Category: Uncategorized

In the week since Elon Musk announced he was buying Twitter, he has already encouraged racist and misogynist bullying of Twitter employees, he’s publicly embraced alt-right sleazoids including the guy who inspired the “Pizza Gate” misinformation campaign, and he’s continually railed against the “woke” left (which apparently includes Netflix for some reason.)

Now I’m not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but I know that when a right-wing scumbag with a racist army buys a social network there’s no point in trying to change that system from the inside. Just within the last week, fascist Musk bootlickers have been emboldened, picking fights with trans people and people of color on Twitter and swarming their replies with abuse. It all reminds me of the days after Trump won the election in 2016, when the Nazis realized they didn’t have to hide anymore.

So if Musk’s $44 billion offer goes through and he takes control of Twitter in six months as planned, I’m leaving Twitter, and I’m already throttling down my daily Twitter use to prepare for that moment. (Though it may not happen; if Tesla shares start to really tank, there’s a good chance Musk might have to back off. I hope the deal falls through, but I’m not holding my breath)

I’ve been experimenting with my old Tumblr account and I’m enjoying myself over there. It’s a creative community that’s visual-forward but allows for long-form blogging. There are two big problems with Tumblr, though: First, there’s no news on the site to speak of, so I’ll need a new way to stay on top of breaking news, and second, there aren’t enough people on there to make my feed feel as lively as my Twitter feed does. I can’t do much about the first problem, but you can do something about the second: If you’re on Tumblr or you want to experiment with the network, be sure to say hi over there.

If Musk does buy Twitter, that means I’m also going to have to do something with my newsletter. I currently use Revue, which is Twitter’s newsletter service. It is, quite honestly, very bad: The formatting is terrible and the back end is janky. I only chose Revue because it was integrated so tightly with Twitter. There’s no value to it otherwise. But the good news is that I can just move those email addresses over to another service and readers shouldn’t notice a thing when or if that happens.

This opening note feels horribly self-indulgent and navel-gazey, but I think it’s important to explain where I’m coming from, in part because I was a huge proponent of Twitter right from the beginning. And yes, I realize that every social network is run by terrible rich people, but I draw a very clear line at people who happily attract mobs of Nazis to do their bidding online. I spent four years on Twitter being obsessed with one deranged rich guy with too much power and a base of foaming-at-the-mouth bigots. I won’t be fooled again.

I’ve been Writing

At the Seattle Times, I interviewed Neil Gaiman in advance of his reading at Benaroya Hall this Sunday night. It was a great conversation, and he was, as always, impossibly charming. (As a bonus, I’m including some outtakes from that conversation at the end of this email.)

Also at the Times, I wrote about Open Books, Seattle’s lone poetry-only bookstore, and its recent move to a new storefront in Pioneer Square. Aside from the pure joy of a new bookstore opening in Seattle’s original Bookstore District, the thing that I love about the new Open Books space is the fact that it has two rooms—the Parlor and the Print Shop—that are intended to be community hubs for Seattle’s poetry community. It’s now a space where literary magazines can be formed, edited, and printed; writing groups can meet to discuss work that will appear in upcoming chapbooks; and authors can debut new books to adoring crowds—all at the same time.

On my Tumblr, I wrote a little bit about why I, a huge Nicolas Cage fan, was disappointed by the new film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. I do a little meditating about what I think the film gets wrong about Cage’s allure.

And it was a big month over at Insider, where I wrote about a new wage tracker that shows exactly how little 66 of the world’s biggest, most iconic companies pay their workforce, why banning stock buybacks would raise wages for workers, why America’s shameful and racist mass incarceration problem is doing serious economic harm to the country, and why the minimum wage would be well over $20 per hour if worker pay had kept up with productivity.

i’ve been reading

So I finally read Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Crossroads, and I found it to be a compelling, if way too angsty, soap opera about a family that’s falling apart at the center of a church community in the 1970s. I can’t deny that it’s well-written, but every single character in this book was an awful person, and every single one of them made at least one choice in the narrative that just completely turned me off. In other words, it’s Franzen doing Franzen.

Seattle cartoonist and comedian Brett Hamill’s latest comic book memoir, Sk8 Dad Summer, is a sweet, low-stakes collection of anecdotes about Hamill rekindling his interest in skateboarding, and a meditation about how the rebelliousness of his youth as a skater interacts with his relatively gentle adult life as the dad of a toddler. The comics in this book reminded me a little of the diary comics of James Kochalka and John Porcellino—a huge compliment, coming from someone who was obsessed with autobio comics in the 1990s—and the stories build on each other to form a lovable portrait of a man trying to do the best he can at honoring responsibilities he’s taken on, while still being true to himself.

Gideon Defoe’s An Atlas of Extinct Countries is an encyclopedia of nations that fell apart, collapsed, or otherwise completely disappeared from the face of the planet. It’s an interesting premise for a non-fiction book, and Defoe (who wrote a few humorous novels about pirates a while back) is both a good researcher and a chatty tour guide. But if you do buy the book, I recommend not reading it straight through from beginning to end, as I did. The various extinctions all get a little same-y when you read them one after the other. This is a better book to flip through than swallow whole.

And while we’re talking about humorous books that you probably shouldn’t rip through cover-to-cover, Ryan North’s How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain is a very funny book that applies real-world science to the plots and schemes of super-villains. Under the guise of describing how to build a secret lair and plot world domination, North explains the basics of earth sciences, computer programming, and climate change in easy-to-understand language. It’s hard to find the perfect mixture between entertaining and educational, but North pulls it off.

