Wednesday July 5th: Reading Through It: Dark Money

You probably know who the Koch Brothers are — those ridiculously wealthy tax-hating men who bankroll everything evil in the conservative agenda. But did you know that the Koch Brothers, as children, had a nanny who made them defecate on demand? Discuss that, and how they implemented their horrific agenda, in this month’s book club. Third Place Books Seward Park, 5041 Wilson Ave S, 474-2200, http://thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Alternate Wednesday July 5th: White Plains Reading

David Hicks is a Colorado writer and writing teacher whose latest book in stories, White Plains, is about post-9/11 Colorado. Hicks is joined by the best of Seattle, in the form of local writers Donna Miscolta and Andrea Dunlop. Always good to see Seattle writers help a visiting writer to launch a book into the world. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday July 6th: An Oath of Dogs Reading

The best sci-fi bookstore in town brings Portland-based Lightspeed Magazine editor Wendy N. Wagner to town to read from her sci-fi novel An Oath of Dogs, which features “eco-terrorism, sentient dogs, and corporate intrigue.” It begins with a man named Duncan getting beaten up by a man wearing cowboy boots. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Friday July 7th: Abloom & Awry Reading

Poet and Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter Tina Kelly, who previously lived in Seattle, returns to town to read from her latest poetry collection. She’s joined by Seattle poet Judith Skillman, who will be reading from her new book about the life of Franz Kafka and the impact left by Kafka’s horrible father. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Saturday, July 8th: Hot Off the Press Book Fair

See our Event of the Week column for more details. Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, 925 E. Pike St., 658-0110, http://fantagraphics.com/flog/bookstore. Free. All ages. 5 p.m.

Sunday July 9th: Nature Poem Reading

Tommy Pico is a prominent Brooklyn poet, podcaster, and an editor at the terrific site Literary Hub. He’s in town with his second poetry collection, a book-length poem called Nature Poem. To help Pico celebrate his new arrival, Seattle poet Sarah Galvin — one of the very best readers in the city — will join him onstage and read a few poems. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 3 p.m.

Monday July 10th: My Oh My Reading

Look, I’m not a sports guy. But even a sports-hater like me has to acknowledge the greatness of Mariners sportscaster Dave Niehaus, who for years made listening to baseball on the radio actually fun. Billy Mac presents his new Niehaus biography tonight, and the crowd will undoubtedly go wild. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Tuesday July 11th: Chain Letter

The third episode of Capitol Hill’s newest reading series (created and curated by one of the long-running, much-missed Breadline reading series) features writers Joseph Raisanen, Cassandra DeKanter, and Bryan Edenfield. These three are little-known writers right now, but this is the kind of reading series that might propel them to the stratosphere. Vermillion Art Gallery and Bar, 1508 11th Ave., 709-9797, http://vermillionseattle.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

No, Seattle doesn’t have a giant book festival. Some of our most insecure public figures — the kind of folks who actually lose sleep worrying about what people in New York City think of our quaint little town — consider the lack of a Seattle Book Festival to be a major failing of our literary community.

And while we still need someone to step up and fill the place of the recently deceased APRIL Festival, I wouldn’t think about trading the Short Run Comix & Arts Festival, say, for a giant, corporate event. In fact, instead of some giant publishing cattle call at the Convention Center downtown, I’d rather see our calendar year filled with a wide array of smaller, truly independent festivals the celebrate the people who write and publish actually interesting books.

This Saturday, July 8th, Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery will present their 3rd annual Hot Off the Press Book Fair from 5 to 9 pm as part of the monthly Georgetown Art Attack. It is exactly the kind of event that could only happen in Seattle — an egalitarian celebration of retailers, publishers, creators, and readers. We have so many formally structured readings every day of the week that events like these tend to feel like an after-work party, a place where people can relax and be themselves.

Hot Off the Press welcomes two headliners for the big show this year. The first is fairly well-known in town: Fantagraphics superstar Simon Hanselmann, who moved here from Tasmania, and California brother-sister duo Peter and Maria Hoey, who publish comics under the name Coin-Op Books.

Hanselmann is one of the better-known alternative cartoonists in the world right now, which is not quite as much of an oxymoron as it sounds. His watercolor strips, rife with dick jokes and depression and, uh, more dick jokes, trade in a vocabulary of gag strips but they hit the reader somewhere in their most vulnerable bits.

