Here are the winners of the 2017 Washington State Book Awards
The Washington State Book Awards ceremony was held tonight in the central library downtown. Here's a list of the winners:
Fiction: Daredevils by Shawn Vestal, of Spokane
Poetry: My, My, My, My, My by Tara Hardy, of Seattle
Biography/Memoir: An Earlier Life by Brenda Miller, of Bellingham
History/General Nonfiction: Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson, of Seattle
Picture Book: Thunder Boy Jr. written by Sherman Alexie, of Seattle, and illustrated by Yuyi Morales
Books for Young Readers (ages 6 to 8): Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea by Ben Clanton of Tacoma
Books for Middle Readers (ages 9 to 12): Some Kind of Courage by Dan Gemeinhart, of Cashmere
Books for Young Adults (ages 13 to 18): Useless Bay by M.J. Beaufrand, of Seattle
Congratulations to all the winners. You make Washington proud.
Seattle Writing Prompts: Twitter
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.
Image from @AEMarling on Twitter
Maybe you were part of #WomenBoycottTwitter on Friday. We were. Or maybe you were frustrated, like Ava DuVeray, that it was only when a white woman was banned that people started speaking up, when women of color have been reporting this behavior for years.
Which sums the problem up nicely: Twitter doesn't listen. Or, they listen and don't care. Or, they care and are somehow so bound to — Metrics? Engagement? Shareholders? Satan? — something, that they cannot fix this problem. So it sure feels like Twitter isn't listening, and the only way to make them listen is stop using their service.
Or, to put a fine point on it, stop giving them the content, for free, that they then sell advertising against. On Twitter, as the saying goes, you are the product. It was an okay trade-off when you were meeting interesting people and making friends, but, that wasn't everybody's experience. Ariel Waldman wrote about Twitter being unwilling to uphold their TOS in 2008, just a year-and-a-half after the service's launch. Six years before Gamergate became, as many have pointed out, a trial balloon for the kind of networked harassment that lead to the organized silencing of women and liberals under the Trump campaign.
And lest you think these things are not connected, the man who, kind of openly, but still allegedly harassed the amazing Kathy Sierra off the internet in 2007 has come out fully as a white supremacist. Previously, he claimed it was all about the lulz. It probably is, to him, as is his belief that anybody without his skin is substandard.
So I'm dedicating today's prompts to some what-ifs. A peek into another dimension of what could have been. Maybe it's just progressive dreaming, but since we're apparently on the alternate timeline where pretty much everything is going wrong, progressive dreaming seems to be all we have left.
Today's prompts
The first response was so rude she couldn't believe it was real. Who could have that big of a problem with her tweet about a comic book? By the time the fiftieth response showed up, she shut down Twitter and went to bed. In the morning, fearing to look, she saw her response timeline was clean, and there was a DM for her from support. "Looks like some jerk sent a bot army your way. We've banned them and cleaned up their mess. So sorry to disrupt your right to express yourself on our platform. We think your actual voice is so much more valuable than trolls."
The cop, broom mustache, wide-set brow, asked her "and where did this threat come from?" — "He posted it on Twitter" — "And you are sure it's your ex?" — "Pretty sure, yeah." — "And this was on...how did you say it? Twitter?" — "Yes." — "What's that?" — "It's a website for publishing thoughts." — "Okay. I don't know much about the internet, but obviously, all of these accounts have real people behind them, and we take any threats very seriously. I'll work with our technology team to request IP addresses and personal information on your harasser so that we can verify it is your ex and build up a case against him before he escalates into violence against your person."
She tweeted "love Twitter! Got this mail today." Attached was a picture of the email. "We noticed that you're friends with a lot of people who have suffered harassment on our platform. We've taken the liberty of hiding your tweets from some people who react too strongly to content, we hope that helps you feel safe and able to express yourself on our platform without fear of harassment."
That bitch. He was gonna teach her a lesson. He went to 4chan and posted a picture of her, and her address. "Help me dox this piece of trash," he wrote. "I dunno," came a quick reply. "The last guy who did this got arrested by the FBI, even though he was going through TOR. I guess these services really take harassment seriously and shut it down before it could grow into anything major."
The Help Desk: Don't forget what your good book said
Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna Madrid can help. Send your Help Desk Questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.
Dear Cienna,
My neighborhood bookstore plays too much classic rock. I find it physically impossible to browse the stacks when Neil Young is playing on the speakers overhead. I had to run out of the building the last time “Southern Man” came on. What can I do to staunch the endless flow of Credence Clearwater Revival while also not being branded a problem customer?
