Hi!

Seattle’s Labor-Day-weekend music and arts festival, Bumbershoot, announced their arts programming earlier this month. There’s a fashion exhibit, an animation show, performance art, kinetic sculptures, a “comedy dome,” a cat circus, wrestling, gymnastics, skateboarding, and more.

You know what they didn’t announce? A single damn literary event of any kind.

This is a tremendous bummer. Bumbershoot has always celebrated literary arts. Jim Carroll headlined the festival’s arts programming in 2000. They’ve welcomed brilliant graphic novel creators like Allie Brosh and Harvey Pekar. Literary organizations like McSweeney’s and Sister Spit performed at the show. And big-time novelists read, there, too, including Terry McMillan, Larry McMurtry in 1977, and Ursula K. LeGuin in 1998.

This year—so far, at least—there’s bupkis. Not even roving groups of local poets entertaining crowds as they wait to get into venues, as was featured at a Folklife festival a while back. Organizers couldn’t even be bothered to throw a little money at a great local literary magazine like Moss, or a literary organization like Jack Straw or Clarion West.

It’s just preposterous to me that Seattle’s preeminent arts festival doesn’t seem to feel the need to represent Seattle’s literary arts at all. We are a UNESCO-recognized City of Literature, for crying out loud! But the summer-ending arts festival, the big event that brings the city together to celebrate art for art’s sake, can’t even be bothered to host a single lousy reading?

I’m not going to suggest that people write Bumbershoot’s organizers and demand including a literary arts program. They’ve made it pretty clear they don’t want book people at their party. 

I’m just mentioning it here because I think it’s a goddamn shame. That’s all.

I’ve Been Writing

But while I am incredibly disappointed about Bumbershoot, I want to put it on the record that I am positively thrilled with this year’s Seattle Reads selection. Seattle Public Library is spending this spring and summer celebrating Octavia Butler and her incredible sci-fi book Parable of the Sower in book clubs, readings, panel events, and other programming all over the greater Seattle area. I wrote about it for the Seattle Times. I was especially thrilled to talk to local sci-fi writer Nisi Shawl, who was friends with Butler in her last few years here in the Seattle area. 

I also previewed some of the best-looking March paperback releases for the Times. 

And I profiled a pair of local authors this month, too. First, I talked to graphic memoirist Tessa Hulls about her astounding generational story Feeding Ghosts, which I think should be this year’s breakout graphic memoir. And then I talked with Seattle journalist Reagan Jackson about her new collection of journalism, Still True. These two women are positively crushing it, and I look forward to decades of great work from them.

And finally, I wrote about Kent’s Page Turner Books, a nerd-friendly new and used bookstore that has survived two disastrous ceiling collapses, only to come back bigger and stronger than ever. If you ever want to soak yourself in genre, you should get lost in the shelves of mass-market mysteries and sci-fi at Page Turner. 

I’ve Been Reading

Speaking of genre mass-markets, I went on vacation this month and took an armload of pulpy paperbacks with me, so this section will be a little longer than usual. I read a collection of short pieces by Harlan Ellison, Stalking the Nightmare, that I remember loving toward the end of my teen years, but which didn’t do much for me anymore. Ellison’s work in general seems not to be aging too well, though big-name writers like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman still speak fondly of him. 

Bob Fingerman’s Pariah is a post-apocalyptic novel about a woman with the power to repel zombies in a zombie-ridden world. Some of the characterization—particularly of the titular pariah—is killer, but the book’s pre-MeToo take on misogyny and sexual assault prevents me from recommending this too heartily.

I read two novels by popular 20th-century novelists who are now largely forgotten. The Storyteller is a semiautobiographical novel by Harold Robbins, who was one of the best-selling authors of the latter half of the 1900s. It was a positively dreadful read: sexist, racist, self-aggrandizing, no plot—trash in the most disparaging sense of the word. (I do recommend Andrew Wilson’s biography of Robbins, The Man Who Invented Sex, though—Robbins’s life is way more interesting than his work.)

Ira Levin, the other forgotten 20th-century giant, is a favorite novelist of mine. The plots of his novels are as taut as harp-strings, and he always has interesting genre ideas that feel deeply resonant with the human condition. You’ve definitely heard of movies based on his books: Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver. This time I read A Kiss Before Dying, a Highsmith-style dark thriller that puts the reader into the head of a murderous sociopath and then shows the repercussions of his actions through the perspectives of people around him. I loved this one—a dark amusement park ride of a novel, for sure.

Gene Smith’s When the Cheering Stopped is a non-fiction account of President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and his White House staff’s herculean efforts to hide the president’s poor health from the American people. This is a story that is somehow simultaneously more salacious and less salacious than what you’ve heard.

I read an old biography of Stanley Kubrick a few months ago, and it left me wanting something a little more comprehensive. So I read Robert Kolker’s Kubrick: An Odyssey, the latest biography of the director. This one scratched all my itches—behind-the-scenes gossip of the making of his films, insight into films that he never made, and mythbusting explanations of his strengths and weaknesses. Related: I watched Barry Lyndon for the first time last month and I was delighted to watch a film that was so transparently willed into being by one person. 

I love the premise of Frederik Backman’s novel My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. It’s told from the perspective of a young girl whose eccentric grandmother dies and leaves her a list of unfinished business to accomplish, and while some of the book is quite funny and tender, too much of it is mawkish and overwrought. It’s a great idea with nowhere to go. 

Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is for People is one of those short books about grief that seem to have become a standalone literary genre. In this case, Crosley is writing about the death of a beloved friend who worked with her at the publicity department at Knopf. I’m not, thankfully, in the middle of grieving anyone, so I can’t attest to its healing power. But it’s a smart and clear-eyed story of friendship and loss, and even if it didn’t feel like the book successfully tied all its loose ends together, I still appreciated its elegance and emotion.

