Friday Comics Hangover: The Dark Knight, reheated

By far, the most-hyped comics release of the week is DK III: The Master Race, the third volume in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight series. Ostensibly co-written by Brian Azzarello, the actual authorship of DK III is in question — Frank Miller has basically admitted that he’s not been involved in the writing of the series. Whoever actually wrote the story, Miller certainly didn’t draw the book; the art is by Andy Kubert, with inking by Dark Knight veteran Klaus Janson. So we have a sequel to a much-maligned sequel to one of the all-time classic Batman stories, written-but-probably not-at-all-written by the original writer and drawn by a different artist. How is it?

Well, it feels like fan fiction. But it doesn’t even feel like Dark Knight fan fiction; it feels like DK II fan fiction. For those of you who have better things to do, the sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, DK II, is pretty roundly regarded as a failure. Marred by atrocious computer coloring and written in a completely different tone than the original Dark Knight series, DK II was a more cartoonish take on the future of the DC Comics canon, including a Batman who was actually — gasp! — having fun. Some contrarians still defend DK II for being a cheeky dissection of the idea of superhero comics. I can understand that defense, but I disagree: the problem with DK II was that it was bad comics. Miller’s satire, never very subtle, took on the form and grace of a cement block. The jokes felt private and insular, the worldview felt increasingly mean-spirited as the book went on, and the entertainment value was erratic. (At times, the book did express a sort of madcap thrill; I might be remembering this wrong, but I’m pretty sure Miller processed 9/11, which happened between issues two and three of the series, in the comics as a giant cartoon frog demolishing a city.)

So in DK III, we have a writer trying on the affect of Miller’s DKR-era writing style and an artist trying on the affect of Miller’s art. Neither is really successful. Azzarello tries to mimic Miller’s style of mocking the media, but really he’s just using the stand-ins for Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart as exposition delivery systems. The book’s plot is delivered in a straight-faced manner, and a last-page twist is so obvious in execution that it ought to be accompanied with a sad trombone sound effect. Perhaps Azzarello is building to something momentous — he’s done good stuff in the past — but right now it feels like too-serious superhero comics at a too-high price point. ($5.99? Come on!)

I’ve never been a fan of Andy Kubert’s artwork. He’s a second-generation comics artist (his father is the legendary Joe Kubert), and his illustration style has the soulless ache of someone who never bothered to learn how to draw anything other than comics. His composition is boring, his figures are thick, and the Milleresque tiny panels on every page only serve to make his art look even sillier by comparison. He has never drawn an interesting page in his life; they’re all awkward grimaces and poses, with not one bit of a recognizable reality on the page.

The only fun part of the first issue of DK III is the enclosed mini-comic starring The Atom, illustrated by Miller and Klaus Janson. It’s tipped into a cardboard leaflet in the center of the book, and it begins with The Atom fighting a dinosaur and reflecting on his divorce, and how aging has mellowed him as a man. This is the kind of fun, weird stuff that people who praise DK II are looking for in their books, and the format feels novel and interesting. Unfortunately, the comic stops short when a plot thread from the main book intrudes on the story, making it a glorified post-credits scene in a Marvel movie: something entertaining, followed by a teaser that pushes the story forward into the next installment. Who cares?

A few years ago, DC Comics tried to mine the Alan Moore/David Gibbons comic Watchmen in a series of prequels. Before Watchmen was presented as a prestige project, and it included a number of big-name comics creators including Azzarello and Kubert. The comics were, for the most part, technically excellent. But they simply didn’t matter. The books were released and collected and rereleased in book form, and nobody gave a shit and they were immediately forgotten. Unless something transformative happens in the next few issues, DK III will suffer the same fate.

Gratitude, stripped bare by her bachelors

It is as if we're in competition to find the starkest horror. This world offers so many comers to the table, each one bloodier, more callous, more inhumane, more despicable than the rest. Some are small insults that strike us in a particular way. Some are grand vistas of despair that we cannot comprehend en masse, and are represented for us by a single photograph, say of a suffering child, as we read the news.

We want to feel it all. To process the world's pain, and know. Like the oculist witness on Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even observing the humiliation of the bride at her wedding, we are the ones who see the world, and hold its measure. But as the sad animals that we are, we have the capacity for so little before we break. Some few have made it their life's work to help others; most of us follow the method recommended by flight attendants: we put our oxygen mask on first before we turn to our neighbor.