Whitney, [Neighborhood Withheld by Request]
Dear Whitney,
A quick biology lesson: booksellers, like aspen trees and all women, share a single root system through which they plot and gossip. Booksellers prefer classic rock because studies show it helps their roots grow and unlike tongues, roots have no sense of taste.
There is nothing you can do to change your local bookstore's playlist without weakening or offending your local copse of booksellers – and we all agree this should be avoided at all costs, given their already fragile state on this planet. Fortunately, you have at your fingertips a stopgap solution for book browsing: earbuds, which you can insert shallowly into the ear canal to mute the sounds of classic rock with music of your own choosing or other pleasing sounds. Personally, I like to shop to a looped recording of spiders purring.
Kisses,
Cienna
Trump Administration withdraws from Unesco, effectively stalling Seattle's bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature
This morning, Gardiner Harris and Steven Erlanger reported for the New York Times:
The Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would withdraw from Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization, after years of America distancing itself because of what it called the group’s “anti-Israel bias.”
The decision to leave Unesco is not really a surprise. President Trump has declared war on art, and and he's announced his ambivalence about the rest of the world. It stands to reason that his cultural illiteracy and his hateful isolationism would manifest in an exit from Unesco.
There's a local angle to this story: Seattle has for years aspired to join Unesco's Creative Cities Network as a City of Literature along cities like Reykjavík, Dublin, Baghdad, and Barcelona. Our bids have been unsuccessful up until now, though we have a whole organization — Seattle City of Literature — dedicated to managing our bid and to keep international cultural exchanges flowing. We talked with Seattle City of Literature head Stesha Brandon about the organization's role a couple years ago. Obviously, this announcement means that we can't join the Creative Cities network and our bid is stalled until sanity prevails again in Washington DC.
Today, Brandon and the board at Seattle City of Literature released this statement:
On Oct. 12, the Trump administration decided to withdraw from UNESCO. Seattle City of Literature extends its unwavering support for a global organization that brings people around the world together for love of culture and the arts. We remain committed to the ideals of free expression and peace between nations, today more than ever. We will continue the important work of making our city a haven for the literary arts, for local and international writers and audiences alike.
If you'd like to show your support for Seattle City of Literature, they're producing a Hugo House event at next week's Lit Crawl. Seattle author Willie Fitzgerald will be appearing in conversation with New Zealand author Nic Low, who is visiting for two weeks in a cultural exchange program. I bet someone from the organization will be there to talk about what's next for our city's literary scene on the international stage.
Now more than ever, Seattle City of Literature is a necessary advocate for our city. We need them to connect us to the world — to broadcast our achievements as a city, and to keep us plugged in to the international cultural conversation. Now that Trump's government has abdicated its leadership role, it's up to cities like Seattle, and to organizations like Seattle City of Literature, to keep us intertwined with the world of art and literature.
Portrait Gallery: Martha Brockenbrough
Each week, Christine Larsen creates a portrait of a new author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know
Sunday, October 15: The First 500 Words
Seattle young adult writer Martha Brockenbrough teaches a free class that will help writers refine the vital first 500 words of their books by minding six important points. It might sound gimmicky, but this is important stuff; the first 500 words are what will get you noticed by agents, editors, and browsers.
Seattle Public Library, Broadview Branch, 12755 Greenwood Ave. N.. 684-7519, http://spl.org. Free. All ages. 2 p.m.
Future Alternative Past: Let’s Talk About Fat Positivity in Sci-Fi
Every month, Nisi Shawl presents us with news and updates from her perch overlooking the world of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror. You can also look through the archives of the column.
Genre Heft: the real and the ideal
I’ve just returned from NINC — that’s Novelists, Inc. — a professional conference attended mainly by writers of romance and mysteries. Among the many differences between this crowd and my usual cohort was an absence of what is often referred to as "the fannish physique." In other, blunter words, obesity. At this event, weighing 280 pounds and straining the capacity of my O cups, I was a definite outlier.
Which goaded me into speculating about how the literary dimensions of SFFH reflects its physical oomph. The answer: That’s changing. For the better.
My first encounter with sfnal fatphobia came when I read Dune as a child: Baron Harkonnen, the book’s bad guy, is mountainously fat. Stereotypes of the obese depict us at one of two temperamental extremes: unrelentingly jolly or unrelievedly evil. Harkonnen’s the latter, but at the precocious age of thirteen what really struck me was how badass his anti-grav wheelchair must be in action. I wasn’t even a little "chunky" at that point, but wow was I jealous of him zooming around and zipping up over people's heads and popping in and out of palatial spaceships. Only later did I realize my hatred for him was actually supposed to be blended with disgust and pity. Not envy.
