My Buttondown Life
Hello!
If you’re reading this email, I’m happy to report that I’ve successfully migrated my email away from Substack. I looked at a number of newsletter hosting options, but the best one for my needs was Buttondown, a small and scrappy startup that seems very customer-focused. And unlike Substack, the founder of the company emailed me to say that he would not allow Nazis on his platform, so I’m thrilled.
I’ll wait a few weeks to make sure this email is getting out to people, and then I’ll delete the Substack archives. But if you should ever want to go back and read old newsletters for whatever godforsaken reason, I’ve got them all safely archived at paulconstant.com.
Many thanks to Erik for recommending Buttondown to me in a reply to my last newsletter. And thanks to many others who recommended other services to me. I investigated all the options, and Buttondown felt like the right choice for me, but please know your input was valued and deeply considered. I appreciate you all.
Anyway, here’s a dirty little secret about the December edition of my newsletter: I write it earlier in the month and schedule it to be sent on the last day of the year. I know! I know! The staggered release feels inauthentic to me, too, but here’s the thing: I’ve developed a practice of not writing at all in the last two weeks of the year. I think it’s a useful way to recharge my creative batteries, and I also get a whole lot of reading done, and that makes me very happy. So the “I’ve Been Writing” and “I’ve Been Reading” sections of this newsletter will be a little thin this month. I’ll include anything I missed in the January edition.
Last year, I listed a few movies and TV shows that really impressed me over the course of the year. This year, I feel like my list of best movies of 2023 are everyone’s list of best movies—Barbenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, May December, The Killer, The Holdovers, Past Lives—and while I watched a lot of very good TV, it also wasn’t a year with a lot of phenomenal standouts. I was saddest about losing Reservation Dogs, and I’m holding out hope for a Willie Jack spinoff. The limited series Beef was incredible. And I also thought The Great ended in a quite remarkable way.
R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface was my most vivid reading experience of the year. It physically hurt to put that book down and go to work, I wanted to keep reading so much. The fact that Kuang also recently wrote a fantasy novel about translation and colonization, Babel, easily makes her the year’s MVP.
I’ve Been Writing
At the Seattle Times, I previewed a few of December’s most interesting-looking paperback releases. Of these, I’m probably most interested in reading Blake Butler’s Molly, but I worry that it will be too intense a read for deepest, darkest winter.
I also wrote about Jonathan Raban’s last memoir, Father and Son, and why I think the pairing of Raban and Seattle was so special.
Edmonds’ Neverending Bookshop closed just a couple of weeks ago, but I explained why its closure is anything but sad. Its owner, Annie Carl, is launching a career as a writer, and she will still bring her charm, intelligence, and estimable willpower to Seattle’s book culture in a million different ways.
And I wrote about a British mystery novelist who discovered that she was related to a Seattle librarian. I really enjoyed learning about this family history and seeing all the differences and similarities between the distant cousins.
I’ve Been Reading
How can it be that Stephen King is writing the best books of his career right now? Holly is one of my favorites of his, a detective novel with a lot to say about intergenerational conflict and—this is big for King—very little fatphobia! If you like thrillers about weird crimes and detectives who are fundamentally decent human beings, you could do a lot worse than this one.
With the Joaquin Phoenix Napoleon movie in theaters right now, I realized that I know almost nothing about Napoleon. So I read Andrew Roberts’s horse-choker of a biography, Napoleon: A Life. My takeaway is that biographies of military figures and long factual accounts of war are definitively Not My Things. Also, I suspect that Napoleon might have been a bad person. I’m glad I read it because my European history is getting really rusty, but it definitely felt like eating my spinach.
Dirty Panties is a graphic novel by Maybelline Skvortzoff about a young woman who gets into online sex work because she’s tired of being broke. It’s a not-sexy-at-all account of what it means to give yourself over to being someone else’s fantasy.
If you’re a fan of novels that take place over a very limited amount of time—think Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine—have I got a couple of books for you. I read two novels back-to-back that relate the events of a handful of hours in the interior lives of protagonists. The Long Form is Kate Briggs’s novel about a mother at home with her new baby in that weird sleepless period when there’s very little human to identify with in the yowling, blurbling bundle that you just brought home from the hospital. And The Guest Lecture is the story of an economist practicing her impending big speech about Keynes during a long evening of insomnia. Long Form is a bit more abstract, straining at the constraints of the structure with bursts of poetry and stream of consciousness writing. The Guest Lecture is funnier and more direct. Reading them one after the other really helped me downshift into quiet interior winter mode.
