You Cannot Be Serious
In which I barely notice that summer has begun and I say goodbye to a writer who meant a lot to me as a child.
Hi!
Sometimes the summer solstice leaves me feeling a little depressed. I’ve always seen the solstice as a time to celebrate and luxuriate in the long warm days, but also a time to mentally prepare for the dark days ahead. I think it says something about the way I see the world that my innate response to the longest day of the year is not to think “how pleasant that the days are so long,” but rather, “it’s only going to get darker from here on out.”
Weirdly, because this year’s solstice was cloudy and gray in Seattle, I didn’t experience my usual sense of joyous dread. The solstice could have been any other day, and the summer is still tentative, like it’s stuck in dress rehearsal mode. Maybe the 4th of July will make it all seem real.
Or maybe the world is so insane that it’s hard to focus on something as ephemeral as the seasons. For a child of the Cold War 1980s, all this talk about nuclear weapons and bunker-busting missiles has been nightmare-making. It appears that Elon Musk is one or two meme-able moments from getting away with going full Nazi without facing any major repercussions. And Donald Trump is even more Donald Trump than he used to be.
All of this is to say that I could use some buffoonery in my life. All the art I’m reading and watching and listening to right now seems too serious and afraid to take risks. The internet has been algorithm-ed to death and even the very nerdy subcultures I used to frequent on social media now feel formulaic and prone to interference by bots and trolls.
The fad diets right now are obsessed with protein and meat and maximizing muscle. Every piece of tech news is about how AI will destroy the world. A shocking number of celebrities and influencers are using steroids, and gambling has become normalized in public spaces. Both political parties are obsessed with slashing budgets and cutting anything humane and decent out of government. Everything in the culture feels at best mean and at worst unnecessarily cruel.
So here’s a question that I’ve been rolling around in my head for a while: What if the way out of this doom loop isn’t through resistance and being more joyless than the opposition, but instead through dicking around and having fun?
Anyway, what I do know is this: It’s been a Harsh Year and a Grim Winter and a Serious Spring and a Dour Summer. If I don’t have a Goofy-Ass Fall in my future, I might just pop a blood vessel.
I’ve Been Writing
I visited East West, a religion and spirituality bookshop that used to be in the Roosevelt neighborhood but now is up in Edmonds.
I looked at the best paperback releases of June.
And while my boss Zach Silk was out of town, I contributed an essay about the evils of private equity for the weekly Pitch newsletter. Basically, any failing chain store you can think of (Toys R Us; Red Lobster; Bed, Bath & Beyond) has either already been or is about to be sucked up by a private equity firm looking to dump a bunch of debt into the company, sell it for scrap, lay off all the employees, and then leave the chain for dead.
I’ve Been Reading
A few of you reached out after last month’s issue about my long walks to recommend books about walking meditation. I read one of those recommendations this month: Hiking Zen by Phap Xa and Phap Lou. It’s a short, straightforward guide to being more mindful while you walk and incorporating walking into a meditation practice. I already do box breathing at certain points of my walks, but this book offered several other suggestions that I can’t wait to try.
I’m a sucker for an Oulipian book, and I recently found one titled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books by Marcel Benabou in a local Little Free Library. It’s basically an attempt to write a book about the meta experience of writing and reading a book. If, like me, you enjoy reading books that are extended exercises to explore the limitations of literature, this is a good one to put on the shelf alongside Raymond Queneau.
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian who was famous for telling the wealthy elites who gather at the Davos conference that they had to pay their taxes if they actually want to improve the world. (He was not invited back to Davos.) His new book Moral Ambition is an attempt to do the same for working professionals—it’s basically just a book-long pitch intended to convince middle managers and corporate drones to quit their jobs and go do work that actually improves the world. I don’t know if I buy the book’s premise, exactly, but I enjoy being directly challenged by a book and I appreciated the way it forced me to investigate my values.
I met Seattle author Danya Kukafka at a literary function a little while back and that chance encounter reminded me to read her novel that had been on my to-be-read shelf for a year. Notes on an Execution is a literary exploration of a serial killer and the women whose lives he forever altered. I really enjoyed how the book picked apart some of the most enduring cliches about serial killers and our true crime culture. (Fun fact: Kukafka is also a literary agent, and I have loved many of the books that she’s represented.)
