Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from April 12th - April 18th

Wednesday April 12th: Krazy Reading

George Herriman was America’s very first cartooning genius. His strip Krazy Kat depicted more than just a love triangle between a cat, a brick-throwing mouse, and a canine police officer — it laid out the cartooning language that we still see in modern comics. Michael Tisserand’s biography of Herriman finally gives the genius his due. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday April 13th: White Tears Reading

See our Event of the Week column for more details.

Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Friday April 14th: Panel Jumper Live

This is basically an entire horny comicon crowbarred into a single evening. You’ll find comics-themed music, trivia, and short films. But that’s not all: there’s also a short play about the actors who play giant monsters in movies, a conversation with Seattle cartoonist Tatiana Gill, and some nerdy burlesque involving Tribbles. West of Lenin, 203 N 36th St., https://www.facebook.com/thepaneljumper/. $10. 18+. 8 p.m.

Saturday April 15th: Write Our Democracy

Seattle poets Quenton Baker, Karen Finneyfrock, EJ Koh, and Natasha Moni read at this write-in intended to promote “free speech and the value of arts in our democracy.” Write Our Democracy is the organization that was launched waaaaaaaay back in January of this year as Writers Resist, a nationwide anti-Trump, pro-democracy writing group. Hugo House, 1021 Columbia St., 322-7030, hugohouse.org.. Free. All ages. 10 a.m.

Monday April 17th: Moving Mountains

Local newsletter The Evergrey brought 20 Clinton voters from Seattle to a pro-Trump county in Oregon in order to facilitate conversation between decent human beings. Tonight, Evergrey founders Anika Anand and Monica Guzman will discuss what they learned from the project, along with the heads of other organizations trying to promote discussion in a divided America Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

Tuesday April 18th: Word Works: Terence Hayes

Brilliant poet Terence Hayes examines the work of deceased poet Lynda Hull by studying three of her poems written over the span of a decade, in an effort to explore “how a poet can both accept and challenge his or her obsessions.” What a terrific way to celebrate National Poetry Month. Washington Hall, 153 14th Ave, http://washingtonhall.org. $12. All ages. 7 p.m

Where, and when, history happens

Published April 12, 2017, at 12:00pm

Donna Miscolta reviews Lauret Savoy's Trace.

Do we really know the land we live, or grew up, on? What histories preceded us? Lauret Savoy's book asks these "literary geology" questions, and brings us on a journey through places we thought we knew.

Read this review now

Literary Event of the Week: White Tears reading at Elliott Bay Book Company

In July of 2015 on the website Very Smart Brothas, Damon Young wrote a blog post titled “Serena Williams Drinks, Bathes In, and Makes Lemonade with White Tears.” The next day, he published a post titled “White Tears, Explained, for White People Who Don’t Get It.” It seems that his original post about Serena Williams inspiring white tears had inspired some white tears of its own. Young quoted a white reader’s response to his article: “It’s disturbing how it seems many black people resent white people, when we all bleed the same color. How can we get to equality when there’s so many stirring the pot with hatred?”

Young patiently (and with more than a little bemusement) explained the idea of white tears to the aggrieved white people, that white tears are “what happens when certain types of White people either complain about a nonexistent racial injustice or are upset by a non-White person’s success at the expense of a White person.” So his original post highlighting white people complaining about racial unfairness was met with more white people complaining about racial unfairness. This cycle probably continues to this very day — imagine an infinity symbol made out of white tears, swallowing itself forever.

So it’s safe to assume that Hari Kunzru has already heard from upset white people about the title of his latest novel, White Tears. He’s probably already been accused of reverse-racism, or race-baiting, or whatever the catchphrase is among the special snowflakes who love to cry out about injustices committed against the ever-innocent white race. If you were planning on going to his Elliott Bay Book Company reading on Tuesday to alert him to his insensitivity toward Caucasians, you can just stay home and rest easy, knowing some other white dude has already gotten there before you. Stay in, draw a nice bubble bath, read some Jonathan Franzen, and rest easy, knowing that your people have already spoken out.

But everyone else should go to this reading.

Over the course of fifteen years, Kunzru has proven himself to be an agile and witty novelist. His 2002 debut, The Impressionist, was about a man at the sunset of British colonialism whose racial identity could freely swap back and forth between Indian and British. (Kunzru himself is British Indian.) Ever since, his books have spoken frankly and with good humor about race.

