At her day job, Seattle cartoonist Colleen Frakes of Prison Island fameis a librarian. She combined those two worlds in a (PDF) comic about information literacy and librarian science. There are no fistfights or controversial twists, but you might just learn something about how to properly source a paper.
Every teleportation is a little death: Talking with M. Thomas Gammarino about sci-fi, book design, and epistemology
M. Thomas Gammarino’s King of the Worlds is an excellent sci-fi novel that combines the interiority of literary fiction from the 50s, 60s and 70s with the all-out weirdness of the golden age of science fiction. (You can read my review here.) It’s set in an alternate universe in which a child actor named Dylan Greenyears stars in a wildly popular Terry Gilliam-directed sequel to ET: The Extraterrestrial. Greenyears becomes a huge celebrity, but then he’s publicly humiliated when James Cameron fires him from Titanic. Greenyears teleports to a planet nearly two dozen light years away where he spends years living in anonymity as a suburban dad and teacher named Dylan Green. Eventually, Green starts digging through fan mail from his teen idol days, and that sets him down a cross-universe quest for meaning. Gammarino and I talked onstage on Sunday afternoon at University Book Store. What follows is a lightly edited transcription of that conversation.
So, what's the deal with Titanic?
I'm glad you asked that, actually. I have no very strong feelings about this film. I'm sort of sentimental and romantic in general so I'm not insusceptible, if that's a word, to feeling a little something about the love story. I remember having some class issues with the film — I didn't love that the poor guy sacrifices his life to safe the aristocrat, that sort of thing — but I think I've seen the film once, and that was probably in 1997 when it came out. I guess the question is, what's going on here? Why did I write about this?
My answer to that is, in 1997 I was just out of high school and this movie was so popular. Everyone I knew was seeing it, many of them multiple times, and I was, for the very first time, beginning to be a little bit of an intellectual, as much as I am. I came from a blue collar culture and I remember one of the first questions that seemed important to me was, “what's going on? What's up with this movie? Why is everybody interested in this boat? We've all known about it forever, why does everybody want to see this movie so badly?”
I don't have a single answer to that but I liken it to the zombie fad of the last decade. Maybe it's gone away now but for a while there, I was wondering "why are zombies suddenly everywhere?".George Romero invented them in the 60's, the American version, and it went away and it came back in a major way. What was that hooking into in our culture? I don't know the answer. It’s probably not any one thing; it's a constellation of things. Probably something to do with 9/11 and terrorism and technology — ubiquitous technology —and the economy. I don't know.
The idea for this book came to me in a flash, in one shower, so in the course of five minutes I knew the outline of the whole thing and it was just Titanic.
It's the invincible getting vinced, right? It's the unsinkable ship going down, and I guess I feel like that hooked into some other elegiac themes I wanted to explore about America becoming life-sized, for instance.
It's a very interior novel, you described it as a ... did you describe it earlier as a midlife crisis novel or a nervous breakdown novel?
I said midlife crisis.
Midlife crisis novel, then, which was very much a trend and in the middle of the 20th century. You've layered all of this science fiction on top of it but it all seems very reflective of Dylan's inner state, the smallness of America and the sense that we've discovered everything in the universe and the disappointment that comes with that. In that initial shower of yours, how much of the science fiction was necessary to the story? Did you ever envision a story without it, or with the science fiction dial turned down a little bit?
That's a great question. The answer is no, it really did — and this is rare, it never happens this way — but with this book it really did all just come at once and anything I say about why is going to have a revisionist aspect to it, rationalizing what to my gut just sounded like a good idea.
It's an expressionistic novel in a way. I teach a class on modernism and when we cover expressionism I teach students to distinguish from impressionism. It's about taking some interior state and refracting external reality through that state. It just seemed like the right expression — for the reasons you stated — this seemed like the right setting, backdrop, et cetera for what's going on with this guy psychically.
When I'm trying to write a book or dream up an idea for one, I just want to write something that I would want to read. That's a cliché but it’s absolutely spot on. There's no other reason to be doing this, believe me. It hasn't made me rich. I think I bought a latte once to celebrate [publication] instead of a coffee.
I want to write the book that I would love to have read, especially when I was younger and more impressionable than I am now. I like science fiction and I also love writers like Philip Roth — that's one of my heroes — and John Cheever. Updike a little less, though that's here too, I think. It’s just a mashup of stuff I like, I guess.
