In Poor Taste
Friends,
Three and a half years after the beginning of the pandemic, I finally caught Covid for the first time. It was pretty rough! The fever completely sapped my strength, I had a grouchy and persistent stomach pain anytime I ate anything, and I was chilly and achy for five days.
But my absolute least favorite part of it all was losing my sense of taste. Even now, almost two weeks after I started showing symptoms, the most I flavor can detect is a chemical aspartame kind of suggestion (when I eat sweet things) or a hint of acrid burnt paper (when I eat anything else.)
I don’t understand people who have lost their taste can still eat like everything is normal. Without flavor, food just becomes a series of weird experiences you put your mouth through—something to tolerate for survival. Here’s some hot and chewy stuff, here’s some room-temperature crunchy stuff, here’s some paste. I only want to eat the bare minimum calories necessary to support my recovery, and if I think about what I’m putting in my mouth for too long I start to get nauseous.
I realize that none of these thoughts are novel—most people reading this are probably moving on to their third Covid infection, not their very first—but this experience is rocking me to my core. I can’t believe how much I took flavor for granted, or how its absence has leached the color from my day-to-day life.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Seattle Times, I visited Apparition Books in Renton, which is a new and used bookstore with lots of bizarre and brilliant treasures hiding in the stacks. This month’s edition of the column is also about how Seattle’s skyrocketing rents are pushing Seattle’s weirdest and most passionate supporters of the arts further and further away.
I also interviewed Seattle cartoonist Susanna Ryan, perhaps better known as Seattle Walk Report, about her latest book, a dog-centric version of those baby’s first year journals. It contains possibly my all-time favorite quote to ever come from an author interview: “I thought I was going to be the first cartoonist ever to be sidelined by a career-ending foot injury.”
And to help promote my upcoming comic in the Project: Cryptid anthology, I took part in a group interview at Cemetary Dance about the intersection of horror, comic books, and comedy.
I’ve Been Reading
It’s a good thing I went on a relaxing beach vacation at the beginning of this month, because the Covid brain fog killed my reading dead.
Every summer I sit down and read Finnish author Tove Jansson’s novel The Summer Book, a collection of vignettes about a grandmother and her granddaughter spending the summer on a small Finnish island. This is my fourth or fifth year with the book, and I’m always amazed by the different details that catch my attention every time. Last year, I was obsessed with Jansson’s knowing description of how summer subtly decays into autumn. The year before last, I relished the grumpy grandmother’s no-nonsense conversational style. This year, I was more interested in the young girl at the heart of the story—the way she flits between calm observation and total irrational emotion really spoke to me. I also read the first two books in Jansson’s middle reader series, Comet in Moominland and Finn Family Moomintroll. They’re delightful, fanciful stories about a growing family of imaginary creatures, and I wish I’d encountered them as a kid.
I have two different kinds of favorite authors. Category one are the authors, like Colson Whitehead or Jhumpa Lahiri, whose new books I have to read as soon as they’re published. Category two are the authors I know I love but whose books I tend to save for months or years, until I feel the need to read an exceptional novel. Percival Everett is a perfect example of a Category Two, and on my vacation I read and adored his novel Dr. No, which combines James Bond and the concept of nothingness into a wildly funny, brain-tinglingly smart book.
Double Dutch Treat is an old hardback book that collects three lesser-known Elmore Leonard novels. (Well, one of the novels, City Primeval, has a slightly higher profile this year because it was recently kinda-adapted into a season of the revived TV show Justified.) Two of the novels didn’t really hit me in the way that truly great Leonard novels do—the dialogue wasn’t quite as good as prime Leonard, the plots didn’t sing the way his best do. But I did really enjoy The Gold Coast, a novel about a woman whose mob boss husband dies and leaves her his fortune—with the caveat that he’s hired a goon to ensure that she never gets together with another man. It’s a great little crime story that would make for a fun movie adaptation.
Tom Scioli’s I Am Stan is a comic book biography of Stan Lee. Lee is a deeply controversial figure in the world of comics. Marvel movies have positioned him as the sole creator of Marvel Comics, but plenty of cartoonists and comics scholars instead see him as a conman who fleeced some of the greatest comics artists of all time and stole the credit for the superheroes who made Marvel into an IP powerhouse. Scioli walks a very fine line in this book, giving room to Lee’s legend while also accepting the ambiguity that Lee himself left in his own life story.
Emily Habeck’s Shark Heart: A Love Story is a novel about a young married theater teacher who suffers from a rare condition: He’s turning into a shark. I admired the way that Habeck dove right into the book’s premise—you picked up a book about a man turning into a shark, so by God in the first chapter of the book the guy learns he’s turning into a shark. It’s a well-written and earnest story about how much personal change a marriage can withstand.
I try to resist the temptation to armchair-edit the novels I read, but I would absolutey have told Hillary Barz to cut the entire first fifth of her novel The Writing Retreat. It’s a fun thriller about aspiring novelists who are invited to the home of a world-famous eccentric bestselling author who wants to coach them into writing bestsellers of their own. But the story doesn’t really start until a fifth of the way through the book, when the writers finally arrive at the retreat, and everything important in the first 50 or 60 pages would have been better parceled out into a couple of fast-paced flashbacks.
I listened to Jaime Green’s The Possibility of Life as an audiobook as I walked on the beach, and her exploration of the possiblity of extraterrestrial life, accompanied with thought experiments into what weird and familiar forms that alien life might take, was a perfect beach companion. This is fun science writing, and Green also uses plenty of examples from science fiction to fuel her imagination.
That’s All for This Month
As I write this, it’s been a week since I turned the corner on Covid. But as I wrote above, my sense of taste is still gone. And I think it’s going to take a little while for me to build back to my typical 21,000-step-a-day pace. From what I’ve heard, pushing too hard too fast can prolong the fatigue and make the recovery take even longer.
It’s hard for me to take things slowly. I’m typically very consistent, and I like to work a lot. But I also don’t want to push myself into a long Covid situation by doing one of my 40-mile walks before I’m ready for it. So we’re doing this right—step by step.
In lieu of a proper conclusion, please accept this photo I took of Wally out on the beach earlier this month:
See you next month! I hope you and yours have managed to avoid Covid in this last surge.
Paul