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph is an anthology from Aperture that collects essays from world-famous photographers who explain the subjects that they refuse to include in their photographs. Of course, it’s light-hearted: if you took every single prohibited subject in the book seriously, you wouldn’t ever take another photograph in your life. But the subject is an interesting constraint, and you can learn a lot about art by studying what mistakes the great practitioners have made over the course of their careers. Great photography is as unknowable to me as magic—I know it when I see it but I have no idea what goes into it or why it works so well—and this book helped me think like a photographer for a while. In that respect it was a fascinating exercise.

I’m a huge fan of Michel Faber—Under the Skin and especially The Book of Strange New Things are all-time great novels—and so I was thrilled to see that he published a novel for young readers. D (a Tale of Two Worlds) is an homage to Charles Dickens and a fantasy novel about what would happen if one day the letter “D” just suddenly disappeared from the world. It’s not my favorite Faber book by any stretch (and this is a very specific recommendation: If you want to read a good novel about letters mysteriously disappearing from everyday use, I’d recommend Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea before this one) but if you’re a fan of Faber’s analytic voice, whimsical creativity, and slightly aloof observational eye, you’ll find plenty to enjoy.

I do love to read books about marriage, but I never really feel as though I recognize the marriage described in the book. That’s how it was for my experience with Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage. I didn’t at all agree with Havrilesky’s insistence that every married person hates their spouse on a regular basis, for instance. That concept is just alien to me. And at several points, the story feels like the author is pumping up the drama of some moments just for the sake of making the memoir more memorable—and a climactic epiphany that involves the Netflix show The Crown and the astrological signs of various British royalty left me absolutely cold. There are four or five good essays stashed inside Foreverland, but I can’t recommend it as a book with any particularly unique insights into marriage.

I listened to Bob Odenkirk’s memoir Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama because Odenkirk reads it himself, and if you’re going to spend time with a celebrity memoir you might as well hear it in the celebrity’s own words. It’s a fun book, and I especially appreciated that Odenkirk didn’t try to hide the fact that he could be downright surly if he feels like someone is trying to mess with his art or screw him in business. He’s got a few axes to grind, and I’m here for it. But I was frankly shocked that Odenkirk didn’t include the near-fatal heart attack he suffered on the set of Better Call Saul last year in the book. Look, I get that publishing works on a very long schedule and I understand that the book was absolutely finished before the incident. But my God—it’s the 21st century: Surely you can rush to insert a chapter acknowledging how close the memoir was to being a posthumous release? Knowing what we know now, the book kind of fades out, and the heart attack is a giant looming shadow over the last couple chapters that’s never addressed.

Wow—in retrospect, I read a lot of books by white dudes this month. I’ve got to broaden my scope for next month.

That’s all for this month

I figured I’d close with a couple of questions and answers that were cut for space in my Seattle Times interview with Neil Gaiman. (My questions are in bold, his responses are in normal type.)

PC: Many years ago, I realized that the first Neil Gaiman book I read was not the Sandman or Black Orchid, but in fact was Don’t Panic, the companion book to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If time was no object, would there be any kind of art that you’d write a companion book for today? Any novels or comics that you’re moved by in the same way that Adam’s fiction spoke to you in the eighties?

NG: That’s a really good question. I don’t think so. But having said that, I did love getting to do my book, The View From The Cheap Seats, which contains lots and lots and lots of essays, introductions, and encomia that actually allow me to talk about books that I love, about writers that I love, about works of fiction that I love, poems I love. And that to me was hugely important.

You do seem to be a world-class reader. I wonder if maybe in another reality you wouldn’t be a literary critic? You’d probably also be a lot poorer.

Well, I was a book reviewer when I started, and so that was where I began. But I’m professor in the arts at Bard College, and I love being a professor, it’s great. One reason why it’s great is because I get to work with young kids and show them what’s amazing to read, and why it’s fun to write, and all of that kind of stuff.

I mentioned on Twitter that I was interviewing you and a Twitter follower named Carrie wanted to know if you have a favorite graveyard.

I have a few favorite graveyards. I love Highgate Cemetery West. It’s amazing. I am very fond of Glasgow’s Necropolis. I love every graveyard I’ve ever been to in New Orleans. I don’t think I’ve ever done an official graveyard tour in New Orleans, but I’ve absolutely had friends in New Orleans take me around graveyards and talk. Actually, I did! I did one official graveyard tour. I remember because they filled me in on lots of interesting facts about how bodies were disposed of in New Orleans that I did not know.

I love graveyards and I love wandering through them. I always find them peculiarly happy places. And I think even when I was a little kid, I’d be scared of graveyards, but I also found them very, very peaceful. There’s something very human about a graveyard—just the idea that people have lived their lives and finished them. That’s wonderful!

Roughly three-quarters of the population in Seattle seems to have entirely let their guard down when it comes to Covid. I’m in the quarter of the population that’s holding their breath and waiting to see if infection numbers spike, like they did the last two times we started to relax and gather in public.

Even if things stay relatively calm, I’m still not in any kind of a hurry to attend conventions or big in-person readings or plays. That said, I do hope that I’ll be able to get into movie theaters for the occasional matinee on a somewhat regular basis sometime soon, because this year looks like it could be an exceptional one for movies: Between two of my favorite actors, Nic Cage and Pedro Pascal, sharing the screen in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the sci-fi weirdness of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the return of Jordan Peele in NOPE, the unabashed Brad Pitt-ery of Bullet Train, and the movie-screen chewiness of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, 2022 could be the most exciting year for non-franchise American filmmaking in at least a decade.