I did once early on have someone read a draft of one scene and she said to me, "why the science fiction? You've got your story without that." And I thought, "yeah, but that story's been written a hundred times, this is a little different." I don't know another book quite like this. I don't know another science fiction midlife crisis novel, actually.
There's definitely Cheever and there's definitely Roth in there. On the sci-fi side, you wrote in the book about Stanislaw Lem, and Infinite Jest is in there. The brand of sci-fi though, feels more to me like the pulpy stuff that Kurt Vonnegut was playing with and that Douglas Adams had some of in the Hitchhikers Guide books. I guess I'm just asking if you could talk a little bit about your relationship to science fiction and the science fiction side of the influences on the book.
Sure. There is no greater compliment to me than a comparison to Kurt Vonnegut. He was life-changing for me, as for so many 17-year-old kids who discovered Kurt Vonnegut. He was my first favorite writer. I read everything he'd written. My prized possession is my first printing of Slaughterhouse Five. So thank you for that.
It seemed like the postmodern dream is finally being fulfilled where we don't necessarily need sections anymore for literature and science fiction. They're the same thing, finally, right? You can have literary fiction that recycles tropes of science fiction. That's a good thing.
For some reason that's brought into relief for me what science fiction is. Genres have become more reified for me than they used to be. I was always reading science fiction, but I never thought of it as, "Oh, I'm going into science fiction mode now while I read Arthur C. Clarke." It's just reading a book.
It's been all the more reified for me because about four years ago, five years ago, I started teaching a course on the history of science fiction. And some of the stuff I hadn't read before was the early pulp stuff from the actual pulp era. It's called the pulp era because these stories were printed on pulped paper which was cheap and acidic and would disintegrate pretty quickly. It was basically aimed at adolescent boys, for the most part, and most of it's terrible. But even the bad stuff is so vivid, and some of it's not bad. There's a guy named Edmond Hamilton, “The Man Who Evolved” is a story he wrote. I just loved his stuff. It's kind of cartoonish but it's filled with that sense of wonder that's so central to every definition of science fiction, so much so that he gets parodied as "sensawunda" — all one word.
I guess I was drawing on that. It's what I was reading while I was thinking about [King of the Worlds]. I could go on all day about science fiction writers I love. I think there's a little bit of Ursula Le Guin's influence here, Kurt Vonnegut for sure, I loved Douglas Adams when I was 18, 19.
In this book you worked with Chin Music Press who are known for the beautiful design of their books, and there's a very design-heavy aspect to this book. The use of the footnotes is very important to the story and I think the design of that is interesting because it doesn't look like a standard footnote, right? You have a little symbol that looks like, almost, a ping on a radar screen. Did you have any say in the design of that and could you talk about the evolution of the visual sense in that?
King of the Worlds — so this word “worlds” for me has a lot of valance both in terms of content and form. When I was thinking about this book, one of my — I don't know what the right phrase here is — the marching orders I'd given myself were to write a book that was at once ontological and epistemological, to use lit-crit terms.
There's a guy named Brian McHale who wrote a book on postmodernist fiction and he talks about questions of epistemology being the dominant of modernist fiction. Modernism's about characters and what they know. It's about brains and brain activity, it's about psychology, deep psychology versus postmodernism which he says is an ontological dominant, that is, it deals with questions about which world am I in? Ontology is the study of the nature of being. I thought it was a really insightful thesis for this book he wrote, but also there was no reason you couldn't combine them.
One of the things I wanted to do here was combine them. I have a novel that's yes, very close third person, lots of psychology. James Joyce is one of my favorites of all time and I hope his influence is always there. At the same time, it deals with so many different kinds of worlds. On one hand, there's the epistemological sort of world, that is, there are many worlds in this room right now — the worlds inside your skulls. There are worlds as in planets, and then there's the old conceit of the fiction itself as a world created by the god who is the writer, and that's another world that I'm playing with and occasionally invading in a meta-fictional way.
I wanted the text itself, the para-text to have multiple worlds. I didn't want it to be just one thing. These are separate worlds within the world of the book. In terms of ticky-tack design stuff, yeah I think the omni-symbol was my idea. We just tweaked the information thing you see on maps at the mall. Some of us have noted regrettably that it looks a little bit like the Target logo, but these things happen. Maybe they’ll sponsor the paperback.
[Gammarino opens the book, flips to the endpapers.]