John Muir: To the Heart of Solitude is a graphic novel by someone apparently named Lomig, and it’s a biography of the great American naturalist. I appreciated how this comic incorporated the appreciation of nature into its rhythms—there are panels and pages that just consist of beautifully drawn trees and plants, encouraging us to take in the same nature that drove Muir to go on his epic walks around and across America. It’s spare, but it’s an affecting comics biography—one of the better examples of the form I’ve encountered lately.
And I also read Alison Bechdel’s fictionalized memoir Spent, which also serves as a continuation of the characters in her long-running alt-weekly soap opera comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel is one of the best in the business when it comes to pacing out comics about interpersonal dynamics—she’s incredible at juggling a large cast and investing the reader in every single character. But this one did feel self-indulgent in the same way that some of the middle works of literary figures like Philip Roth and John Updike used to feel. There comes a point in the career of the most-lauded artists that they can only see to the edge of their own writing desks. I read this book, and I was entertained, but I came away from it liking Bechdel a little bit less as an artist.
Tell Them While You Have Them
If you asked me in my teens, I probably would have told you that Peter David was one of my favorite writers. He wrote comics including X-Factor, Spider-Man 2099, and a 12-year-long run on The Incredible Hulk that was probably my favorite monthly read when I started buying comic books with my own money as a child. David also wrote a bookshelf’s worth of Star Trek novels and a few original novels including the monster farce Howling Mad, about a wolf who turns into a human after being bitten by a werewolf.
I liked the way that David always made room for humor in his fiction—he’d slip a pun or an allusion to a raunchy joke into virtually every scene he ever wrote, because he understood that making a reader laugh is the best way to make a reader care about a story. But he wasn’t afraid to write about violence and war and other serious issues, either. In many ways he struck a perfect balance for a writer of commercial fiction—he knew how to keep a story moving but he was never happy just advancing a plot for the sake of advancing a plot. He wanted his books to mean something, and they did.
Peter David died on my birthday. He was 68 years old, which is too young. And his family had to run several crowdfunding campaigns in the final years of his life–first to help him with some tax trouble, and then to pay for healthcare after a stroke and kidney failure in 2022.
I want to say plainly that it’s downright shameful that David created so much value for Marvel and DC Comics, for Star Trek and other intellectual properties, yet in the end his family had to ask fans for money to pay for healthcare. Concepts that David created were used in billion-dollar-grossing movies, but none of those companies stepped in to even help make his last days more comfortable.
David himself wrote many times about the shabby ways that comics publishers treated their creators as they entered old age. I recall him encouraging fans to send money and support to other writers who had fallen on hard times. So it’s likely that he knew what he was probably in for. But it’s disgusting that this is the kind of world we live in—where a man who wrote hundreds of thousands of pages of prose, non-fiction, comics, and screenplays can wind up with nothing to his name. Our priorities as a culture are all wrong, and they’re not likely to improve anytime soon.
When I heard about David’s death, I tracked down six of his books online—a serialized collection of paperbacks under the series title “Psi-Man,” which were originally published under the pen name “David Peters” but were eventually republished under his real name. They’re a sci-fi twist on the men’s adventure serials of the 1970s and 80s, about a pacifist named Chuck Simon who has psychic powers. Simon (Psi-Man, get it?) must go on the run to evade the shadowy government and criminal forces that want to harness his powers for evil, and he is aided by a sardonic telepathic German Shepherd who served as both the comic relief and the muscle.
I’m reading my way through the Psi-Man books right now and David’s writing is just as fun and well-structured as I recall. I don’t know if I could recommend these books to anyone who doesn’t have experience with David’s writing or serialized men’s fiction like Doc Savage or The Destroyer series of novels. But it’s been a wonderful experience to go back and experience the writer who made such an impression on my youth with adult eyes. Reading these books has filled me with gratitude for the life of a man who I never met.
So anyway, here’s a gentle suggestion: If a writer who meant a lot to you as a kid is still alive, maybe you should write them a fan letter while you still can.
That’s all for this month.
Take care,
Paul