The Help Desk: Caking your claim
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,
What's the proper way to tell my aging father that if he gifts his art book collection, which I've been coveting my whole life and which made me go into arts curation, to my little brother who thinks he deserves everything, that I'm going to bring him back to life just so I can kill him again?
Thanks,
Witchy-Poo in Wedgewood
Dear Witchy-Poo,
In my family, we write all important missives on ice cream cakes. It makes news like “I’m engaged!” even more joyful – although the “You’re not my real dad!” cake and recent string of “I have diabetes!” cakes tasted decidedly bittersweet.
When crafting your cake, keep your message simple and direct: “Bequeath unto me your art book collection or else you are double dead unto me.” If your father is cake averse, you have two alternatives: On your next visit home, ask to borrow one of his books for research purposes and then say, “I know this is a morbid subject but when you die, I really hope you give me your collection. They sparked my passion for arts curation and I can’t think of a happier way to remember you than looking through them.” Or you can wait until Christmas (or Hanukkah or whatever fun superstition your family embraces – for us, it’s casual Satanism). Gift wrap his art books and address each present to yourself. Then be sure to note the surprise on everyone’s face when you unwrap them. This is how my devoutly Catholic aunt Mary came to gift me my first box of condoms for Christmas (or what we casual Satanists called “some Wednesday in December”). It makes for a fun, confusing way to get what you want!
Kisses,
Cienna
Katherine Dunn, the Oregon-based author of the incredible novel Geek Love, has died. Geek Love is one of those life-changing novels, the kind of misfit literature that inspires people to drop everything and become writers. (Lynda Barry's wonderful novel Cruddy, for example, would probably not exist without Geek Love.) Rather than reading a bunch of online reminiscences, I'd urge you to read this OregonLive story from 2009 about how Dunn fought off a mugger:
Dunn, 64, was carrying a bag of groceries from Trader Joe’s to the Northwest Portland home where she has lived for more than 30 years when someone yanked the purse strap on her left shoulder so hard it spun her around.
“I was facing this young woman who shouted, ‘Let it go. Let it go,’” Dunn said.
She did not. So, Dunn said, 25-year-old Brandy Amber Carroll kicked her in the shin and slapped her face. Dunn figured that gave her permission to put her years of training to work.
What a wonderful story. What a phenomenal human.
Portrait Gallery: Andi Zeisler
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
Bitch magazine founder Andi Zeisler is coming to Town Hall on Monday to promote her new book We Were Feminists Once.
Yesterday, Book Expo America officially launched in Chicago. BEA is the biggest, loudest trade book show in the United States; it's when all the big publishers announce their biggest, splashiest projects and the industry looks ahead at the year to come. Publishing Perspectives just ran an overview of a report on the global state of e-books. And how are e-books doing? Not so great. In fact, the word "stalled" comes to mind. And the wide array of pricing — from $12.99 to $14.99 for many e-books at large online retailers to 99 cents for self-published titles — could be confusing matters: "the wider fear is that the advent of the paperless digital book and rock-bottom pricing has actually adjusted in the minds of reader-consumers the value of a book."
Thursday Comics Hangover: Class war is hell
The illustrations in the new comic from Kaare Andrews, Renato Jones The One%, resemble Frank Miller’s artwork — particularly from his Dark Knight Returns era. Throughout, you'll find chiaroscuro layouts and plenty of exaggerated, pinched facial expressions. Andrews has bitten Miller’s style in just about every way imaginable. But Andrews’s art, once you look deeper than the surface, doesn’t really have any life to it; his art resembles Miller’s without the years of hard labor that made Miller such an icon. It’s got all the pizzazz and energy of a pencil sketch on a piece of tracing paper.
The book gets worse when you start reading what’s inside the word balloons. The first issue of Renato Jones is the titular character’s origin story, which is a riff on Batman: when he’s a child, Jones’s wealthy parents are killed in a home invasion. With the help of an older family friend, a hardcore Alfred Pennyworth figure named Church, Jones declares war on the corrupt wealthy even as he pretends to be an idle one-percenter in his secret identity. (Presumably, Andrews has some twists in store, because this premise is so clearly a rip-off of standard comics tropes that it’s embarrassing.) Here’s a passage from early in the comic, broken up in captions over a silhouette of Jones standing with a comically large gun:
For twenty years, they’ve been murdering the working class. Decimating wages, destroying benefits and killing jobs. They’ve crashed the economy, destroyed families and stolen their homes. They’ve turned the middle-class poor and the poor into convicts. Still you won’t find any of THEM serving time. The “ONEs” have bought their way out of judgment. With that kind of money, that kind of power, how can anyone stop them? How can anyone make them pay? Who will make them pay?!
Okay. I’d argue it’s been forty years and not twenty, but most of the first part of that quote is correct: the wealthy have changed the contract for working-class Americans, and our current economy is unsustainable. What Andrews is playing with here is populist outrage, which is obviously a correct reading of the American political climate. Look at the support that Bernie Sanders (or, hell, Donald Trump) has garnered and you’ll see an America that is fed up with income inequality and its attendant political inaction. But Andrews’s sausage-fingered attempts to capitalize on this divide are laughable, and though he’s seemingly coming at it from the more liberal side of the aisle, Andrews brings all the wit and grace of a Sean Hannity to the political conversation.