Acts of Service is a debut novel by Lillian Fishman about a young woman who gets swept into an open relationship. It’s one of those books where every character, in the right light, is a normal person disguised as a monster—but at the same time, you could easily see a nice young person in their 20s absolutely identifying with these characters on a fundamental level. 

Katherine Min worked on the novel that would become The Fetishist for years. She envisioned it as a kind of Lolita, only about white men who fetishize Asian women. Now it’s been released as a posthumous publication, and it’s one of the better novels I’ve read in a while. 

Betting on Dread

I don’t follow sports at all. And I mean at all. From the Olympics to baseball to soccer to a child’s tee-ball game, anything sports-related just bounces off my big dumb head. But I did briefly take notice in 2018, when the Supreme Court basically took the reins off sports betting in the case Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association and 36 states soon legalized sports betting.

At the time, I noticed it because it had the characteristics of most other modern Supreme Court decisions—smugly irresponsible, with the very real threat of dire consequences for ordinary people looming just overhead. 

I feel like a bit character in the early part of a zombie movie—terrible things are happening in the background and I’m just barely noticing that something is amiss. Because I don’t watch sports on TV or read about sports in the media, I’ve been noticing small consequences lurch around slowly in the background. 

For instance, I’ll be listening to a comedy podcast and a sports betting ad will come on—something that never would have happened ten years ago. I’ll glimpse an ad for a betting service on a cable TV playing at a restaurant. A pundit will make a reference to gambling in a way that feels so much more casual than it would have years ago.

Now, I’ve gathered from headlines that supposedly one of the best baseball players in America—a guy whose name I’d literally never heard before—is swept up in a gambling scandal. The consequences of the Court’s actions are gaining speed now, and they’re starting to do some damage.

The amazing thing about all this is how utterly obvious it is. We’ve seen what happens when you loosen the rules around sports betting. I am allergic to sports, but even I know about the Black Sox scandal. When you put this kind of temptation in front of a bunch of athletes—which is to say a dozens of highly competitive and impulsive young men with a lot of extra money and a shared feeling of invulnerability—they’re going to fall for it. This might be the first major scandal of the post-Murphy era, but even I know it won’t be the last.

And that’s just the beginning of this particular monster movie. I suspect in the next five years we’re going to see an uptick in young men ruining their lives, now that it’s ridiculously easy to bet on sports. We’ll see some app finally perfect making sports betting as addictive and easy as pulling the arm on a penny slot machine and then you’re going to have a small city’s population worth of 22-year-old men pondering suicide because all of a sudden they’re $75,000 in the hole and they only make $22,000 a year. There’s a lot of misery, pain, and destruction coming our way, and along the way a handful of people are going to get insanely rich.

Again, anyone with an ounce of foresight could have predicted how this was going to go. But the Supreme Court, as it stands, is only interested in looking backward—at wondering what a bunch of dead slave owners in powdered wigs would do about gambling, or guns, or abortion. And the Court’s colonial cosplay is going to immiserate and kill hundreds of thousands of people before we get the opportunity to repair the damage they’ve done.

We’ve got to fix our judicial system. We need term limits for judges, because only royalty should be given titles for life. We need to make sure that judges have to live with the consequences of their actions, the same way all of us do. Top to bottom, we need to reform the whole damn judicial system so judges don’t just wallow in their own corruption. That’s my point. That’s what I want to say. 

This has been an intense one! Sorry. Hope your spring is going well. See you at the end of April!

Paul

Hi there! 

Earlier this month, AHOY Comics published my most recent comics work in Project: Cryptid #3, a story I wrote called “The Demon in the Pines.” It’s a pioneer story about the Pacific Northwest illustrated by the great Peter Krause and colored by the marvelous Pippa Bowland. Even better, my story is published in the same issue as a fantastic story by Bryce Ingman—also illustrated by Krause, in a completely different style—about one of my favorite cryptids: The Loveland Frogman. 

This is the last comics work I’ll have out in 2023, and I hope you can pick up a copy at your local comics shop. But if you can’t find a physical copy, you can also buy a digital copy of the comic from the good folks at Omnibus, an independently owned digital comics app that is beautifully filling the huge gap left behind when Amazon took their Comixology app off the market. I have no idea why Amazon seems to be institutionally losing interest in comics—in addition to deleting Comixology, they also quietly removed the comics category from their social media app Goodreads’ best of 2023 awards—but I’m glad to see the good folks at Omnibus stepping up to fill the void.

And I just added an event to my calendar that Seattle-based readers of this newsletter might be interested in attending: On December 5th at Town Hall Seattle, I’ll be interviewing former Elizabeth Warren adviser and Vanderbilt University law professor Ganesh Sitaraman about his new book Why Flying Is Miserable and How to Fix It. In the book, he explains how the modern hellscape of air travel is the direct result of choices to deregulate the airline industry in the 1970s, and what we can do to make the skies friendly again. I’ve interviewed Sitaraman before, and he’s a brilliant thinker who deeply cares about making economic policy work for everyone. This should be fun; I hope you’ll join us.

I’ve Been Writing

In addition to my bookstore profiles, I’m picking up a new regular gig at the Seattle Times: At the beginning of every month, I’ll highlight somewhere between six to eight interesting new paperbacks. For my debut column, I recommend six November releases from authors including Haruki Murakami and Allegra Goodman. These columns are surprisingly fun to write—and hopefully fun to read—and I really enjoy getting to see all the new books that are coming out in the weeks ahead. 

I also asked three awesome Seattle-area booksellers to share a few of their favorite holiday recommendations, and their selections were wide-ranging and surprising. Even if you don’t go for holiday gift guides as a rule, I bet you’ll find a new book to love in this piece.