But selfish or generous, our daily rhythms are ticked like rulers with the routine of our days, the cycle of the seasons, the turning of the earth. When my father was sick and dying, he was rather taken with the idea of "thin places", where the membrane that separates this world and the next is stretched. It can be a secular metaphor as well as a religious one, and I prefer to think of it referencing a time instead of geography, such as cathedrals, or Stonehenge, or other sacred locations.

A thin place is a time where our fabric stretches and we see its weave. Where the ticks on our ruler marking seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, stretch and warp the very perception of time itself. Sherman Alexie has said he wrote hundreds of poems after the death of his mother. It's as if he stepped off of the crust that supports life onto fabric suspended over a fissure, and felt it give with each step. Those poems are him calling back to us, on the shore, to describe what he feels. Having done that walk before, I can testify it's fraught, and also affirming. You fall, and sometime expect that you too will be lost to the depths, but that material is stronger than you can imagine. You land face down, seeing the epoch below. Discard the cliched advice you've heard in the action movies: you must look down. If you close your eyes and try to will yourself back to steady ground, you risk the footing of your entire life turning soft.

Births, deaths, weddings, and other passages of life change us like this. Nights with superb friends — where understanding dawns amidst the pleasures — are like this. That first night with a person after you've fallen in love is like this. A particularly mind-blowing meal can do this. And holidays, where we set aside the world to mark a shared experience, can be like this, if we let them.

My grandfather was a glass salesman. One of his clients was Pepsi-Cola, in Southern California, which was owned by the Alessio family. For vacation, every year, my mother, her two sisters, and her parents would drive to Ensenada, Mexico, to spend a few weeks vacation.

On the way they would stop by the Alessio house in San Diego for dinner, and every year the matriarch of the family, Gemma, and my grandfather would enact the play they had improvised together. Gemma would say: "I'm going to make you something very special for your visit."

"No, Gemma," he'd say. "We want your spaghetti."

"No, I won't make something so plain for company! I will make a roast."

"Gemma, please," my grandfather would say. "Please, for the love of all that's good, make us your spaghetti."

My grandfather, who was the cook in the family, once asked Gemma to write down the recipe, and she did. But you might as well have asked Elizabeth Bishop to write down a poem so that you can write one just as good. Nobody cooked like Gemma, and Gemma did not use recipes. It never tasted the same at home. I've made that spaghetti sauce. It's simple and nice. But nobody would ever request it from me. It wouldn't evoke that starry-eyed look my mother gets when she describes its scent in entering the Alessio house.

This was the ritual of my mother's family. When my mother talks about her family and gathering, she sometimes talks about Christmas dinner, or maybe Thanksgiving. But more often than not she talks about those Ensenada trips and their stop in San Diego. The ritual of it was unique to her family, it was an experience they owned.

I was in San Francisco with a band. We went to record some songs at a friend's house. In the Haight, there are four Victorians that are designed as the four seasons, built in a neat little row. Our host owned Winter, and had built a recording studio in the 1st floor flat. I asked him what he did to be able to buy such an iconic house, and he said "I'm a designer."

"What do you design?"

"I've designed lots of things. I've designed chairs. But mostly I design molecules."

We were there for the fall in San Francisco, and when we weren't recording we wandered around the sunny city, spending time in Golden Gate Park. Because it was over Thanksgiving, our host arranged for us to crash a friend's gathering.

We took the bus, carrying a few offerings and dishes in shopping bags. It was one of those old San Francisco homes that may have been built as apartments, or once was a strange, plain, huge family home. We had to go down the side, and up some stairs, and in through the kitchen. We arrived at 7pm or so.

There, a turkey was on. Arguments were underway about the internal temperature, and how long it takes to reach it. We drank wine and cocktails, the living room completely unlit save for the central overhead light in the kitchen. The oven and counters were crowded with dishes covered in foil, in a random assortment of dishes.

Dinner was served, after many drinks, some time after 10pm. There was no family here, other than the family we chose. I was with the band, and the San Francisco people were — like many people in San Francisco — freaks of a certain sort who ran away screaming from their traditional upbringings.

And yet, here we were, all gathered, sharing a meal. It was wholly unremarkable, the food. I remember missing a bigger spread with experienced cooks. The company, too, although pleasant, was not my company. I was not among the people I felt warmest and safest.

