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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. 

Howdy,

Earlier this month, Apple unveiled their Vision Pro headset, ending years of wild speculation about Apple’s strategy for virtual/augmented reality. I haven’t had access to the headset, but I have read just about every review written by tech journalists who have.

Most of the reviews rave about the fact that Apple has gone to ridiculous lengths to perfect and simplify what it has termed “spatial computing.” Apparently, the headset can create a dinosaur in the middle of your living room that looks so real that your basal ganglia tells you that you should run away before the giant reptile eats you. It can project multiple enormous screens in your room, or throw you into three-dimensional photographs that make you feel like you’re wandering around in a memory. In fact, most of the reviews I’ve read have expressed frustration at the fact that they can’t fully express in words how holistically pleasing the experience of using the Vision Pro is. 

When they’re finally available for sale next year, the Apple Vision Pro will be about $3500 each, and it will cost even more for glasses-wearers like myself to have special lenses crafted in order to use the device. In other words, I’m defnitely not getting one. But I’m sure that future versions of the device will be more affordable for mass-market use (probably the Apple Vision Air™, coming to engulf your head in 2027 or so) and so I’m certainly not going to vow that I’ll never buy one of their headsets.

I can’t help but notice how lonely most of Apple’s use cases for the Vision Pro are. Almost all of the examples in their press materials show people sitting or standing alone in stylish, airy living spaces: They’re doing work, video chatting, watching movies, and looking through photographs alone. All alone. 

And even though the headset projects an image of your eyes onto the front of the headset when another person is around, and even though the first ad for the Vision Pro goes out of its way to show a dad wearing the headset while horsing around with his kids in the kitchen over breakfast, those lonely figures are what really stand out to me as the most likely use-case for the device in its current form.

I just can’t see myself sitting down to watch a movie in the same room with friends and family like this, with each of us wearing our own Vision headset. But when I said this to a friend of mine recently, she pointed out that teenagers absolutely will do that. She’s right, of course. Younger people will absolutely wear the Vision Pro (or, more likely, the more affordable next versions of the Vision Pro with better battery life) in public. Young tech workers who live in tiny but expensive studios will love the ability to watch IMAX-scale movies from the comfort of their own futons. 

But unless there’s a massive societal shift—and never bet against Apple when it comes to creating massive societal shifts—I would feel too embarrassed to ever let strangers see me wearing this thing. This is the first time in my life that I can feel a technology passing me by, aimed over my head at the generation behind me. And I’m pretty okay with that. You kids go on ahead and strap a teevee to each eyeball. Maybe I’ll hop in later, after my nap. 

An Update on AI and Writing

Here is a completely real interaction I had with the ChatGPT iOS app yesterday:

Man, it is scary how smart this thing is getting.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Ballast Book Co, the independent bookstore in downtown Bremerton. The charming little shop, which changed ownership a little while back, just went through a small renovation process and is back open with a huge slate of book clubs that meet all around Bremerton. I learned in the process of writing this piece that Bremerton has a huge and very committed nerd community, with lots of arcades and board-game bars sprinkled throughout the area. 

And I also profiled Washington author Dave Neiwert, who is a leading expert on far-right and white nationalist organizations. His latest book, The Age of Insurrection, is a harrowing read explaining how regional clusters of militias and whitessupremacists have become a legitimate threat to American democracy. It’s an essential read for people who want to defend our country against neo-Nazis and other Trump-enabled creeps

For the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I discussed the economics and politics books we’re looking forward to reading this summer. I enjoy being mean to Goldy, and I’m glad that some of my bullying of him has been recorded and preserved for posterity.

I’ve Been Reading

The best new book I read this month, by far, was Yellowface, a novel by R.F. Kuang. It’s a satire of the publishing industry tucked into the framework of a literary thriller about a white woman stealing her Asian-American friend’s novel after a fatal accident and passing it off as her own. If you’re currently trying to sell a debut novel to a major publisher, I encourage you to read this book’s warts-and-all portrait of the publishing industry before you sign on the dotted line. It’s a clever story about someone trying to get away with a con, only to learn that she’s just a tiny part of a much bigger scam. I can’t guarantee you’ll feel great about the world when you finish this book, but I sure did tear through this one in an afternoon because I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

I re-read Jonathan Raban’s travel memoir Passage to Juneau this month. This was one of the first books I read when I moved to Seattle and got a job at the Elliott Bay Book Company 23 years ago, and revisiting it as an older man offered a different kind of experience. When I was younger, I loved the book for its dazzling tour of the history and geography of the region, but this time I deeply felt for Raban’s experience of loss and discovery. He was one of the finest writers ever to live in Seattle, and this one holds up beautifully.