Jones’s first target is Douglas Bradley, a “Hedge fund manager and self-described philanthropist” who hosts Jones on a “yacht” that is drawn to look more like a cruise ship. Bradley is so obviously a bad guy that he might as well shoot a child in the head the first time we see him. He cozies up to Jones immediately, saying “Let’s hit the hot tub, dude. Talk some GMOs. This hybrid crop shit isn’t gonna solve world hunger, dude, it’s gonna monetize it.”
If that’s not a clear enough indicator that he’s a bad guy, soon Douglas is kicking a maid in the stomach, telling Jones “they’re not even people. Not at ten dollars an hour, dude.” Then, Douglas sees Jones’s alter ego, a gun-wielding hit man named The Freelancer, murdering his staff, and he’s in disbelief: “Thought this dude was a fairy tale,” Douglas says, “Like government regulation.”
Eventually, we learn that Douglas is even worse than Andrews has led us to believe. (Which is remarkable, considering he starts at reprehensible and only gets worse from there.) And then we learn Renato Jones’s catchphrase when he blows away the bad guys: “Choke on thi$.” Yes, with the dollar sign. No, I’m not sure how “thi$” is pronounced, though I like to picture it as the chime on an old-timey cash register as it opens.
Let’s lay this out as clearly as possible: Renato Jones is a terrible comic. Andrews’s art is punishingly ugly, his dialogue trots past laughable into cringeworthy territory, and the story mangles serious issues with what seems to be a dunderheaded earnestness. I’m not saying that class warfare is a bad idea for a comic — hot-topic political issues have always blended well with comics, ever since the days when Captain America decked Hitler on the cover of his first issue, back when America was trying its damndest to stay out of World War II.
But this hideous book wants to have it both ways. It wants to claim the moral high ground on income inequality while also glamorizing the extravagance of western hyper-violence. It wants to rage against the corporate machine while blatantly ripping off corporate superheroes like Batman and the Punisher. It wants to address economic topics without actually having to talk about economics. And it wants to profit on the zeitgeist-y loathing of the status quo while promoting an aesthetic that celebrates the worst of the last four decades of mainstream comics. If I could describe Andrews’s style in one word, it would be Reaganomics: it’s bloated and shallow, ahistoric and nihilistic, gaudy and vapid. This is a serious contender for the worst comic book of 2016.
Over at my day-job blog, Civic Skunk Works, I wrote about last night's launch party for local labor organizer David Rolf's new book about Seattle's $15 minimum wage battle. The Fight for Fifteen explains how we embraced $15 locally, and many of the major players behind the wage increase — Councilmember Kshama Sawant, fast food worker Martina Phelps, and venture capitalist (and, full disclosure, my boss) Nick Hanauer — were on stage to discuss what they learned and what's coming next. Go take a look.
One week after the GiveBIG meltdown, what's happening?
Last week, you might recall that GiveBIG, the Seattle Foundation’s huge annual Seattle-area nonprofit fundraising drive, suffered from big problems. The new payment processor for the drive, an organization called Kimbia, completely failed, making it impossible for people to donate to their charities of choice. (Though GiveBIG is a local event, it is part of a national program called “Give Local America,” and many other regions reported the exact same troubles as Seattle.)
Once the problems were identified, GiveBIG, which traditionally takes place over 24 hours, was extended another full day. The staff of local nonprofits suffered through 48 incredibly stressful hours, first by deploying their marketing emails and social media campaigns, then by fielding questions from angry would-be donors who could not donate, and finally by redeploying all their marketing for a second time. Over the last few years, GiveBIG has transformed from a fundraising bonus for local nonprofits to a reliable (and often quite large) source of income, and Kimbia’s failure put the bottom lines of many nonprofits in danger.
So, a week later, how has the aftermath been? Todd Bishop at Geekwire writes:
The CEO of the Kimbia online fundraising platform, Daniel Gillett, will forfeit his salary for three months, and the company will donate his normal pay to groups that took part in last week’s Give Local America campaign, which was hampered by problems with Kimbia’s technology.
Kimbia says this is just the first part of a campaign to make restitutions to nonprofits and win back their trust. Meanwhile, Nicole Neroulias Gupte at PhilanthropyNW reports on the Seattle Foundation’s response to the GiveBIG failures, and tallies up the total donations received from Give Local America events around the region.
Meanwhile, nonprofit marketing advisor Kivi Leroux Miller wrote a lengthy post that dissects the winners, losers, and victims of the GiveBIG fiasco. She asks if nonprofit leaders might “use the experience to shore up their own tech prowess, so they aren’t entirely dependent on partnerships with community foundations and tech companies.”
Look: you can’t plan for events that you don’t expect. Sometimes, accidents happen. But this is not the kind of situation that can just be resolved by a single email of apology, or even a symbolic olive branch like the CEO giving up a quarter of his annual salary. (Frankly, with CEO pay as high as it is, three months’ worth of pay doesn’t seem like too much of a sacrifice.) Transparency and discussion are necessary, and Seattle’s nonprofit leaders — some of whom are the best, most thoughtful people I know — deserve a long explanation about what happened and an overview of how organizers intend to keep it from happening again.