The Hoeys are not as well-known, but their books deserve a wider audience. Coin-Op comics combine the rigid formalism and ironic nostalgia of Chris Ware with the unsettling dreaminess of Charles Burns. Their comics are gorgeous and sleek, as slickly produced as a Mickey Mouse animated short, but with an underlying tension — a sensation that at any moment everything could turn sour.

The Book Fair also includes a screen-printing demonstration from Fogland Studios. Ballard cooperative Push/Pull will be setting up shop as well, alongside Short Run exhibitors, avant-garde comics publishers Cold Cube, feminist biographers Hey Lady, several cartoonists from the now-defunct Intruder comics newspaper, and UK comics publisher Breakdown Press.

It’s a lineup that’s guaranteed to be hiding a few surprises for everyone. That joy of discovery is exactly what book fairs are for — no corporate sponsorship required.

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Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

A Pilot Explains Waypoints, the Hidden Geography of the Sky

Pilot Mark Vanhoenacker’s description of the invisible landmarks used to map the sky is two years old, but we plead special dispensation — this is the time of year when Seattle’s skies are gloriously clear and bright, and the entire city’s in a dream of summer. How can we resist an article by and about the lucky few who spend their days navigating those (almost) cloudless fields of blue?

Word lovers will particularly enjoy the conventions that name Sonoma’s waypoint SNUPY, honoring Charles M. Schulz and his pilot pup, and Hannibal’s TWAIN, among many other suprisingly quirky choices.

From a plane, even a wide modern road can look as slow and old-fashioned as an ancient bridleway. The plane slides like an eye over the page, like a finger across a map, over everything the road and the drivers on it must turn to avoid — towns, mountains, lakes — features so low they appear nearly smooth from above. Waypoints, though invisible, remind us that while pilots are not nearly as constrained by the sky as drivers are by roads, neither is our path always as free as it appears.

An Agoraphobic Photographer’s Virtual Travels, on Google Street View

What if everything in the world were captured on camera, all the time, and one photographer pored through endless reels of film and pulled out the most evocative shots to share with the rest of us?

Jacqui Kenny more or less fits that description, and Andrea DenHoed’s profile includes a gorgeous selection of images from Kenny’s Instagram portfolio. Shaped by Kenny’s agoraphobia, the images are spare, and somehow at once wide open and controlled. A short read but one worth a long look.

Sometimes, she has difficulty going to aisles of the grocery store that are too far from the exit, and getting on a plane is a huge ordeal. To go to her sister’s wedding, in New Zealand, she told me, required months of therapy beforehand. The Street View project has become a way for Kenny to visit places that she could never go to herself—the more remote, the better, she said. It’s also a practice that involves a tension between control and surrender: she has the ability to parachute into anywhere in the world, but her views and angles and lighting are in Google’s hands.

New York Times copy desk to top editors: ‘You have turned your backs on us’

#amediting is a-Twitter this week over the New York Times’ decision to eliminate its copydesk and adjust the balance between people-who-write-copy and people-who-edit-it. The letters by the copydesk editors and the Times’ executive and managing editors, published by Poynter.org, are excruciating to read.

The Times is a stronghold for those who believe passionately in editorial standards, and this is another crack in the foundation — making similar shifts more likely across the industry and threatening the livelihoods of an entire class of professionals. It may not be wrong (may not), but it hurts, badly.

We are living in a strange time when routine copy-editing duties such as fact checking, reviewing sources, correcting misleading or inaccurate information, clarifying language and, yes, fixing spelling and grammar mistakes in news covfefe are suddenly matters of public discourse. As those in power declare war against the news media, as deliberately false or lackadaisical reportage finds its way into social media feeds, readers are flocking to our defense. They are sending us pizza. And they are signing up for Times subscriptions in record numbers because they understand that we go to great lengths to ensure quality and, most important, truth.

Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.)

As SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) becomes METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence), the twenty-first century is making its first serious addition to a long line of attempts to talk with aliens. Steven Johnson’s examination of the challenges and ethics associated with contacting other life is characteristically precise. But it’s hard to think your way around the romance and terror associated with the subject, as displayed in this stellar quote from the first attempt — 1974’s Arecibo message.

Not just “malevolent,” note, but “malevolent or hungry.” Yikes.