I listened to the audiobook version of Tom Hanks’s novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and I had a great time with it. Hanks reads a large portion of the story, but he brings in guest readers to handle the monologues that are specifically from the perspective of important side-characters. This is not a ground-breaking or brilliant novel, but it is a charming and cheery overview of the process of making a movie. When I heard that the film featured in the novel is an adaptation of a Marvel-like comic book, I thought Hanks was going to publish more of a satire of the money-grubbing side of the film industry, but he happily treats the movie-making process as art, and every person involved in the process of making the art—from the writer/director on down to the lowliest production assistant—is treated as an artist, with dignity and compassion. Is it cheesy? Sure, a little. But that means it’s also a perfectly pleasant diversion for film-lovers who enjoy meandering solo summer walks on the beach. 

I was a teenager when the Branch Davidian compound at Waco went up in flames, and I was fascinated by the story, devouring every morning’s newspaper for new developments. (My parents didn’t have cable, thank God, or else I would have been glued to CNN.) I was surprised when I read Koresh, by Stephan Talty, to learn how little I actually knew about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. I didn’t realize exactly how much abuse and criminality Koresh had been allowed to get away with before the raid, for instance, and I wasn’t aware of the rush to make a TV movie of the Waco seige before it reached its conclusion. It’s not a must-read unless you’re weirdly fascinated by the story, but it’s a good overview.

In my quest for something light after that dip into true crime, I read both of Blythe Roberson’s nonfiction books, How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful? Of the two, the latter has much more to recommend—it’s a book-length account of Roberson’s quest to visit national parks from coast to coast. Roberson has worked as a standup comedian and a writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and I have to say she’s currently more of a comedian who writes than a comedy writer, if that makes sense. While her books are full of funny jokes, they’re not as witty as my most preferred comedy writing—think Wodehouse, Sedaris, Crosley, Adams, Ephron, Parker. I think she has it in her to really ratchet down the writing so that every line sparkles, but she’s not quite there yet. 

Night Fever, the latest comic by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, is a weird noir novel about an ordinary guy on a business trip who’s struggling with insomnia and wanders into a secret underground society that leads him toward a criminal double life. I love all of Brubaker and Phillips’s comics, but this one is special. It has the feel of an early David Lynch film, or a much more successful investigation of the gossamer-thin veil between the supernatural world and real life that Kubrick seemed to be going for in Eyes Wide Shut. If you like Jim Thompson novels and/or Lee Marvin movies, this one won’t let you down. 

The Lois Common Denominator 

Superman comics and Charlie Brown comic strip collections were my pathway to literacy, and in return I have developed a deep and lifelong affection for both of those characters. While there have been many great Superman comics produced in my lifetime, the last half-dozen or so movies with Superman in them have been….Very Not My Bag. Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill both looked the part of Superman, and they both conjured the earnest farmboy heart of the character at certain points in their movies, but Superman Returns, Man of Steel, and all the attendant Zach Snyder-driven Justice League films completely failed to understand Superman as a character.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the Superman: Legacy casting news that came out earlier this week. It remains to be seen if James Gunn has written a good Superman movie, but David Corenswet certainly looks like Superman and Clark Kent, and both his sleazy character in the film Pearl and his tragic turn in the show The Politician have somehow convinced me that he has the range to play an alien god who is raised on a Kansas farm by the most decent Americans in the history of the world. 

But the news that I’m most excited about is the casting of Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. Lois is the most important character in Superman comics because she’s Clark Kent’s tether to humanity. She’s an ambitious, empathetic, brilliant journalist—but she’s also impetuous and prone to jealousy and anger, and even though she’s the best reporter on the planet, she can’t spell to save her life. Superman both looks up to her and is terrified of her. She’s perfectly imperfect—in other words, human. Margot Kidder doesn’t get enough credit for the work that she did opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman. She dug through some of the pretty clunky Superman comics that were being produced at the time to find the heart of Lois—and through Lois’s heart, she found the heart of the movie.