Pity is evoked much more successfully in James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” which I previously discussed back in January. Perhaps because the author’s also going for empathy? Or perhaps because the heroine’s obesity is caused by a malfunctioning pituitary gland and thus in no possible way her fault.
Yet, with a wealth of futuristic medical technology at their disposal, why should anyone be overweight? The protagonist of Tanith Lee’s novel The Silver Metal Lover is tricked into fatness by her insecure mother, but loses her excess flesh with the support of an adoring robot. It’s all done with chemicals.
Horror novel Thinner’s body consciousness is of course horrific. Published as by Richard Bachman right before Stephen King admitted that this was a pseudonym of his, it’s deeply problematic in its depiction of curse-wielding so-called "gypsies." They cause the book's obese lawyer to shed pounds speedily, involuntarily, bringing him to death’s threshold.
The comic Bitch Planet’s Penny Rolle is probably the best example of fat-positivity in recent SFFH. It’s an ironic feminist take on exploitive "women behind bars" stories; the "Bitch Planet" of the series' title is the nickname of a dystopian dumping ground for "noncompliant" women. Rolle’s body is by definition noncompliant because it defies standard beauty standards. Which suits her, and me, just fine.
In another instance of a nicely-adjusted attitude toward body image, the narrator of "Venus Rising" by Carol Emshwiller (collected in Report to the Men’s Club speaks of young women maturing in terms of them “coming into” their fat.
In my own SFFH I do my best to represent non-stereotypical obese characters. The narrator of "Maggies," published in Sheree Renée Thomas’s second Dark Matter anthology, crushes out on a genetically engineered underwater terraformer whose extra-thick layer of fat insulates her from an alien planet’s cold seas. In "Otherwise," published in the YA anthology Brave New Love, 220-pound lesbian teenager Lo knows she’s lovable and loved. As are we all.
Couple of upcoming cons
Though Chessiecon resembles traditional SFFH conventions, it has only existed three years. It’s put on by the Thanksgiving Science Fiction Society as a sort of living memorial to a deceased local fan hight Jaelle of Armida. TSFS’s primary goal is promoting women writers; eleven of their twelve Guests of Honor have been women, so they’re backing that idea up with action. Chessiecon’s Turkey Award is given in recognition of awesomely bad writing á la Bulwer-Lytton; the implied irreverence colors the rest of the con’s programming as well.
This November’s World Fantasy Convention emerges from a pair of controversies: one focused on its HP Lovecraft-shaped World Fantasy award busts, the other on racist panel proposals of the past. Also it has survived the death of its founder, David Hartwell. Smaller than the similarly named Worldcon with which it’s sometimes confused, World Fantasy’s attendance tops out around 1000 smart, funny, incredibly interesting people — but there’s still time to sign up to be one.
Recent books recently read
An Excess Male (Harper Collins) is Taiwanese-born author Maggie Shen King’s debut novel. Expanding an idea originally published as a short story in Asimov’s SF Magazine, King fast forwards us to the lopsided genderscape of a future China shaped by the government’s infamous “one-child” policy. Her clearsighted, even-toned writing acquaints us pleasurably with plausible, engagingly flawed characters: Wei-guo, a 40+ bachelor finally in possession of the dowry necessary to purchase the position of third husband in an established marriage; that marriage’s wife, May-ling, hopelessly infatuated with her gay first husband Hann; Hann himself, balancing love for his child with desire for members of his discreetly naughty badminton team; and Hann’s brother and May-ling’s second husband Xiong-xin, whose autism is even more illicit than Hann’s homosexuality. Fearlessly piercing stereotypes in her assessment of what truly makes a family, King also seems to hew effortlessly close to cultural values, making the stresses and rhythms of her characters’ interactions feel authentically unfamiliar to this US-raised reader.
Not so with Elizabeth Bear’s latest novel in her entrancing Eternal Sky series, The Stone in the Skull (Tor). Though set in Asianesque fantasy lands, plot arc and scene beat and sentence all connect easily with a Westerner’s literary expectations. Those aren’t necessarily dependent on having read the three earlier Eternal Sky books, either. I found very little overlap between the old series and the one this new book begins in terms of characters: a slave-poetess here, an immortal automaton there, an aging veiled assassin everywhere. And the Lotus Kingdoms whereThe Stone in the Skull’s dynastic disputes occur lies at the edge of the previous trilogy’s map. There’s a secret message sent to one ruler, a disaster engulfing another…but summarizing its action conveys very little of this book’s undeniable attraction. That attraction is much plainer in Bear’s starkly vivid descriptions; her spare yet luscious language; and the stubbornly endearing people inhabiting her enthralling imaginary world.