White Tears finds Kunzru taking on American racism with a bold frontal attack. It’s about two young New Yorkers who pass a contemporary recording off as a 1950s blues classic, thereby raising questions about cultural appropriation, authenticity, and authorship. The book travels through time and exhumes some dangerous ghosts as the recording seems to hit everyone it encounters in their most fleshy, delicate spots. The fact that a few angry white people probably couldn’t make it past the book’s title without writing a strongly worded Facebook post is part of the joke, and only proves Kunzru’s point.

Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Your #resist, #resist, is on my list

I hope you're keeping up on the Phinney Books Resist List, a regularly updated list of civically minded books for sale through their website and in their store. Twenty percent of all Resist List sales will benefit the ACLU. This is the sort of thing that independent bookstores are great at, and it's another way to stay involved in a time when every day brings with it a series of new political horrors.

Book News Roundup: Politicians we love

That verse is difficult to translate precisely into English, and there has been an array of attempts over the years, many of which you can read here. Generally, it says something along the lines of what the Hilali-Khan translation schema maps out as “O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as awliya (friends, protectors, helpers, etc.), they are but awliya to one another. And if any amongst you takes them as awliya, then surely he is one of them. Verily, Allah guides not those people who are the zalimoon (polytheists, wrongdoers, unjust).” Whatever your interpretation, it’s not very nice to Jews and Christians.
This verse is subject to a truly fantastical amount of bullshittery in the modern era. And that bullshittery takes on a particular flavor depending on the agenda of whoever is translating the verse. Keep in mind that 75% of Muslims are non-native speakers of Arabic (I’m one of them), and of that 75%, most know a few phrases of Arabic at most; just enough to be able to perform the five daily prayers, plus some tangentially related religious terminology (I know a bit more). To put it more simply, the vast majority of Muslims around the world do not read the Quran in the original Arabic. They read an interpretation rendered into their local language. And this is where the bullshittery starts.

  • In the aftermath of all the upset comics fans calling for his blood and some unspecified disciplinary action from Marvel, Syaf published a post announcing, "My career is over now."

  • Joe and Jill Biden have signed a book deal. Hopefully Joe Biden's book will have a chapter on how to hotwire a Camaro.

  • Speaking of politicians we love, Wonkette's Doktor Zoom runs down the nerdy books that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (siiiiiiigggghhhhh) adores:

You’ve got your Stephen King of course, and your Neal Stephenson, the master of erudite cyberpunk who gave us Snow Crash (the main character is a guy named Hiro Protagonist), and your Tad Williams, who goes more toward the sword-n-sorcery stuff. The two novels Trudeau names are also science fictional — Ready Player One is a dystopian SF story about adventures in virtual reality, which is a far preferable place than the dying overheated Earth of 2044 that Donald Trump is helping to build right now. And La Part de l’autre is a 2001 alternate-history affair (never published in English as far as we can tell) about the life of a young man named Adolf H. who in 1908 gets accepted to the Vienna School of Fine Arts, becomes a painter, and never bothers with politics. But he does meet a nice doctor named Freud who helps him work through some issues.

Shin-Ichi’s Tricycle

I stepped down from the trolley that day in Hiroshima

and walked by the river where the children had floated in flames,

but I could not hear their cries of misu, misu. Lost.


I saw the rowboats tied to the shore waiting for the living,

and the Prefecture building as the autumn wind

blew through the skeletal dome and every leaf lay scattered.


I passed by heaps of flowers and burning candles

to the doors that let me in to where the lights were dim,

so many shadows, each display lit only by a row of flashlights.


Power outage, someone said and so I need not pay my yen

but paid another way past fingers dripping skin,

a lunch box full of barley ash, the twisted tricycle


Shin-Ichi’s mother dug from severed earth. She gave it

so the boy would live in memory:

sculptured handlebars and pedals burned to black


all buried by the father who found him lying dead.

I thought of myself at five,

pedaling my tricycle down the middle


of Wilsonia Road, the rainbow shine of oil,

the sun, my father’s call

as he came swooping down to pull me back,


shouting, Don’t ever do that again.

Although of course I would.

And of course we did.


Joan Swift died on March 13, at age 90. In arrangement with Cave Moon Press, we've named her our April Poet in Residence, and are running four poems from her this month, all from the upcoming book The Body that Follows Us.

Previously: "Listening to My Bones"

This year's Pulitzer Prizes were exactly right

I don't know about you, but I feel as though this year's list of Pulitzer Prize winners is a perfect representation of the year's work. David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post did excellent work dogging Donald Trump all year long. Oakland's East Bay Times is a great paper that never gets recognized for its excellent work.