Many in the nonprofit community have expressed distaste for GiveBIG’s feeding frenzy-model of fundraising, calling it “Hunger Games for nonprofits,” or “gladiatorial combat.” Perhaps this next year would be a good time to reevaluate the model, and try to figure out a more inclusive way to raise money for everyone without pitting nonprofits each against the other? Now, when everyone is reevaluating the process, is the best possible time to investigate what GiveBIG means and how the program might be changed to better benefit all the players.
Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from May 11 - May 17
Wednesday May 11: Becoming the Virgin
Austin writer Taylor Jacob Pate is traveling the country to celebrate the publication of his first book of poetry, Becoming the Virgin. He’s joined tonight by Seattle poets Sarah León and Jane Wong. Any bill with Wong on it deserves your attention; she’s fast becoming one of the biggest names in Seattle poetry. The Pine Box, 1600 Melrose Ave, 588-0375, http://pineboxbar.com. Free. 21+. 8 p.m.Thursday May 12: The Game of Love and Death
Racist jackasses recently trolled an Old Navy Twitter ad because it showed a mixed-race couple. This makes Martha Brockenbrough’s The Game of Love and Death more than just a novel about a white boy and an African-American girl who fall in love and become entwined in a cosmic game of fate; it’s now a political statement. Queen Anne Book Company, 1811 Queen Anne Ave N., 284-2427, http://qabookco.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Friday May 13: Working Stiffs
This reading series asks writers to share their stories of work. Not, like, their writing process, but actual jobs that pay actual money in exchange for actual dignity. Today’s readers include former Seattle Magazine editor Brangien Davis and excellent Seattle poet Quenton Baker. And, as with every Working Stiffs event: free Top Pot doughnuts! Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030, http://hugohouse.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Saturday May 14: Breakfast with Neruda
Pablo Neruda is so hot right now. His lost poems were recently discovered and published by Port Townsend’s Copper Canyon Press, and now Laura Moe has published Breakfast with Neruda, a young adult novel about a pair of teens who bond over the 20th century’s greatest love poet.University Book Store Mill Creek, 15311 Main St., 425-385-3530. http://ubookstore.com. Free. All ages. Noon.Sunday May 15: Mangold, Queen, and Vogel
This event from the Institute for New Connotative Action (INCA) promises some brainy literary action for your Sunday. Seattle poet Sarah Mangold (editor of the sadly defunct Bird Dog magazine and author of Electrical Theories of Femininity)is joined by Talena Queen and Danielle Vogel, who are both out at the cutting edge of literature. INCA, 2 W. Roy St., http://incainstitute.org/. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Monday May 16: We Were Feminist Once
See our Event of the Week column. Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7:30 p.m.Tuesday May 17: Boy Erased
Garrard Conley’s new memoir, Boy Erased is about the trauma of growing up gay in the south. Conley’s story is thick with prejudice, violence, and the heartbreaking psychological trauma caused by ex-gay therapy, but he still finds room in his heart for forgiveness and gratitude. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Event of the Week: Andi Zeisler and Amelia Bonow at Town Hall Seattle
In the 1990s, feminists drew lines between a pair of up-and-coming magazines: in many social circles, you could either be a fan of Bitch Magazine, or you could be into Bust. Bitch was uglier than Bust, less glossy. Bitch was interested in feminist theory and it reviled the concept of selling out; Bust was more fun, more inclusive. Bitch had way more words per page, and fewer celebrity interviews. Bust got a fancy book deal and great placement on Borders’ newsstands around the country; Bitch was often tucked in the back of the racks, with the philosophy magazines and some of the weirder subcultural signifiers like The Comics Journal.
If you had asked me to predict the future back then, I probably would have sworn that one of those magazines would be gone by 2016. Though as far as I can recall, the editors of Bitch never explicitly called out the editors of Bust or vice versa, the two seemed eternally at odds. Two magazines enter the feminist Thunderdome, and only one can leave. Right? Happily, no. Both Bust and Bitch are still around today. There’s room enough in the world, it seems, for two perspectives on feminism.
But even in 2016, you’ve just gotta pick a side. My feminist tastes always leaned more toward Bitch, because it was prickly and sarcastic and dedicated to its own unalloyed principles. I didn’t realize it back at the dawning of the Bitch/Bust days, but by siding with Bitch I was declaring my allegiance to Andi Zeisler, the cofounder of the magazine. Zeisler’s writing exemplified—and still exemplifies—Bitch at its best: she’s smart and funny and honest and more than a little condescending to her enemies. Zeisler wrote in the 20th anniversary issue of Bitch that she was somewhat disappointed to see that her magazine was still around: “when your mission is to respond to crappy, insulting representations of gender, race, and more, after all, the goal is to put yourself out of business.” But there will always be more idiots, and so we should be grateful that there are people like Zeisler who can call those idiots out.
On the Seattle stop of her book tour, Zeisler will be in an extended conversation with Seattle-area #shoutyourabortion founder Amelia Bonow. Whoever thought up this pairing deserves a raise; Bonow is loud and unapologetic and more than a decade younger than Zeisler, which means the two will have to navigate a slight generational gap in order to reconcile their views on feminism. This should be a hell of a talk: loud, angry, unapologetic, funny as hell.
Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7:30 p.m.