Within days, the Royal Astronomer of England, Martin Ryle, released a thunderous condemnation of Drake’s stunt. By alerting the cosmos of our existence, Ryle wrote, we were risking catastrophe. Arguing that ‘‘any creatures out there [might be] malevolent or hungry,’’ Ryle demanded that the International Astronomical Union denounce Drake’s message and explicitly forbid any further communications. It was irresponsible, Ryle fumed, to tinker with interstellar outreach when such gestures, however noble their intentions, might lead to the destruction of all life on earth.

How Much Did This Guitar Story Cost Me? $2,376.99

Just a boy, his guitar, and 30+ years of rock history. A “making of” story by arts critic Geoff Edgers that captures the nostalgia and geeky glory of a high school kid’s fascination with the guitars of the greats.

You can do a lot with an abandoned Supro, especially if you’re a chubby 14-year-old with a gap between your front teeth and a very questionable collection of Jams. Buy a cheap amplifier and go to Pete Woodward’s. He’s got the drum set in the basement. Learn three chords  —  G, C and D  —  and bash out a simple version of “Wild Thing.” Then record it on a Maxell tape, slap it into your Walkman and listen to all 43 minutes of instrumental glop over and over again. Suddenly, you’re a band.

Seattle Writing Prompts are intended to spark ideas for your writing, based on locations and stories of Seattle. Write something inspired by a prompt? Send it to us! We're looking to publish writing sparked by prompts.

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The first time I stepped inside King Street Station was in the 1980s. My family had moved from Southern California to Bellingham, and my mom and I decided to ride the Coast Starlight to Los Angeles, as an adventure.

The inside of the station was depressing, in a way that's hard to describe if you hadn't been there before the twenty-first century restoration. Remodeled, in the worst sense of the word, in 1965, there was a drop acoustic tile ceiling some ten feet below the molded plaster above, probably made of asbestos. Heat was provided by open electric coils, hung like fluorescent lamps in aluminum half-round fixtures, as if travelers were chickens to be broiled. They removed marble tile from columns (I mean, who wants nice materials?), and it was an environment made inexpensive and functional over beautiful. Or even slightly pleasant.

To add insult to injury, the architects of the station, Charles A. Reed and Allen H. Stern, were designers who worked on Grand Central Terminal in New York City. They knew a thing or two about making a train station a nice place to be. But after years of disrepair, it was easier to hide than fix, I suppose.

But in November 2006, then-mayor Greg Nickels announced that the city would buy the station from the BNSF Railway for $1. It turned out that the price rose, steeply, to $10 before the city council signed off on it. But doing so managed to gain $19 million from the state and federal governments to restore the station.

They started with the clock tower, and worked through the building, uncovering and fixing the ornate plaster tiling, and making the station a place somebody might enjoy sitting while waiting for a train.

It's a busy station, with twenty-three daily departures, counting the Sounder commuter rails, and three Amtrak lines: the newer Cascades run, the Empire Builder to Chicago, and the Coast Starlight to LA.

With all of those departures and arrivals, you might not be surprised that almost 650,000 passed through the station in 2016. That's like nearly the entire population of Seattle taking at least one train ride last year. Surely, with that, we can find something interesting to write about:

Today's prompts

1. The first worker to look above the acoustic tiling in forty years nearly fell off his ladder. "I'm okay!" he shouted, some twenty feet above the terrazzo floors. He secured his footing on the aluminum stair, and took another look around. His flashlight beam was highlighted in the dusty air like a movie projector in a smoky theater. In the corner, in the dark, a shadow sat waiting. It'd been trapped there nearly a half-century, but as soon as the grid containing it — a grid put in place by the most powerful necromancer of the modern era — was removed, once again it could wreak havoc on the world.

2. Two years before they actually met — two years before this love at first sight thing, two years before both of them independently called their best friends (who, ironically, were second cousins once removed) to talk about the moment they just had, two years before all of this, each of them sat back-to-back on the wooden bench in King Street Station, inches away from each other, perfectly aligned, both drinking the same flavor kombucha. If they had only just ran into each other that day, things would have been very different for them.

3. The Great Northern Tunnel's south terminus opens, like a mouth, just to the north of King Street Station. A commuter, hopping off the Sounder from Tacoma, was the first to see the man stumbling our from the darkness. "Hey! Get off the tracks!" someone shouted. The man didn't stop. "It's coming," he cried. "It's right behind me," and then he collapsed, one leg splayed over the rail.