A veteran SF author who’s also an engineer working in U.S. intelligence, Philip K. Dick Award-winner David Walton draws on his dayjob expertise in The Genius Plague (Pyr). Fungal sentience originating in the Amazon threatens the integrity of the intelligence community by influencing its members’ thoughts and desires. It cures the Alzheimer’s afflicting the protagonist’s father and rouses support for ecologically sound candidates and practices. But it’s also behind some rather nasty massacres and assassinations. Codebreaking and computer servers stand between the National Security Agency and this sporulating mind’s crop dusters and smoothie stands. It’s unclear by the novel’s end if humanity’s defenses will prevail. Or even whether they should. Perhaps we’ll know that after reading a sequel or two.
The true story of Wonder Woman, in theaters tonight
Before Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman landed on the bestseller lists, Wonder Woman's origins were a deep nerd trivia cut. But now, pretty much everyone knows Wonder Woman was created by a disgraced professor named William Moulton Marston who was part of a triad relationship, and that with his wife he invented the lie detector. Now that it's common knowledge, the character's unique backstory has become a part of Wonder Woman's appeal.
And tonight, just a few months after the very first Wonder Woman movie released in theaters became a global smash hit, a smaller and more intimate Wonder Woman film is being released in theaters around the country. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is a biopic about the man who created the character, and the two women who made his success possible. Best of all, the biopic is written and directed by a woman named Angela Robinson; not even five years ago, it's easy to imagine this story being mangled into a mess of male gaze and bad sexual politics by a well-intentioned but tone-deaf male director.
Because it basically amounts to a relationship drama, Women is a film that succeeds or fails based on its cast. On that front, it's a tremendous success. Luke Evans plays Marston as an ambitious and goofy man, a born lecturer who's convinced of his own greatness but puts that ego in service of the peace-loving matriarchy he believes is inevitable. He's just damaged enough to reveal his haunted past, but he's chipper enough that you can't feel sorry for him.
As Elizabeth Marston, Rebecca Hall is Evans's grounded better half. She's competent where he's lazy. She's pragmatic where he's dreamy. Hall doesn't just play Marston as a killjoy, or the nagging wife. She's got goals of her own, and she's madly in love with her husband. And both Marstons fall deeply in love with Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote,) a comely and kind-hearted student who builds the perfect understanding between their two outsized personalities.
Together, the three actors forge a finely balanced triangle of seduction, aggravation, and finally genuine appreciation. The scenes where they create ground rules for their relationship are among the most interesting in the film. Heathcote and Hall both create characters that, when combined, form what Evans's Marston calls "the perfect woman," which he later translates into his idealized comic book hero.
Women does suffer from the inevitable biopic flaws: the soundtrack is noodly and generic. Biopic cliches run through the film: as soon as a character coughs once, for instance, you know you're going to witness their long and painful decline from a horrible disease. And the structure of the film is awkward, with plenty of fits and starts. The three don't become romantically entangled until the middle of the movie, and Wonder Woman doesn't show up until very late in the film. A framing device depicting the religious crusade to ban Wonder Woman comics is striking — a neighborhood comic-book-burning scene will churn your stomach — but ultimately goes nowhere.
In the end, if you're a Wonder Woman fan, you'll probably enjoy Women a great deal. Robinson's script indicates her clear love of the material, and her direction proves that she cares deeply about bringing the complex relationship behind the character to her movie. But if the character doesn't do anything for you, you'll likely lose interest in Women around the time that Marston first decides to write the comic. That's your loss. This is not the best comic book movie you'll see all year, but it's definitely the one with the most compelling relationship storyline.
Thursday Comics Hangover: The dream of the 90s is (barely) alive in Fante Bukowski
In the 1990s, a ton of male cartoonists made their careers by writing stories about schlubby men with huge egos. These self-important losers — from Buddy Bradley to Adrian Tomine's protagonists to Ivan Brunetti's self-portrayal — were important at the time: they poked necessary holes in the idea that the only stories worth telling were stories about straight white men of a certain age.
Cartoonist Noah Van Sciver's newest book, Fante Bukowski Two, seems to desperately want to be from the 1990s. It's designed to look like the Black Sparrow edition of Charles Bukowski's Factotum, and it has a completely realistic facsimile of a Borders price sticker on the back cover.