Book News Roundup: Sherman Alexie to curate SAL series
- Sherman Alexie, Seattle's most prominent author™, promoted his brand-new book for kids, Thunder Boy Jr., on Comedy Central last night. He talked with Daily Show host Trevor Noah about the problems of being a Junior, Crazy Horse's childhood name, Andrew Jackson, and the name of Washington DC's football team.
- Speaking of Alexie, yesterday Seattle Arts and Lectures made a very exciting announcement via Twitter:
ANNOUNCEMENT: @Sherman_Alexie to curate & host a new 3-part SAL series focused on authors he loves. Stay tuned for details!
— SAL (@SeaArtsLectures) May 9, 2016
Over at the James Franco Review, editor Corinne Manning wrote an insightful response to the Antioch Review's horrendous transphobic essay, accusing the editors of the Antioch of laziness and a lack of discernment. Go read the whole essay.
Here is a great appreciation of the Fantagraphics comic Love & Rockets.
As part of her ongoing series of delightful exit interviews, Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin told The Guardian that literature had become dull lately because “We all have to be in job-interview mode all of the time. We’re not allowed to say, ‘The Paris Review is boring as fuck!’ Because what if the Paris Review is just about to call us?” Thankfully, the Paris Review responded with good humor:
Our fabled CIA connections notwithstanding, the Review has always admired those who speak truth to power. That’s why, for the next twenty-four hours, new subscribers can use the discount code BORINGASFUCK for 10 percent off one year of less-than-scintillating reading. Subscribe now to enjoy the best in boring fiction, boring poetry, boring interviews, and boring art.
- It is positively crazy that Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio is retiring this fall. Say what you will about Barnes & Noble, but Riggio has kept it afloat for decades, sometimes seemingly through sheer force of will. The future of the chain is definitely in question now that he's moving on.
It begins with a single step
Published May 10, 2016, at 11:58am
On Saturday, Paul Constant walked 14 miles to visit six comic book stores in the greater Seattle area. This is what he saw.
History of the non-quiet Devo
Of the thousands of Devos, it was not so difficult to pick the ones that would make music.
*There were at this time the castle-dwelling Devos, the confrontational Devos, the hundreds of philosophical Devos, and (up the stairs and to your right) the non-quiet Devos.
*Terrible news was when some not-insignificant portion of Devos (the Cornish hen Devos, the table-setting Devos, the world-weary Devos) would at once disappear, Atlantis-like. Also terrible was when you listened to the non-quiet Devos in your bedroom in eighth grade and your Dad said this was absurd, you’d never keep listening to them, and then, three years later, you never did keep listening to them.
*The Devos arrived before the cell phone, the single-sourced American chocolate bar, and the time-traveler Kevlar suit, but, nevertheless, they were from and of the future. Unstable combinations of Devos that were quick to disappear included cowboy Devos and hand-mopping Devos.
*Some nights, at 3 am, try waking up suddenly, as if throwing a switch. The moon flooding the room, the small hum of the streetlight, the exhaustion of the day ahead, and the day ahead of that. There, in the corner—is it Ghost Devo? Is it Child Devo? Is it Limitless Devo? We shall mourn them all.
Paige Cornwell at the Seattle Times wrote about how Seattle Public Schools doesn't fund its libraries.
In Seattle, the differences in libraries between have- and have-not schools are most extreme at the elementary level, with $28 per student separating the lowest- and highest-funded schools, according to the librarians’ survey.
The members of that group won’t say which schools are at the top and bottom because they agreed, as they collected information, not to reveal the schools’ names. They worried that identifying them might make it seem like they were blaming the librarians, principals or school PTAs.
But they are releasing data about the difference in spending among schools — which ranges from $1.69 per student to $29.88.
“The district needs to realize there are some schools without PTAs, and it’s just not fair,” Eads said.
Many thanks to the Seattle Times for reporting on this important story. We at the Seattle Review of Books originally wrote about the disparity of Seattle Public School libraries two months ago.
Win tickets to see Annie Proulx
We're teaming with this week's sponsor Seattle Arts & Lectures to give away tickets to see Annie Proulx talk on June 23rd, along with a copy of her upcoming book Barkskins. It's easy to enter — just head to our sponsor's page, and click the link to join our mailing list.
Have you seen Seattle Arts & Lectures upcoming season? It's a stellar lineup, from Ann Patchett to Seattle's own Timothy Egan, Helen Macdonald, Ben Fountain, Bryan Stevenson, and Helen Oyeyemi in the Litarary\Arts series, and in Poetry: Claudia Rankine, Ada Limôn, Rachel Zucker, Ross Gay, Ellen Bass, and Alice Notley. We're so excited to see the people they have coming to town.
We have only four sponsor slots left, before August. If you're a small publisher, writer, poet, or foundation that is looking to back our work, and advertise your own in an inexpensive and expressive way, take a look at our open dates. We'd love to talk to you about opportunities to sponsor us. It's our way of making internet advertising something to look forward to.
Writing center gets written on
On Saturday, hundreds of people flooded into the Hugo House to take part in a public celebration of one of the most important literary spaces in Seattle. Though the House will host a few more literary events between now and the old building's demolition, Saturday's party certainly marked some sort of an end. Someone described it to me as a wake, but that doesn't seem quite right; I've never been to a wake where they played AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" at high volume.