There's also this. I love this, and this was a last — literally, I think this came together in the last day before they pressed the button on production. In the endpapers here, you have a bunch of fan mail. It's the letters that are in the box that Dylan opens early in this book that sets the whole thing in motion. These were written by my friends and my kids and they're pretty ridiculous, if you can actually make out what some of these say.
Like this one here says, "Dylan, have you ever seen moth balls? How'd you get their little legs open? Hahaha, I'll eat you up, I love you so. Call me, call me, call me, call me. Kelsey Anne, Call, I love you". That's one of them.
[Designer Dan D. Shafer] was afraid that the cover was a little on the nose, or a little literal, but I loved it immediately, this design. It's right. There's something that everybody in America knows something about this cover. That's good. It hooks into something, you know, it's not just another book on the shelf. It's, "oh, does that have something to do with Titanic?"
[AUDIENCE QUESTION] You talk about teleportation and the fact that — which was sort of implied in Star Trek and other places, but not really spelled out there — that it actually involves the death of the person being transported, and like reconstitution somewhere else. So I was wondering, basically, how is it to write a book like that where your character is actually being destroyed and recreated. Obviously there’s, sort of, an existential effect, but then he's also saying that it's what happens to everybody in the course of a normal lifetime.
Precisely. That was so insightful. In fact there's a moment where Dylan himself realizes what a handy metaphor teleportation is for what we do everyday anyway. We're all dying all the time but also being reborn.
Is teleportation going to happen anytime soon? No. I like to distinguish between plausible and feasible. Which one is which, I'm not even sure. It's not feasible, but it is plausible if you're a materialist as I am.
I don't think there's any special sauce to me, I think I'm a bunch of stuff and that if you could properly reverse engineer that stuff, that'd be me. There's one issue there: if you could clone me exactly with my clothing and my belt and my socks and my microbes — 90 percent of the cells in your body are not you, by the way — if you can clone all that stuff exactly, by definition it can't be exactly where I am in time and space, it has to be over here. Put it right on top of me, we explode, right? It has to be over here and so its experience diverges instantly and it's not exactly me. Pretty darn close, though.
My favorite treatment of that question is not Star Trek but an Australian writer named Greg Egan wrote a story called “Learning to be Me,” which sounds kind of feel-good new age. It's not. It's about this near-future world where, when a baby is born they're implanted with this device called the Dual, as in D-U-A-L, but a British man pronounces it "jewel" and the term jewel sticks.
So you're implanted with a jewel, and between the jewel and your organic brain is something called the teacher and the teacher transcribes all of the information more or less from your brain to this jewel, with the idea that when you turn 30 you have your organic brain scraped out and replaced with a jewel and now you get to live until our sun dies.
The narrator isn't sure he wants to go through with this. Everyone who's gone through with it seems to think they're no different from a moment before and it's just a little hiccup when you have the surgery. A little hiccup in your consciousness, no big deal. He's thinking maybe it is a big deal, “maybe I don't want to die.” It's a fascinating question. It's pretty clear to me that if you die, in terms of your numerical brain, that sucks. It's game over for you, even if some other thing that's identical to you gets to go on. But it's a fun idea to play with. Star Trek plays with it in all kinds of ways.
I have another nerdy sci-fi question.
Cool, love them.
This universe where Dylan was a star is obviously not the same as ours because they have quantum teleportation in the 90's. Did you envision an exact point when that universe diverged from ours?
Yes, 1980. Some of you have seen Carl Sagan's Cosmos, recently rebooted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. That's the moment. In our actual universe, Cosmos was successful, a lot of people got turned on to science, and I think it was the first time in America where maybe astrophysics seemed really cool. But I don't know that it had a major effect on the federal budget.
In this novel, in the world of this novel, universe of this novel, NASA immediately begins getting 60 percent of the federal budget. Is it actually reasonable to expect that 15 years later we're settling exoplanets and teleporting here and there? Probably not, but it's an invitation to play with absurd ideas, keeping them plausible while forgetting about feasibility altogether.
That's very clever. That's in the book, too. It's just not pointed out as the central point where the timeline breaks from ours.
It's true, yeah, [the mention] comes close to the end. I think for me I knew early on that that's the first point of departure.
So the big continuity nerd question is, how does all that lead to Dylan landing a role in the E.T. sequel?
That's interesting you say that, though, because that's one of my misgivings all along. In an alternate history you're going to change one thing and there's going to be a causal through-line, and I don't exactly have that. I sort of had multiple points of departure. But your review was really great, I thought, on this question of, “what are we doing when we include all this physics that we don't really understand in fiction?”