Yet this night I remember more clearly than many other Thanksgiving meals. I think that has to do with the choice — nobody was there because they had to be. Nobody was pushed up against a familial cultural clash that made them uncomfortable. Nobody there was traditional in any sense of the word. We came together to eat the bird and partake of the two relevant themes of Thanksgiving: communion, and gratitude.

As usual, when talking about food, M.F.K. Fisher said it best:

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

But, perhaps, in forward-looking critique of unprepared cooks and guests dining too late at night, she also said:

First we eat, then we do everything else.

Like all holidays with any tradition, Thanksgiving is problematic. Foremost because it's a stark reminder of genocide, subjugation, and then cartoony celebration of that subjugation under the guise of communion. The narrative of the holiday is wrong, and offensively so.

Less bad, but still bad, the imagery is cheesy and cliched. The tall black hats with gold buckles, the feather headdresses, the cartoon turkeys winking at the viewer, all in flat browns, reds, and oranges. It's a holiday that operates at a Kindergarten level of sophistication.

If you're more worldly than that, perhaps you picture a table set by Normal Rockwell, with Ma serving and Pa carving, and Grandma and Grandpa smiling on the messy, but authentic, grandkids. You are in the 1950s, and the men and boys spent the morning raking leaves and tossing a ball around, while Grandpa rocked on the porch and smoked that fragrant tobacco — the women, of course, cooked.

Or maybe you picture that other great American house where a television the size of a wall emits football and commercials non-stop, turkey dinners are served on tv trays, and the women are fishing out their sleep masks so they can get a few hours in before hitting the Black Friday lines at 3am.

This is not mockery. These are the set pieces of Thanksgiving in our country. If they resemble yours, and you love them, I wish you all the best.

But I don't recognize myself in those traditions. Still, I make this bold claim: Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. As an agnostic (which is the modern non-asshole version of an atheist), I like Thanksgiving because it's secular. And I like the reminder once a year to pay attention, and be grateful for the things that you have.

A friend on Twitter argued that we shouldn't need one day a year to appear grateful, and while I agree with her, I think holidays like this are not for us who are old enough and experienced enough with life to know how to be grateful more often. The older I get, the more my personal attitude aligns with "there but for the grace of God go I." Except without the God part.

The ritual is still worthwhile because, as humans, we need those reminders to pay attention to the ticks on the rulers of life. We need to teach these slower, longer cycles of life to those that haven't learned it yet.

Gathering at the table with people you choose to have around you, and hopefully love, and sharing a special meal? That's hitting a perfect three on the Fisher checklist.

Perhaps we need a new Thanksgiving iconography. Something modern and clean. It should be just as secular as before, just as focused on caring and gratitude. I'm certainly not the first to call for such a thing, and my call will not be instructive or give methods. My call will simply be an evocation of sorts.

Let us use this one day to set aside the troubles a world away that we cannot control, and mark what we have, and show appreciation. That helps us decide when we can assist that neighbor with their oxygen mask. That helps us decide what resources we have to marshal for the greater good.

We do not have to forget that there are those in need. We are not reveling in our privilege or lording it over those without — we are simply marking the ticks on the ruler of our days, and noting that we are passing them as we go forward. One holiday day cannot halt time, but like a train moving through a station without slowing, it can certainly point out that we're on a track and we are moving. It is human nature to forget that.

Maybe you'll find yourself around your own table, or another. Maybe it's a tray in front of the TV, or a dark room in a San Francisco house, or a walnut burl table with antique lace runners, or even your own room, alone with a book. Maybe where you are the air will shift a bit, and you'll come up to see the movement around you. You'll step off the crust onto the fabric and feel it stretch. Maybe this holiday will give you a moment to see from another perspective. Maybe that perspective will bring you something you need.

Here are some online book sales you can feel good about

Yesterday, I told you about some local independent bookstores that you should visit on Small Business Saturday. But that doesn't mean you can't buy books online, too! Below are three big sales from independent publishers just in time for Thanksgiving-weekend consumer madness. Buying directly from these publishers will help pay for more great new books in the coming year.