Everywhere, people were drinking way too much and writing on the walls in Sharpie. Some wrote personal reminiscences of their time at the House. Most people quoted favorite poems or authors: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt," from Kurt Vonnegut, was a favorite. Lots of partyers quoted the building's namesake, Richard Hugo. Most were copying the quotes from their phones so the graffiti was surprisingly accurate and typo-free. There were shockingly few penises scrawled on the wall — I only spotted two — and sadly very few attempts to write fiction incorporating the surroundings. (I would have liked to see someone write a short story involving a door all around a doorjamb, for instance. But I suppose the raucous party might have interfered with the composition of fiction.)
Upstairs on one wall, Seattle cartoonist and Hugo House teacher David Lasky drew a nine-panel comic featuring portraits of Hugo House authors (Sherman Alexie, Stacey Levine, Octavia Butler) right next to a mural by his frequent collaborator and teaching partner Greg Stump. Someone wrote a fantastic riff on the Richard Hugo poem "What the Brand New Freeway Won't Go By" titled "What the Brand New Light Rail Won't Go By." The artist (and frequent House reader and collaborator) Clare Johnson drew a pair of gorgeous illustrations — an array of masked and caped underwater superheroes and a tree house on a rainy day.
Everyone got way too drunk way too fast. A few people talked about their excitement for the House’s temporary digs on First Hill, but for the most part, people couldn’t keep their heads out of the past. Which is exactly what the party was all about: it was a time and a place for mourning, for thinking back, for regretting, and for enjoying the good times. There’s plenty of time for tomorrow.
You can find my photo album of some of the writing on Hugo House’s walls right here.
The joys of neighborhood bookselling
There has been a bookstore on top of Queen Anne hill almost continuously since 1998. Queen Anne Books, the bookstore that was the precursor to (our Bookstore of the Month) Queen Anne Book Company, changed hands once since its founding and moved roughly half a block north. Three years ago, the store closed for several months before reopening under the slightly modified name and new ownership. One of the points of continuity between Queen Anne Books and Queen Anne Book Company was bookseller Wendee Wieking, who has been working for the organization since 2007.
Wieking, who has lived on Queen Anne since the 1980s, refers to her almost decade-long career at QABC as “a dream fulfilled.” She says she “always wanted to work in a bookstore,” and that “I love it more than I thought I would initially because I’ve come to understand what it means to be a bookstore in a neighborhood like this.” So what does it mean to be a neighborhood bookstore? “I love being surrounded day in and day out not only by the books on shelf, but people who love books and love to talk about books.” She says that having a neighborhood bookstore “makes us a better neighborhood.”
Wieking says QABC reflects its neighborhood through its stock. “I would say that for a store our size we have a fairly significant cookbook and cooking literature section. We try to not have just Plenty and Jerusalem and the really hot cookbooks, but we try to break out the section in terms of region and parts of the world.” Mysteries and the kids’ section are the other two highly specialized parts of the store, she says, that have been most shaped by QABC’s customers.
Another book she’s loved lately is Bettyville, a memoir by a New York magazine editor who returns home to Georgia to take care of his 91 year-old mother. “It turns out that he is a gay man and this was an issue that was never talked about in his family,” Wieking says. She calls the book “a beautiful tribute to his mom.”
Wieking says she knows there’s “chitter-chatter out there about books dying and people not reading, but I just don’t see that in my community.” On the neighborhood level, she says, publishing is doing just fine: “I don’t want to say we’re protected or insulated from the problems [that the publishing industry is facing], but I have a sense that the neighborhood is deeply tied to the store.” In fact, as much as Queen Anne loves QABC, the bookstore loves the neighborhood back just as much. “When I come in in the morning and flip the lights on and people are waiting to come into the store,” Wieking says, “that’s a great feeling.”
The Sunday Post for May 8, 2016
‘You Want A Description Of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-hour Problem
Intense, tragic, and deep special report by Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion, and Scott Glover in the LA Times, about OxyContin and Perdue Pharma, and how marketing the drug as a 12-hour remedy lead to abuse and bad prescription practices.
But OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.
California Notes
When Joan Didion publishes a new essay, we link it. I think that's a good standing rule. Here she starts with the Patti Hearst trial, and meanders around that state she wrote about most:
At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.
The House Is a Home
Sarah Galvin on her memories of Hugo House, now that the old building is slated to be demolished.
Though it bills itself simply as “a place for writers,” the Hugo House is actually a gateway to another dimension. The non-profit was founded in 1996 by Linda Breneman, Frances McCue and Andrea Lewis with the hope of creating a hub for Seattle’s diverse, burgeoning community of writers and readers. Named after working-class, Seattle-born poet Richard Hugo, it has consistently honored the spirit it was named in, providing resources and community to writers of every stripe.
How The Rhetoric of Imposter Syndrome Is Used to Gaslight Women in Tech
Alexis Hancock, looking at her experience in tech as a black woman, and how not only was her work not appreciated, how the idea of imposter syndrome was used to keep her marginalized.