Neither Amy Adams nor Kate Bosworth had enough to work with in their turns as Lois, so I can’t fault them for not getting the character right. But Brosnahan proved in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel that she has the charisma to steal a scene from some of the world’s best actors, and she can make them fall in love with her while she does it. Her portrayal of Midge Maisel is a world-class mess—she’s selfish, oblivious to the sacrifices that everyone makes for her, and willing to step on anyone in her quest for fame—but Brosnahan somehow convinces the audience to cheerfully follow her every step of the way. The only other actor who I’ve seen pull off that particular trick in a somewhat similar role is Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.

It’s frankly a crime that Brosnahan hasn’t been in four or five incredible movies at this point in her career, but this role could be the one that puts her over the top. Because if James Gunn got the script right, Lois Lane will run away with this movie and everyone will leave the theater talking about how great Brosnahan was. 

That’s a huge if, I realize. But Gunn has one of the best records when it comes to writing and directing modern comics adaptations. I loved the first and third Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and The Suicide Squad was a pretty great superhero movie too. He will have to switch tones for this movie; I don’t think Superman is the right vehicle for dick jokes and gross-out comedy. But I think Gunn also understands that. He’s no one-trick pony. 

I realize it’s a little ridiculous to be talking about my anticipation for a superhero movie that is scheduled for 2025 and has yet to film a single frame. But I think it’s a crime that out of the dozens of superhero movies we’ve seen over the last 15 years the first and greatest superhero has yet to get his due. A lot of people claim that Superman is boring, or too powerful, or too much of a goody two-shoes for modern audiences. I disagree. A person who can shatter planets with his bare hands but instead makes a conscious choice to be gentle, kind, and useful is one of the best stories that there is.

I hope your summer is going well!

Paul

Hi there!

In the last post, I wrote about my fears that AI would replace a lot of writers relatively quickly. Within a week of sending that email, I heard from two different readers of this very newsletter who had, in fact, recently been laid off from their writing gigs and (in one case, presumably) replaced by artificial intelligence. The corporate shift away from human writing and toward AI writing is real, and it’s happening right now. 

Wow, That’s a Dark Way to Open a Newsletter. Let’s Start Over.

Hi there! 

Hope this finds you well, and that you haven’t heard any terrifying news about technological advances recently. 

I have some exciting news! Last week, AHOY Comics announced a new anthology miniseries coming this September, and I’ve contributed a comic to it! The book is called Project: Cryptid, and it’s a five-issue miniseries collecting stories about mythical creatures like Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and the Loch Ness Monster. 

I can’t share too much about my story except to say that the artist is the amazing Peter Krause, I shared some of Peter’s gorgeous preview art last month, and it’s a weirdly personal story set in the Pacific Northwest. 

I’m not yet sure which issue our story will be in, but you’ll want to read this whole miniseries because it’s packed with stories from some of the best comics writers in the world today including Mark Russell, Paul Cornell, Alex Segura, and Alisa Kwitney, and the stories are illustrated by some amazing artists including Gene Ha, Zander Cannon, Jamal Igle, and Richard Pace. The first issue’s cover looks like this:

So if you’re the kind of person who buys monthly comic books at your local comic shop, I’d appreciate it if you subscribed to this one. I’ll also let you know when the issue with my story is set to be released, and hopefully there’ll be a collected edition to buy sometime down the line. I’m excited to read everyone else’s stories in this series, and I’m thrilled to be a part of this weird, wonderful comic that was written, drawn, colored, and lettered 100% by human beings.

I’ve Been Writing

For almost 20 years now, I’ve been a fan of autobiographical cartoonist Julia Wertz. Her online comic strip, Fart Party, was an early viral sensation and she now publishes regular strips with The New Yorker. She’s since expanded into full-length books about her life, and her newest one, Impossible People, is her most ambitious yet: A big book about awful relationships, recovery from alcoholism, and the awkwardness of becoming an adult. For the Comics Journal, I interviewed Wertz about her whole life and career. It is thousands of words long—we talked on the phone for two hours, with both of us walking around our respective neighborhoods—and I’m very happy with how it turned out. We discussed earnestness, regrets, and the idea of whether you ever feel like you’ve earned your life accomplishments. (It’s extremely weird talking to someone at length about their life when you’ve never spoken before.) I used to read the Comics Journal as a kid and their long interviews with comics professionals were always the epitome of cool to me, so I’m thrilled to be published by the Journal.

