The Longest Little Vacation
In which I share my thoughts on Bellingham, the movie Halloween, and two of November's hottest tickets.
Hi!
Since the last newsletter, I’ve been out of commission with a pretty bad cold that might have been the flu. If you haven’t gotten your flu or Covid shot yet, please consider making an appointment to do so soon. (And while I’m nagging, I hope you’ll remember to vote if you have a local election happening Tuesday. Also, please don’t vote for Nazis.)
So since the last few weeks have been more or less a wash, let’s talk about the best choice I made this month: On October 3rd, I took the Amtrak north to Bellingham, which, for those non-local readers, is a small Washington city close to the Canadian border. If you’ve never taken the train north from Seattle, I highly recommend it—the route follows the Puget Sound coast, so I was treated to a lovely sunset view of water and mountains as I relaxed and read a book. Because I booked the trip at the very last minute, the downtown hotels were all booked, so I rented a nice basement apartment through AirBnB that was just a couple blocks away from the downtown center.
On October 4th, I followed the route of the Subdued Saunter, a 20-mile walk around pedestrian trails of Bellingham. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time in Bellingham so it was a pleasure to wander around and take it all in—the campus of Western Washington University, which is nestled up against a lovely arboretum; the streets of Fairhaven, with a dizzying array of ice cream shops; a truly gorgeous waterfront walkway; and the quiet green calm of Whatcom Falls.
Once I finished the Saunter route, I kept walking. I visited The Comics Place, which has to be one of the very best comic book stores in the whole Pacific Northwest, and I watched families enjoying the last few rain-free evenings of fall at the BMX park at the Port of Bellingham. The foliage was turning all sorts of vivid shades of gold and orange, the air was crisp, and the skies were clear. All told I walked 32 miles, and I had plenty of time the next day to stop for a big breakfast before catching a bus back to Seattle. I got home and had a lazy Sunday afternoon with my dogs.
Getting to know a city on foot is one of my all-time favorite activities, and it felt so refreshing to carve out some time in a regular old weekend to take a trip just for the pure pleasure of it. I’ve taken longer vacations this year, but no other trip left me feeling as rested and reinvigorated as this one. If you have the time and the extra cash, I really recommend taking a few days to explore a nearby town or city that you’ve never taken the time to explore on foot.
Find Me Offline
I’ll be introducing David Sedaris at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, November 16th. Tickets are still available. Sedaris is an excellent reader of his own work and an entertaining and funny live answerer of audience questions. And as I mentioned in my last newsletter, he will be joined by special guest Patricia Lockwood, which makes this an especially noteworthy evening. They are the funniest and most original observers of human nature of two different literary generations, and the alchemy of them sharing the stage at Benaroya should be particularly powerful.
Also, tomorrow is the Short Run Comix Festival, which is happening in Georgetown. Because I’m a fan of comics, zines, and hand-drawn and printed art I’ll be there, and I hope you’ll be there too.
I’ve Been Writing
As part of the trip mentioned at the top of this email, I profiled Bellingham’s own independent bookstore, Village Books. It’s a huge new-and-used bookstore with robust writing programs, author events, a long-running variety show, and a regularly published print catalog that runs a whopping 80 pages! It’s an exemplar of what an independent bookstore that’s really plugged into its community can be.
I’ve Been Reading
I re-read The Crying of Lot 49 this month. I originally read this one in my late teens, when Gravity’s Rainbow felt too daunting but I wanted to get my head around some Pynchon. Now that I’m 30 years older, I get a lot more of the references but the conspiracy-theory plot seems sillier and more light than it did when I was a Serious Young Man.
Daniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the Sky is a thriller about an alien invasion story that centers itself around a Native American community in Oklahoma. I enjoyed it for the personal touches woven into the story—the characters were more interesting than the plot, which was an interesting way for a page-turner to go.
Jesse Lonergan’s comic Drome is a fantasy epic that creates its own alien mythology of creation myths and warrior civilizations. It’s a largely wordless comic told in Lonergan’s trademark style—he breaks pages up into, sometimes, dozens of tiny panels and parcels information out into those panels in fascinating ways, sometimes squeezing more action into one page than some artists include in a 20-page comic. My favorite Lonergan book is still Hedra, which is a much smaller and more intimate sci-fi story that uses the multi-panel technique to, in my opinion, greater effect. But Drome is an ambitious and exciting new use of the comics form.
Elizabeth is a novel written by Ken Greenhall that was published in 1976 and recently reissued by Valancourt Books. I guess this was my Halloween read by default, since it’s the only horror novel I read this month. This one is dark—it’s about a little girl who is ensorcelled by a weird spirit who appears to her in the mirror. She then almost immediately murders her own parents with a spell. The book is actually even darker than that last sentence might suggest so if you’re in a tender place, I don’t recommend it. But if you want to read something really screwed up and vaguely timeless, it’s a lost cult classic that absolutely deserves to be rediscovered.
That’s All for This Month
Hey, it’s Halloween! I’m not a huge fan of the holiday, honestly. When I had a lot of little kids in my life I enjoyed going along on the trick-or-treat outings, but I’ve never been one for costumes and camp.
Aside from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!, I think my favorite seasonal media is the John Carpenter movie Halloween, which basically created the modern slasher film as we know it. If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend spending time with this one—it’s a lean, tense nihilistic little burst of a movie that’s way better than it ever had any right to be.
This week’s episode of the What Went Wrong podcast offers a crash course in the making of Halloween and it’s kind of a tribute to making art on the cheap. I found it really inspiring how Carpenter and his crew manufactured an autumnal suburban neighborhood out of sunny Pasadena, and though I already knew he wrote and performed the soundtrack on his own, I had not realized that Carpenter made the whole minimalist score from scratch in three days. It’s one of the all-time best movie themes, and it bounces around my head all month whenever October rolls around.
Anyway, even though I’m not much of a Halloween guy, I don’t want to rain on your trick-or-treat. Which is to say, if you’re into costumes and parties and all the spooky trappings, I hope you have the Halloween of your dreams…or nightmares. [Insert cackle here.]
Talk to you in a couple weeks,
Paul