I do think largely it functions as a metaphor but I also talked to scientists and do a lot of reading and they're confused too. Richard Feynman famously said, "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
One of the boggling ideas is the multiverse idea. If you've ever thought about infinity, well, think about the universe for a second. Is it finite or is it infinite? What do you guys think? [Silence.] Well, you're right, the jury's out. Maybe it stops somehow. What the hell does that mean? Is there a brick wall? That can't be right, that feels wrong, right?
And then when I talk about this with students they say, "I think it's shaped like a doughnut" or something clever, and that's attractive but your next logical question, having evolved on this planet to survive and reproduce as we have — by the way, that's not a prescriptive statement, it's just a descriptive one, none of you has a direct ancestor who failed to reproduce, right? — the next question is, what's outside of the doughnut? I don't know. On the other hand, if the universe is infinite, whoa, think about that.
There is one little wrinkle here that I didn't include because it just gets too fussy. I guess it's possible that we could be in infinite space, even with infinite stuff, and not have every possible permutation because what we don't have is infinite time. If the Big Bang really happened 13-point-whatever billion years ago, maybe it hasn't been enough time to make another [Chin Music Press owner] Bruce Rutledge sitting at my reading but with red hair. Maybe that hasn't actually happened yet, but eventually it would. Given infinite time, infinite space and infinite stuff, every novel in this [bookstore] that doesn't defy the laws of physics is non-fiction. It's happening somewhere out there in the multiverse.
Then you hear somebody like Max Tegmark at MIT talk about different types of multiverses, four types, and the Big Bang becomes not even a factor and nor do the laws of physics, and then even every fantasy book in this room might be happening somewhere, because the laws of physics are different inside of different bubbles. This is at the point at which physics becomes almost religious because you can't test these hypotheses, you just kind of speculate and do your math. That's where I get offboard. I can't do the math, I'm just an armchair scientist.
Breaking Up is a Honeycomb Harvested from the Buzzing Hive of the Heart
fare well, feels. be gone
sacred geometry from
lover’s muscled tongue.octogonal taste
buds — honey whispers hiding
larvae, bee stings, wax.freeze this full chalice
cocktail of liquid lapis —
high tide in the cup.
This Albany Times Union interview with a local librarian named Lauren Cardinal has a very interesting aside:
Pine Hills just went back to the Dewey Decimal System; how do you feel about it?
I’m not sure who was happier—the staff or the patrons! The branches had been using a “bookstore model” for a few years, where books are more loosely arranged by topic, not by the official Dewey numbers and categories. The theory was that it would make browsing easier, and perhaps it did, but it made finding a specific book much harder. Dewey is a quicker and more logical way of locating items—and we have had nothing but positive responses all around.
I had no idea that some libraries were going to a bookstore model. This seems like one of those ideas that some PR person unacquainted with libraries would introduce as a way to make libraries more "relevant" somehow. The Dewey Decimal system is a very useful tool because it makes finding books dead-simple. When the library is laid out well — the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library is pretty wonderful for this — the greater pattern of Dewey becomes apparent to browsers. If anything, I'd want bookstores to adopt the Dewey Decimal system, not the other way around.
This is just another reminder that people are trying to screw up our libraries, and it is the general public's duty to make sure that they don't succeed.
(Via Jessamyn West on Twitter.)
Hugo House in the (new) House!
How excited are we to have Hugo House as a sponsor? More than you can know. Unless you've taken a Hugo House class, or been to a reading there, or met with one of their writers in residence, or gone to a one-day workshop, or....well, if you know Hugo House, you know why they're excited.
They want you to know they're in their new digs on First Hill, next to the Frye Art Museum. They have a ton of great events coming up, but pay attention! The awesome Write-O-Rama on June 25 os a great way to get a feel for the classes Hugo House offers without a big commitment. Read more about it on our Sponsor's page, and pick up tickets as soon as you can.
It's thanks to sponsors like Hugo House, and readers like you, we sold out this season of our sponsorships. We couldn't be more thrilled. If you'd like to be notified when we release the next block, sign up for our low-volume sponsors' mailing list.
The one-sided deal
Published June 06, 2016, at 12:01pm
There is an agreement between every author and reader. By abandoning English for Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri has violated that agreement. Is that an okay thing to do?