4. Nobody knew why the boxcar train stopped under the eaves of Safeco field. A sunny day, the roof was open, and the Mariners were six innings into rousting the Dodgers. Humiliating them, even, invigorating the packed stadium. So when his contact at the BNSF finally called back, Mariners' security chief Dan Charles was shocked to hear "we have no idea where those cars came from. We have a serious situation going on here. You need to evacuate the stadium right now."

5. It's a very particular feeling to board a train with a one-way ticket. It's another to board knowing that you'd never ride a train again. So when Juan caught the Coast Starlight south from Seattle, he knew his final ride, to San Luis Obisbo, would be his last. He sprang for the large cabin. When you're about to die, saving your money seems downright foolish.

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 turn 50 next year. Will I ever be able to alphabetize my bookshelves without singing the A-B-Cs to myself?

Barbara, Queen Anne

Dear Barbara,

Normally, I save lectures on the patriarchy – my albatross, my muse – for more appropriate arenas, like weddings, first dates, or when any fool I call friend ignores their parental instincts and asks me to watch their children for an evening.

But you do not need an alphabetized library in order to be happy, no matter what Melvil Dewey – A MAN – or the thousands of librarians chained to his decimal system will tell you. The perception that we need the "alphabet" in order to tame our collections is socially structured and enforced by the patriarchy. RESIST. The alphabet contributes to our oppression – just think of "woMAN" and all the English words like spinster, nag, and nymphomaniac that are gendered slurs with no male equivalent.

There are better ways to organize books you love – for instance, the internet suggests by color, height, or how "woke" the author is. I have bookshelves in half the rooms in my house and this is how they're arranged: My bedroom books are books I do not lend out; my living room and bathroom books are fine for anyone to read; and my guest bedroom books are either duplicates of beloved books (the lendable copies) or books I enjoyed but am happy to pass on if a special guest wants to take one. As a fun twist, I've begun further arranging my guest bedroom books by the first word in their titles, so each shelf secretly spells out a fun message:

FEMALE EJACULATION IS REAL

DO NOT OVER STAY YOUR WELCOME

I AM WATCHING YOU

SLEEP TIGHT

You are nearly 50 years old, which means you have lived through many waves of feminism without drowning. Congratulations! Now go burn a bra (or put on two, whatever) and experiment with ordering your books in a way that has never occurred to you before. If, in the end, you find that you are most comfortable in the chains of your oppression, that's fine, too. Just chant, "I'm a strong, independent womyn, and I adopt these chains as my jewelry because this is how I like my books arranged. A, B, C, D..."

Kisses,

Cienna

Many thanks to Ruth Graham at Slate for citing our book club as the first example in her article about reading and resistance in the age of Trump:

Some independent bookstores, progressive media outlets, and activist groups have launched new clubs to meet the moment. In Seattle there’s “Reading Through It: A Post-Election Book Club.” (First selection: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of growing up in a poor white family in what is now Trump country.)

There may or may not be a few other media mentions of Reading Through It in the pipeline. If you want to see what all the buzz is about, we're meeting next Wednesday, the 5th of July, in our usual location (Third Place Books Seward Park) at the usual time (7 p.m.). This time, we'll be discussing Jane Mayer's brilliant dissection of the right-wing Koch-powered political money machine, Dark Money. If you buy it at Third Place Books Seward Park, it'll be 20 percent off until the night of the event.

Also, you should like the Reading Through It Facebook page and continue the discussion all month long.

Each week, Christine Marie Larsen creates a new portrait of an author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know

Sunday July 2nd: Reading with Rover

Fun fact: if you know a child who is having trouble learning how to read, have them practice reading to dogs. And if you don’t have any dogs in your life, bring them to this event, which features trained therapy dogs just waiting for kids to read to them.
University Book Store Mill Creek, 15311 Main St., 425-385-3530. http://ubookstore.com. Free. All ages. 11:30 a.m.

Learn more about the Reading with Rover program. http://ReadingwithRover.org

If you think writers like to gossip, you should spend some time with elected officials. Nobody — not even a well-lubricated novelist — loves to gab like a politician. I was at a cocktail party a while back when a certain public official was clearly sitting on a big, juicy secret. They tried to sound nonchalant as they dropped their intel on a tight circle of Seattle-area political figures: “did you hear?” Everyone in the circle leaned in. “I hear Erica C. Barnett got a book deal.”