Speaking of unique cinematic experiences, I watched one of the better non-franchise films of 2021 a couple weeks ago: A Romanian comedy called Bad Luck Banging: Or, Loony Porn. After a frankly pornographic (but not idealized) opening scene depicting a sex tape made by a middle-aged husband and wife, the film is broken cleanly into three parts: First, the woman in the sex tape, Emi, walks around Covid-era Bucharest as she realizes the tape has been leaked onto the internet and the underage students she teaches have seen it. The second part of the movie is a very funny non-narrative video glossary explaining the social mores and history of Romania. And the third part is basically a play in which Emi comes face-to-face with the disgusted parents of her students in an all-hands meeting. The parents then vote on whether she should be allowed to keep her teaching job.

I really dug the movie for its wild blend of inventiveness, realism, and patience. Watching all the extras in the first and last third of the film tug on their masks to cover their noses as they try to obey Covid protocols felt strangely touching. And though Emi’s climactic encounter with outraged parents is stylized and openly political, it feels almost civilized compared to some of the videos we’ve seen filmed at American PTA meetings in the last couple of years. (Then it goes totally off the rails.) If you can tolerate graphic sex, this is the best weirdo movie of 2021 that almost no American has seen, and if you’re curious but don’t want to stress over the ethics of exploitation and sex on film,  a ridiculously censored version is available on Hulu.

And since we’re talking about watching stuff, I have to chime in on the three dramas about internet startups that are streaming right now: Super Pumped, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the founder of Uber, is way too enthralled with the macho dickishness of Travis Kalanick and startup culture to critique it in a meaningful way. It feels like an ad for toxic masculinity—like if Brett Ratner had written and directed The Wolf of Wall Street or Fight Club. WeCrashed, starring Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto about the making and undoing of WeWork, basically encapsulates the entire narrative in the first episode so there’s no reason to keep watching, and Hathaway’s confident acting doesn’t begin to make up for the amateurish forced “comedy” of Leto’s performance.

The only one of these three shows worth watching, in my estimation, is The Dropout, the Amanda Seyfried-starring series about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. The key to it is Seyfriend’s remarkable performance as an awkward brilliant geek who wants more than anything in the world to be Steve Jobs. She’s heartbreaking and horrifying to watch—often both in the same scene. And it’s genuinely funny: There’s a throwaway line in the most recent episode when Holmes is showing a camera crew around the Theranos building and she says, with all sincerity, “This is our state-of-the-art lobby,” and I’ve never heard a more hilariously Silicon Valley thing in my entire life. You’d have to be either a sociopath or a comedian to come to the conclusion that liminal spaces are ripe for disruption—and The Dropout is canny enough to portray the sociopath in all her moral shame, while still giving us some room (and grace) to laugh over the ridiculousness of the situation. Of the three new startup shows on streaming services right now, it’s far and away the best.

I’ve been writing

At the Seattle Times, I wrote about Ballard’s Secret Garden Books, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. Secret Garden began as a children’s-only bookstore—it hosted a reading with Madeleine L’Engle!—but now it’s a fine general-interest bookstore with an exceptionally strong children’s section. This is one of the pillars of Seattle’s bookselling community, and it was fun to do a deep dive into the shop’s long and storied history.

For Insider, I wrote about how abortion bans undermine the economic power of women, forcing them to be reliant on the men in their lives and stripping them of autonomy. Women need to be able to control their own bodies before they can control their own destinies, so abortion bans are really battles over power—specifically, the power of women to participate in society.

I also wrote about a great new book that takes on Davos, the annual gathering of the world’s richest people. It’s a star-studded event in which the wealthy elite all sit around and talk about ways that they can fix the world with their fabulous wealth. Weirdly, the topic of paying more in taxes never seems to come up. And speaking of rich people with too much money, does anyone really believe that CEOs work 350 times as hard as their lowest-paid employees?

Finally, I wrote about the real cause of the rising inflation we’re all paying at grocery stores and gas stations: Corporate greed. I honestly can’t figure out why the Federal Reserve thinks that raising interest rates will do anything to lower prices when CEOs are openly bragging about jacking up prices in their quarterly earnings calls.

I’ve been reading

I very much enjoy the work of siblings Maria and Peter Hoey, who for years independently published their comics stories under the title Coin-Op Comics. Their latest book, a collection of linked short stories titled Animal Stories, was just published by Top Shelf last month, and it’s a significant step in the continuing evolution of their work. The fables in this book all have to do with humans encountering a mysterious animal (or multiple mysterious animals) and through that interaction coming face-to-face with the unknowableness of everything. The Hoeys’ comics combine the formal genius of Chris Ware with the literary aspirations of Dan Clowes, and this book is a magnificent meditation on religion, wonder, and the mystery behind every pair of nonhuman eyes.

Last month, Christina Gilbreath of The Wise Owl Books and Music recommended A Psalm for the Wild Built to me in my Seattle Times column. She said the book “is just a big warm hug. I’ve actually recommended it to a couple of nurse friends of mine, and they come back and say ‘I didn’t know I needed this book.‘” It’s the first book in a series about a tea-making monk who meets a robot, and then they explore an alien world together, all the while discussing desire and other lofty concepts. Gilbreath is absolutely right—I needed to read this book, and I can’t wait to read more. (The second book in the series comes out this summer and I’m actually going to preorder it, which is a rarity for me.) What a wonderful, gentle little novella about friendship and conversation.

The Writer’s Crusade, Tom Roston’s book-length exploration of the writing and publication of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, is an adoring fan letter to one of the greatest pieces of anti-war art produced in the 20th century. For fans of Vonnegut—even longtime readers like myself who haven’t reinvestigated his work in well over a decade—this serves as a good reminder of why Vonnegut mattered so much, and exactly how influential his greatest book was.

Slate film critic Dana Stevens published Camera Man, a biography of Buster Keaton and basically through him the entire American film industry, just last month. I really dug it. It’s a thoughtful exploration of how many facets of American life are just the same today as they were a century ago—but Stevens also explores the important differences, too, and exactly how they changed. I like that she takes the time throughout the book to explore the creation and evolution of film criticism—it’s the kind of subject that probably doesn’t warrant its own mainstream book, but Stevens cares about it and so she skillfully wraps it up into the narrative she’s researching.