Husband-and-wife Seattle cartoonists Jessixa and Aaron Bagley published their first full-length comic collaboration this month—a YA graphic novel based loosely on Jessixa’s childhood titled Duel. I interviewed them about the process of writing the book, why Aaron was the right artist to draw the story, and why it’s okay to make your main characters do unlikable things every now and again.

Up to now, the 21st century hasn’t been great for LGBTQ+ bookstores in Seattle—though most every store in town now has a good-sized LGBTQ+ section, it seemed that local gay specialty bookstores were going extinct. Earlier this month, Charlie’s Queer Books opened in Fremont, putting a new spin on the proud tradition of LGBTQ+ bookselling. It’s a gorgeous, colorful, joyous space and if you live in Seattle you really have to stop by and check it out. Writing this story was a pleasure, and I loved being at Charlie’s for their first official day in business. 

I also guest-hosted an episode of the Pitchfork Economics podcast this month. Goldy and I had the honor of interviewing economist Claudia Sahm, who is the inventor of a rule that economists use to determine whether or not we’re entering a recession. It’s called the Sahm Rule, and, based on this conversation, boy does it seem stressful to have a rule named after you!

I’ve Been Reading

The places where I tend to write about books have a no-self-published-book policy, so I want to use this newsletter to lavish some praise on Manatee Cove, a new comic written, drawn, and published by Seattle stand-up comedian and cartoonist Brett Hamil. It’s his debut fiction graphic novella, and it’s a tender and funny portrait of a young boy teetering on the precipice of adulthood. I recognized myself a little bit in this comic—though the evangelical Christian Floridian adults bear thankfully very little resemblance to the adults in my childhood. The comic is relatively quiet and internal, but it has a few bawdy laughs in it—it gives off a feeling reminiscent of an episode of the Wonder Years as written by Harry Crews. It’s available on Hamil’s website, and Seattleites can also buy copies at Nook & Cranny Books on Capitol Hill or the Fantagraphics Bookstore in Georgetown. 

For no particular reason other than the workings of the Seattle Public Library hold system, the other books that I’ve read this month wound up grouped into two general categories: Nonfiction books about movies and show business, and biographies of comic-strip cartoonists.

In quick succession, I read a book about 1980s male action movie stars titled The Last Action Heroes, a history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe titled MCU, and a history of Frank Herbert’s Dune series and the TV and movie adaptations of the books titled The Spice Must Flow. All three were interesting, fun, and breezy reads. Action Heroes appealed to me because I’m never going to read a biography of, say, Sylvester Stallone, but I was more than happy to read a gossipy chapter-long biography of Stallone and an accompanying account of his various feuds and foibles through the drug-drenched, money-hungry 1970s and 80s. MCU had less juicy gossip than Action Heroes, but it came out at the perfect time—a retrospective of a studio that seemingly could do no wrong, until absolutely everything started to go wrong. And as someone who enjoys the lore around Dune more than the actual writing in the Dune books, The Spice Must Flow is an excellent overview of all things Dune-related, with capsule reviews of the later books in the series that I have no interest in reading and a great overview of the fan culture that has built up around the books over the last few decades. 

And while we’re on the subject of showbiz, I forgot to mention last month that I enjoyed Maria Bamford’s memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult. It’s a warts-and-all account of Bamford’s various struggles to maintain her mental health, and all the sketchy schemes that temporarily helped her to achieve balance. Her honesty is disarming and the book is genuinely funny.

I happened to read two biographies of comic-strip geniuses this month, both told in comics form: Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles Schulz and Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy. The Schulz biography has the conceit of being formatted like a collection of comic strips starring Schulz—so the book has the rhythm of six black-and-white four-panel comic strips in a row, followed by a longer, full-color “Sunday” comic strip. While I enjoyed the book overall, I found the narrative rhythm to be honestly a little monotonous, and the need to hit a “punchline” every few panels made the details feel a bit too pat for my liking. Three Rocks, though, is definitely the best thing Zippy cartoonist Bill Griffith has ever done—it’s a tour-de-force biography of an underrated cartoonist and his truly bizarre creation, told artfully and with undeniable passion. 

And I also read a book written by a more recent comic-strip genius: The Mysteries, a picture book written by former Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson and illustrated by John Kascht. I don’t want to spoil any of it, but this is a haunting little picture book for adults—it takes just a few minutes to read, but it really cuts into a tender place and leaves a mark. 

Holos, a sci-fi YA novel by Danielle Paige, has an interesting premise: It’s about what happens when computer science essentially becomes advanced enough to create a digital afterlife, when people are able to interact with the world after they die in the form of a holographic ghost. There’s one choice in this book that really hurt my enjoyment of the story: Paige’s decision to have the plot revolve around a relationship with a boy who is the son of a woman who just became President-Elect of the United States of America. Paige does such a bad job addressing the realities of that situation—access to the president-elect is way too easy, for instance, and nobody seems to take the gravity of the situation seriously enough—that it tarnishes the fiction around the sci-fi premise by association. You can tell a fast-paced thriller about a digital Rapture in less than 200 pages OR you can tell a fast-paced thriller about dating the son of the next president in less than 200 pages. I don’t think it’s possible to do both. 

I Am Code is a poetry book written by a generative artificial intelligence. The very funny writer Simon Rich helped edit the book as an alarm bell—a warning that AI is getting very close to becoming good at writing—after his computer scientist friend showed him a generative AI called code-davinci-002 months before ChatGPT became an internet sensation. (You can read Rich’s original piece about his unnerving experience with AI at Time Magazine.) The poetry is actually pretty okay, and it’s written in the first person—so, from the “perspective” of the AI, making it a queasy reading experience. But the real reason I’m recommending this book is that the audio book is read by Werner Herzog, and that adds enough layers of irony to make the thing palatable. It’s probably the most fun experience I’ll ever have with AI-generated chat, thanks wholly to the human reading the words.