The other elected officials in the room nodded, impressed. Everyone knew the name, of course: Barnett has been a reporter in Seattle for well over a decade, covering local politics, policy, and feminist issues at outlets including Publicola, the Seattle Weekly, The Stranger (where, full disclosure, I worked with her), and, most recently, at her own news site, The C Is for Crank. An uneasy cloud hung over the group after that. Barnett is well-respected, but she’s also earned a reputation as a determined and well-sourced reporter. You could see the politicians doing the mental calculus, trying to figure out if she was going to write, specifically, about them.

Over Facebook chat, Barnett confirms that the rumors are true: she’s hard at work on a book for Viking Books, an imprint at Penguin. “The book is a reported memoir about my own experiences in the treatment industry and in recovery, with a focus on relapse and the many different paths to recovery,” she writes.

Barnett pitched the book early this year. In a packed field of addiction memoirs, what makes hers different? “Most of the recovery narratives we hear share a comforting, reliable arc — from the first drink to rock bottom to redemption,” she says.

“But the truth is, recovery is messy, and it often involves relapse after relapse, rock bottom after rock bottom. I've hit a lot of rock bottoms and seen many aspects of the recovery industry from the inside.” Ultimately, she says her goal “is to share my experience and show that there are many roads to recovery, even if our treatment system is geared toward only one.”

The book doesn’t have an established publication date, but she’s already deep into the writing. The differences between journalism and memoir have already made themselves apparent to her: “One of the reasons I'm a reporter is because I like to stand to the side, so writing about myself — and reporting on myself — presents some unique challenges.”

We’ll let you know when the book is published, but for now Barnett is pulling double-duty, writing a book while keeping C Is for Crank on top of a remarkably busy tumultuous mayoral campaign. (Her candidate interview series has been the most substantial resource in Seattle media during this election cycle.) If you’d like to help her keep the lights on while she juggles this incredible workload, you should consider contributing to her Patreon.

I read the first issue of Mother Panic, a comic from My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way's Young Animal imprint of DC Comics, when it was first released over half a year ago. I didn't think too much of it — the comic suffered from first-issue-itis, wherein a lot of things happened but we weren't told why we should care.

Last week, DC published the first collected volume of Mother Panic. Titled A Work in Progress, the book collects the first six issues of the series. When read all together like this, the story is good enough to make me feel embarrassed for giving up on the series too soon.

Mother Panic is a weirder, more experimental B-side to the character of Batman. It begins with a young celebutante named Violet Paige who returns home to Gotham City after some time away. When Paige isn't posing for the paparazzi, she's putting on a costume and acting out her vigilante fantasies on the streets of Gotham.

But while Batman and his attendant bat-heroes all dress in shadowy blacks, Mother Panic wears head-to-toe white. Her head is concealed behind a giant pointy white helmet. She wears enormous white gauntlets. While Batman is haunted by his dead parents, Mother Panic is haunted by her living mother — her brain addled by early onset Alzheimer's, Paige's mother lives in a fairy-tale land constructed in Paige's mazelike home, never quite making sense but still providing guidance through her cryptic observations. ("Here. Sometimes the audience should get flowers," she says early on in the series, as though she's talking right to the reader.)

If superheroes represent wish fulfilment, then Batman appeals to people who want total control over every situation. While Batman is all about control, Mother Panic is kind of a mess. She screws up a lot and shouts "FUCK FUCK FUCK!" when things don't work out. She shouts "FUCK YOU, TOO" at whichever agent of Batman happens to be spying on her at any given moment. She's all id and art, the flipped coin to Batman's boring overpreparation. I'd much rather be a Mother Panic than a Batman — deep down, I think she's having more fun.

The first two issues of the book, illustrated by Tommy Lee Edwards, are my favorite. Edwards' style is perfect for the character: he draws with a severe line that belies a certain cartoonishness rubbing just under the surface. Later issues are drawn by Shawn Crystal, who has a looser, more caricatured style. Both artists keep things nice and claustrophobic, rarely ever giving us a pulled-back shot. These are close quarters, and we are up in every character's face, with colorists Jean-Francois Beaulieu's deep reds and angry purples giving everything a certain cast of danger.