Benjamin Percy’s The Ninth Metal is the first book in a series that’s kind of like Stephen King meets HP Lovecraft in the middle of a superhero comic book. It’s about an eerie metal with supernatural properties that falls to earth in Minnesota, creating a modern-day gold rush and giving super powers to a few people, seemingly at random. I had a lot of fun with it—it’s the kind of book I would have devoured as a teen and then immediately sought out every other book in the series immediately.

The Ice Palace is a slender novel by Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas that was translated into English by Elizabeth Rokkan . It was heartily recommended by Phinney Books’ owner Tom Nissley in my column a while back as one of his favorite books of the last few years, and you just can’t let a recommendation like that slip by. While the book didn’t quite make that kind of a dent in me, it did swallow me up and refused to let me go until I finished. It’s the story of a Norwegian girl who goes missing on a cold winter night, and what happens after she disappears. It plucked the same emotional strings as The Sweet Hereafter, and I was transfixed by the stillness in its prose—it’s a book that feels like winter, through and through.

I really dug Friday: The First Day of Christmas, the first trade paperback collection of an ongoing series written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Marcos Martin. It’s a supernatural mystery series about a one-time sidekick to a kid detective who comes home from college to find that the kid detective hasn’t grown up at all, but the world around them both has gotten a lot darker. I think it’s about time to realize that I’m officially an Ed Brubaker stan—his Kill or Be Killed and Reckless series of books are some of the best comics I’ve read during the pandemic, not to mention the noirish standalones Pulp and Bad Weekend—and Martin is simply one of the best comics artists alive. This first Friday collection is relatively slight, but I can’t imagine this particular team of creators letting me down in upcoming volumes.

That’s all for this month

I’ve been listening to Downlowd, a podcast history of Harry Knowles’s infamous nerd-movie-review site Ain’t It Cool News, and I’ve become a fan of the podcast. The problem is that it’s a serialized show, so you have to listen from the very beginning, and the beginning is pretty rough. Downlowd‘s creator, Joe Simon, is very upfront about the fact that he’s never made a podcast before, and his awkwardness really comes through in the first couple of episodes—particularly the first episode where in a fit of writerly ambition, he tries to compare Harry Knowles to Charles Foster Kane in an analogy that falls apart under the slightest investigation. Anyone who writes as a career has overshot our ambition on multiple occasions, but writers at least tend to edit out those mistakes before we hit “publish.” Simon doesn’t have that luxury—he’s building the airplane in real time as it takes off.

But Simon and executive producer Kristina Bell are very open about their mistakes and missteps, often explaining them at length in special bonus episodes that are released between installments of the show. And I think each episode gets better as the show goes along—more insightful, better produced, less credulous. So if you’re interested in watching someone learn in broad daylight how to be a better reporter, this is an interesting, and fairly transparent, case study.

And of course, as someone who visited AICN regularly and would regard its atrocious comment section and poorly written reviews like a rubbernecker at a car crash, I’m interested in the subject matter. Toxic internet fan culture in particular is something that I’m deeply interested in—I touched on the subject in my first full-length comic book, Planet of the Nerds—and Harry Knowles’s site is kind of the ur-text for toxic geek fandom. You don’t get the poisonous incel army that rages against any female Marvel superhero or nonwhite Star Wars character without AICN paving the way.

But I don’t want Knowles to take up the spotlight any longer than he already has, so let me recommend a podcast that thoughtfully engages with culture from a perspective that isn’t that of an entitled white male. I’ve really grown to enjoy Criticism Is Dead, a weekly pop culture conversation podcast hosted by Jenny Zhang and Pelin Keskin-Liu. They usually discuss two big topics a week—a TV show, a movie, occasionally a book—along with a brief overview of the week’s hot topics, and they’re pretty much everything that AICN never was: smart, curious, and entertaining. I’d say I disagree with their critiques about 20 percent of the time, but I never regret hearing their opinions. AICN is undeniably a relic of the past, and I hope that Criticism Is Dead’s thoughtful and humane conversation represents the future of reviews.

As I’ve written multiple times (sorry) the collected edition of the comic I created with artist Fred Harper, Snelson: Comedy Is Dying, will be published on March 15th. I don’t have any celebratory Ides of March bookstore readings or events on the calendar to mark the publication for a couple of reasons:

1. Virtual readings really bum me out. I’m not the most eloquent speaker in the world in the best situations, but I’m really bad on Zoom, where the slight lag throws me for a loop.
2. With state mask restrictions ending and the nation seemingly under a mass delusion that pretending coronavirus is a thing of the past will somehow make coronavirus go away, I don’t feel comfortable doing an in-person reading.

I hope that in coming months, I’ll be able to do something to celebrate the book’s release. I’m proud of it–I’m especially giddy over Fred’s work—and I’d like to get people together again. But I think another spike in cases is likely as regulations fade away and the weather—at least in this part of the country—won’t allow us to properly ventilate our indoor spaces with fresh air. I refuse to be the reason a bunch of people get sick, so please feel free to celebrate my book’s release in your own way, safely and responsibly.

I’ve been writing

I wrote about Seattle’s (current) newest bookstore, The Wise Owl Books & Music, for the Seattle Times. It’s a small space in the Tangletown neighborhood, and it was born from a mother’s secret wish. When Christina Gilbreath’s mother passed away a few years ago, she left behind about 40 boxes of used books that she was keeping to fulfill her long-held dream of opening a bookstore. Gilbreath hadn’t known about her mother’s dream, but it echoed her own dream of one day opening a record store, and so she decided to make both dreams come true with Wise Owl. I can’t wait to see what this bookstore becomes as the neighborhood begins to shape its stock and Gilbreath’s plans for expansion take root.