Third Place Seward Park is our June Bookstore of the Month
Every time I’ve visited in the three weeks that they’ve been open, the Seward Park branch of Third Place Books has been busy. The Raconteur café and restaurant in the front of the store is always slammed — it had to close for lack of food on opening day, which is a high-quality problem. And sometimes it’s hard to browse the books you want because someone else is already standing right where you want to be. (The comics at the front of the store are an especially attractive destination for couples out on a first date.) Some of this, obviously, is just the shock of the new: people love to visit a new restaurant, a new bookstore.
But there’s more to it than that. The south side of Seattle has always been underserved so far as books go. The Bookworm Exchange has been around for a long time, but those looking for a general-interest bookstore oftentimes would be better served by going to the Tukwila Barnes & Noble than visiting any of the great bookstores available to the north half of the city. And as traffic in Seattle gets worse, that north-south divide becomes more and more glaring.
Seattle is a city that’s divided by more than just traffic. When Third Place Seward Park opened, people on Facebook protested the schedule of author appearances to celebrate the store’s launch: all the authors were white, which failed to represent the diverse community surrounding their store. Third Place Books managing partner Robert Sindelar and Seward Park’s general manager Eric McDaniel acknowledged the tone-deafness of the lineup. They immediately offered to meet with people to talk about the issue, and they’ve been having conversations ever since.
That opening slate of author appearances was a mistake, but ever since it’s opened the store has been learning from the community, and vice versa. On any given visit, you’ll see a diverse group of browsers. Displays have gone up that reflect the community’s interest. Popular titles like Between the World and Me and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen are on multiple displays throughout the store, but on a recent visit the table by the entrance featured an array of books on the topic of race, and the table was being heavily browsed. Things are not perfect, but they’re better.
Third Place Seward Park is our June Bookstore of the Month; every Monday we’ll feature interviews with booksellers and other examinations of what it means to open a bookstore in south Seattle in 2016. If you have any thoughts on the bookstore that you’d like to share, please drop us a line; we’d love to talk.
The Sunday Post for June 5, 2016
Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker
The letter that has taken the internet by storm. It's a stunning, heartbreaking, and brutal read — the judge in the case (who is up for re-election this year) gave the convicted rapist six months and probation, because a longer sentence would have "a severe impact on him". As this letter so rightfully points out, the punishment doesn't come near to fitting the crime.
I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that this sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding. That he was going to go to any length to convince the world he had simply been confused.
On the run with my dad
Spokane writer Shawn Vestal in a piece from the Guardian about his unusual upbringing with his dad.
That Sunday afternoon. Dad called us all into the living room and told us that he had done something terrible. The sheriff’s deputies would be coming the next day to arrest him for a crime he did not specify. Because he couldn’t bear that, he said, he was going to get in his car and leave, and he wanted us to follow him. We packed and Mom drove us north through a snowy night, following Dad across the border and into Canada, where we spent a week hiding from the law.
The Lost Secret Sign Language of Sawmill Workers
Sarah Laskow on the language sawmill workers developed as a way to communicate over the din of the machinery.
The core of the sawmill workers’ sign language was a system of numbers, standardized across the industry. Those signs were shared in a technical notebook, and, the linguists wrote,”in the view of the management, that was about all there was to the language.” But it covered much more ground than technical communication. Workers could talk about quitting time, lunch time, and cigarette breaks. They could talk about sports and the bets they placed on games. They could talk about their wives, cars, and colleagues. They could tell jokes and comment on what was going on around them without their bosses ever knowing.
Mr. and Mrs. B
Novelist Alexander Chee, once a member of ACT UP, on a job he held as a private waiter for William F. Buckley, who once wrote that AIDS victims should be tattoed for easy identification.
In 1997, I began working as a waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley. I was the picture of a New York cater-waiter: 5′ 10″, 165 pounds, twenty-nine years old, clean-cut. I took the job because I looked good in a tuxedo and couldn’t stand the idea of office work unless it was writing a novel. It was the easiest solution to my money problems when I returned to New York after getting my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I’d already been doing it for two years when I was called to work for the Buckleys. Cater-waitering paid $25 an hour plus tips and involved working everything from the enormous galas in the Winter Garden to People magazine lunches to openings at the Guggenheim. The tuxedo and the starched white shirt—and the fact that each assignment was at a different, often exclusive, place—all made me feel a little like James Bond. Sometimes my fellow waiters and I called it the Gay Peace Corps for how we could come into places, clean them up, make them fabulous, throw a party, and leave. And I liked that when I went home, I didn’t think about the work at all.