If you're looking for some recommendations, you can't go wrong with Hip Hop Family Tree for the music-lover in your life, the Complete Peanuts for virtually anyone, or this gorgeous edition of The Eternaut for the comics fan on your list from Fantagraphics. Drawn & Quarterly publishes beautiful reprints of the Moomin series for all ages, Blankets by Craig Thompson for that special someone, and the hilarious Lisa Hanwalt's My Dirty Dumb Eyes for fans of the Hanawalt-designed show Bojack Horseman. If you're looking for gifts from Melville House, you should consider the Neversink Library for the literary purist, the Art of the Novella series for people who want to read more quality fiction in the coming year, and Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin for just about anyone who loves a great novel.

The University District Farmer's Market wrote a poem

Kristen Steenbeeke reports that Hugo House's crowd-sourced poetry experiment has come to a close for the year. Last week, Hugo House set up a stand with a typewriter at the University District Farmer's Market and encouraged passers-by to contribute to a group poem. The poets were only allowed to write one line, and they were only allowed to read the line that came before their line.

Is the end result great poetry? Well, no. But it is fascinating stuff. I especially like how the poem shifts moods wildly from one poet to the next: the nonsensically giddy "Happy day party time new baby" gives way to "the fog rolls in," and then "the gray hearkens her mind" is followed by "happy thoughts shine through." This is a group of anonymous Seattleites, telling each other to cheer up through the fall gloom. The poem's multitudinous attentions eventually wander to pumpkins and octopuses and apricot danishes. As a narrative, it says nothing much at all. But as a collective gauge of the mood of a large crowd of Seattleites in the middle of a chilly November, I'd say it's surprisingly accurate.

Three holidays in, Ada's Technical Books is growing up

The weeks leading up to Thanksgiving are traditionally when booksellers look back at the year that was and prepare for the busiest few weeks of the year. Danielle Hulton, the co-founder and manager of our November bookstore of the month, Ada’s Technical Books, is in that process right now, and she feels pretty good about where her store is.

“This will be our third holiday” in the store’s new location on 15th Ave, she says, and “the excitement that we felt from customers and from the neighborhood two years ago seems to have stayed.” She says the store has developed a steady flow of regulars, both on the cafe and the bookstore side, and daily patterns have been established. Hulton has transitioned from managing a five-person shop to a store with 20 employees. “I feel like I’m starting to get my legs under me“ so far as management goes, she says. It’s been a year since Ada’s started up The Office, a co-working space in the attic, and Hulton says “the monthly spaces are always completely full, which is wonderful. The daily spaces are picking up steam, and the conference rooms, people are really excited about. Those seem to be rented more than the daily spaces.” It’s starting to feel like a real office up there, Hulton says: “It’s nice for me because my desk is up there and I have a nice group of coworkers that don’t even work at Ada’s.” The next step in Ada’s gradual expansion is to open up an event space, tentatively called The Lab, on the property. Hulton is taking her time to get it right, “fleshing out exactly what it will be.”

As she prepares for the holiday onslaught, what are the books that Hulton looks forward to reading? “I’m really excited about Margaret Atwood’s new novel that she just published, The Heart Goes Last.” And then she sounds a little reticent: “this isn’t even nerdy — it’s an embarrassing obsession. I’m obsessed with the Lunar Chronicles, a YA fantasy series. The final one, Winter, was released last week.” Hulton loves the excitement of retail Christmas. She likes that it highlights the bookstore side of Ada’s, which is “what I’m passionate about.” She enjoys the moments when the store is full of “more people coming in, more people excited to be there, more people seeing what we’re about.” She hopes first-time visitors to the store will understand that it was founded with an idea of providing “accessibility to everybody,” a chance to "be nerdy or geeky about the things that they’re interested in.” She hopes people won’t be turned off by the “Technical” in the store name. “We’re not a general bookstore,” she says, “but we are a store for the general public.”

Our previous coverage:

* Ada's Technical Books is our November bookstore of the month

* The bookshelves where science and the humanities meet

* An interview with Steve Winter

Mail call for November 24, 2015

Mail Call, catch-up edition!

This is a headline that exists in the world:

"Amazon pulls Nazi symbols from New York subway ad campaign." (Here's context for those who weren't on the internet yesterday.)

A love letter to Eve Babitz

Published November 24, 2015, at 12:00pm

Martin McClellan review Eve Babitz's Eve's Hollywood.

Everybody who writes about Eve Babitz wants to either be inside her bubble of cool, or pop it. Martin just wants to show some love and appreciation for an under-appreciated writer.