Unions are more popular in America right now than they’ve been since the 1950s. But union membership is basically at an all-time low. President Biden, our most labor-friendly president since FDR, just made a big first step toward allowing federal workers to unionize, but I wrote in Insider that he can still do more to encourage the labor movement. Also: Did you know that employer-provided health care is a scam? It’s true, and it’s not just a scam for Americans—it’s a scam for employers, too.

I also wrote about why corporate price increases have less to do with inflation and more to do with price-gouging. That piece was retweeted by Elizabeth Warren, which was pretty damn exciting for me, since she’s one of the few national politicians I actively admire:

I’ve been reading

Last summer, I read and enjoyed a new Stephen King novel for the first time in ages. That novel in question was Billy Summers. This month, I read the novel Stephen King published before that, a thin paperback original titled Later, and I enjoyed it even more than Billy Summers. This is a remarkable late-career turn from a writer who had become (with semi-recent titles like Under the Dome and Cell) a parody of himself. Later is a short and dirty crime thriller about a kid who can see ghosts, and it’s got everything you like about King—the creepy images that stick with you; the world-weary, working class characters; the plots that seem somehow feel realistic in their ridiculousness. If you can grit your teeth and tolerate King’s relentless and inexcusable tendency toward fat-phobia, which pops up in the last fifth of this book, I endorse Later.

If you’re a fan of the excellent afterlife-themed comedy The Good Place, I highly recommend the audio version of Good Place creator Michael Schur’s new philosophical exploration How to Be Perfect. Virtually the entire cast ofThe Good Place make guest appearances on the recording, giving the book the feel of a pleasant afterword to the series. It’s a kind of crash course into what it means to be an ethical person, with pit stops at just about every major philosopher you’ll encounter in a Philosophy 101 course, and it’s a fun and funny way to while away time on a road trip. Schur’s book isn’t, well, perfect—for some reason, he conflates the Overton Window with the slippery slope argument, and he also bafflingly at one point says that nobody would question whether Jeff Bezos and other billionaires deserve their fortunes—but Schur is an earnest and curious narrator, and the book is full of little ethical thought experiments you can toss around with friends.

Libba Bray’s YA novel Beauty Queens is a satire about the contestants in a Miss Teen USA-type pageant crash-landing on a desert island and then fighting for survival. It’s a little too long, but the book is riddled with over-the-top product placements for cosmetics in the form of footnotes to the survival narrative, and I laughed out loud at the satire a few times. I’m so glad that books like this are available to teenagers now from major publishers like Scholastic. When I was a kid, you basically jumped from Ramona Quimby to Breakfast of Champions, and now YA novels like Beauty Queens provide more of a bridge between those two extremes.

Helene Tursten’s An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed is not as wickedly entertaining as the first book in the series, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good,but I was so charmed by the first book that I’m just grateful to spend more time with the serial-killing elderly lady at the center of the story. It’s The Talented Mr. Ripley by way of The Golden Girls—what’s not to love?

Seattle artist Steven B. Reddy’s self-published art and essay collection, Walks with Willa: A Love Story, is about Reddy adopting a dog in the early days of the pandemic and then falling in love with her as they go on long walks through a city shut down by Covid. Reddy’s illustrations of his dog Willa running around various Seattle trails and parks are positively delightful, and I love his full-color drawings of houses, too—Reddy’s perspectives are always a little bit cattywampus, and that makes his drawings fascinating to investigate. Seattleites, fans of long city walks, and dog lovers will find a lot to recognize and appreciate here. (Though as the owner of two greyhounds—one of whom is completely blind—I do take issue with Reddy’s eagerness to let Willa off-leash and to encourage other dog owners to do the same. Not every dog should be off-leash in public places, and speaking from experience off-leash dogs can pose a real danger to leashed dogs.)

Helen Jukes’ memoir about her first year of beekeeping, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, is an informative book about a subject I want to know more about. But I really came down with a bad case of this-could-have-been-an-article-itis while I was reading this thing—Jukes kept digressing into asides about her friends and her personal life and I just wanted to hear more about the damn bees. Perhaps this is unfair to Jukes, and I acknowledge that I definitely could have read a more scientifically focused book instead. But I like to think I’m always open to being seduced by a good memoir; this book didn’t fit that description for me.

Craig Mazin, a host of the excellent Scriptnotes podcast, recommended Dennis Palumbo’s book Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within as an actually useful how-to-write book. I’m kind of a sucker for that particular subgenre, so I picked it up. Palumbo is a former screenwriter who became a psychotherapist who specializes in treating screenwriters, and Inside is a collection of some of his observations. I was kind of bummed to discover that the book did absolutely nothing for me—I thought it was a somewhat trite collection of self-esteem-building exercises for writers. And as someone who doesn’t ever suffer from writer’s block, who doesn’t really feel envy for other writers’ accomplishments, and who doesn’t have problems hitting deadlines, the lessons didn’t really do anything for me. If you are a writer who experiences any of those common afflictions, though, this book might be just the ticket.

That’s all for this month

I’m writing this section on President’s Day—I tend to write these emails piecemeal, over the course of the month—and it occurs to me that President’s Day is an awful idea for a holiday. We’ve had plenty of mediocre-to-actively terrible presidents, and in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, a day that honors and celebrates presidents hits a little like a sour joke. A quick glance at my bookshelves will tell you that I love presidential history and trivia, but it’s clear now more than ever that the institution of the presidency simply does not deserve this kind of celebration.