And the book choices are exactly as they should be. Colson Whitehead's brilliant novel The Underground Railroad absolutely deserved to win the prize. It's great to see Seattle poetry press Wave Books win for Tyehimba Jess's book Olio, and I've heard Matthew Desmond's book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City described as one of the most important books written about American cities in the last few years. I'm excited to read that one soon.

And it's fitting that Seattle Times book critic Mary Ann Gwinn — herself a Pulitzer winner — was on the committee to choose the fiction award this year:

Earlier this year, the Seattle Times chose to buy Gwinn out of her job as books editor as a cost-cutting measure. Her position on the Pulitzer committee is a perfectly timed show of respect from her fellow critics, and it makes the short-sightedness of the Times's choice even more apparent.

The Seattle Times did not win any Pulitzers this year.

UPDATE 5:06 PM: This post has been updated to clarify the fact that Whitehead's novel is awesome. My original language about was inexact. Apologies to Whitehead and to anyone who was confused by my language.

A taut high-tech thriller

Northwest writer Jeffrey Warren — a long time Seattle resident — set his latest book Justifiable Homicide largely in the city, amongst our high-tech firms. It covers investigative reporting, drug rings, computer wunderkinds, and most notably: encryption. A subject Warren knows well: he's an entrepreneur and engineer.

We've run the full first chapter from Justifiable Homicide on our Sponsor's page. If you like gripping thrillers, we think you'll like what you find there.

Sponsors like Jeffrey Warren make the Seattle Review of Books possible. Did you know you could sponsor us, as well? Get your stories, or novel, or event in front of our passionate audience. Take a glance at our sponsorship information page for dates and details.

Everything you wanted to know about literary agents (but was afraid to ask)

Yesterday, literary agent Nathan Bransford updated his web page answering the ages-old question, "what the hell does a literary agent actually do, anyway?" If you're a writer who's looking to break into the field, I highly encourage you to check this page out.

Now you can buy "Revenge"

If you, like tens of thousands of others, loved Elisa Chavez's poem "Revenge" when it appeared on the Seattle Review of Books in January, you should know that a broadside of the poem is now available on Etsy. It costs $35, and all proceeds benefit the International Rescue Committee. It looks absolutely gorgeous, too.

Grab Back Comics gives a voice to survivors of sexual assault

Grab Back Comics is a site that collects and publishes comics about sexual assault, harassment, advocacy, and consent education. It’s produced, edited, written, and curated by a Seattle cartoonist who uses the pseudonym “Erma Blood.” In person, Blood is thoughtful and eloquent. When the conversation turns to abuse stories, she’s always quick to turn the focus to survivors — what they need, what they feel, how to help. In less than an hour, the immense reserves of compassion and consideration she’s poured into the topic becomes apparent.

As the Trump-inspired name suggests, the idea for Grab Back Comics “came to me after the election,” Blood says. To celebrate her first wedding anniversary, “I went away on a trip with my wife and it was very sweet. But my experience of the coverage of sexual assaults and harassment during the election had really taken a toll.” She couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that a man who had openly bragged about his history as an abuser was about to become the most powerful human in the world. “It felt like it really shut me down. I just didn't feel like I was engaging in the way that I wanted to,” Blood says.

She knew from her own experiences that she wasn’t alone: “a lot of people are really suffering. And I wasn't sure what I could do, but I felt as though I needed to do something.” As corny as it sounds, the idea of Grab Back Comics came to her in a dream during that anniversary trip. Once she got back, she started work on building it in Wordpress. “It's pretty close to the way I imagined,” Blood says.

The first order of business was to seek out work that already existed. “I'm trained as a research scientist, and so this work of digging in and finding details and looking for more is familiar ground,” Blood explains. And once she started releasing Grab Back Comics into the world, “some comics friends of mine asked if they could contribute.” It’s been growing nonstop ever since.

Blood sees the site as a continuation of a Northwest tradition, born from “my own roots in riot grrrl and in punk rock and making independent fanzines when I was a teenager.” She learned as a young artist in the 1990s to “crystallize” her “anger and discomfort into something creative.” Her voice on the site is absolutely in that spirit of empathy and rage: — “very direct, very feminist, very no-nonsense, and at the same time, very supportive of people who are having a hard time, who are suffering from our current political climate.”