And the content of the book, too, feels ripped from the 1990s. It's a book about a bearded loser who believes himself to be the next Outlaw American Novelist, but who is in fact a talentless hack. Bukowski drinks too much, he lives on donations from his too-tolerant parents, he refuses to get a job. In this book, he lives in a flophouse and makes tons of zines and fails to sell copies all around town.
But the question that Van Sciver fails to answer is: who is this book for? Do we really need another book that skewers bloviating mediocre literary white men? Bukowski feels from the start like the alternative comics from the 1990s, and it never really stops wallowing in nostalgia for that era.
To be fair, Van Sciver is a talented cartoonist, and he has a great sense of comic timing. Parts of Fante Bukowski 2 are very funny. But I expect more than “funny” from a Fantagraphics title — the Seattle publisher has such a stellar publication history that I expect some sort of a point from all their books. Unfortunately, Bukowski feels like an exquisitely crafted fan fiction tribute to Fantagraphics titles from a bygone era.
And this question might seem petty, but it’s actually quite important: Do people like the person this book is supposedly satirizing even exist anymore? Do Bukowski acolytes still talk about the authentic human experience and produce zines to distribute at open mic nights? To me, this feels like a time-capsule, a skewering that arrives twenty years too late.
This is not to say that Van Sciver shouldn’t satirize white men, or that white men aren’t a relevant target anymore; quite the contrary. We live in a time in which mobs of bored white dudes are starting riots because their preferred flavor of corn syrup isn’t available at their local McDonald’s. If the self-entitled jackass star of Bukowski were alive today, his obsessions and behavior would likely be very different. With its obsessive backwards stare, Bukowski feels stale and hopelessly retro.
Juliette Wells writes about Jane Austen's writing group for Literary Hub. All you writers out there should take comfort in the fact that even Austen had to endure what the title of Wells's piece refers to as "workshop."
Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from October 11th - October 17th
Wednesday, October 11: Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions Reading
Publishers are, understandably, hitting the heavy nonfiction titles pretty hard right now. But maybe you should take a breath and read a fun mystery series for a while? Amy Stewart’s Kopp Sisters series focuses on a woman who becomes deputy sheriff in the year 1916, and she focuses on women-centric crimes. So even while you enjoy a novel, you’ll still have strong feminist women to admire. Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, 525-2347 http://thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.
Thursday, October 12: Noir at the Bar
This Halloween edition of the ongoing mystery series features local writers including Waverly Fitzgerald, Alice Boatright, Tracy Weber, and, making her debut as a mystery novelist, longtime Seattle writer Bharti Kirschner. Get a fancy drink, take in the fancy surroundings, and let host Will "the Thrill" Viharo guide you through the evening of scary mystery. Sorrento Hotel, 900 Madison St., 622-6400, http://hotelsorrento.com. Free. 21 and over. 7 p.m.
Friday, October 13: Word Works: Mary Reufle
Poet and essayist Mary Ruefle’s new book, On Imagination, is a thoughtful examination of everything that makes imagination the most important human trait, pulling together anecdotes about geniuses like Jane Goodall, Gertrude Stein, Steve Jobs, and Emily Dickinson. Tonight, she’ll provide an original talk on imagination intended for aspiring authors. Frye Art Museum. 704 Terry Ave., 622-9250, http://fryemuseum.org. $15. All ages. 7 p.m.Saturday, October 14: Cascadia Poetry Festival
See our Event of the Week column for more details.
Sunday, October 15: The First 500 Words
Seattle young adult writer Martha Brockenbrough teaches a free class that will help writers refine the vital first 500 words of their books by minding six important points. It might sound gimmicky, but this is important stuff; the first 500 words are what will get you noticed by agents, editors, and browsers. Seattle Public Library, Broadview Branch, 12755 Greenwood Ave. N.. 684-7519, http://spl.org. Free. All ages. 2 p.m.
Monday, October 16: A Conversation with Armistead Maupin
From his beloved newspaper column to his even-more beloved series of Tales of the City novels, Armistead Maupin has enjoyed a remarkable writing career: though he began his career as one of the first openly gay mainstream writers in America, he’s now happily married to a man he claimed to meet on Daddyhunt.com. That’s a lot of history for one life. Tonight, Maupin will appear in conversation with some dickhead named Paul Constant. Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., http://seattlesymphony.org. $39-75. All ages. 7:30 p.m.