I have a few ideas for national holidays that would be good replacements:

* American History Day: Every year, the president could issue a little proclamation calling on the nation to focus on a particular facet of American history—the Great Depression, say, or the War of 1812, or whatever—and maybe the media could use the president’s cue as a way to investigate and contextualize that historical moment in a big national history class.

* Public Sector Workers’ Day: The hell with Millard Fillmore! I want a day where we go to a parade to honor our postal workers and teachers, and where every federal and state employee gets a little bonus check.

* Volunteer Day: I know most people who get the day off would just take the damn day off no matter what you call it, but it’s still not a bad idea to celebrate civic sacrifice. People who give their time and skills to nonprofits are way more admirable than wealthy people who just dump cash in a glitzy show of philanthropy, so let’s honor them with an official day of service.

These are all silly rough sketches, but I think any one of them would serve the nation better than a President’s Day. And I think the presidents we should honor most would agree with me that President’s Day is an inappropriate federal holiday. 

Okay. That’s it. I hope you’re doing well,

Paul

The fifth and final issue of Snelson: Comedy Is Dying, the dark satire about cancel culture and comedy that I created with genius artist Fred Harper, came out last week. If you want Snelson on your bookshelf, you’re in luck—the fancy-pants collected edition, which will include five bonus short Snelson comics and some neat behind-the-scenes looks at Fred’s artistic process, will be published this March. You can pre-order it now from your local comic shop, from your local indie bookstore, or from Bookshop or Powell’s.

I’m honored to report that David Sedaris wrote a blurb for the collected edition that is beyond generous. Here it is:

“The best satire in America is between these covers. So dark, so rich, and so beautifully, eerily rendered.”

Wow. And if that’s not enough sickening self-promotion for one email, I’m also absolutely thrilled to inform you that I was recently shortlisted for Best Comic Writer of 2021 by comics criticism site Broken Frontier. If you’re so inclined, the awards are a people’s choice kind of deal, and you can vote for them online through January 1st. Really, though, the honor is just in being nominated by Broken Frontier staff—you can find some of the best comics of the year on that list of nominees, and I’m proud to be included.

I’ve Been Writing

For Business Insider, I wrote about how large financial institutions prey upon their poorest customers to the tune of billions of dollars a year with overdraft fees. I also wrote about how the economic security that used to belong to the American middle class is now an indulgence that’s only enjoyed by the top 90th percentile of American wealth, and I explained why so-called “colorblind” economic theories which don’t take race into consideration are ultimately harmful for people of color.

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Uppercase Bookshop, a beautiful mostly used bookstore in Snohomish that a mother-daughter team runs out of a log cabin. And I also contributed two blurbs to the Times‘s roundup of favorite books of the year.

I’ve been reading

I really liked Dream Girl, Laura Lippman’s novel about an old novelist in decline. It’s a story told by a man—a cross between Phillip Roth and Jonathan Franzen—who isn’t willing to accept his flaws, even as his mistakes come back to haunt him. The first half of the book is a gorgeously constructed character study of a basically terrible (or terribly basic) man, and in the second half of the book a murder plot introduces itself and the book turns into a gleefully dirty little thriller.

The premise of Everything and Less, Mark McGurl’s book-length essay about how Amazon has changed the content and structure of novels, is a brilliant one. Through novels including Fifty Shades of Grey and the comic erotica of Chuck Tingle, he makes a compelling case. Unfortunately, the book is rather aggressively academic, and McGurl crawls up his own argument to the point that it starts to feel like an obscure conspiracy theory. It’s a great topic for a long magazine article, but it’s annoying when stretched out into a whole book.

This year, a new musical about the making of Jaws called Bruce will debut at the Seattle Rep. (The name of the play is taken from the name of the mechanical shark used in the making of the movie, which was itself named after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer.) I just read the book that the musical is based on, a quickie making-of narrative by Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb called Jaws Log. It’s a fun document of the frustrations and triumphs of making the world’s first summer blockbuster on a limited budget, though it’s hardly a warts-and-all scorcher. If you like show business memoirs, this is a funny and well-told, though relatively scandal-free, example of the form.

A few weeks after Stephen Sondheim died, my long-awaited library hold on the audio version of James Lapine’s Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George happened to come come through. Lapine was relatively unknown in the theater world when Sondheim partnered with him to make a musical about Georges Seurat’s famous painting. In the book, Lapine interviews Sondheim, original cast members including Mandy Patinkin, and others who had a hand in the production about their experiences during the musical’s rocky transition from workshop to Broadway. Like Jaws Log, it’s very reverential of the artwork in question’s success, but it’s similarly well-told—and it’s even more curious about the alchemy that created the production’s success. Jaws Log is the more fun book of the two, but Putting It Together is probably more useful for people looking for insight into the creative process.

I’ve loved all of Jess Walter’s novels, so it’s not surprising that I loved his latest novel, The Cold Millions. But I was completely blown away by this book, which is about the fight over labor unions in Spokane in the early 20th century. It’s far and away Walter’s best book, and it has to be one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s been out for a while now–just came out in paperback a couple months ago—but I’m glad I saved the book for a holiday season when I could really sit and take my time with it.

Charles Baxter’s The Sun Collective is a novel about an anti-capitalist cult that tears apart a midwestern family. While it’s not the best thing Baxter’s ever written, I really enjoyed the book because it felt so very of-the-moment, dealing as it does with homelessness, class issues, liberal self-reflection, and the growing gap between the haves and have-nots in American cities.

And if you’re looking for a good old-fashioned mystery series, the Reckless series of graphic novels by writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips will scratch your itch. The series follows a half-assed private detective named Ethan Reckless as he navigates the seedy underbelly of 1980s Los Angeles. I binge-read the first three books in the series—Reckless, Friend of the Devil, and Destroy All Monsters, in that order—over the holiday break, and now I have to wait four or five months for the next book. This is the most exciting series in comics right now, for my money—both in terms of storytelling skill and the publication format. I think more comics are going to start to be published this way, in the form of bulkier hardcover releases once or twice a year rather than slender monthly stapled comics, and I’m glad Phillips and Brubaker are showing comics creators what they can do with the format.