Read this review now

Don't forget to celebrate Small Business Saturday

I mentioned this in Your Week in Readings, but I thought it could use a little elaborating here: the Saturday after Thanksgiving is Small Business Saturday, when consumers are reminded to turn their backs on malls and chain stores and online retailers and visit the stores that help make their communities vibrant, interesting places to live.

Even better, local independent bookstores are celebrating Indies First, a program (invented by Sherman Alexie) in which authors work as booksellers at their favorite bookstores for a day. In short, you can go support small business, get a book signed, and get a personalized recommendation from your favorite Seattle authors. Here's a list of all the Indies First participants that I've found (in alphabetical order) and a list of the authors appearing at the stores. Click the links for schedules and more details.

  1. The Book Larder presents cookbook authors Jeanne Sauvage, Renee Erickson, Susan Volland, Shauna James Ahern, and Erica Strauss.
  2. Elliott Bay Book Company hosts Sherman Alexie, Peter Mountford, Nicole Hardy, and Sonya Lea.
  3. Fantagraphics Books in Georgetown is hosting comics memoirist Colleen Frakes.
  4. Open Books is hosting Emily Kendal Frey, John Burgess, Alejandro de Acosta, Sarah Mangold, and Susan Rich.
  5. Queen Anne Book Company presents Sanae Ishida, world-famous showroomer Allison Stieger, Sarah Adler, Lala Rukh, Elizabeth Rose Stanton, Toni Yuly, Sherman Alexie, Erin Malone, Jessixa Bagley, Kevin O'Brien, and Matthew Buscemi.
  6. Seattle Mystery Bookshop hosts Urban Waite, Neil Low, Ingrid Thoft, and Candace Robb.
  7. University Book Store hosts Greg Bear, Terry Brooks, Rosamund Hodge, Isaac Marion, Stephanie Oakes, Chelsea Pitcher, Julia Quinn, Adam Rakunas, Dana Simpson, and Conrad Wesselhoeft.

Go give your local booksellers some love. And give the people you love books for the holidays. Books are obviously the best gift.

Dispatched

A bee flew about the living room, then another, and more. They began to lodge in the African masks that hung on the walls. They clung to my lip. My house is infested, I thought, and opened the door to the outside. Bees covered the door’s lower half. I fled through it in fear, and in hope of finding help. In the living room, my father moved about with the bees, untroubled, unwilling to leave.
Today's must-read: "On Pandering"

The entire literary internet is currently exploding — in a good way, in a great way — over "On Pandering," an essay by Claire Vaye Watkins at Tin House. She tells a story about a male author behaving badly, she talks about the institutional gender bias of the publishing industry, she tears some preconceptions down to the studs and examines what's left. It's angry, funny, shocking, intelligent and, in the end, hopeful. You really have to read it.

Amazon covers New York City subway cars in Nazi insignias

Uh.

Seats on 42nd Street subway Shuttle cars are wrapped with symbols from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, intended to carry commuters into the alternate history of the Amazon TV series, The Man in the High Castle, in which the Axis Powers were victorious.

“Half the seats in my car had Nazi insignias inside an American flag, while the other half had the Japanese flag in a style like the World War II design,” said straphanger Ann Toback. “So I had a choice, and I chose to sit on the Nazi insignia because I really didn’t want to stare at it.”

In an America where Donald Trump leads the Republican presidential contest by running on a platform of bigotry, fear, and xenophobia, this particular image hits a little bit too close to home.

Village Books opens second location in Lynden

Shelf Awareness reports that Bellingham's grand old bookshop, Village Books, has opened a new, 3,000-square-foot location in Lynden, a town just north of Bellingham. Between this and the new branch of Third Place Books in Seward Park that's opening in early 2016, it's time for the media to put away the tired "bookstores are dying" narrative for something newer, fresher, and more optimistic.

The inventor, viewed in stereo

Published November 23, 2015, at 12:00pm

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper review Gretchen Jane Gruber 's View Master.

William Gruber invented the View-Master, which let millions of children see 3D stereo images. His daughter wrote a biography, but didn't flinch from the truth of the man, and why he was under investigation by the FBI.

Read this review now

Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from November 23 - 29

MONDAY Elliott Bay Book Company kicks off your week in readings with an event that might improve your Thanksgiving dinner: Sommelier Madeline Puckette reads from her book Wine Folly: The Essential Guide to Wine tonight. If you ask nicely, she will probably tell you what wine goes best with turkey and stuffing.