While most Batman-adjacent characters replicate the character's formula without much variation, Mother Panic feels like a weird interpretation of the idea — Batman run through Google Translate and back a few times, or set to a rumba beat, or played at 1.5 speed. It's one of the most interesting variations on the character that I've seen since Grant Morrison stopped writing Batman. I want more weird modern melodrama like this in my superheroes.

Wednesday June 28th: Poetic Grid

For the last two years, Claudia Castro Luna has made Seattle proud as our Civic Poet, representing Seattle’s many experiences through poetry. She’s brought poems to City Hall events, she’s published a great chapbook of poems, and she’s paired with a large number of our great arts organizations. Tonight, she debuts the Poetic Grid, a fantastic collaborative poetry map of Seattle. Open Books, 2414 N. 45th St., 633-0811, http://openpoetrybooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday June 29th: Death Rattle Hum

Idaho nonprofit Death Rattle Writers Festival is an organization intended to bring other Northwestern writers together with Idahoan writers through contests and festivals and literary events. This reading features excellent Seattle poet Quenton Baker, reading with Idaho writers Alex Yan, Griffin Rae Birdsong, Dig Reeder, Ricky Ramirez, and Diana Forgione. Vermillion Art Gallery and Bar, 1508 11th Ave., 709-9797, http://vermillionseattle.com. Free. All ages. 6 p.m.

Friday June 30th: The Last Hurrah

See our Event of the Week column for more details. Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. Free. All ages. All day.

Saturday July 1st: The Fateful Fourth Reading

Washington historian Russel Holter discusses “the notorious 1900 trolley accident” that helped shape the city of Tacoma for a whole century. It’s an account of a doomed 4th of July celebration that, on our first 4th of July under President Trump, might be even more resonant than ever. University Book Store Tacoma, 1754 Pacific Ave., (253) 692-4300, http://u.bookstore.edu, 2 p.m. All ages. Free.

Sunday July 2nd: Reading with Rover

Fun fact: if you know a child who is having trouble learning how to read, have them practice reading to dogs. And if you don’t have any dogs in your life, bring them to this event, which features trained therapy dogs just waiting for kids to read to them. University Book Store Mill Creek, 15311 Main St., 425-385-3530. http://ubookstore.com. Free. All ages. 11:30 a.m.

Monday July 3rd: Works in Progress

One of Seattle’s most venerable open mic nights continues in a special pre-Independence Day edition. Bring your non-fiction or fiction or patriotic pantoum and share it with an eclectic room of regulars and newbies and aspiring writers. Press materials warn that “Some content not suitable for children or small animals.” Hugo House, 1021 Columbia St., 322-7030, http://hugohouse.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Tuesday July 4th: Democracy Slam

What better way to celebrate the 4th of July than with a poetry slam? Think of today’s Democracy Slam as a celebration of your constitutional right to celebrate the freedom of speech, with booze and prizes. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than getting drunk and blowing a thumb off with some fireworks. Re-Bar, 1114 Howell St., http://rebarseattle.com. $5. 21+. 7 p.m

• Hugo House announced their new Poet-In-Residence yesterday. Amber Flame will be available for appointments starting on September 15th.

Flame has regularly worked as an activist and organizer for a diverse number of theatrical, cabaret, queer, and POC communities — both during her time in the Bay Area and since returning to Seattle. Her connections to a broad network of artists and teachers also extends to the growing immigrant community and incarcerated populations through her work with The IF Project, a program funded by the Seattle Police Foundation.

• Yesterday, Hugo House also announced their newest Made at Hugo fellows, which is a program that creates a cohort of young Seattle writers and gives them access to all of the Hugo House's mighty educational opportunities. The Made at Hugo program is a great way to take the pulse of Seattle's next generation of literary talent. You'll be seeing more of these names in the near future: "poet Holly DeBevoise, poet and writer Max Delsohn, writer Nia Dickens, poet Kym Littlefield, poet and artist Erin Lynch, and indigenous prose writer D.A. Navoti."

• Speaking of mighty educational opportunities! Short Run's summer school looks like a lot of fun, with many free classes and all other classes below $50. Topics include letterpress printing, comics classes for kids, papermaking with local papercraft cartoonist Mita Mahato, and a class titled "How to Be Self-Employed in Seattle" that a lot of you should take.