Radical Bookselling - Kickstarter Fund Project #22
Every week, the Seattle Review of Books backs a Kickstarter, and writes up why we picked that particular project. Read more about the project here. Suggest a project by writing to kickstarter at this domain, or by using our contact form.
What's the project this week?
Radical Bookselling. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer
Who is the Creator?
What do they have to say about the project?
Help Moe's Books publish this colorful volume about Moe Moskowitz, his epic bookstore, and his place in Berkeley's history.
What caught your eye?
If you've read our site at all, you know how much we love booksellers. I may not, like Paul, have worked in bookstores, but I sure did spend a significant amount of my life in them. My family would visit bookstores like some might visit a mall. We'd all get lost for a few hours and only meet at the counter to ring up the day's haul.
I can't say, however, I ever had the pleasure of going to Moe's. Opened in 1959, it's one of those local bastions that is both iconic and seems endless. At Moe's, they have midnight parties for new Thomas Pynchon novels. When Moe was called a "balding intellecutal" in the early 60s, he started the Society for the Defense of Balding Intellectuals.
And of course, they sell books. Now run by his daughter, the fifty-seven year old shop is still thriving. And now they're publishing a book about Moe.
Why should I back it?
Because you have gotten to know your booksellers. Because we all know a person who runs a business who is incredibly quirky and brusk and interesting. In this day of homogonized corporate brands that are perectly clever or cute, how can you not want to support someone with a little more verve and personality? Small businesses can do that. Especially if you've hung your name in big letters out front.
How's the project doing?
They're 34% funded currently, towards their goal of $5,000. That's nothing! It's looking good!
Do they have a video?
Kickstarter Fund Stats
- Projects backed: 22
- Funds pledged: $440
- Funds collected: $380
- Unsuccessful pledges: 0
- Fund balance: $600
Towering Babel
The new documentary Finding Babel opens with the construction of a statue of the author Isaac Babel. Scenes of the statue being sculpted are intercut with an introduction to Babel’s grandson, Andrei Maleev-Babel. We spend the rest of the film with Maleev-Babel as he he travels the world trying to discover the truth about his grandfather’s past.
As Maleev-Babel follows his grandfather’s footsteps, Finding Babel unspools in a chorus of voices. We hear from fans of Babel about what his work means to them, from people who remember Babel, from people who saw firsthand the same atrocities that Babel witnessed. The horrors of World War II are relayed across generations: we see a field where 2400 Soviet citizens of Jewish descent are buried, forced by the Germans to dig their own mass grave. “Tragedy,” a local man says. But then he shrugs. “Such was the time. What are we to do? It’s history. Our history.”
Mixed in with Maleev-Babel’s journeys are readings from Babel’s work performed by Liev Schreiber, whose purring voice could make an interpretation of HTML code seem positively profound. “A majestic moon floats on the waves,” Schreiber reads, and you don’t even need the visual interpretation of the words that appears on the screen to put you there. Then, a few lines later, he tells us that “someone sinks, loudly cursing the mother of God,” and a somberness soaks the words. We never see Schreiber’s face, but his performance is what holds the film together: by bringing Babel’s words to life, he’s demonstrating why we still care about his writing, why this journey matters.
The little details are what makes Finding Babel so successful. At a shrine, we’re introduced to the expression “well-prayed,” which is to say that an icon has “absorbed the prayers” of decades of worshippers and therefore taken on a greater, unspeakable depth and complexity. Babel’s words are well-prayed like that: the people in Finding Babel who adore his writing so much have, with their adoration, retroactively imbued Babel’s life with an additional meaning.
The Help Desk: Deflated by word balloons
Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.
Dear Cienna,
I never figured out how to read comic books. This sounds silly, I know, but every time I look at a page, I don't know where to start. This word balloon? That box with text over there? Starting in the upper left corner doesn't seem to work for a lot of comics pages. I'm 35 years old and I've tried to read all the comics everyone says I should read: Persepolis, Palestine. I never get more than a few pages in before I develop a terrible migraine. But my friends, particularly the guys, say I should keep at it. Is it okay if I just give up?