TUESDAY At Town Hall Seattle, neuroscientist David Eagleman, who you most likely know from his PBS series about the brain, will be reading and discussing his new book The Brain: The Story of You, which aspires to “explore why we think and feel the way we do, and how the brain shapes nearly every aspect of who we are and what we perceive as reality.”

WEDNESDAY No readings happening tonight, but Ravenna Third Place Books is hosting a book club discussing the great John Scalzi’s sci-fi novel Old Man’s War. It’s about a widower in his 70s who joins a space army.

THURSDAY It’s Thanksgiving day. We suggest you stay home and read in the morning. Pick a good short book — Jim Dodge’s Fup, say, or We Should All Be Feminists — and sit down and read it in its entirety, from front to back. It’ll give you something to talk about over dinner, and it will calm and center your mind. If you can’t take a holiday to do something special for yourself, what’s the point of holidays? And what could be more special than carving out the time to read a whole book in one sitting?

FRIDAY Just as there are no readings on Thanksgiving day, there are no readings on Black Friday, either. If you’re not out supporting your local independent bookstore, you should know that the Central Library is hosting fall crafts for kids from 1 to 5 pm today. That sounds like a nice way to dodge all the holiday shopping craziness.

SATURDAY The book event of the week is happening at Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery in Georgetown, where cartoonist Colleen Frakes signs her comic book memoir Prison Island, which I reviewed when it was released back in September. It’s about growing up on McNeil Island, a prison island in Washington state.

(Saturday, I must mention, is also Small Business Saturday, which is the day when you’re supposed to leave the mall behind and visit your local inependent shops. University Book Store is hosting events all day, including three readings and two panels — one on YA and one on sci-fi. Most other bookstores in your area are having events, too. Go give them your support. This city would be a terrible place without independently owned businesses.)

SUNDAY It’s time for “Bow Wows and Books” at the Greenlake branch of the Library. Here’s the description: “Practice reading with a new friend who is warm, friendly and a perfect listener! Certified therapy dogs and their handlers join young readers to read one-on-one in a relaxing and nonjudgmental environment.” This simply could not be any more adorable.

The Sunday Post for November 22, 2015

SELFIE: The revolutionary potential of your own face, in seven chapters

I've seen many defenses of the selfie, but never such an indepth exploration of what it means, and why it is important. Rachel Syme covers it all, in seven parts.

Shot One: Open on a woman snapping a picture of herself, by herself. Maybe she is sitting at an outdoor cafe, her phone held out in front of her like a gilded hand mirror, a looking glass linked to an Instagram account. Maybe she tilts her head one way and then another, smiling and smirking, pushing her hair around, defiantly staring into the lens, then coyly looking away. She takes one shot, then five, then 25. She flips through these images, appraising them, an editrix putting together the September issue of her face; she weighs each against the others, plays around with filters and lighting, and makes a final choice. She pushes send and it’s done. Her selfie is off to have adventures without her, to meet the gazes of strangers she will never know. She feels excited, maybe a little nervous. She has declared, in just a few clicks, that she deserves, in that moment, to be seen. The whole process takes less than five minutes.

Shot Two: Zoom in on a group of people watching this woman, one table over. They are snickering, rolling their eyes, whispering among themselves. Maybe they are older than she is, making jokes about Narcissus and the end of civilization as we know it. Maybe they are all men, deeply affronted by a woman looking at herself with longing, a woman who is both the see-er and the seen, the courier of her own message. Maybe they are a group of chattering women, who have internalized a societal shame about taking pleasure in one’s face in public, who have learned to be good girls, to never let their self-regard come off as a threat. Maybe they are lonesome and hungry for connection, projecting their own lack of community onto this woman’s solo show, believing her to be isolated rather than expansive. They don’t see where her image is headed, where it will take up space in the infinite. This is scary for them, this lack of control, this sense that her face could go anywhere, pop up anywhere. This is why they sneer at her like she is masturbating. This is why they believe that no selfie could ever mean anything other than vanity. This is why they think selfies are a phase, something they can wish away. Whoever they are, and for whatever reason they hate selfies, they are wrong.

Space Oddity

Bee Lavender, on returning home to Seattle to visit her Aunt Mary.