I believed in the rhetoric. I thought the process of self-acceptance would mean professional acceptance by my peers. I thought I would stop experiencing negative actions in tech once I could just believe in my worth, and show it to others. I thought that if I worked hard enough and completed enough projects, I would eventually reach a point where I didn’t feel like a fraud. And to cope with the racist and sexist comments along the way, I just focused on reaching that point of power, when my accomplishments would shine brightly. But I’d fallen into a trap.
A Voyage to Panjikant: A graphic novel about the Silk Road - Kickstarter Fund Project #18
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?
A Voyage to Panjikant: A graphic novel about the Silk Road. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer
Who is the Creator?
What do they have to say about the project?
An ambitious teenage girl of the ancient past rallies against the closed-minded world she must abide by--but at a great cost.
What caught your eye?
I love historical projects, and here's one that has included a lot of research into the groups of people who were being written about. That, and the silk road has always had a tremendous interest for me. The paths of trade inform so much of the shape of our world, and have for thousands of years. How interesting to take a look back into time, and a graphic novel is a great medium for that.
Why should I back it?
Looks like a good story, first of all, but beyond that, back it to learn something of the Sogdian people, an ancient civilization of what is now Iran. Tons of trade happened between Tang Dynasty China and Sogdian merchants. This book takes a look inside one fictional family and how they lived.
Dabaie has a series of great reward options, but of course, the goal here is to get the book. Everything else is gravy.
How's the project doing?
She's made 118% of goal of $4330 at this point, so hurray!
Do they have a video?
Kickstarter Fund Stats
- Projects backed: 18
- Funds pledged: $360
- Funds collected: $300
- Unsuccessful pledges: 0
- Fund balance: $680
Talking with Shann Ray about forgiveness, masculinity, and the violence of western literature
This past Saturday, Independent Bookstore Day, I interviewed author Shann Ray onstage at Phinney Books as part of the ongoing Dock Street Salon reading series. It is impossible to talk about Shann Ray without using sentences that go galumphing off into a long series of ands. Watch this: Shann Ray writes poems and non-fiction, and fiction about masculinity, bar fights, and forgiveness. His debut novel, American Copper, was praised by no less a Seattle luminary than Sherman Alexie as “tough, poetic, and beautiful.” Dave Eggers called him “lyrical, prophetic and brutal, yet ultimately hopeful.” And get a load of this passage from his bio:
He holds a dual MFA in poetry and fiction from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University, a Masters in clinical psychology from Pepperdine, and a PhD in systems psychology from the University of Alberta in Canada. He has served as a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a research psychologist for the Centers for Disease Control, and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
These ands could seemingly just keep and-ing off into infinity, with not a “but” or a “finally” in sight.
Ray is a stellar conversationalist and a charismatic reader. Before he read from American Copper, he read three poems written by other writers — Sherman Alexie, Robert Hass, and Catherine Barnett — and he sang a snippet of the Rick Springfield song “Jesse’s Girl” to further illustrate the Alexie poem. The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
I don't know if I can recall another reading when an author led with other writers' poems beforehand. Is that something that you always do, and if so, do you always lead with those poems?
I think my wife and I, as we talked after the readings that we went to, we often said, "That was the...boringest thing I've been to." Seriously. That's rude, I know, but there are a lot of readings that are boring. She's a performer and she's a musician, and I'd ask her, "What would you do with that?" So we just talked about it a lot.
I also was, long ago, reading Dana Gioia, who became the director of the National Endowment for the Arts. He's a poet, and he wrote a book, Why Poetry Matters. In that book he said we should be reading other people's poems, we should be exposing people to the poets that we love in readings. I thought, “that's great, I want to do that. I love so many poets. Let's get some of these poems out there.”
He was talking about how poetry got a bad rap from maybe the 1930s through the 1970s by getting taught in a way that made us hate it. Also, a lot of poets for awhile there were very inaccessible. You'd look at it and be like, "I have no idea what I just read." Now there are so many poets — then, too — that are just so accessible and they really speak to you. So that's probably the reason, and my wife telling me when I would get done with something, "That was totally boring. Why don't you sing some ‘Jessie's Girl?’" All right.
It makes everything better.
Yeah, “Jessie's Girl” makes everything better. So when I come across poems I think are very meaningful to me, I might shift these [poems that I read tonight] out. This book tour I've been doing these three, but if I do too many more dates, I'll definitely shift these out.
So we are here on Independent Bookstore Day, and I've noticed in reading interviews with you, that you can namecheck specific booksellers in your interviews.
They have some of the greatest names ever. [Queen Anne Book Company bookseller] Tegan Tigani? That's like Zinedine Zidane.
I just feel like the bookstores themselves — bookstores are always their own work of art. If you love beauty and you love art, it's like being at home when you're in any independent bookseller's place.
Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane, where I live now and I've lived for the last twenty-five years, used to be this massive — just one of the great old multi-floor bookstores. Three floors, everything was books. Then the big-name bookstores come in and that gets harder for Auntie's and it gets a little bit smaller. Then the Great Recession hits, and it's still gorgeous. You can still look up through the column in the middle, but all those two floors up there are now rented-out spaces, and everything around them is rented out. They’re still a big beautiful space, but it's probably a third of what it was at this point. They're living a life of art, and that is counter to the capitalist transaction culture, and I love that. I'm always trying to be in them and be with them.