Just a handful of months in, the site is already a tremendous resource, collecting everything from Namibian comics that provide resources for survivors to “bro to bro” guides explaining consent to a 1984 Marvel Comic that discusses Spider-Man’s history as a survivor of sexual abuse. Blood also reviews books on the topic and interviews cartoonists. As you’d expect from someone who works in research, the site is fastidiously tagged so users can find first-person accounts, work relating specifically to date rape drugs or incest, and comics produced for public health campaigns.

The need for a site like Grab Back Comics is obvious. Just in terms of the amount of preexisting work it catalogues, it’s clear that artists have been working on this wavelength for decades. Why does Blood think that comics are such a useful medium for this kind of work? “With comics we can integrate more than one type of voice and perspective — a graphic voice, a written voice. We can integrate scenery and backgrounds and set moods that, I think, can be more richly rendered than in written narratives when they're done really well.”

Blood has been surprised by some of her findings. “I learned that there is a pretty impressive movement in India around sexual assault and child sexual abuse, particularly, by relatives,” she says. “Of all of the international comics I found, there seems to be a lot of energy in India around those topics. It's something that I'd like to learn more about.” She’s also happy to find that the work has become more inclusive: “conversations around all of these topics of consent and sexual assault and child abuse have expanded to include all genders” in the decades that they’ve been around, she says. When comics about assault first appeared, they tended to “focus very heavily on women, and particularly on middle-class white women, and that's really changed over time.”

Blood is looking for submissions to an upcoming print Grab Back Comics anthology. Between now and May 21st, cartoonists should submit their work relating to the whole array of experiences, from consent to abuse to recovery, to grab.back.comics[at]gmail.com. Blood will assemble those submissions into a minicomic which she’ll then distribute at the Comics and Medicine Conference, which is happening in Seattle this June, and at the Short Run Comix & Art Festival in November.

If you have a question about the anthology, you should get in touch with Blood. She’s also interested in connecting writers with artists, too. “Artists have told me they don't have a story to tell, and other people I know have told me they don't want to draw their own story. So I'm starting to try to link up artists with people who have stories,” she says.

For Blood, this journey has been inspiring. When I ask what themes she’s encountered in all the work she’s collected, she doesn’t hesitate. “I consistently am finding with all of these stories that there's so much bravery and honesty and a willingness to be vulnerable in order to create connection.” Grab Back Comics honors that spirit, and expands the connection to a whole new audience of readers.

The Sunday Post for April 9, 2017

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.

When Pat Buchanan Tried to Make America Great Again

This piece by Sam Tanenhaus is a vivid history of Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, with direct lines via Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump’s victory last year. Judging by this retelling, politics has become considerably less witty — though no less petty. Time for the Twitterverse to up its game.

For [Garry] Wills, "Nixon's main problem, I think, was his nose," Buchanan recalls. He's serious. Nixon's ski-jump nose, beloved by caricaturists, was a staple of the period's cornball humor. Even Nixon worked up good-sport one-liners. ("Bob Hope and I would make a great ad for Sun Valley.") Wills, crammed beside him in a DC-3, under the dim overhead spotlight, was transfixed—not by the nose's fabled length but by "its distressing width, accentuated by the depth of the ravine running down its center, and by its general fuzziness . . . the nose swings far out; then, underneath, it does not rejoin his face in a straight line, but curves far up again, leaving a large but partially screened space between nose and lip" ...
Where have all the hard men gone?

For non-fans, sports are a blur of frantic movement punctuated by long, dull waits and nerve-shattering cheers and boos from true believers. It’s not easy to sell us on the storyline, but Kevin Alexander manages it in this piece on “Hard Men” — the bruisers and bullies who’ve held folkloric status on English soccer teams for decades and are now fading into history.

You can get a sense of their skill sets by looking at the nicknames of the Hard Men of the ’60s and ’70s, such as Chelsea’s Ron “Chopper” Harris and Liverpool’s Tommy “the Anfield Iron” Smith. (“Tommy Smith wasn’t born,” Bill Shankly once said, “he was quarried.”) My personal favorite is Leeds United’s Norman “Bites Yer Legs” Hunter. Another Leeds Hard Man, Joe Jordan, was nicknamed “Jaws” because he refused to wear dentures after losing four teeth to a kick in the mouth.
A Moral Tale: Vladimir Nabokov, bad Samaritan?

In a short piece packed with literary gossip and impeccable research, Levi Stahl puts a forgotten tale of Vladmir Nabokov, butterflies, and a dying prospector under the microscope.

After more than four hours of hiking, the two were descending a steep slope covered by ice-crusted snow when they lost their footing and began to slide toward the edge. Nabokov managed to snag a rock with his butterfly net, and Laughlin was able to grab Nabokov’s shoe while rushing past him. The net held, and the men survived.