Tuesday, October 17: BAHFest Seattle
BAHFest “is a celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect scientific theory,” in which speakers present bad and wrong science to scientifically trained judges. Before the intentionally bad science begins, BAHFest founder Zach Weinersmith will read his new book, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.
Temple De Hirsch Sinai 1441 16th Ave., https://bahfest.com/. $1-$30. All ages. 5 p.m.
Literary Event of the Week: The Cascadia Poetry Festival
The idea of Cascadia has occasionally been held aloft by people who represent questionable causes. White supremacists love the idea of a free Caucasian Cascadia, for instance, and there are a couple of loudmouth anarchists in the Seattle area who love to bore folks at parties with their improbable vision of a utopian lawless barter economy.
But cast your eyes away from the fringes and you’ll find something impressively durable in the concept of Cascadia. Seattle obviously has more in common culturally, environmentally, and politically with Vancouver, British Columbia than it does with, say, Salt Lake City. The idea of a bioregion that transcends government boundaries is one deserving of examination — particularly now, when huge Trumpy swaths of the rest of our country are unrecognizable to us.
This is why the Cascadia Poetry Festival is more important now than it ever has been. Running from Thursday, October 12th to Sunday the 15th in Tacoma, the festival, which is now in its fifth year, hosts what may be its highest-profile slate of authors yet. Nationally recognized poets Patricia Smith and CAConrad both headline events and host workshops for aspiring poets.
The festival looks back to the history of Cascadia with a “Tribute to Grunge” reading featuring poets like David Fewster who have lived in the area since the Singles era and a panel discussion on the life and legacy of criminally underrated Cascadian poet and novelist Richard Brautigan. (You might argue that Raymond Carver or Tom Robbins have done more to shape the region’s literature than Brautigan, but I’ll respectfully riposte your claims with dozens of poems by contemporary local writers ranging from Sarah Galvin to Sherman Alexie that feel like distant literary cousins of Brautigan’s.)
But the Cascadian Poetry Festival doesn’t exist just so it can stare backward. Most of the festival’s programming is forward-facing. Washington state Poet Laureate Tod Marshall, for instance, hosts a workshop to “explore some of the ways that poets have used a sense of ‘place’ to propel their poetics,” and then extrapolate those observations into the concept of “what a Cascadian Poetic might mean for each of our practices.”
Perhaps most importantly, on Saturday afternoon the festival will host a small press fair featuring a cornucopia of local poetry presses including Wave Books, Ravenna Press, entre ríos books, and Floating Bridge Press, along with literary magazines including PageBoy and Poetry NW. This is an opportunity for the poetry-minded to network and discuss what it means to be from and of a place.
Because this is much is true: we won’t be able to figure out what it means to be from Cascadia until poets put a name to what Cascadia is. Without poets to lead the way and define our ambitions, Cascadia is nothing but a plot of land.
Weapons of Marvel destruction
Over the weekend, Marvel Comics announced a partnership with arms manufacturer Northrup Grumman. The plan was to produce a comic book aimed at kids that promoted STEM education, but the fans, thankfully, weren't having it. Here's something delightful from a Guardian story by Joanna Walters about the blowback:
Tom Catt, a Brooklyn drag queen who declined to give his real name, was attending dressed as Cat Woman and with his friend Tony Ray, who was kitted out as the Voltron comic character Princess Allura. Tom Catt said Marvel was guilty of “the militarization of our comics” and said the company had “failed the fan test”.
That paragraph alone renews my faith in fandom for another twenty years.
Marvel later announced that the deal had been canceled, though their statement was certainly lackluster, citing a failure to properly capture "the spirit" of the "activation," which was "meant to focus on aerospace technology and exploration in a positive way."
Seattle's own G. Willow Wilson, who has been writing Ms. Marvel for the publisher for over four years now, blogged about the decision in a post titled "Yeah, No":
I would have left. I’m not naive; I know all collaborations involve compromise, ideological or otherwise. But everybody has their own red lines, and bespoke recruitment paraphernalia for combat drone manufacturers–under the fantastically cynical guise of encouraging kids to get into STEM careers–is my red line and then some.
Wilson also wrote beautifully about the crossroads of commerce and art a couple years ago, when it was discovered that Marvel Comics CEO Ike Perlmutter donated a million dollars to the Trump campaign. By taking these very public stands against corporate malfeasance, Wilson is proving to be the conscience of a company that is supposedly interested in telling stories about the pursuit of justice against all odds.