• Last year, some unpaid employees of Emerald City Comicon — who are unfortunately dubbed "minions" by ECCC leadership — sued the convention for compensation. Yesterday, lawyers announced that ECCC reached a settlement with the minions.Brigid Alverson at Smash Pages writes:

Under the settlement, Eitane Emerald Corp. and the Demonakos family will pay almost $500,000 to the volunteers, with the lawyers scooping up $123,300 for their troubles, [former "minion" Jerry Michael] Brooks [who filed the suit in the first place] getting $5,000, and the 250 or so other “volunteers” will divvy up the rest according to how many hours they worked.

• This tweetstorm about BBC English is a great illustration of how language evolves, and how what we think of as "normal" English probably didn't exist just a few short decades ago. A few highlights:

Today we speak of "BBC English" as a standard form of the language, but this form had to be invented by a small team in the 1920s & 30s. 1/

— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) June 26, 2017

The Sub-Committee came up with the following list of possible new words for the users of the television apparatus: 11/ pic.twitter.com/WeNmVYuMIV

— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) June 26, 2017

Other ideas were...less successful. E.g. Smith proposed the BBC call televisions "view-boxes," call traffic lights "stop-and-goes," and 19/

— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) June 26, 2017

You don’t often recognize the importance of a venue until it’s gone. If you’ve lived in Seattle for more than five years, you can probably name a now-extinct rock club or bar that played a significant role in your life. Odds are good that you didn’t even know you’d miss those places until they closed forever.

Town Hall Seattle is only temporarily closing its doors for a top-to-bottom remodel, but it’ll be out of commission for long enough that we’ll acutely feel its absence. It’s impossible to imagine Seattle’s literary scene without Town Hall, and the next year is going to feel barren without the 400 events annually hosted at the venue. Particularly in the spring and fall — the busiest seasons for books — we’re going to be missing Town Hall like hell.

The simple fact is that no other venue is Town Hall-sized: with seating for 900, the grand upstairs hall is large enough to accommodate the crowds summoned by big-name visiting authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and Arundhati Roy. The downstairs hall, with its church-basement vibe, is just the right size for civic events and up-and-coming authors like Claire Dederer or Bryan Lee O’Malley, who might overpower more modest bookstore reading rooms.

But it’s more than just a matter of arithmetic: Town Hall’s stateliness imbues events with a certain legitimacy that no other space in Seattle (barring perhaps the over-the-top grandeur of Benaroya Hall) can touch. A night at Town Hall feels like a proper night out on the town, and the wide array of events happening in any given week— science, music, literature, politics — means that any Seattleite can find something in Town Hall’s readings calendar that appeals to them.

This Friday, June 30th, Town Hall is throwing an all-day party before it shuts down for renovations. At 10 and 11 am, staff is leading tours of the space, which was constructed 101 years ago as a Christian Science Church. At noon, staff will be playing some of their favorite Town Hall talks over the years in a kind of greatest-hits reel.

Then there’s an opportunity to become part of Town Hall’s history. At 2 pm, Town Hall will be hosting an open mic of sorts, in which anyone has the opportunity to speak for five minutes on any topic they desire. Those presentations will be recorded for posterity. And at 4 pm, anyone who donates $25 or more to Town Hall’s renovation campaign will be given a Sharpie and one square foot of floorspace to decorate as they see fit.

Finally, from 7 pm to midnight, Town Hall is hosting a big last hurrah of a party. Onstage, you’ll find slam poetry from Seattle great Buddy Wakefield and a dance performance from Northwest Tap Connection and a special edition of the popular Ignite series of slideshow lectures. Outside the great hall, you’ll find food trucks and photo booths. At the end of the evening, there will be a special poetry reading and a toast to the venue’s future. When you raise your glass, look around and consider how that great hall — a big empty space, for the most part, made special by the people onstage and in the pews — has made such an indelible mark on this city.

Those special snowflakes in the so-called "men's rights movement" have targeted Australian bookstore Avid Reader Bookshop for sharing a post by feminist writer Clementine Ford. In response, Avid Reader's social media manager has been working overtime revealing the MRAs for the ridiculous babies they are:

If you run with the big dogs, prepare to get bitten 🐶 pic.twitter.com/uKFYH61pcQ

— Avid Reader Bookshop (@avidreader4101) June 26, 2017

A customer delivered an "anti-troll" sour cream and walnut cake to Avid Reader's booksellers, which certainly seems like it should become a tradition when the Nattering Nabobs of Nincompoopery target an innocent bookstore for basically no reason. Unfortunately, this seems like it might become a semi-regular occurence.