That was not the only time death came near Nabokov that summer.

Buk

One strategy for interacting with beloved authors is to avoid eye contact at all costs and leave the room if possible. Jonathan Carroll favors a different approach.

Like so many people, I happened onto one of Bukowski’s collections of poetry in a university used book shop. I stood there a long time, drinking down his poems for the first time like they were cold Coca Cola on a hot day. I’d never read anything like them and it was a thrilling experience. In my 20 year old college boy “I want to be a writer too someday” voice I wrote all of that to him. A few weeks later I received an envelope from the Sunshine Inn Motel in San Pedro, California.

Seattle Writing Prompts: The Terminal Sales Building

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.

Also, how are we doing? Are writing prompts useful to you? Could we be doing better? Reach out if you have ideas or feedback. We'd love to hear.

The first thing you need to know about the Terminal Sales Building — besides its oddly specific and wonderful name — is that its address is 1923 1st Avenue, and guess what year it opened? That's right, 1923. Of all of the landmark buildings around Seattle, surely the Terminal Sales Building is the most numerologically aligned.

The gothic-revival building was designed by Henry Bittman, the famous Seattle engineer and architect. Many of his buildings still stand (his own home in Wallingford, built in 1916, sold in 2015 for $1.6m — although the last owner was apparently very reclusive, Bittman and his wife were not. An essay by Caterina Provost-Smith in Shaping Seattle Architecture: A Historical Guide to the Architects notes, of Bittman and his wife: "The couple, who never had children, entertained here frequently and with flair. They crowned each year with an elaborate New Year's Eve party, where, at the stroke of midnight, a specially designed dining table would split open and a sculpture commemorating the year would arise and revolve.").

Terminal Sales was the long-time home to Peter Miller's design and architecture bookshop (now on 2nd Avenue), which catered to the many design and architectural firms that lease space in the building. The other notable retail tenant, Baby & Co., has been a long-time favorite for couture conscious Seattlites with actual good taste, and the money to realize it.

A second, smaller, older building, on 2nd Avenue, now bears the name Terminal Sales Building Annex, which is a poor name for a building that is only connected to its larger, younger sibling by a skybridge over an alley.

But the Terminal Sales Building, with its big steel-framed windows, and terra-cotta tiles, appears wide-eyed and open to the world. It's ready to greet you. It's asking you in, to its loft-style spaces to run your business, or interact with someone else's. Let's find some stories there, inside a single design office.

Today's prompts

  1. The receptionist was nice, giving sympathetic smiles, as the candidate sat and waited for the Creative Director. He was screaming so loud the office wall might have not even been there, dressing down some poor sap for running the wrong copy in an ad. When that puffy-eyed creature left his office and the receptionist showed candidate in (and got the hell out of there as quick as she could). The candidate, clutching her large black portfolio, only hoped was that he liked her work. But entering his office, she knew that things were not going to go the way she wanted. This man looked murderous.

  2. God, he really was crying. The copywriter marched right past their little birthday celebration, with the cupcakes out and candles burning and singing going on, tears in his eyes. He didn't even notice them. He didn't even say hello. He didn't even notice his name on the cards. Nobody said anything for a minute, then that funny designer said something that made everyone laugh.

  3. The Creative Director was not in a mood to look at some fucking book by some fucking kid and play nice and encourage them. He was in a mood to destroy. He was like Kali, and everybody who crossed his threshold today was gonna feel the heat that his client rained down on him in epic display. He would redistribute that rage in equal measure, for them to take through their days and press into other's hands. And then the baby designer was so fucking nervous and stuttery, he was just ready to show her what professional people have to deal with. See if she wants the job after that. See how tough she really was. But then, he opened her book. And fuck it all if he saw something he never expected to see in a new graduates' work.

  4. It had to be in person. The sales director from the magazine knew that anything less wouldn't play very well. He held the bottle of 20 year old scotch in his sweaty hand. He was going to march in, tell the firm director that the copy mistake was their fault, and offer to reach out to the client. He would talk about how important their business was to him. He would talk about how their upcoming media buys are so important, and he would explain exactly how he's changed policies to safeguard against this happening again. How he fired the layout man who made this mistake. If only the elevator would come. If only it would come, he would stop shaking and get on with this terrible business.