Deborah, Hawthorne
Dear Deborah,
I get it. Personally, I can’t read read technical instructions or nutrition information without bleeding from my eyes. If you’ve given graphic novels your best effort, feel free to do what I do whenever a well-intentioned friend confronts me with technical instructions or nutrition information and threaten to burn their house down. (Practice saying to your guy friends, “I am a strong independent woman and if you wave that shit in front of my face again I will burn your motherfucking house down with gasoline and fireworks.”)
If, however, you want to give the medium another shot, I suggest you relax and treat them as you would children’s books: look at the pictures first and then, if you feel inclined, read the text. Remember: you’re not being tested on the material so who cares about comprehension? Also, maybe try reading a fun graphic novel before diving into beautiful-but-bleak works like Persepolis and Palestine? I recommend Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. It’s at least equal parts funny and bleak.
Kisses!
Cienna
Portrait Gallery - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Each week, Christine Marie Larsen creates a portrait of a new author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know
Seattle writer, and Seattle Review of Books contributor, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is previewing her new reading series tonight at Hugo House. You should definitely go.
And for your calendar next week, did you know that I'm having an art opening with paintings featured here in Portrait Gallery on Friday, June 10th? It's true! It's put on by Push/Pull Gallery, and the Seattle Review of Books, and is taking place at Essentia Mattresses Store on 1st Avenue. We'll be joined by Lesley Hazelton, Maged Zaher, and Sarah Galvin. More information is here on the Facebook invitation.
The final frontier
Published June 02, 2016, at 11:58am
A new science fiction novel from Seattle publisher Chin Music Press employs sci-fi tropes to deliver an interior novel about a man who has forgotten how to feel.
Thursday Comics Hangover: Coming back to Captain America
Last week, Marvel Comics published the first issue of a comic book titled Captain America: Steve Rogers by writer Nick Spencer and artist Jesus Saiz. At the end of the comic — uh, spoilers, I guess — the superhero Captain America is revealed to have always been a double-agent of Hydra, a super-villain analog to the Nazis. (You can read an explainer here.) People on the internet wrote a lot of posts and tweets and Facebook updates expressing their dismay about the reveal. Also last week, I wrote a flippant post on this site telling people not to get upset about it, that it was just a comic book and that there was no point in being outraged.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have written that post, because it was a bad post. It was flip and unthoughtful, which are two qualities I dislike when they appear in my writing. What I was doing there was applying my own experience — both as a lifelong superhero comics fan who has become jaded about plot twists, and as a white guy — to a situation without any consideration of what someone else’s experience might be. A couple of our readers alerted me to some writing which helped me realize that I was being boorish and insensitive to these other experiences. I particularly learned from a post by Megan Purdy at Women Write About Comics and a pair of posts on the Tumblr Tea Berry-Blue.
Another post that helped me realize I was being a jackass was Devin Faraci’s rant on Birth.Movies.Death about so-called “fan entitlement.” Faraci’s post reeked of establishmentarianism; he was defending the poor, put-upon corporate entertainment from the mean old fans in a way that instantly made me realize how dumb I had been. I reject Faraci’s claims that “fandom is broken.” I dislike the idea that there are good fans and bad fans, or that you need a certain level of understanding to truly enjoy a piece of entertainment. By railing against the responses to a piece of art, you are actually taking a stand against cultural criticism. And I am all for cultural criticism in all its forms; it’s why I co-founded this site. (That said, some basic points about fan responses must be made: death threats are absolutely never okay, and burning a book to protest a character’s Nazism is unbelievably stupid.)
Recognizing my worst traits in others is a theme in my life right now. As a straight white guy of a certain age — I turned 40 last week — I’m very sensitive to the predictable ways in which my generation is becoming terrible. People I went to high school with are now writing outraged Facebook posts complaining about PC culture, vocal fry, and coddled millennials, and it makes my fucking skin crawl. I do not want to be one of those people who reflexively assumes that The Kids Are Up to No Good simply because I’m not one of the kids anymore. I do not believe that my youth was the Good Old Days, or any kind of a golden age. That is a cheap and easy worldview. It’s lazy and self-affirming, and it’s anti-empathy.
As a writer, my deal should always be that even if I don’t agree with you, I should always make an effort to at least understand where you’re coming from. I did not do that in my post last week. That was a mistake, and I regret it. And I certainly am in no place to pass judgement on people who regard this story (and Marvel's promotion of the story) as anti-Semitic or cavalier about the perception that it might be anti-Semitic. My insensitivity on that last point, in particular, is especially egregious; it's not my place to dictate to any other group how they respond to art.