I Need to Get Off Substack

This feels like an abnormally long issue, so I’ll try to keep this brief. After reading Jonathan M. Katz’s recent story at The Atlantic about how Substack is profiting from Nazi newsletters, I’ve got to stop using the service. I can’t in good conscience stay there.

I left Substack once before, but I made the unfortunate decision of migrating over to Twitter’s newsletter service Revue, which I then had to flee for a return to Substack when Elon Musk bought Twitter. (Musk pulled the plug on Revue almost immediately, so I would have had to jump ship in any case.)

I appreciate the fact that Substack is free and easy to use, but the truth is that the founders of the app have always been deeply awful. They’re making money from some of the worst people on the planet, and they’re shamefully framing themselves as free speech absolutists while they do it. Plus, it sure seems like they’re floundering around a lot—just this week, Substack sent out a big old advertising blast promoting the fact that they’re pivoting to video, which feels more like a cry for help from an unstable business than part of a coherent expansion plan from a newsletter company. 

So anyway, long story short: I need to find a new newsletter platform. This should affect readers of this newsletter not one bit; I can just migrate your email addresses over to the new platform when I find it and you should keep receiving these on the last day of the month as usual. 

But I do want to ask: Can anyone out there recommend a good newsletter platform? My only criteria are:

1. No Nazis or TERFs.
2. Affordable.
3. Easy.

I hear okay things about Ghost, but it’s a little pricey for a free newsletter. Beehiiv looks interesting, but it also looks like it could be needlessly complex—and the misspelling of the brand name gives me the hiivs. And since I already run my personal website here on WordPress, it seems like their newsletter extension would be a natural fit. But honestly WordPress has always felt a little noodly and finicky to me, and I do not want to spend a whole lot of time worrying about the back end of this thing. So please—recommend away! 

In any case, I’ll be back next month, from a platform with (hopefully) way fewer (preferably zero) white supremacists. In the meantime, I hope your holidays are low-stress and high-joy.

Paul

Hi!

First of all, thanks so much to those of you who sent sympathetic get-well-soon notes after last issue’s account of my first bout with Covid. You were so generous with your good wishes that I retroactively feel as though I somehow overplayed my sickness, but it was much appreciated at a time when I felt very bad.

And for an update on that front: I finally got my full sense of taste back about a week ago, which is a relief because it was honestly driving me a little batty. For weeks, my sense of taste was popping in and out, sputtering like a blown speaker. 

So with that, I think I have fully bounced back from Covid, though it really did knock the strength out of me. I had to ramp up my big walks over a period of weeks—10 miles one Saturday, 12 miles the next Saturday, 16 miles the next Saturday, and so on—but I should be fully back up to my usual long-distance urban hikes soon.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about two new bookstores this month. First, I attended the opening celebration of Mam’s Books, a new bookstore in Seattle’s Chinatown/ID neighborhood. The ID has had a front-row seat to some of Seattle’s biggest problems for the last few years, including housing inequality, rampant drug addiction, and increased hate crimes, and Mam’s is intended to be a positive community resource—a bright, cheerful place for people to go and hang out and make plans for the future and buy a book from a curated collection of Asian and Asian-American authors.

I also visited Paper Portal, a tiny little new bookshop in Madrona with a mighty collection that specializes in the weird and wonderful. In addition to a truly excellent intense book club that meets multiple times to dig deeply into classics of science fiction, the store also sells a selection of VCR tapes!

And I interviewed the most adorable married couple ever—a pair of New Yorkers who decided to write a book together about their love of Costco. They traveled the world and got behind-the-scenes tours of the astounding operations systems that keep Costcos stocked with an unholy amount of merchandise. Did you know that Costco sells over half the world’s cashews every year? Did that little piece of trivia break your brain the way it did mine? I don’t know what to do with that piece of information, but it’s embedded deep in my brain now and I will never forget it.

Finally, I celebrated the 50th anniversary of Gas Works Park by talking to musicians, event promoters, and yoga practitioners about what Seattle’s unofficial back yard means to them. 

I Worked On This

I didn’t write this book, but I did do a couple of copy edit passes on it and it’s dominated a lot of my time at my day job for the past couple of months so I wanted to mention it here: My boss, Nick Hanauer, co-authored a book with Nation journalist Joan Walsh and In the Public Interest Executive Director Donald Cohen. It’s called Corporate Bullsh*t, and it’s officially published today. The book is an immensely readable little encyclopedia of the lies that politicians and corporate interests tell working Americans in order to thwart the passage of progressive policies. It tracks 200 years of corporate malfeasance, from Alexander Hamilton (yes, the one in the musical) extolling the character-enhancing qualities of child labor to Lee Iaccoca dismissing seat belts as “a complete waste of money” to wealthy Seattle restaurant owners arguing that raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour would force at least a quarter of the restaurants in town to close. The book is a lot of fun, and it’s funny, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out. 

I’ve Been Reading

Back in June, I read and loved R.F. Kuang’s brutal publishing satire Yellowface. It’s probably one of my favorite reading experiences of the year so far, and it was so good that I was inspired to go back and read Kuang’s previous novel Babel, a fantasy story about a conflict at Oxford University in the early 19th century. I’m a tough audience when it comes to fantasy, but I loved this book: The magic is subtle, ingeniously described, and very well considered, and the story had a lot to say about colonization, translation, labor, and education. It would be reductive to call Babel an anti-Harry-Potter—but if it takes a reductive phrasing to get you to read the book I’m not too proud to stoop to that level. Babel has almost nothing in common with Yellowface, which is a contemporary literary novel/thriller with a vicious sense of humor, and this left me wondering if any other young author has recently demonstrated this kind of range—the ability to hop between very distinct styles and genres seemingly without effort. Iain (M.) Banks is perhaps the closest analogy I can conjure at the moment. 