Book News Roundup: Media news, festival lineups, a scam, and something beautiful
Seattle Media news, part one: Capitol Hill Seattle blog, which went on a hiatus last year, is now up and running again, with a staff and everything! (Joining CHS founder Justin Carder are photographer Alex Garland and great Seattle reporter Kelsey Hamlin.) CHS is looking for 2000 subscribers to put a few dollars a month into their Patreon account to pay for the work they do.
Seattle Media news, part two: Ana Sofia Knauf, formerly neighborhood reporter at The Stranger, is now at Seattle-area newsletter The Evergrey.
The full Lit Crawl lineup just became available on their website. Highlights include EILEEN MYLES. And a lot more that we'll talk about in the coming days and weeks. But, really: EILEEN MYLES.
The full lineup of this year's Short Run Comix & Arts Festival has been released. Aside from the always-amazing convention floor show, highlights include panels featuring cartoonist Julia Wertz, Bitch Planet author Kelly Sue DeConnick, and a conversation between Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters) and Leela Corman (We All Wish For Deadly Force), moderated by me. The big show happens on Saturday, November 4th in Seattle Center.
Bad news: if you're a freelancer who was recently approached by an editor at The Atlantic, the odds are good that you're the victim of a scam:
Across the last few months, individuals posing as our editors and senior leaders have sent fraudulent job offers to unwitting freelancers or jobseekers looking to work with The Atlantic. The impostors have created numerous misleading email accounts, including gmail addresses in the names of editors, gmail addresses that include the Atlantic’s name (e.g., recruitment.atlanticmagazine@gmail.com), and addresses employing fake domains (e.g., @atlanticmediagroup.net). The aim of the scam is to obtain personal information such as social security numbers, addresses, and bank account information from the intended victims.
- But here's something good and pure:
My Own Hikmet Poem
— it’s 1962 March 28th
it’s 2017 September 19th.
I’m sitting at the window on the 3rd floor of fog.
Day is rising.
I never knew I liked
morning lifting like a conductor’s baton.I didn’t know I loved my body.
Can someone who hates their body love it.
I’ve always schemed against my body.
It’s just like all my other lovers.I’ve loved long roads all my life — the flat
macadam itself listening under the mist of lamps, no traffic at the
hour. I know that road is both obscured and obvious.
I know its lights aren’t enough to see —I love to close my eyes and look at your eyes
and see if your eyes are still closed.
The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair is just days away
The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair is back as our sponsor for one last week. This weekend, October 14th and 15th, they'll fill Seattle Center's Exhibition Hall from wall to wall with books, maps, and prints — almost a hundred vendors from the United States, Canada, England, and Spain.
This is the kind of event to plan a weekend around. Start Saturday off with coffee and pastries (you'll need sustenance) and spend the morning and afternoon exploring the Fair's endlessly surprising stock of rarities. Come back on Sunday — one ticket gets you in on both days — to dive deeper with your favorite exhibitors. It's a once-a-year opportunity, different every year, and well worth the time.
Sponsors like the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair make the Seattle Review of Books possible. We're booked solid through the end of January (thank you, everyone!), but if you have a book, event, or project you'd like to get in front of our readers, reach out and let us know. We'd be happy to reserve a spot for you before the next block of dates goes public.
Tickets are available now for Armistead Maupin and David Sedaris
I'm taking part in a couple of upcoming readings at Benaroya Hall that you might want to consider attending.
Next Monday, I'm appearing in conversation with beloved novelist Armistead Maupin. He'll be in Seattle to debut his brand-new memoir, Logical Family, which charts Maupin's path from a young conservative kid growing up in the South to a beloved newspaper columnist and gay rights activist to the novelist who created the astonishing Tales of the City series. Maupin's career path is a wild one, and he's telling his own story for the very first time. Tickets for that reading are available here.
And then on Sunday, November 19th, I'll be introducing David Sedaris as he makes his annual swing through town. You probably don't need me to tell you that Sedaris is one of the very finest readers in the world. I've attended his Seattle readings for almost twenty years now — from back when he used to fill up the downstairs reading room at Elliott Bay Book Company's Pioneer Square location — and I've never seen him give a bad show. He's always funny and smart and very, very entertaining. Tickets for that are available now. You won't regret attending this reading.
New Hire: Talking with DW about moving to Seattle, publishing his sketchbooks, and finding cartoonists from every continent on Earth
On Saturday, October 14th at 6 pm, the Fantagraphics Bookstore in Georgetown presents new work from three great young cartoonists. Denver’s Noah Van Sciver and Los Angeles cartoonist Joseph Remnant share the stage with a new-to-Seattle cartoonist who goes by the initials DW. Fantagraphics is releasing DW's very first book, a reproduction of a graph-paper sketchbook titled Mountebank.