It sounds like you're always working on a poem or another, and I wonder how that works in relation to all the different jobs you have and all the different writing projects you have, and if you can maybe give us a little bit of a window into your process.
I knew I loved writing — or the idea of writing; I wasn't a writer, but I loved the idea of it — in college. I also knew that if me or my family had to rely on my writing, we wouldn't have enough money to eat a hamburger. I think that came from my dad, too. He grew up very poor with this trapping and sheep-shearing family. My dad had severe poverty growing up. He always forced my brother and I to get good grades. He was forced out of high school. He did not successfully pass high school, but they gave him the diploma because they said, "You're a hellion and we don't want to see you again."
I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who teaches forgiveness before, and forgiveness figures into your writing a great deal. I find that forgiveness is generally handled very poorly in fiction in that it happens almost like an epiphany. I've read novels about forgiveness and it tends to be a lot of dwelling and then when the book hits the five-sixths mark, forgiveness happens, and the whole process feels very unrealistic to me
Did that happen in my book?
No, there was obviously some thinking into it that I thought seemed really genuine.
That's good.
I was wondering if you could talk about how forgiveness plays into your work in terms of the psychology work that you do, and also if there are any other writers who you think handle forgiveness really well?
To shift a family system, they say it takes fifteen years. For behavioral character change, the research shows about three to five years from the point of what we call total brokenness or total willingness to change to something more intimate or more whole. All of that is long-term, and I love long-term projects. And art is long-term too.
Then I also hate things that are cheesy or too fast. In general, in the research, too fast of a forgiveness is probably codependency. We know that there are people who walk the earth that are almost living angels and I'm happy any time I get to brush my shoulders with them. Maybe they are the best symbols of unconditional forgiveness, so I don't want to over-condemn that either. I think they do exist. I think of Martin Luther King Jr's wife as like that. I think Corazon Aquino from the Philippines was like that. Their vessel is unconditional forgiveness. That's how they live, and I admire that.
In the development of art, maybe you have some people like that. I think [American Copper character] Evelynne’s a little bit like that; she can carry it. But then most of us think forgiveness is threatening, it's painful, it's self-shattering. It's all these other things. I don't think there's any such thing as an easy overcoming of massive harm. I think you're just trying to capture: how do people do it?
I know the Cheyenne, they were called “the beautiful people” by the military during the Sand Creek Massacre, which was a terrible massacre. The US military comes in and mows down the Cheyenne when they're flying a white flag of peace. It’s basically a blood orgy at that point. They're cutting off body parts, they're killing fetuses in the womb, and then they come back to a public stage in Denver and they parade the body parts and things like pubic scalps on the stage, and it's a big party. This is America.
So there's no way to say, "Okay, we forgive." That's just going to be anti-humanity or against real life. So at the same time, the Cheyenne are some of the most ultimate forgivers I've ever been around. You go there, they're not holding anything against you, me, or anyone else in the history of America. They're some of the most patriotic people.
Trying to capture that in the novel was just part of trying to understand ultimate forgiveness. The research now is profound: people with higher forgiveness capacity tend to have less anxiety — significantly less anxiety, significantly less depression, significantly less anger, and (an amazing one symbolically,) less heart disease. So cool. That's kind of amazing. The Mayo Clinic uses forgiveness treatment with all of their patients now because they're thinking it has pretty significant links to stronger immune system. So all of that, that's not in [American Copper], but it's in the bodies of the people in a way. Some people are never going to forgive and some people are never going to ask forgiveness. We have got to spend our lives looking at that if we're artists. That's always the task. How to have it breathe as a living art, and I think forgiveness has a big part of that.
And other writers who write forgiveness well?
C.D. Wright — who just died, the poet — her books are, I think they're just singing forgiveness, though maybe she never says the word “forgiveness.” So she'd be a huge one. Michael Ondaatje, another major figure for me. I think his [books] just have an underlying dignity that's something about forgiveness, even if, again, he might not directly say it. Those are some.
So along those lines, you write a lot about violence — the culture of violence and personal violence. To me you write about it in a way that is not the same as, but sort of in the tradition of, some writers of the West. When I think of writers from the East coast, I don't think of the same type of violence in their work and I wonder: do you think that out here in the West, we're closer to our violent past and that's why it features in the books, or do you disagree with my premise?
If you've ever read about the different nations that make up America, the West is one of them. The deep South is way different than the West, and the northern East coast — you see what I'm getting at. I think we're closer to the direct massacres in a way. We really are. I think there's a violence that is very visceral, but then I think also that we've lost something that the Native American writers didn't lose — and that when I think about my heritage, the Czech writers, some lost and some didn't — which is a sense of sacredness, not just cold fate or nihilism.
I think that the wilderness is oriented towards an elegant and maybe inescapable sense of sacredness. If you write [about the wilderness] from nihilism or from cold fate, you get wilderness as violence. Yes, that exists, that's true, but you almost never get wilderness as intimacy, which we've all felt tons of times in our lives.
I think that's something of privilege to write from cold fate, instead of from intimacy. People make a case in theology for the northern European theologies being cold theologies versus the equator theologies. You think of Colombia and South America and you think of some of the theologies that have come out of there like Romero and others. These are intimacy theologies, matriarchal often. Then you think of native America and you have this attachment, intimacy attachment.