You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger is a brilliant look at the post-2016 hellscape that is the world as it teeters on the edge of fascism. Obviously, the hook of the narrative is that Klein has been driven to the edge of reason by people continually confusing her with Naomi Wolf. And Klein’s obsession with the way Wolf descends into the bottomless right-wing conspiracy grift-hole does provide the narrative structure of the book. But it’s really just an excuse for Klein to turn her incredible eye for detail on the world as it is right now. If I have a criticism, it’s that a lot of this stuff has shifted already in the time it took Klein to publish this book—a closing chapter about Israel and Palestine, for instance, suddenly feels like it was written ten years ago. But I guess that’s just what happens when you try to draw a still-life of a mudslide: the dang thing gets away from you.

I enjoyed Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits with Gun, a mystery based on a real-life family of crime-fighting sisters from the early 20th century. While this novel didn’t leave me clamoring for the second book in the series, I might pick up the next couple of titles to serve as distraction during future plane trips and three-day-weekends. 

Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe is a novel about a young woman working at a Silicon Valley startup. And there’s a lot to recommend here: The faux-warrior tone of the young CEO in this book felt painfully accurate, and Etter is an excellent stylist. But something about this book felt a little formulaic to me—take a disaffected young protagonist, put her in a job that’s packed full of easily satirized targets, and then include some lofty symbolism about black holes that never really gels with the rest of the plot and you’ve got yourself a very sturdy (but ultimately forgettable) piece of modern literary fiction.

Glossy is Marisa Meltzer’s gossipy biography of how a brilliant young woman named Emily Weiss transformed a style blog into the wildly popular Glossier chain of stores. I enjoyed the details that Meltzer would casually toss into the narrative—her aside about how Teen Vogue interns were always hungry and wouldn’t know what to do with a Chipotle burrito bowl if it tried to jump into their mouths will stick with me. Even if you’re not familiar with makeup brand names, I’d enthusiastically recommend Glossy over either of the two Big Silicon Valley Genius Bro biographies that are on bestseller lists this fall.

Swedish Cults is a collection of Lovecraftian short fiction by Swedish author Anders Fager. I enjoyed this book a lot, but it’s very, very similar to Lovecraft—by which I mean, some of these stories are basically a note-for-note cover song. If you’re hankering for a story collection about people falling prey to a madness older than time itself, you’ll find a lot to love here.

Unearned Male Confidence Is Reaching Apocalyptic Levels

Throughout human history, unearned male confidence has never been in short supply. But the past year, to me, feels like some kind of an apex (or nadir) in unearned male confidence—men who are so high on their own supply that they honestly believe they stand apart from and above every human who has ever lived. 

One year ago this month, Elon Musk announced that he was smarter than one of the two greatest strategy games ever invented. When one of his boot-lickers asked him if he played chess, Musk replied, “I did as a child, but found it to be too simple to be useful in real life: a mere 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only 2 players, both sides exact same pieces, etc.”

This is the kind of thing a moron says when he wants to sound intelligent. The dead giveaway is the mention of “spawn position,” a video game term and which suggests that he thinks Call of Duty has more to say about the vagaries of human conflict than an elegantly devised game which completely removes the element of chance and strips both players of any ability to hide or bluff their opponent. 

Earlier this month, the internet enjoyed dunking on a white supremacist who is currently trying to rebrand as a right-wing provocateur. I’m not going to share his name or link to his profile, because a quick glance of his timeline demonstrates that it’s obvious this man isn’t repentant of his white supremacist beliefs. But he tweeted: “Pretty sure if you gave me a year I could write Shakespeare quality work. Like if someone hadn’t read all of Shakespeare and you randomly gave them me or him, on average they couldn’t tell the difference. Of course without the blind test people would pretend it wasn’t as good.”

Again: You have to be profoundly stupid to believe that the only thing separating your writing and the works of William Shakespeare is a surfeit of free time. And along those lines a staffer at the Tax Foundation argued that the Scarlet Letterwas total garbage based on its first sentence: “Look at this first sentence. 136 words. And all the sentences are like that.” How does a friend not gently pull you aside and firmly suggest that you swear off posting on the internet when you think to publish something like that? 

It’s not original or interesting to claim that the classics are overrated—teenagers have been doing this for centuries. But the pride in being so profoundly uninterested in history and literature and tradition feels a little more brazen than your standard 13-year-old class clown. There’s a whiff of nihilism in the obvious, gaseous pride that these grown men feel in giving rank dismissals of topics that they clearly don’t understand. 

Granted, all three of those examples have a few telling elements in common: They’re all modern Republican white men, and they’re all posting on the same dying social media service, which has clearly demonstrated that the quality of engagement doesn’t matter so much as the quantity of engagement. All of which is to say, these are self-selecting grandiose idiots.

But then I think about the fact that six percent of Americans believe they could win in a fight with a grizzly bear. Six out of every hundred people! Maybe even worse than that, 17 percent of Americans—nearly two out of every ten—believe they could beat a chimpanzee in unarmed combat! Do you know what a chimpanzee could do to a human being’s face in less than a second?

And in the middle of October, Marc Andreeson published what he calls “The Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto,” which he no doubt envisions as a call to arms to solve humanity’s problems faster and more efficiently with technology, but which is really just a poorly written screed about why this immorally rich man thinks he shouldn’t have to deal with petty mortal concerns like regulations, taxes, or criticism. 

I hate to invoke his name twice in this newsletter, but it really feels like Musk broke something in America’s tech sector, much the same way Trump broke something in the Republican Party. The myth of the citizen-CEO of the 20th Century, the business leader who used to talk grandly about the importance of community and citizenship, has been well and truly debunked. No more do Silicon Valley tech bros pretend that they’re just ordinary people working together to build a better future—now, they’re a superior kind of human with a vision that mere mortals cannot understand, and anyone who tries to question or constrain them is a villain who needs to be silenced—or, if need be, destroyed. They see themselves as Ayn Randian supermen—The Captains of Industry!—but they behave more like the venal, self-aggrandizing villainous masterminds their comic book heroes used to fight in every issue. 

