Writing

I spotlighted 11 of May’s best new paperback releases. 

I also checked in on three local bookstores that have made big shifts in the last year: Nook & Cranny Books moved from Capitol Hill to the University District near Ravenna Park, Paper Boat moved to the Junction at the heart of West Seattle, and Couth Buzzard Books changed ownership and opened a brand new fancy food service counter. 

And I celebrated the opening of the Seattle area’s first brick-and-mortar romance bookstore—Hardcovers, up in Mill Creek. 

I’ve Been Reading

If you’d like to read a smart person write about the importance of bookstores, Jeff Deutsch’s In Praise of Good Bookstores is probably exactly what you’re looking for. These types of books often strike me as a little too grating and navel-gaze-y, but this was the right book at the right time for me, given the current anti-intellectual and anti-free-speech activities of the Trump Administration. 

I enjoyed Jessica Anthony’s political novel Enter the Aardvark, but her third novel, The Most, is even better. It’s a very short novel about an abnormally warm day in the fall of 1957, when a housewife decides to go into the pool and just stay there. Her husband and children are dismayed—what will the neighbors think?—but she refuses to leave the pool for hours and hours. This is a book about marriage and adulthood that doesn’t feel cliched. 

Edward Ashton wrote the sci-fi novel that became the basis for the excellent Bong Joon Ho movie Mickey 17. His latest sci-fi novel, The Fourth Consort, is probably not worthy of that high of a level of adaptation. Instead, it’s a fun sci-fi novel about a guy who accidentally joins the harem of an alien queen (but not in a fun, sexy way.) 

It’s easy to understand why the promotional materials want to compare Liann Zhang’s novel Julie Chan Is Dead with R.F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface. Zhang’s plot bears a lot of similarities to Kuang’s excellent novel. It’s about a poor young woman named Julie Chan who learns that her estranged twin sister, a wealthy social media influencer, has died. Rather than mourning her sister, Chan decides to take her sister’s place. But this book goes to very different places than Yellowface. It’s a broader, more fantastical novel and it would perhaps be more aptly titled Escape from Influencer Island. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Yellowface—that’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years, so it’s a tall order—but I had a lot of fun with it.

I enjoyed The Thursday Murder Club, which is soon to be adapted into a miniseries by Netflix, but by the time the charming protagonists discovered that a second murder had happened I found myself wishing they had solved the crime already. A little too long for what it is, but enjoyable.

James Morrow is one of the most important authors I encountered in my youth. His satirical—some might even say blasphemous—novel Only Begotten Daughter, which I discovered when I was in my teens, opened the world up to me in ways that I’m still discovering. In his latest works, Morrow has been exploring two of his biggest fascinations—his admiration for Charles Darwin and his love of black-and-white classic monster films. Behold the Ape combines evolutionary theory with a feminist take on King Kong in a showbiz satire that doesn’t hit the heights of Morrow’s best work but which clearly belongs on the same shelf as those books.

Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915 is a fairly dry and academic study of intentional communities in the Puget Sound area around the turn of the 20th century. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone for casual reading, but I hope some author is reading this book and planning to turn one of its stories into a full-length novel, because this region is full of people who tried to build utopias and that is fascinating and fertile ground for fiction. 

And finally, I read a pair of books about the embarrassing habits of rich people. Survival of the Richest is a short and entertaining book about super-rich people trying to build apocalypse-proof bunkers that will allow them to survive the end of the world. (Spoiler alert: They will not survive the end of the world.) More Everything Forever is a book that pokes plenty of holes in the growing obsessions of the super-rich, including the nonsensical belief that a “singularity” is coming that will bring about a technological paradise, eliminating death and aging; and the moronic philosophy of “Effective Altruism” that basically only exists to fluff the egos of rich people and make them feel as though they’re the all-important saviors of all humanity. 

Does Something Gotta Give?

I turned 49 this month. The day before my birthday, I walked past a notice stapled to the front of a bar. It was a public health notice warning the community that a person with measles had been at the bar on a certain date, and advising anyone who was at the bar on that date to keep an eye out for measles symptoms within a given timeframe.

So I’ve lived nearly half a century, and this was the first public notice of a measles outbreak that I’ve ever seen in my life. The image stuck very firmly in my head and I haven’t been able to shake it. Not to be superstitious, but it had the feeling of some kind of a portent. 

That’s what the news feels like to me right now. Every headline could be the first ten minutes of a disaster movie—aggression between Pakistan and India, Israel’s latest ground operation in Gaza, old-fashioned diseases roaring back and thriving thanks to anti-vaxxers, instability in international relations. 

It’s important to not give these eerie feelings too much credence. But it’s hard for a pattern-recognizing primate to ignore the lessons we learned before. We saw this already in the first Trump Administration—specifically, in 2020 with Covid. It started as an item low on the front page of a news site, and then it slowly spread to consume everyone in a global conflagration. 

Because the same guy is back in the White House dumping the same buckets of chaos all over the mechanisms that run the world without any reason or sense of responsibility, this moment feels much like that pre-Covid moment to me. Pick any news site and read the headlines and it all feels like a game of societal Russian roulette: Which potential disaster is going to be the one that takes off and personally affects every human on the planet?

I don’t want to be a downer. I don’t really believe in the end of the world, as such—every person who lives long enough will eventually see the world that they grew up in wither and die and be replaced by another one. But rarely in my lifetime has the world felt so primed for the unfettered release of chaos as it does right now. 

Now, chaos isn’t always a bad thing. Society can also make great progress in moments of chaos. So I guess what I’m saying is keep your eyes open and keep your imaginations primed. There could be danger right ahead, but there could also be opportunities to build good new things. 

Take care,
Paul