That’s all for this month

Because it’s the end of the year and the end of the year is always about lists, I thought I’d share ten of the books, movies, and TV shows released in 2021 that moved me most. These aren’t ranked lists—I don’t believe in “best” or “favorite” works of art—but they are pieces of art that I enjoyed and which provoked feelings and thoughts that stayed with me throughout the year.

Books

(Note: If you’d like to learn more about any of these, I’ve written about all these books in previous issues of this newsletter.)

• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
• The Leak by Kate Reed Petty and Andrea Bell
• Secret Seattle by Susanna Ryan
• Project Hall Mary by Andy Weir
• The Contrarian by Max Chafkin’
• Touching This Leviathan by Peter Wayne Moe
• Cheer Up! Love and Pompoms by Crystal Frasier, Val Wise, and Oscar O. Jupiter
• We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida
• The Seeds by Ann Nocenti and David Aja
• We Hereby Refuse by various artists

TV Shows

• Reservation Dogs
• The Great
• Dopesick
• Foundation
• Ted Lasso
• What We Do in the Shadows
• Only Murders in the Building
• Dickinson
• Hacks
• Pen15

Movies

• Don’t Look Up
• The Power of the Dog
• The French Dispatch
• The Green Knight
• C’mon C’mon
• Passing
• Finch
• Dune
• Shiva Baby
• Bo Burnham: Inside

Finally, with this email I’ve officially been doing this newsletter for one year. I want to thank you for reading and subscribing, and I especially want to thank everyone who takes the time to write back. I’ve really enjoyed creating a record of my writing, reading, and thoughts in this way—it’s a hell of a lot more intimate than a blog, and I’ve enjoyed experimenting with my writing voice to reflect that. I’m looking forward to year two, and I hope you are too.

Wishing a very happy and healthy new year to you and yours!

I want to call your attention to a letter that my friend Tim Lennon, director of LANGSTON, recently wrote to the Seattle City Council. Tim was responding to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s surprise appointment of a director to Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture—read more about that at Publicola—but even if you don’t live in Seattle I think you should read this part:

Seattle’s cultural sector was the first to shut down due to the pandemic and many of us have yet to even partially reopen or find work. The challenges of affordability, equitable access to resources, and the volatility of public and philanthropic support our sector was facing even before the pandemic made working in our industries increasingly tenuous. The last year and half of pandemic closures and cancellations only accelerated the impact of those trends. My fellow culture workers have put in impossibly long hours to find creative ways to keep our workers employed, to get our doors open again, to keep creating, and to keep meeting our communities’ cultural, spiritual and material needs. 

The sad truth is that over the last two decades, even the most liberal American cities have failed to adequately support arts and culture. The arts is widely regarded by our local elected leaders as something people do in their spare time when they’re finished working at their real jobs, and I worry that as we emerge from the pandemic the arts will continue to be treated as a nonessential expense.

But art is what makes cities work. It’s the musicians and artists and writers who define a place and give it value. When I was a teenager growing up in a small town in Maine, I didn’t dream of moving to Seattle because it’s where Microsoft is headquartered—I wanted to move here because I loved Nirvana and Fantagraphics Books and Jason Lutes’s amazing comic Jar of Fools. And it’s the art that’s kept me committed to this city, more than 20 years after moving here.

Even before this pandemic, it was impossible for a beginning artist to afford to live in any of America’s biggest cities without a pre-existing financial cushion of some sort. In the next couple of years, we’re going to see some significant reprioritizing of values as cities and states recover from the pandemic. I worry that our leaders might prioritize boundless economic growth at the expense of cultural health. The fact that Mayor Durkan has proposed turning the appointed position of an arts director into a part-time job when it has always been a full-time position only justifies my concern.

If elected leaders push organizations like LANGSTON (and Short Run, and Hugo House, and the Vera Project, and so on) to the margins, I’ll have to reconsider my commitment to Seattle. I want to live in a place that values arts as an essential part of daily life.

find me online

Holy cow—I’m doing two virtual events in October? I hope I don’t sprain anything.

First up, comics journalist Dan Campos asked me to take part in a virtual panel on October 12th to discuss whether the current ongoing apocalypse will change the way we read and write about fictional apocalypses in the future. I’ve been thinking on this subject a lot, and I’m really excited to have this conversation. But I’m positively giddy that my current favorite comics writer, Mark Russell, is taking part in this panel. He’ll have plenty to talk about, considering that he’s currently publishing a great post-apocalyptic comic called Not All Robots that was written, I believe, during the pandemic.

And second, I’m doing a neat virtual event produced by the good folks at Elliott Bay Book Company on  October 29th: I’ll be interviewing historian Timothy Snyder and artist Nora Krug​, who worked together to adapt Snyder’s essential little book On Tyranny into comic book form. If you went into a bookstore during the Trump presidency, you absolutely saw Snyder’s slender book on the shop’s bestseller list, and for good reason: Snyder has the rare ability to synthesize the current moment into the flow of history in a way that is neither hyperbolic nor boring. Krug’s adaptation of the book brings a new urgency to the text, and I can’t wait to talk to them about how it came to be and what the process of translation from prose to comic was like.

I’ve been writing

At the Seattle Times, I wrote about Joie des Livres, a beautiful little bookstore that popped up on the Washington coast a couple years ago and is rapidly growing into its role as the only new bookstore for many miles around. It’s in the middle of a weird expensive pre-fab urbanist beach town called Seabrook that didn’t exist at all 20 years ago. Seabrook used to kind of creep me out, but Joie des Livres makes it feel much more like a real place.