I was reading a lot of people like Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch again — these people, they never lose the sacredness in the writing. So that attracted me fundamentally to what we're talking about right here: okay, so yes there's violence, and maybe it's pretty framed as patriarchal, capitalistic, dominant culture violence. It's got to be a lot more complex than that. Where are the women? Where is the circle instead of the line? Where is the gift culture instead of the transaction culture? It just wasn't receiving writing as much. It exists, now, it's blooming quite a bit more — you think about the Native American Renaissance in writing and African-American Renaissance. We're getting more blood and flesh that's oriented towards intimacy.
You talk and think and write a lot about masculinity and femininity, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but in the news right now-
Go ahead, Paul.
Yeah, I'm doing it. In the news right now there's a lot of conversation about transgender rights and bathroom bills, and it seems to be sort of tied into these questions-
Totally.
And I was wondering if you had any thoughts about this.
Glad you asked it. I think we all, if you read any bell hooks or you read any of the people of critical race theory or you've been influenced by non-dominant culture, you can see the tension that the nation's in. Heavy, high-level tension. A lot of that tension, as I see it, is the masculine being unwilling to loosen its grip on power.
The research on that is incredibly compelling. Having worked with marriages, and I think we all know biologically, we all understand that we're made up chromosomally and biologically masculine and feminine, each person and the collective. So there's maybe no such thing as only masculine or only feminine. I think of that binary and how I think the transgender movement is collapsing or fracturing the binary, which is helpful to a nation that's been too linear. It doesn't mean our country isn't beautiful and a great place to live, if you've ever lived in other countries and especially in really desperate situations. We do have a beautiful country and a great country to live in in a lot of ways.
I think as artists we're trying to critique the things that maybe need to be critiqued. I'm always trying to do that in regard to the masculine and the feminine in that — what is a holistic masculine or feminine? That holistic masculine or feminine does something different with power. Okay: it's tough for people to relate to each other, tough for men and women to relate to each other, it's tough for men and men to relate to each other, women and women. Why is that?.
The divorce rate is high. What does that mean? It could mean a lot of different things. I think that says something about the masculine and the feminine. First of all, if a person divorces once, their divorce rate goes to eighty-six percent for the next marriage, if they get married again. You can see why a lot of people are avoiding marriage, too. Then if a person divorces twice, it goes to ninety-six percent. That gets us out of this mode where, that other person is the reason why I divorced. You start going, maybe I need to work on myself.
The stuff on that's really fascinating. Eighty percent of men who divorce, they all share one flaw. So what is that flaw? It's fascinating. It comes from thirty-five years of longitudinal research right here at the University of Washington — John Gottman and their teams of researchers. That flaw is those men do not receive the influence of the feminine. That's such a gorgeous finding. It tenders us down even hearing it. They don't receive the influence of the feminine. In a way, a man's work is to receive the influence of the feminine. That's a beautiful conception in a lot of ways. Eighty percent of women who divorce all share one flaw. Contempt for the masculine. Hatred for the masculine.
That's the context of war. Do you see what we're getting at? So I think the tensions, when I look at that, I think the resistances almost always come from the unwillingness to release some hold of power that I've earned or felt that I've earned. Most of us in our most inner moral core would want to release power in order to give life to those who have been less privileged than ourselves. But the defensive structure doesn't allow us to get to that inner core a lot of times. That's what I think about it.
The Help Desk: how to teach the lottery
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'm a published novelist who makes a fair amount of income teaching writing classes on the side. And I have a secret: the truth is that most of my students will never get anywhere because they don't work hard enough. I mean, I tell my students that working at writing is the most important part, but they don't seem to listen. Too many things — work, social life, video games — get in the way.
I always want to be flat with them and say that if they're not willing to put in the time at writing, they shouldn't bother taking my class. But this is how I get paid. So instead I offer encouraging words and watch while they flush their dreams down the toilet by playing Halo 46 until three in the morning or whatever. Many of these students are more talented than I am, but I just can't get the idea that writing a lot is the secret to writing well through their heads. Do you have any advice for me?
Seamus, Port Townsend
Dear Seamus,
I hate to break it to you but that doesn't qualify as a secret. Most writers know that their odds of "getting anywhere" are slim, just as they instinctively know the sun is an attention hog, gravity's a drag, and vegan bicycles are the most insufferable type of bicycle. That's not the point. As I see it, there are two main motivators for taking a writing class:
- Being around other writers, and getting the chance to read their work, pass judgement, and get feedback on your writing.
- Having artificial deadlines imposed on your work.
People also enroll in your classes for the same reason I line my underwear with lottery tickets: there's hope embedded in the ritual. Which means your job — as a successful writer, mentor to other writers, and gatekeeper of hopes and dreams — is to impose those artificial deadlines, give good feedback, and facilitate discussion. Keep in mind that being a successful writer isn't like being an astronaut or child bride — there are no age restrictions. Students who are dedicated Halo drones today can develop the discipline it takes to finish a manuscript five or ten years from now. So tell them the truth but don't belabor the point: great writing takes time, discipline, and talent. Then smile, take their money, and invest at least half in underwear lottery tickets. Odds are you'll regret it but just think: what if you don't?
Kisses,
Cienna