  5. The receptionist placed the call when nobody was around. This place was for the birds. Everybody was so uptight all the time. Her last job was so great. Why did she ever leave? She dreams about it now. The phone rang, and her old boss would pick up and be surprised to hear from her. But surely they could put the affair behind them? Surely what she was feeling for her old boss wasn't love, right? Surely, her old boss would never leave her husband, would never live openly, so what was the use of even trying here? Surely, she told herself, this phone call was about the job and nothing else. And then the phone picked up, and she heard that ever-so-distinct voice on the other end: "hello?"

A colorful chorus of voices

Published April 07, 2017, at 11:40am

Paul Constant reviews Various's Political Pamphlet Series.

In the final entry in our weeklong investigation of Mount Analogue's books, we investigate their line of political pamphlets. Somehow, the long-dead art of pamphleteering now feels more immediate and relevant than even magazines.

Read this review now

The Help Desk: For the millionth time, are TV shows the new novels?

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,

If one more douchey techbro tells me that TV shows are the new novels, I’m going to lose my mind. It’s become the stock response when I tell my coworkers that I enjoy reading. I liked Mad Men as much as the next person, but watching a TV show is just never going to be the same thing as reading a book. Can you give me a pithy comeback for the next time this happens?

Virginia, South Lake Union

Dear Virginia,

You say this: "Teevee shows ARE the new novels, in the same way that reality stars are the new Leaders of the Free World."

Personally, my favorite new show is Real Housemarms of Orphan Liver Donors, in which orphanage housemarms sell off tender young organs to the worldly battle-scarred businessmen who actually need them. I was really rooting for one of the marms to be chosen as our next Secretary of Education – they're all excellent at maximizing the potential of orphaned children's livers, just think of what they could do with the nation's young minds.

Kisses,

Cienna

Portrait Gallery: Kaitlyn Greenidge

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

Friday April 7th: Hugo Literary Series: Betrayal

The Hugo House brings three writers and a musician together to produce new work on a theme. The final event of the 2016-2017 season is “Betrayal.” Readers include poet Anis Mojgani, celebrated novliest Kaitlyn Greenidge, and poet Rick Barot, along with musician Maiah Manser.
Fred Wildlife Refuge, 128 Belmont Ave. E., 322-7030. http://www.hugohouse.org. $10-25. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

The Future Alternative Past: Writers gotta write, readers gotta read

Every month, Nisi Shawl presents us with news and updates from her perch overlooking the world of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror. Read past columns here

Not what it used to be

The future science fiction depicts has never been the future. So-called Golden Age SFFH of the late 1930s to mid-1940s projected its times’ values and aesthetics onto imaginary eras flung far over the event horizon. Robert A. Heinlein’s literal space cadets, like his juvenile hero Matt Dodson, are all heterosexual men, though daringly cosmopolitan in their inclusion of differing nationalities — one of them even speaks French! Later, New Wave SFFH from the 1960s and 1970s espoused antiestablishment rebelliousness in the spirit of contemporary countercultural freakazoids like Abbie Hoffman and feminist SFFH authors including Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ pulled off populating the future widely with women-as-subjects rather than “love interests” or unattainable ideals thanks to the then-current examples of Gloria Steinem and Mary Ann Weathers. As the real-life present changesthe SFFH future does too. Because the present is what it’s based on.

Sometimes there are gaps in the projection. SFFH’s gatekeepers — publishers, editors, agents, producers, distributors, reviewers — may not feel the zeitgeist some authors are trying to represent. Or a few years pass in which features of the present that some authors want to riff off of can’t be plausibly placed in what’s called a “near-future scenario”: a setting mere decades off. You’d think doing that would be easier than making a case for far-future stuff, but no. An analogy: a character in Isaac Asimov’s story “The Ugly Little Boy” likens time travel to scratching your ear. It’s easier to do with your fingers than your elbow, though the latter’s anatomically closer. And it’s easier to posit certain changes as manifesting in a distant epoch than trying to plot out the path we’ll take between now and then.

Sometimes the continuous parade of global events or scientific discoveries renders a particular future dissonant with the resulting new present. These dissonances can accumulate: the absence of pocket calculators, cell phones, and GPS on the technological side; no trace of Brexit or Trump’s presidency on the political. Suddenly whole oeuvres, whole shelves, entire imprints lose their tenuous verisimilitude. The works of Heinlein and Asimov are obvious examples, but no writer is immune to this trap. For instance, my stories “Lazzrus” and “Sunshine of Your Love” — one published in November and the other yet to appear — mention a connection between cloning and obesity, but since I wrote about it that connection has been disproven. Stories such as mine can now only be appreciated as historical artifacts despite the dates they supposedly occur.

Social evolution also causes whole swathes of SFFH to date. Many SFFH classics impress newer readers as horribly offensive. Sexism and misogyny, racism, ableism, and other discriminatory mindsets pair frequently and unselfconsciously with more progressive and deliberately provocative attitudes; look at Bester’s The Stars My Destination and McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang.

What’s the solution? For us authors, the answer is to keep writing. Write some more. Write what works in the moment, and don’t worry that the moment ends, demolishing as it can your most recent futures.

Writers gotta write. Readers gotta read.

Keep reading. Keep writing. And SFFH’s futures will die only to be reborn.

Recent books recently read

Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, New York 2140 (Orbit), is as large and complex as the city it’s named for. Ever optimistic, Robinson depicts a Manhattan that despite being half-drowned by melting polar ice caps rises Venice-like to meet the challenges of hurricanes and investment capital with its celebrated insouciance. The author has famously advocated for the shameless use of infodumps — those frequently lamented expository passages so often necessary to the construction of SFFH’s brave new worlds. Entire chapters of this book are nothing but. Readers who look down on infodumps can easily avoid them. Why would you want to, though? They’re relatively short and scattered through with treasures. And they blend so well with the rest of the book’s chapters, written from the viewpoints of a reality show star-cum-dirigible pilot, a pair of subversive finance software specialists, a big black cop more than a little reminiscent of the late Octavia E. Butler, and others. Viewpoint and non-viewpoint characters are fascinating, believable, and varied. Add Robinson’s vivid descriptions of natural and artificial beauty and his inventive neologisms — portmanteau words like delanyden and gehryglory — and the result is a portrait of a protean, mythical New York, a place deserving of our honor, our respect, our attention, and our lasting love.

Just as optimistically disruptive, Electronic Frontier Foundation advocate Cory Doctorow gives us Walkaway (Tor), a novel daringly bridging the gap between a highly likely near-future dystopia and a happy post-human millennium. The effortlessly involving plot follows the sexual and romantic entanglements, guerilla parties, philosophical arguments, torture, kidnapping, and escapes of a disaffected heiress with the nom de guerre Iceweasel; an outer-space-hungry cross-dresser named Kersplebedeb; Disjointed, an aging scientist working on a cure for death; and a dozen more revolutionaries. In this fictional world the word “walkaway” is both a verb and a noun. When you walkaway, you lay aside all conventional burdens and burdensome conventionality and head for a walkaway, which is an anarchic place like Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones, but more widespread, and supported by an impressive array of abundance tech. In contrast to what’s termed the “default,” no one works unless they want to, no one gets paid, no one starves, no one fights. How do we bring about the future we want? By living as if it’s already here, say Doctorow and those of his characters who walkaway.

Couple of upcoming cons

Sometimes cons resemble TAZs. At the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts last month, another attendee asked me which con was my favorite. Like at least half the people partaking in that convo I named WisCon. Certainly it’s the preeminent gathering of feminist SFFH fans in this hemisphere. Certainly it’s the most thoughtful congeries of Social Justice Warriors this side of the Inn Earnest Giraffe Emulation. And certainly I’ll be going again this year, along with my mother, who in the audience of her first James Tiptree, Jr. auction there laughed helplessly at the idea of trying to explain to her friends exactly what these whacky women were doing. (I think this was during the Titty-Shaking Duel.) You should probably go, too.

Then there’s the Nebula Conference, aka “the Nebs.” It’s a weekend of workshops, panels, and disco anthem performances, culminating in a nerve-wracking ceremonial banquet for those on the Nebula Award’s final ballot. Like me. I’ll be working a paying gig, though, so perhaps you should go in my place?

Trouble in paradise

Published April 06, 2017, at 11:30am

Paul Constant reviews Halie Theoharides's Final Rose.

For our Thursday comics column, we look at a book made up entirely of screenshots taken from episodes of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Is it comics? Is it poetry? Is it art? Is it a desperate howl from the inside of the human heart? Yes, yes, yes, and absolutely.

Read this review now

What we did then

What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump's America was announced right after Election Day last year. It was published right before Inauguration Day this year. A two-month window is incredibly small for the wholesale creation of a book — particularly one like What We Do Now, which anthologizes recent writing by big-name authors like Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Gloria Steinem, Robert Reich, and Elizabeth Warren. Ordinarily a work like this would span at least a year from inception to publication date.

It's weird, then, that a book as immediate as What We Do Now already feels so dated. Most of the attendees of last night's Reading Through It Book Club at Third Place Books Seward Park agreed that the book already feels like a time capsule of sorts. It was born of a certain moment of panic — that frightening time between the surprise of Trump's election and the horror of the day that he actually took office. None of us knew what to expect, and the resulting queasy uncertainty inspired a grimness that was very particular to that moment in time.

This is not to say that the current situation is not grim. As book club attendees pointed out last night, Trump's policies are causing incredible damage to foreign relations, to the environment, to the very idea of truth. But perhaps the realization that Trump is an inept and hateful president is at least a little more comforting than the pre-inauguration fear that Trump was a brilliant and hateful president. He can still cause a lot of damage — he can still destroy the world, even – but he is not a planner, and he is not a rational thinker. An identifiable challenge is always preferable to an unknown challenge.

Still, this is no time for complacency. Any number of institutions are at risk, and many people stand to suffer from Trump's policies. Last night, we discussed the importance of keeping the truth in sight — of subscribing to a few news outlets and reading them cover-to-cover. The ongoing degredation of the truth is not just a conservative problem. We talked about the importance of communicating progressive ideas in a way that transcends politics, that speaks to the human in everyone.

And we redoubled our efforts to remember what that dawning moment of shock felt like when we realized that Trump had won the presidency. As we approach the end of Trump's first 100 days in office, it's important to recall how quickly everything can change, and how a seemingly concrete understanding of the universe can fall apart in a matter of seconds.

The next Reading Through It Book Club meets at Third Place Books Seward Park on Wednesday, May 3rd at 7 pm. We'll be discussing Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. The book is 20% off at Third Place between now and then. Please join us.

Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from April 5th - April 11th

Wednesday April 5th: Reading Through It: What We Do Now

See our Event of the Week column for more details. Third Place Books Seward Park, 5041 Wilson Ave S, 474-2200, http://thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday April 6th: American Junkie Reading

Tom Hansen’s grunge-era Seattle memoir American Junkie is finally being reissued. It’s a story about drugs and punk rock and a city on the precipice of something bigger. To celebrate his book’s second chance on life, Hansen’s being joined by Seattle authors Sean Beaudoin and Joshua Mohr for a group reading and a moderated discussion. Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, 525-2347 thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m

Friday April 7th: Hugo Literary Series: Betrayal

The Hugo House brings three writers and a musician together to produce new work on a theme. The final event of the 2016-2017 season is “Betrayal.” Readers include poet Anis Mojgani, celebrated slam poet Kaitlyn Greenidge, and poet Rick Barot, along with musician Maiah Manser. Fred Wildlife Refuge, 128 Belmont Ave. E., 322-7030. http://www.hugohouse.org. $10-25. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

Saturday April 8th: The Songs of Trees Reading

So it turns out that trees are a lot weirder than we ever guessed. They communicate using bizarre fungus webs and they cultivate “bacterial communities” that serve all kinds of functions that we’re only just now learning about. In his newest book, David Haskell discusses the cutting edge of tree research, which should probably be known as “treesearch.” Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

Sunday April 9th: Truth Be Bold Reading

Julene Tripp Weaver is a Seattle poet who worked in AIDS services for over two decades. Subtitled Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS, her latest collection continues the themes of her work. This afternoon, she debuts her book with nine local poets and AIDS educators in a reading hosted by local writer David Schmader. Hugo House, 1021 Columbia St., 322-7030, hugohouse.org. Free. All ages. 4 p.m.

Monday April 10th: Ask the Oracle

Suzanne Morrison joins Seattle experimental writer Doug Nufer and prolific Seattle poet Megan Snyder-Camp as part of Hugo House’s divination-based reading series. Authors will answer audience questions using answers pulled from their texts. All three writers are great, but Nufer in particular could be a standout; he does lots of performance-based routines and should be especially devoted to the schtick. Sorrento Hotel, 900 Madison St., 622-6400, http://hotelsorrento.com. Free. 21 and over. 7 p.m

Tuesday April 11th: Ghosts of Seattle Past Reading

The long-awaited atlas of lost Seattle places debuts with a reading featuring Hollis Wong-Wear, Sara Brickman, Chuck Wolfe, Anisa Jackson, and Davey Oil. After this reading/signing session, the whole party rolls downhill to Belltown for a big afterparty at the Rendezvous with more readings from Kibibi Monie, Elissa Washuta, Kathy Fennessy, and Kate Lebo. There'll also be a musical performance from Aaron Seme. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.