That said, as a book critic — and as someone who reviews comics in this space every Thursday — I do have some thoughts on the story that might be relevant. Reviewing ongoing comics is a tricky business, because you’re basically reviewing a book one chapter at a time. And it’s perfectly within your right to abandon a book because something in the first chapter offends you. But here’s why I think this storyline might be worth reinvestigation later on down the line: Between this Captain America comic and its sister title, Captain America: Sam Wilson, Nick Spencer is writing a comic series that is very much centered around the America of today. His comics are very overtly responding to the racist insanity of the Republican presidential primaries and the unhinged anti-immigrant sentiment on the right and the rise of Donald Trump.
Captain America has, through the years, always embodied America’s self-regard: in the Watergate era he abandoned the name of Captain America; during the amoral, business-friendly Reagan Administration he was forced out of his job due to a copyright dispute that eventually led to a murderous maniac taking on the Captain America title; the steroidal Bush/Clinton years saw Captain America becoming a tool of excess, wearing gaudy armor and having ridiculous adventures; the shameful conclusion of the George W. Bush presidency saw Captain America bound in chains and assassinated. Is it too much to consider that perhaps in a time when the Republican presidential candidate is a buffoonish reality TV candidate preaching fascism to packed stadiums of howling, fearful Americans that a story about the moral corruption of Captain America might be worth telling right now?
When Spencer finishes telling his story, it might be worth reinvestigating to see how successful he was. But if the ham-handed way Marvel Comics handled the publicity for the story made a reinvestigation impossible for you, that’s totally understandable. If you dislike or are offended by the premise so much that you simply can’t stomach the book, that’s okay, too. You can respond to the story however you choose — you can write about it, boycott it, tweet your opinions. It doesn’t make you a bad fan, or a symptom of a broken fandom. It means that you care, and that you’re responding to your culture as a fully empowered human being. It is your right, and that right is something to be celebrated.
BuzzFeed writer Arianna Rebolini writes in a Craigslist lost and found ad that she lost a white Mead 5-Star composition notebook while visiting Seattle:
Hi! I was in your beautiful city the weekend of May 20 and seem to have misplaced an incredibly important notebook in that time. Have you seen it? It's a 5-star Mead composition notebook with a white plastic-y cover with folder inlay. On the inside you will see an index and then headings like "Emily & Nathan's relationship" and "DAY TWO" and "SSWW." You will also see fully written pages which are then completely X-ed out with giant "NO"s covering them. What you won't find is any contact info for me, and I will rue this fact until my dying day.
If you have this book I will pay you $$$$!!! Also, if the book I was planning in that notebook comes to fruition, I will thank you IN THE BOOK!
I AM LOST WITHOUT THIS BOOK. PLEASE HELP.
If you see the book, please contact Rebolini on Twitter or through Craigslist.
Well, this is huge.
Now after 13 years of remarkable rewards, a ton of laughs, hard work, good cheer, and so many remarkable children and families in my life, I’m ready to start new projects, write new stories, and make time for yet more fearless adventures.
The timing is right. We have weathered some big changes in the organization and will be returning to our remodeled post-gas-explosion site in a few weeks. BFI has a terrific, inventive professional staff in place that promises to take the organization to new heights. We just had our most successful PEG ever, and the outpouring of support from the community after the explosion was truly moving. It’s time for big new ideas from big, new thinkers.
In case you needed a reminder that Teri Hein is absolutely the best, the announcement also comes in the form of a (PDF) comic book illustrated by David Lasky which doubles as a writing contest.
Teri Hein created the Bureau of Fearless Ideas as a branch of Dave Eggers's wonderful 826 National series of nonprofit youth writing organizations. In the time since, she has crafted the organization into something uniquely Seattle. I fully expect Hein to continue her relationship with the BFI, and I can't wait to see where the organization goes next.
The Pandora of poetry
This, which we found on poet Kelli Russell Agodon's Twitter feed, is a terrific idea: poet.tips recommends poets to you, in the by-now-ubiquitous internet recommendation format of "If you like X, then you'll like Y." The engine stretches from classics...
...to contemporary greats...
...to local favorites:
Recommendation engines are not the be-all end-all of discovery, of course, but they can send you on some interesting tangents. And there are worse ways to while away the time than typing poet names into a search engine, just to see what connections its algorithm might find.
Sancocho
Published June 01, 2016, at 12:00pm
Donna Miscolta looks at a new collection of shorts from Dominican women.