I’ve been reading Josh Feit’s writing, I think, for about two decades now. As the news editor at The Stranger and as a founder of Publicola, Josh has helped shaped my understanding of urbanism and what it means to live in a city. Over the past five years or so, Josh has gotten into reading and writing poetry, and he’s published two books of urban-planning-themed poems in the last year. I interviewed him about his poetic education and his poetry practice for Poetry NW. His enthusiasm for poetry is so enviable, and a reminder that it’s never too late to stretch your writing in new ways, which I find really inspiring.

For the Seattle Times, I profiled used bookstore Ophelia’s Books, which has been a steady presence in Fremont for 25 years. This story actually breaks some news: Ophelia’s has just recently brought on a new co-owner, and among other improvements the shop is going to carry a small selection of new books for the first time in its history. It’s always exciting to see booksellers adapt and try new things, and I have great faith that Ophelia’s will be even stronger for these changes.

I’ve Been Reading

Friends, I was absolutely charmed by Bea Wolf. It’s a comic book adaptation of Beowulf for and about kids, written by Zach Weinersmith and drawn by Boulet, who only has one name. The title character is a fearsome warrior in a suburban neighborhood full of children who are terrorized by a boring old man who hates youth. And it’s written in a riff on the old English of Beowulf. Here’s the first few lines: “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters, the parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof, the unbowed bully-crushers, the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers, fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.” Yes, it’s all written like this and it is glorious. I have no idea if kids would enjoy this book or if they’d find it impenetrable and frustrating. But for me, it’s the most joyous reading experience I’ve had in a long while.

Lone Women is not my favorite Victor LaValle novel, but “not my favorite Victor LaValle novel” is a category that still ranks above most other novels. It’s about a woman who moves to Montana as a homesteader. She’s got a mysterious past and she’s carrying a weird secret in a large locked trunk—and bad things happen when that secret gets loose. This one paired well with the book I read immediately after—Noah Van Sciver’s Joseph Smith and the Mormons, which is one of the best long nonfiction narratives I’ve ever read in comic book form. It takes a somewhat dispassionate, objective look at Smith’s life and the earliest days of the Mormon faith, and Van Sciver’s handling of the subject matter is nothing short of masterful. 

I came across two titles on the staff recommendation wall at Third Place Books Ravenna that immediately spoke to me. The first, Sam Wallman’s Our Members Be Unlimited, is a comic-book history about the history and importance of labor unions. I really dug the way Wallman presented information in comics form (with the unfortunate exception of two early chapters in the book that took a more abstract turn and which were for whatever reason incredibly difficult for me to follow) and it’s a stirring argument for organized labor. The second staff recommendation was Hourglass, a novel by Keiran Goddard about a maladjusted man who completely falls apart when a romantic relationship ends. I didn’t enjoy this one as much, but that might be because it was an incredibly dark book and I didn’t want to spend that much time in the dark this month. It’s well-written, but it’s a rough trip.

So naturally, I accidentally read another incredibly dark book almost immediately after: Hanna Bervoet’s novel We Had to Remove This Post. Bervoet is a Dutch author and this is her first book to be translated to English. It’s easy to understand why: It’s a novel about a young woman working as a content moderator at a social media company, and it’s based on journalism about the hellish duties of a content moderator. Basically, the narrator and her coworkers are exposed to horrendous filth posted online all day, every day, and they have to apply the social network’s esoteric and always-evolving moderation rules to determine what should be deleted and what should stay. It’s a dark novel about the junction between technology and despair, and I enjoyed it more than  Your Driver Is Waiting, which I read last month and which is kind of in the same lane. But don’t read it if you’re in a sensitive place. I mean, yeesh.

Hernes is a real change of pace for Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a collection of very short stories about the residents of a coastal Oregon town—kind of like a more ambitious prose version of Spoon River Anthology. Hernes is a very airy, experimental read—it’s easy to understand why this one is published in a limited edition by a small press rather than one of the big publishers that puts out Le Guin’s sci-fi novels—but I’m glad to meet this side of Le Guin and to know there’s more like it out there in the world.

From the delightfully named Portland publisher University of Hell Press, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk is a collection of personal essays written in and about the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s fascinating to me now that those first lockdowns already feel like history, like a thing that happened, and reading this book marked the first time I really thought of the moment as history, as opposed to something that happened a while back.

After a whole bunch of false starts in which I’d wildly pick up and abandon books, I encountered a cheesy 1970s mystery paperback called The Running of Beasts in a local Little Free Library at exactly the right moment. Bill Pronzini and Barry Malzberg’s novel is a multi-perspective thriller about a community that’s terrorized by a serial killer, and I tore through it. Not groundbreaking, but a lot of fun.

The Longest Walk

On Sunday, May 28th, I decided to make an attempt at my fourth annual walk around Lake Washington. I usually try to circumnavigate the lake at the beginning of summer, when the days are long but before the weather starts to get too hot (and/or smoky, PNW summers being what they are in the age of climate change.) I wrote about last year’s hike for the Seattle Times, and I mentioned then that after walking for 103,000 steps, I felt like I had another hour or two in me. 

This year, I put that hypothesis to the test. After leaving the house at 4:28 am I followed the same route as last year for most of the way—north to the Burke Gilman Trail, over the top of the lake, south through Kirkland, Bellevue, and Factoria—but then I cut over to Newcastle and down through Renton before circling back north to home. It added a little less than two hours to the trip—so, roughly six miles.

In the end, I walked 112,004 steps, arriving home at 11 pm sharp. I barely sat down or stopped walking for the entire day, except for bathroom breaks, picking up food to walk on the trail, or changing my shoes and socks halfway through the walk. 

It was the most I’ve ever walked in a single day, and it will probably be the most I’ll ever walk in a single day. I can’t recall ever feeling quite as tired—mentally and physically—as I was by the time I walked in the door to my house that night. If I kept going for much longer, I think that I would have collapsed. But those ill effects weren’t long-lasting. Remarkably, I had no blisters (I credit this Foot Glide anti-blister balm that you spread on your feet like deodorant) and I wasn’t really sore the next day, just a little stiff in the hips when I woke up.

I’ve always been the kind of person who tends to extremes. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, until I quit cold turkey. I liked to drink beer a lot, until I stopped drinking entirely. I’m curious to see what happens now that I’ve hit this physical extreme. Now that I’ve done the most walking I can do in a day, does that mean my relationship to walking will change? Will my weekly long walks feel a little less compulsive than they have in the past, knowing exactly what I’m capable of doing? Maybe! But it’s honestly kind of fun to be at this point—to hit a milestone in a long-running obsession, and to find out what’s on the other side. 

Just about every writer I know has lost their mind over ChatGPT and other AI language models this year. And for good reason! AI has become very good at producing passable text almost instantaneously, and it’s practically free. Now that Amazon has gotten into the generative AI language model game, I think the entire field of professional writing is about to change for the worse. Amazon’s greatest talent isn’t e-commerce—it’s the relentless devastation of entire industries through the clever application of hyper-efficient technology. 

In the short term, a lot of professional writers are going to be out of work. When I state this belief anywhere online, a lot of writers get mad at me. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think that AI is better at writing than most human professional writers. I believe that good writing is important to a functioning society, and I don’t believe that AI will ever be able to produce truly great writing.

But it’s like that old punchline: “I don’t need to run faster than the bear; I just need to run faster than you.” AI doesn’t have to be better at writing than most professional writers; in most corporate settings it just has to be good enough to satisfy middle managers. And most middle managers have a very low bar for what constitutes serviceable writing. The problem is that excellent writing and editing is an invisible art, and the people in charge of hiring writers don’t, as a rule, have the ability to understand what makes a piece of writing excellent.

This is dark stuff, and I hope I’m wrong. But it feels like I’ve been here before. As a bookseller in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I sat in many rooms where older booksellers proclaimed that nobody wanted to buy books from faceless online stores, or that nobody wanted to read a book off a screen. Today, independent bookstores are still thriving in many parts of the country, but a whole lot of bookstores went out of business over the last twenty years, and great swaths of the country—mainly poor and rural areas—are now book deserts. 

I think a similar kind of devastation is about to happen to writers. Writing is about to become (even more of) a boutique profession that is only supported in fields and locations with great wealth. Pretty much every non-boutique copywriting or content production job—clickbait blogs, cheap public relations firms, etc.—will be farmed out to AI, with maybe one overworked and underpaid human contractor on hand for quality control purposes.

This is bad for the written word. Soon our inboxes will be choked with floods of personally targeted AI-produced spam emails that cost fractions of pennies to create. Press releases written in bland AI language will flood the inboxes of media professionals. News sites will fill up with blandly written crap that will then swarm social media with the help of bots. Sloppy but mostly serviceable writing will be everywhere, to the point that we’ll begin to perceive the written word as radio static, an obnoxious background hum to be ignored. We’ll recruit AI bots to weed out the AI-written emails in our inboxes, and billions of documents will be composed and deleted by artificial intelligence every hour without one human eye ever seeing them.

I expect that in the short run, AI will finally inspire the “pivot to video” that Facebook tried to kick off (through outright fraud) a decade or so ago. We’ll become so exhausted by the wall of bland, meaningless text weighing down our phones that we’ll only trust news or opinions if they’re delivered by a real human being—and the only way to confirm that a real human being is sharing the news and opinions will be if we can actually watch the words escaping their mouths. (Of course, we’re also not too far away from anyone being able to create cheap and convincing AI video newsreaders that look and sound like real human beings, but that’s a problem for a few years down the road.)

And I think that fiction writers are still safe, for at least a while. I’ve asked Google’s Bard to write a story, and the results are as boring and weightless as a stranger trying to explain a dream to you on an airplane. But I also don’t think we’re that far away from being able to ask Disney’s Storyteller AI™ to write us an officially sanctioned fanfic novel about Spider-Man meeting and falling in love with Princess Leia, and I think many fans would be thrilled enough by that experience to forgive the uninspired AI prose.

In the past, automation has largely taken jobs from blue-collar, working-class professions. And the response from leaders has largely been underwhelming—they tell 45-year-old factory workers to get retrained or move, and then they’re shocked when those laid-off workers resent them for being out of touch. I’m interested to see how leaders respond when automation comes for a job that’s traditionally been a white-collar profession. 

In a just world, humans would be able to enjoy leisure and play while the robots took over work in our stead. But I just asked Google’s Bard AI model to tell me a story about that kind of utopia, and the story the computer told me included societal unrest due to widespread unemployment. I guess even artificial intelligence can’t imagine a happy ending for this particular situation. 

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Nook & Cranny Books & More, a new shop on Capitol Hill’s 15th Ave. It’s in the space formerly occupied by “bibliotherapy” bookstore Oh Hello Again, and browsing this tiny shop is a delight. 

On Twitter, the great comic artist Peter Krause posted three wonderful previews of a project I wrote that he’s currently drawing. 

(Link to tweet, because Elon Musk is breaking Twitter embeds.)

(Link.)

(Link.)

I’ve been reading Peter’s comics since the 1990s—his Power of Shazam! is a favorite, and it’s currently being reprinted by DC. So getting the pages for this story in my inbox is a dream. It’s a story that feels very personal to me, and it just couldn’t be in better hands with Peter on art. I’m excited to tell you more about it later this year!

I’ve Been Reading

The Laughter by Seattle author Sonora Jha is a satirical novel told from the perspective of an old white professor who stalks a young Pakistani Muslim professor. It’s a dark comedy about cancel culture, and Jha manages to freshen up the exhausted campus satire genre with her sharp sense of satire.

Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss is another novel that takes place in an exhausted genre—the misanthrope’s complaint. It’s a story about a medical transcriptionist who becomes obsessed with the woman in therapy sessions she’s transcribing. She eventually seeks out the patient and tries to insinuate herself into her life using knowledge culled from the recordings. In the 1990s, this book would have been written by Martin Amis, it would have starred a male protagonist who was portrayed as a hero, and it would have been half as good.

I read a couple of gossipy nonfiction books featuring behind-the-scenes drama this month. The Fight of His Life is Chris Whipple’s account of the first two years of the Biden presidency, and it’s got plenty of office drama and political tension. One of Whipple’s scoops in this book is the fact that President Biden doesn’t necessarily trust all the members of his Secret Service team to be loyal to him over Trump, which is a truly horrifying fact if you spend more than three seconds contemplating the ramifications. Not an essential read, but if you like to learn how the political sausage is made, there’s plenty of interesting stuff here. And Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars reveals the backstage drama in several of the most high-profile Academy Awards campaigns in history. Perhaps it’s because this was one of the first Oscars that captured my attention as an adult, but I loved the section about how Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love essentially stole the Best Picture Oscar from Saving Private Ryan. It’s somehow refreshing to hear that Steven Spielberg, who’s been Hollywood’s dad for pretty much my entire life, was full-on pissed at Harvey Weinstein for the way he manipulated the Academy. 

Speaking of Hollywood, Sarah Polley has evolved from one of my favorite actors to one of my favorite filmmakers, so I was virtually guaranteed to love her memoir-in-essays, Run Towards the Danger. But I think it surpassed even my inflated expectations. Her accounts of growing up as a child actor, learning how to work within a system full of sexual harassment and gender inequality, and overcoming several health crises under the watch of uncaring medical professionals are well-written and full of the anger and introspection that makes her films stand out to me. 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a cozy time-travel novel by Toshikazu Kawaguchi about a coffee shop that enables people to travel through time. The problem is that the time travelers are subject to a number of constraints while they’re traveling: They can only travel through time on one seat in the cafe, for one thing, and they can’t leave the seat while they’re traveling. Further, the travelers have to return to the present before the coffee in their cup goes cold. The rules, which are repeated in the narrative a bit too often for my tastes, keep the story grounded and the stakes low. 

Priya Guns essentially admits in the acknowledgements of her novel Your Driver Is Waiting that the book is is unabashedly intended to be a Taxi Driver for the age of Uber. I enjoyed both Drivers, but the elements that I liked least about the novel were the scenes that were clearly most influenced by the Scorsese film. Damani, the protagonist, deserves more than to be a modernized, gender-flipped response to Travis Bickle—I really felt for her desperation to make ends meet by ferrying customers everywhere in her beater of a car, and I wish the book stuck with those stakes rather than escalating into an exploration of obsession and alienation. 

Social Media Update: Social Media Still Sucks!

This month, Substack introduced its Twitter clone, which it calls Notes. Notes is probably most, uh, noteworthy because Substack CEO Chris Best embarrassed himself by basically refusing to say he’d kick Nazis off the platform in an interview with The Verge. I’m messing with Notes a bit, but it feels like if LinkedIn and Medium had a baby: Everyone on it is too slick, too professional, too eager to sell you something. (And yes, I am thinking about leaving Substack for the second time because it’s owned by people who refuse to say that hate is bad.)

So what’s the state of social media? I very occasionally post work-related stuff to Facebook and Twitter, but I’ve stopped visiting both platforms and I don’t miss either of them. I do have a profile on Post, but I barely ever go there because it has all the cultural vibrance of a Daily Kos comment thread on Thanksgiving weekend. I watch videos on Tik Tok, but I will never be comfortable making or being in videos. 

The social media platform I spend the most time on, by far, is Mastodon. It’s still only a fraction of the time that I used to spend on Twitter, but I enjoy the weirdos and nerds I follow there, and they introduce me to new perspectives, which was my favorite part of Twitter. 

That said, the Mastodon experience is janky as hell. It’s hard to follow people, the app can sometimes take two or three minutes to update, and the first instance I joined disappeared due to drama so I had to basically wipe out my profile and start over. There’s no network-wide search, so you have to use hashtags for discovery, which is such an ugly and clunky way to navigate the internet. Worse still, Mastodon is full of technically astute computer people who are incredibly eager to explain to you in great detail why all of the above is Good, Actually—a feature and not a bug—even though it makes for a really awkward and frustrating experience for casual users like me.

So for now you can find me on Mastodon. I post little wrapups of my weekly long walks every Saturday or Sunday, and I’ll engage in conversations with other users because those interactions don’t usually turn into bar brawls the way every interaction on Twitter does. But I can also picture myself just drifting away from the platform one day and never coming back. It’s quite possible that no social media site will ever enthrall me the way Twitter did back in the day—and that’s okay. 

I can’t argue that social media has been a net negative in my life. I’ve made lots of friends and been introduced to all kinds of perspectives that have expanded my understanding of the world. But it’s time to move on. The foundational idea of social media, of broadcasting our thoughts to as wide an audience as possible, was broken from the start. We can and will have better conversations in smaller rooms.