And Open Throat, by Henry Hoke, is a very short novel told from the perspective of a mountain lion in the Hollywood hills. If you’re the kind of person who would endlessly complain about how a mountain lion could understand English, this isn’t the book for you. But I loved it, even though I knew the book was going to tug on my heartstrings by the end. Don’t read if you’re feeling fragile.
Fairytale of Pioneer Square
December 25th was Pogues singer Shane MacGowan’s birthday. He passed away in November, right after Henry Kissinger, but he would have been 66 on Christmas.
Decades ago, I was lucky enough to accidentally get drunk with Shane MacGowan. I’ve been sober for 14 years now but this was in 2002, when I was in my peak drinking era. My coworkers and I were having a drink at our preferred after-work bar, which was technically a hotel bar. (Whatever image of a hotel bar this causes you to conjure in your imagination, dial it back a ways. It wasn’t a dive bar, but it was absolutely, shall we say, bare bones—the barest minimum a bar could possibly be in terms of comfort, decoration, and amenities.) The Pogues were playing a show at the Showbox that night on 1st Ave, and his band happened to be booked at the hotel.
Shane MacGowan popped downstairs all by himself for a drink, and then my coworkers and I ran to the bar to buy his drink for him. Shane ordered a whiskey, and the bartender explained that the bar didn’t serve hard liquor because it didn’t have a kitchen attached. There was a second when I thought Shane was going to leave, but instead he ordered a chardonnay and then he sat down with us.
Shane MacGowan was famous for having terrible teeth, and between that and his thick Irish accent, I could barely make out anything he was saying at first. He somehow said “Chardonnay” in a way that was all consonants and one syllable, and his laugh was a kind of hiss—“KSSSHHHHKSSHHHHHHH.” But as we kept downing pitchers of beer and he kept downing bottles of wine, I started to understand him clearly.
I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about. I do recall that an episode of the X-Files was playing on the bar TV and every time Dana Scully came on the screen, Shane would turn to the person next to him and say, in a Gillian Anderson impersonation, “THERE MUST BE A LOGICAL EXPLANATION!” and then everyone would laugh. And I know I got really gushy and sentimental and told him that he was probably my favorite living poet—which was true, right up until the day he died—and he tried to wave me away and I told him it was true and asked if he believed me and he said yes.
Finally, two hours after The Pogues were supposed to go on stage, one of Shane’s bandmates stormed into the bar to drag him to the show. Shane asked if we were going to go see him perform. I said I wish I could, but I was a broke bookseller and couldn’t afford the tickets. He said he’d put us on the list, took our names, and left for the show.
Myself and a few drunken booksellers left the bar and staggered down First Ave. I was so excited—I’d never been put on the list of a rock show before! The night felt absolutely full of possibilities.
So you can imagine my disappointment when the bouncer took one look at us and, well, bounced us. He didn’t care that we said we were on the list—we were absolutely plastered and he wasn’t going to let us in his club. So because we’d spent all night drinking with Shane MacGowan, we were too drunk to actually go to the Pogues show.
(And by all accounts, it was a terrible show. Shane was pretty far in the bag by the time they finally went onstage. Ooops.)
As I mentioned, I am very happily sober now, and I sometimes regret that I didn’t quit drinking sooner. But of all the terrible drunken nights of my life, I have to say that night with Shane is one of the few that I don’t regret at all.
I don’t believe that anyone needs to be an addict or miserable in order to be a great artist. I wish that Shane could have gotten sober and had a magical third act, full of creativity and joy and life. I was glad that he eventually got his teeth fixed (the dentist later referred to that repair job as “The Mount Everest of Dentistry”) and that he seemed to have people around him who deeply loved him every step of the way.
And his songs are going to keep living. They felt ancient and crusted with barnacles even when he wrote them as a young man in his twenties, and I think they’ll only continue to get crustier and weirder and more deeply loved as time goes on. This performance from his funeral is absolutely the first step in that voyage to immortality.
That's all for this month, and this year. I hope you’ve been having a warm and loving holiday season, and I only wish the best for you in 2024.
Paul