Mary’s son Charlie was born later that year and I held him within hours of his arrival home from the hospital. I remember the shabby apartment they lived in, and the VW van my new uncle drove, and the fact that he was a gentle and sweet man. I also remember the fights between him and my aunt, which looked like any schoolyard scuffle, and that they carried their drugs around in the diaper bag. I was sad to lose that uncle when the marriage broke up; he was the nicest one I’d ever had.

One day left to preview some great holiday genre fiction

Our sponsor Grey Sun Press has put out this wonderful collection, Joy to the Worlds: Mysterious Speculative Fiction for the Holidays. On our sponsor page, we have samples from four of the eight stories in the book. All from fanastic local writers: Maia Chance, Janine A. Southard, Raven Oak, and G. Clemens.

They're going on a huge tour to celebrate this, starting with a house party on December 4th. And, if you're a Santa Bot stuck on a webpage somewhere, they'll be doing a Google+ event on December 5th, a Reddit AMA on December 18th, and in between, in the real world, you'll have a chance to see the group in Bellevue (12/6), Beaverton (12/11), Seattle (12/12), or Tacoma (12/13). Check out the page for more details.

And our thanks to Grey Sun Press. It's amazing sponsors like this that make our site possible. We have one slot left in January — if you'd like to get your work in front of our readers, and join us to make internet advertising 100 percent less terrible, then check out our how to sponsor page.

Rahawa Haile’s short stories of the day, of the previous week, for November 21, 2015

Every day, friend of the SRoB Rahawa Haile tweets a short story. She gave us permission to collect them every week. She's archiving the entire project on Storify

The pain of art

Jennifer de Guzman at Comics Alliance published an illuminating report on the high cost of drawing comics:

Being a comic book artist is a physically taxing job. Long hours sitting at the literal drawing board (whether drawing on paper or digitally) can strain muscles in the back, neck, and shoulders; repetitive motions inflame tendons in the arms. Combine this demanding work with the life of a freelancer, which, in the United States, does not come with any form of health care, and you’ll realize that many comics artists are living one injury away from economic disaster. An injury will not only cost money to treat, it will also cost time as it heals — time that could be spent drawing — resulting in lost income.

This is a reality I’ve heard from many comics artists of my acquaintance: Drawing hurts. From general soreness to serious repetitive stress injuries that cause permanent damage, pain always eventually accompanies art.

There's nothing we can do to make drawing easier on the body. But we should all as a society be continually outraged that Americans don't have access to the health care that they need. Art is work, and the fact that America doesn't take care of its own workers is embarrassing.

NaNoWriMo Week 4: In praise of devotion to Saint Selfish

How's your word count this week? If you're on track, you're at about 34,000 words. Get in extra this weekend to allow for padding over Thanksgiving (if you're American) because you deserve a day with family, food, and gratitude.

If you're behind, I still urge you not to despair. You are learning about yourself, and about your story, and you are writing more than you were before November, right? We are stepping on the right path. Work as hard as you are able for the month, and then it will be time for appraisal and consideration.

But today, the topic is selfishness.

The worst thing we can do in life is only think of ourselves. The worst thing we can do for our writing is to think of others. Writing is a form of constrained selfishness — when you set about to do the work, the only person in your direct and peripheral vision should be yourself. You should be going inward, and outside distractions and attentions are antithetical to that. This means writers must do something that is generally unacceptable in polite society: we need to give ourselves permission to be selfish.

People in your life will complain to you about this, at some point. What they want more than anything is your attention. The reason it is notable when partners and friends are called out for being supportive is because it is unusual. The reason spouses and children are thanked in books is because they sacrificed a part of their mutual life with the writer for the work to happen. Maybe this is the price of loving a writer as opposed to loving the idea of a writer. But however bad we feel, if we want to write, we must be selfish.

Some people say they support you and your art, and then suspiciously find ways to insert themselves into your writing time. When that happens — and it happens to every writer — you have to make a choice. At times, writing must be put aside. For emergencies, for children in more-than-casual need, for partners who are suffering. But this must be the rare exception, and a hopefully radical one. What you must do with these people is politely explain that they are not welcome in that room of your own. That it is important to you that you have that time to yourself. If, after assuring you that they understand, they continue inserting themselves passive-aggressively into your private time, then you need to decide what is more important: your writing, or them in your life. Perhaps they are curious what it is like inside the room when are you there. The irony is that they will destroy the room by entering it. It is a catch-22. The only way they can find out is to become a writer themselves and be selfish.