And in my Business Insider column, I wrote about how the federal government might be able to regain the trust of its people, why cutting pandemic benefits too soon is a terrible idea, and why the snack food industry has gone through so many strikes recently. I also wrote about “Right-to-Work” laws, which sound like a positive thing but are in fact a way to lower worker pay and shrink bargaining power.

I’ve been reading

Because I’m apparently a masochist, I listened to the audiobook of I Alone Can Fix It, Carol Leonnig & Philip Rucker’s account of Donald Trump’s “Catastrophic Final Year” in office. To be clear: I’m not saying that everything is perfect now, but holy cow, I’m shocked that I had already started to forget exactly how frantic everything was when Trump was in office. I knew it was bad, but I forgot that pit-of-the-stomach churn that I used to feel every morning when I opened Twitter. It’s interesting, too, that General Mark Milley appears to be a major source for this book, given that Bob Woodward’s new book about the same period of time has a lot more information about what Milley was actually up to during this period. Fix It is almost certainly the story Milley wanted you to hear, but it’s certainly not the full story.

Speaking of how frantic recent years have been, Hermione Hoby’s novel Virtue is set during the frantic last couple of years, and it’s a book that tries to cram all of America’s social conversations into a single narrative. The story follows a young man as he becomes a low-level editorial intern at a storied literary magazine in New York City, and the first third of the book effectively lampoons the self-importance of the magazine and its staff. But then the narrative takes him to a farmhouse where he becomes entangled in the married life of an older couple, and the story loses some steam. It’s unfortunate, too, that one major Black character in the story has to stand in for every major race-related issue of the past four years—she becomes our narrator’s lens into subjects ranging from protests to police violence to tokenism in the arts, and she carries so much weight that she loses any sense of autonomy by the time the book reaches its climax. Still, it’s an ambitious debut novel and I’m excited to see what Hoby does next.

Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying In H Mart is worthy of the accolades it’s received. Zauner, who records music as Japanese Breakfast, writes about her family—especially her mother—with tremendous sensitivity, and her complicated love for her mother’s Korean family is so specific that it feels universal. A relatively quiet and small story, but one that stuck with me.

The Very Nice Box, by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman, is a novel about a woman who designs products for an IKEA-like company. It’s very mannered. The main character is emotionally wounded in the improbable way that only protagonists of novels are emotionally wounded—she never deviates from her perfectly attuned daily schedule, and nothing ever interferes with the little cocoon in which she’s hiding from her trauma, until the inciting incident of the book throws her years-long uninterrupted torpor into chaos. It feels less like a novel about real people and more like a pair of authors playing with stiff figures in a doll house. Regardless, I enjoyed the ideas, symbols, and themes of the book, even if I never emotionally identified with the characters.

Billy Summers is the best novel that Stephen King has written in decades. That sounds like high praise, but please know that I’ve loathed all of Stephen King’s novels since, maybe, The Green Mile? (I haven’t read all of them, but boy was Under the Dome terrible.) It’s the story of a hit man who pretends to be a writer as a cover for his latest assassination, but he slowly falls in love with writing and so he gradually learns how to be human again. The book reads more like Elmore Leonard than Stephen King in parts, which I mean as a huge compliment. Readers should be warned that there are plenty of King-isms here: His trademark fatphobia is on full display, and he addresses the trauma of sexual assault with all the stunted empathy and understanding that a well-meaning Boomer man can muster. But I had a really good time with this book, and was shocked by how present King felt throughout, with none of the sloppiness that clogged up most of his recent books.

Robert J. Sawyer is a Canadian sci-fi writer who writes about Big Ideas but doesn’t take them too seriously. I loved his book Calculating God, which is about aliens who show up on Earth one day demanding to talk to a paleontologist. Together, the aliens and our protagonist try to unwind a mystery that might uncover the true meaning of life. If you like old-school sci-fi that doesn’t get too wrapped up in making the high concept feel realistic, this might be for you—though you should be warned that the ending is super-rushed.

I read Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None for the first time, and it was a lot of fun—but my favorite part of the book was Christie’s introduction, which can be succinctly paraphrased as “This book was really hard to write, you guys, and I did a really great job with it.” Here it is:

That’s all for this month

Like many of you, I’ve been watching a lot of TV. And TV is really good these days! I’ve enjoyed Nine Perfect Strangers and Ted Lasso and The White Lotusand all the same shows that everyone’s talking about. (Except I just can’t get into Succession, and I’ve tried a couple times; I’m unable to find the appeal of watching a bunch of terrible rich people behaving terribly.)

But I was blown away recently by the FX comedy Reservation Dogs. It’s a half-hour comedy that’s actually funny, and it stars a cast of young Indigenous actors who have charisma to spare. (Seriously—any one of the four main leads could headline their own Marvel movie tomorrow if they had to.) It’s well-written, well-acted, and addictive as hell, with each episode advancing the story in important ways and no filler episodes to speak of. Each episode is stuffed with satire and a little bit of magic and gallons of heart.

It’s also noteworthy that ReservationDogs is a show about people who are poor, who in fact have to worry about money all the time. All the shows I mentioned above, and I think the majority of shows on network television, are about people who never have to worry about how they’re going to pay rent, or where the next meal is coming from, or how they’re going to materially improve their lives. TV has always over-represented rich people, but it seems like poor people have all but vanished from TV over the course of my lifetime. it’s great to watch a show that takes place in the real world, where everything isn’t sterile and extravagantly bland for a change.

The first season of Reservation Dogs is 10 episodes long and it’s all on Hulu now. I hope it runs for another six seasons, and that’s why I’m asking you to watch it, too.