The problem with this kind of grandiose self-confidence is that it continually reproduces. People who get high on their own supply never taper off of their own volition—they keep going faster and faster until they pancake into a concrete wall. And while these schmucks are not one-one millionth of the ubermensch they believe themselves to be, they still have more than enough power and money to take a giant chunk of society down with them when they crash and burn. 

Hello!

I’m excited to let you know that the comic with my short story “The Demon in the Pines,” illustrated by the incredible Peter Krause, will be published this November, in the third issue of the Project: Cryptid miniseries. Here’s the solicitation copy from my beloved publishers at AHOY Comics:

PROJECT CRYPTID #3 (OF 6) (MR)
SEP231347
(W) Bryce Ingman, Paul Constant (A/CA) Peter Krause
What lurks in the dark recesses of the Pacific Northwest? Bryce Ingman (the Ringo-nominated My Bad)brings us the Loveland Frogman, who is ready and willing to help when he can. Paul Constant (Snelson, Planet of the Nerds) brings us the Gumerboo, who is willing to help in a very different kind of way. Both stories are beautifully illustrated by Peter Krause (also My Bad). Variant cover by Mattie Lubchansky (The Nib, Boys Weekend).
In Shops: Nov 15, 2023
SRP: $3.99

https://www.firstcomicsnews.com/ahoy-comics-november-2023-solicitations/

The book will be published with two different covers, and the more common non-variant cover is below:

So if you’d like a physical copy of this comic, I suggest going to your local comic book shop in the next couple of weeks and saying “Hi, I’d like to reserve a copy of Project: Cryptid #3 from Ahoy Comics, please.” They’ll take care of the rest, and the book will be there waiting for you on November 15th. You can also buy single digital issues on the amazing app Omnibus, which is an independently owned digital comic shop that I’ve been enjoying lately.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I interviewed the authors of a new book called This Is Wildfire. It explores the history of wildfires and wildfire prevention, and offers lots of policy and personal solutions for managing wildfires in the future. We’ve had some wildfire smoke here in Seattle recently, and this book was a great resource for helping me stay sane during that time.

A year ago, two longtime friends decided to open a bookstore in Bothell as their grand retirement project. At Wanderlust Book Lounge, they’ve been learning ever since. This was a delightful piece to research and do interviews for, and I especially loved hearing that to celebrate their first full year of hosting mystery and sci-fi book clubs, the two book clubs will be joining together into one super book-group to discuss a sci-fi thriller. 

I’ve Been Reading

It seems like a lot of new novels that I’ve read lately have followed a similar structure: They’re broken up into three or four linked novella-length stories, often told from different perspectives and taking place across different time periods than the other stories in the book. I can understand the appeal of this trend—it allows you to obtain a larger view of a narrative—but it also stops a story’s momentum dead and requires the reader to get interested in a new story all over again. I wish these books were marketed as “linked novellas,” because they sure don’t read like novels and I’m starting to resent the bait-and-switch of it all. This month, I encountered two examples of this trend: Lucky Dogs, Helen Schulman’s #metoo novel, and Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle followup, Crook Manifesto. Of the two, Whitehead’s collection of novellas feels more thematically and narratively satisfying. But both times, I felt a little bummed out that the novel I was reading turned out to be something different than advertised. 

Seattle author Nisi Shawl’s middle-grade novel Speculation is about a Black girl who finds a magical pair of glasses that allows her to see ghosts. Those ghosts reveal her family history of slavery, sacrifice, and a generational curse. This is a fantastic book that teaches children about some heavy subjects in an accessible, not-too-scary way. 

I encountered Vincent LoBrutto’s biography of Stanley Kubrick in a used bookstore and decided to indulge my early-20s obsession with the director. As a biography, Stanley Kubrick isn’t that satisfying. It starts out with an account of Kubrick’s life and his beginnings as an artist, but once he begins making movies, his personal life is more or less set aside and the book just becomes a series of long chapters describing the making of each of his films. It would be more appropriately titled Kubrick: A Filmography. Plus, the copy I bought was published just before Kubrick began work on his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, so it’s frustratingly incomplete—but that’s part of the risk of buying used books, right?

Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring is very much a debut novel—it’s a little too ambitious and doesn’t quite earn all that confidence. This is dystopian fiction about wealth inequality and what we lose when we give up our faith and our stories, and it’s easy to understand how this book immediately launched Hopkinson’s career into the sci-fi stratosphere.

Box Brown’s The He-Man Effect is a non-fiction polemic about the loosening of regulations that allowed toymakers to market their products directly to kids in the 1980s, in the form of popular TV cartoons. Brown’s take is a hot one—he argues that toy companies essentially colonized the imagination of a whole generation of American kids, stunting our creativity. By the end of the book, I kind of got on board with his claims. 

Kate Flannery’s memoir Strip Tees is about her time working at American Apparel in the porn-chic early 2000s. It’s an interesting time capsule of a deeply problematic period, when Vice magazine and American Apparel CEO Dov Charney seemed to be successfully combating years of feminist progress. The book essentially follows the same structure as any cult survivor’s memoir, and it’s pretty predictable—but it’s an interesting look back at a time that now feels like ancient history, and the ending of this one was absolutely brilliant. 

There’s a line from Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones that has haunted me since I read the book the year it was published. I can’t seem to find the exact quote now that Google has officially stopped trying to be a useful search engine, but the gist is this: The narrator, who is dead and in heaven, talks about things on earth that don’t matter. She mentions offhandedly that when you have a full view of eternity, it turns out that reading books isn’t nearly as important as we think it is while we’re living. That is a line that shook me to my core, because books are an essential part of my existence. What if I’m dragging my eyes over ink on wood pulp for nothing? This anti-book thinking is kind of the thesis statement of Patrick DeWitt’s new novel, The Librarianist. The protagonist of the book is a retired librarian in Portland, Oregon who has dedicated his life to books and reading. And at the beginning of the book, it seems increasingly obvious that all his devotion has amounted to nothing. Nobody cares about literature, and books haven’t made him into a better human being. All those decades of reading haven’t done much of anything to help him, or anyone else. As a young bookseller, being introduced to that idea in The Lovely Bones was horrifying. As a middle-aged man who’s worked in and around books for decades, I felt ready to explore the idea a little more, and DeWitt’s novel was the perfect vehicle for that exploration.

Seattle-Area People Are Making Literature

I got a few responses to my last email’s fretting over the lack of young upstarts in Seattle’s literary scene, and so I thought I’d share them with the rest of the class:

• Philip recommended Asterism, which is a Seattle-located “online bookstore and wholesale portal designed, built, and run by independent publishers.” It looks like an interesting small-press answer to Bookshop.org, and you’re someone who likes to seek out independent and small press titles, you might want to give it a whirl.
• Demersal Publishing is a local “short-run paperback publishing house specializing in literary fiction” that just published their first book—poet Robert Lashley’s debut novel, I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer. Robert is one of my all-time favorite Washington poets—he’s got a newsletter of his own, too—and I’m really excited to dig into this novel. 
• One publisher that I forgot to mention last time but should have is The 3rd Thing, a new-ish poetry publisher out of Olympia that is bringing new and exciting poetry into bookstores. 
• And Bryan wrote, “I co-produce and co-host the Foolish Oracle Variety show at Bulldog News, a kind of arts/news variety show. Myself and some other involved are from the literary and/or theater community. We are the first Saturday of the Month, and we’re a morning show, starting at 11 am!” He also notes “The Unpoetry Series is also at Bulldog, 2nd Sat of the month. Eric Acosta runs that, it’s at night and skews younger, in terms of who’s involved (from what I’ve seen).”

So there you go: People are making things and sending them out into the world. I’ll keep my ear to the ground and I’ll share what I find in future editions here, as well. 

The Boys of Summer

Some of you exclusively come back here very month to see photos of my greyhounds, so here’s what you’ve been clamoring for:

No human I know loves summer as much as these two love summer. Which I guess makes sense, considering that they’re short haired, skinny greyhounds that raced in Florida before they retired and moved to Seattle. Obie is a big fan of long summer walks before the day gets too hot, and Wally likes to go outside and lie in the sun multiple times a day. They don’t know that fall is coming, and I just don’t have the heart to tell them. 

This has been a long one—I hope I didn’t test your patience, and that you’re enjoying the summer with all the gusto of a retired racing greyhound.

See you next month,

Paul

If you’re in Seattle, I hope you’ll join me at the Elliott Bay Book Company on Tuesday, August 29th at 7 pm. I’ll be interviewing author Garth Stein and artist Matthew Southworth to celebrate the release of the second volume of their Seattle-set sci-fi series The Cloven. The first Cloven was a delight—a throwback to the inventive weirdness of 1960s Marvel Comics with a modern sensibility. Seattle audiences will especially appreciate how Southworth depicts the city in his gorgeous expressionistic art style. Best of all, the book is published by local press Fantagraphics, making it a truly homegrown affair. 

I interviewed Southworth and Stein in a virtual reading for the release of the first Cloven, and it was the most fun Zoom reading I did during lockdown. I’m really excited to do this one in-person. Join us! It’s free!

And if you’re looking for me online, definitely don’t look on Twitter or X or whatever it’s called. Everything that Elon Musk has done over the last year or so has affirmed my decision to leave the social network when he took over. Instead, my attention is fragmented across several sites, where I post rather more infrequently than I did back in my Twitter days. 

Still, the grand experiment to replace Twitter continues. I’m still on Mastodon, and my posts there tend to be more earnest, Seattle-centric, and political. Mastodon is complicated, and the culture can be off-putting, but it’s the place online where I’m most likely to engage in a conversation.

I joined Bluesky this month, and it’s a lot of fun, but it feels allergic to honest sentiment—it’s pretty much a place for what the kids called “shitposting” in 2006. However, Bluesky does seem to have absorbed a huge portion of the comic book creator community, and I’m enjoying all the comics talk I’m seeing over there. I joined Threads, too, but it feels like a cross between a shopping mall and a summer camp for wannabe influencers. Gross.

Still, I post a lot less in general these days than I did back when I joined Twitter 15 years ago, and I’m happy to post less frequently. I’ve almost completely stopped processing the day’s news in the form of staccato soundbites that fit into tweets, which feels very healthy. While I’m sure social networks of some sort will always be a part of my professional life, I’m happy to spend less time online. Maybe I ought to send Elon Musk a thank-you bouquet or something.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I profiled Isis Asare, the founder of the amazing Sistah Scifi online bookstore, which now has vending machines in the greater Seattle and Oakland areas stocked with science fiction by Black and Indigenous authors. Specifically, I focused on a new vending machine in the Northwest African American Museum that features adult, middle-grade, and YA fiction and comics by Black Northwest authors. I also write a little bit about NAAM’s amazing literary programming, which includes providing tens of thousands of free children’s books to kids around the Seattle area.

I’ve Been Reading

I started the month with a depressing pair of novels: The Guest by Emma Cline and Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis. The Guest is about a woman trying to find a place to stay in a wealthy beach community after her boyfriend kicks her out of his vacation home. She wanders from place to place, pretending to be different people, and becoming more and more detached from reality.  Girlfriend on Mars is about a guy whose long-term girlfriend spontaneously joins a reality television show competition whose grand prize is a one-way trip to Mars. While I was pleasantly surprised by how dark the story gets in Girlfriend on Mars, The Guest is the one that really cut me to the core—just a beautifully rendered story about someone with nothing to lose.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar is a book that explores the history and philosophy behind America’s love affair with cheap and free parking. I learned a lot from this book, though I do think it probably would have made a better long magazine article. 

As a young man, I loved Douglas Hofstatder’s book Godel Escher Bach, and I was pleased to learn that he co-wrote a book about the importance of analogies, called Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. This isn’t just a deep dive into the subject of analogies—it’s a painfully thorough exploration. While I appreciated the deep thinking on the subject, the dry, academic prose made for a joyless reading experience. 

Ander Monson’s Predator is a memoir about the author’s obsession with the 80s sci-fi film Predator. It’s a little bit silly, sure, but the way Monson uses the film to reflect on masculinity, fandom, and the consumption of art is also a little bit genius.

On first glance, Eleanor Davis’s Why Art? looks like one of those cute little illustrated inspirational books about the importance of making art and living like an artist. But it’s actually much deeper and weirder than that. While it starts out with some platitudes about art, it evolves into an eerily accurate little fable about the ugly side of creation. I don’t know how Davis pulled this off, exactly, but damn if this book didn’t take my breath away at the end.

I’m sure you’ve seen some of the studies which claim that young people in their 20s are having less sex than previous generations, and that the quality of their sex is declining. Maria Yagoda’s non-fiction book Laid and Confused is all about that. I enjoyed the sociological overview of how sex and conversations about sex have changed over the last few years. When I was looking up this book, I saw that Yagoda is raising funds to pay for chemotherapy treatment for advanced Hodgkin lymphoma. Yagoda is a prolific writer who has bylines with Vice and Food & Wine, among other places, and it’s a huge bummer that she has to ask internet strangers for money for life-saving health care. 

Katie Williams’s My Murder is a sci-fi thriller about a group of women who are cloned and returned to their normal lives after being murdered by a serial killer. It’s a clever premise, and the science-fiction elements are handled elegantly, but I do think that Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You handled the true-crime obsession with murdered women in a more interesting way.

Chatter, by Ethan Kross, is about the science of the little voice in your head that narrates your life and criticizes your accomplishments. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have listened to this one on audiobook, because hearing a voice in my head talk about why I have a little voice in my head made for an uncomfortable meta-experience. This was a really interesting read about a subject that most of us think too little about.

I found a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions in a Little Free Library and I decided to re-read it for the first time in over three decades. This was a seminal reading experience for me—probably the book that marked my graduation from humorous sci-fi and fantasy into adult literature. (When I was a teenager, there was no such thing as young adult fiction. You basically had to find your own path from Ramona Quimby to Rabbit Angstrom.) I’m now close to the age that Vonnegut was when he wrote Breakfast of Champions, and I understand the impulse to write the book—Vonnegut explains that he wants to empty his head of all the junk that has accumulated up there over the span of 50 years. But I’m sad to report that this one is very tough to finish—about halfway through the book, Vonnegut starts dropping racist slurs with startling frequency. And while his intentions for using the language were probably coming from a good place at the time he was writing the book—I believe he casually drops the N-word throughout the book, for example, to highlight how terrible the word is—that doesn’t make the modern experience of reading it any easier. I’m not saying Vonnegut should be posthumously canceled or that the publisher should release a sanitized version of Breakfast of Champions, but I am saying that modern audiences will likely have a hard time reading this book. Vonnegut’s decision to embrace racist language is poorly explained within the text and I expect this book in particular will continue to age poorly for that reason. 

Where Is the Future of Seattle’s Literary Community?

So here’s a question that I’ve been asking every bookseller, author, and literary-type person I’ve talked to over the past few months: Is anyone doing anything interesting and new in the Seattle literary scene right now? Are there any exciting new local literary magazines, or any new reading series that are inviting fresh voices to form a new vanguard? Who is the hot new curator in the literary scene right now? Who’s the bold taste-maker challenging Seattle’s literary status quo?

Nobody I’ve talked to has been able to conclusively point to any interesting young communities of artists shaking things up, and that’s making me very concerned for the health of Seattle’s literary community. 

Don’t get me wrong: Seattle is still a world-class literary city, with plenty of important institutions ranging in age from one to five decades. But culture can’t grow without continuous replenishment, and institutions need outside agitation in order to stay relevant. I just don’t see any groups of young turks trying to tip over any sacred cows right now. 

It could just be that I’m old and out of touch. I stopped doing onstage literary events in 2021 because local bookstores largely weren’t requiring audiences to wear masks. And as a result, I’m probably more detached from the Seattle literary scene right now than I have been at any point over the past 20 years. 

For as long as I can remember, there have continuously been loud groups of young writers trying to make something exciting and new in this city—your APRIL Festivals, your Moss literary journals, your Short Run festivals, your scrappy small presses. Sometimes those exciting new things burn out and disappear, and sometimes they become part of the city’s literary establishment in their own right. 

But if there are groups of young artists trying to create a scene of their own in Seattle right now, I can’t find them. And even though I’m not the target audience for this kind of thing—I’m an old fogey who’s been writing about the city for nearly a quarter century, after all—it seems as though I should be aware of their existence. What’s the point of raging against a machine if the machine doesn’t even know you exist?

Maybe this is what a housing crisis looks like for the arts. Maybe young writers just can’t afford to live here anymore. Who can start a dynamic small press when rent eats up 65% of your paycheck? If that’s what’s going on, this is bad news for the city’s future. Without a vibrant arts culture, a city just becomes gray and fallow—a glorified strip mall. 

Maybe the pandemic just threw everything into a kind of artistic hibernation. For a few years there, it was hard for people to get together and have the kind of heady, pretentious conversations that create a new aesthetic. But if that’s the case I hope we start to see some exciting new work from new names soon. Art is worthless if it’s not continually drawing in new perspectives, and it’s well past time time for the new kids to have some fun.