Like most things in our modern world, this is gendered. It is absolutely harder for women to carve this space out then it is for men. Even for the most progressive families, women do the bulk of the work at home, and the bulk of the child rearing. The default expectation is that a woman's attention belongs to everybody but herself. It's not only mothers who face this. Societal conditioning towards non-confrontation and niceness, and the pressure that you are to set other people in front of yourself, set a stage where a Greek chorus is always singing in your ear. If you want to write, you must learn to make a place where those voices are summarily dismissed. You absolutely must be selfish about this, and it is appropriate and good that you are. If you need permission, it is granted. Not by any authority I have, but by your recognition of this need, and every writer you have read and admired who has done the same thing I am saying you should do; by the very nature of you holding her book, she has done this, and you should appreciate her sacrifice and echo it in your own work.

Sometimes we force ourselves outside of our attention by looking for people that we can help. As horrible as they are, a person correcting you on social media probably thinks they are helping you. They are giving you, they think, the truth, and the truth will enlighten you (it is an ignorant view, but a common one). They are driven by that same instinct as you are to help your friends. But just like that person not realizing that they are annoying and pedantic, so too do we not realize that sometimes our help, although appreciated, is not always needed.

But alone with ourselves, we feel that lack of connection with other people, and we open Twitter or Facebook, or we check our email to make sure that thing or this thing is done or responded to. This is the same for those who have tens of thousands of items in their inbox, and those who clear every message the moment it comes in.

Being selfish means allowance to be bored, at times, and frustrated, as we work through the story at hand. We must be selfish with other people, and we must be selfish with ourselves. We must put ourselves in quiet spaces uncluttered with outside or internal intention aside from writing, and there, and only there, can we truly apply ourselves to the page.

Try not to talk about your story with friends too much. Imagine your story is like a balloon. Every time you talk about your story, you are letting air out of the balloon. Every time you work on your story — not by thinking about it or talking about it, but by writing words on (real or virtual) paper, you are filling the balloon.

In computer programming there is a term called "rubber duck debugging." When a developer is facing a particularly baffling problem, instead of talking to somebody else about it, she can turn to a rubber duck and explain the code line-by-line until the problem becomes self-evident. Colloquially, it also refers to the phenomenon of turning to a colleague when particularly frustrated and blocked only to find that in explaining the problem, she has solved it without the colleague saying a word. "You might have well as been talking to a rubber duck," they might say.

Because you will face problems — plot issues, dead ends, murderers who couldn't have done it and innocents who too neatly look like they did, propulsion systems that are inartfully explained, bodices too well stitched to rip, small towns too bleak even for empathy — you will need to reason out some things. Because you shouldn't talk to other people about it until your story is set and your balloon is close to popping, try the rubber duck technique.

But who should the writer use instead of the rubber duck? You should use Saint Selfish, the secular saint of writers. She has your face. It is a little like praying to yourself, when you look at her, and we must overcome how uncomfortable that feels. We must embrace it.

It could be that your schedule is such that you have hours and hours each day to worship in her presence. It could be that your schedule is such that you only have twenty minutes. Whatever your window is, this is your time. Turn off the internet. Turn your cell phones on quiet mode, so that they won't buzz or beep or call to you. In fact, put them far enough away that you would need to walk over to them, so as to stop that automatic lifting of the screen without conscious intention.

Then, when you are in the dream of your story, this quiet and this focus manifests like a sucking sound rushing past your ears, and light becoming a pinprick as your world condenses, the aperture squeezes shut and your vision becomes crystalline. You have entered that dream of your story, and you trust — because you have done this work beforehand — that there is none that can remove you from it until you are ready. It is this state of flow that is the dream of the creative person, and although not every writing session will inspire it, those that do will make the rest worth it. And the only way to achieve it is to be absolutely selfish and make sure you will not be interrupted. This is the state where deeply wrought, complex, and communicative art is made.

She is waiting for you; it is high time you demonstrated your devotion to Saint Selfish. Put that icon where she can oversee that you are manifesting proper respect. Close off the world; tell everybody that they can harangue you again when you emerge and not a moment before. Your devotion to Saint Selfish takes effort, but it pays in poems, and stories, and novels. It pays in creation. She is the artist maker, and when you look on her statue, gaze upon the words inscribed at her feet, for they are directed at you and only you. They read: "It is time to write." Do not disappoint her.

Previously in this series: