A Post-Post World
Hello,
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.
Hope the rest of your summer is swell,
Paul