DW is a serious and thoughtful young cartoonist who, in his spare time, co-founded and co-edits a comics anthology called Irene. He was kind enough to take a break from a visit to the east coast to talk to me on the phone about why he picked Seattle as a home, how he came to publish with Fantagraphics, and the responsibilities of being an editor of comics. This interview has been lightly edited.
When did you move to Seattle?
On July 7th. My friends, who drove me up, we left San Francisco on July 4th and we got to Seattle on July 7th.
How long were you in San Francisco before that?
Five years. I graduated from the Center for Cartoon Studies in 2012 and spent the rest of the summer in Vermont after that. On September 5th 2012 I flew out to the Bay Area and spent about eight months living in Oakland, and then moved over to San Francisco. So all told, it came out to almost exactly five years in the bay area.
Can I ask why you moved to Seattle?
I found San Francisco to be a very lonely place. It was a big problem for me there — connecting with people and feeling like I was part of a community, either on a personal level or as an artist trying to be amongst other cartoonists. I had given it my best shot for five years.
So it was partly running away from stuff there and just wanting to move onto something different, which I had been thinking about doing for quite a while at that point. But it was also about running towards something, because [Fantagraphics and I] had been working on [Mountebank]. That was about to come out about the time I made the decision to move to Seattle.
I already had several good friends who were cartoonists in Seattle and are part of a really rich, vibrant community. I checked with them to find out — I was like, ‘Is it still kicking? Is the cartoonist community still alive and well in Seattle?’ And they said, ‘Yes, it absolutely is. Better than ever. You should come for a visit it and see if you feel at home here.’
So I visited and then made the decision pretty much right then and there that I was going to give it a shot.
So Seattle does not have a reputation for being a warm and welcoming city to new visitors. I assume you probably heard to death about the Seattle freeze.
I think it should be called the San Francisco freeze.
I have heard about it, and I have not found it to be a part of my real-life experience in any way. I have found moving to Seattle to be an exciting, lovely, stimulating, warm experience. I feel really connected to the people. For the first time in a long time, I feel part of an artistic community, part of a healthy social world.
So I haven't had any problems with the Seattle freeze. I know it's legendary. You know I think as an East coast person, born and bred, I'm never going to feel completely at home on the west coast, which is part of the reason why I like living on the west coast. But I instantly felt connected to something in Seattle that I never felt in the Bay Area. It doesn't feel like work every day to feel connected to people, both on an artistic level and on a basic human social level. I've loved it so far.
Are there any cartoonists in the community who you want to especially highlight? Any cartoonists who were especially instrumental in your move?
Either before I moved here or who I’ve encountered since moving here or both?
Either.
Before, the two who were both my closest Seattle friends and are also two of the best cartoonists I know, are Ben Horak and James Stanton. Their work has been printed in the anthology that I edit. They’re both buddies of mine, and even if I wasn't close friends with them I would completely have nothing but good things to say about their cartoon abilities.
[Max] Clotfelter and [Tom] Van Deusen and Marie Hausauer — I didn’t know any of them personally... Oh, and Handa. Do you know Handa?
I don’t think so.
She's amazing. I was big fans of all their work before I moved here and now I'm becoming friends with all of them. I've had a chance to start to get to know all of them, and they're all really good people.
Probably my favorite Seattle cartoonist right now is Seattle Walk Report. Do you know her work on Instagram?
No! Seattle Walk Report? That sounds awesome!
Yeah, everybody should follow her.
Oh, and I forgot to say Marc Palm. Marc was the guy who helped me find a place to live, which was really important because I've become friends with all my roommates now. Marc, besides being a good cartoonist and a good guy, is such a pillar of the community.
As you well know, because you've been through all this with him, what he's accomplished recently with the left-handed drawing thing is something that is, to me, a major accomplishment for an artist. It's really inspiring the way he deals with adversity and adapts to his situation and turns it into something new. That ability to do that and make lemonade out of lemons is what I aspire to as an artist and a person. So Marc is a very important guy, both before I moved here and still to this day, as a friend and colleague.
So you went to the Center for Cartoon Studies, which basically means you are hardcore. That is not something you bumble into because you think you're going to maybe try this cartooning thing. You go there if you want to be a cartoonist for the rest of your life.
It's true. Yeah, it's like if you want to get your time's worth and money's worth out of it you have to be prepared to go hardcore with it — whatever that means for you as an individual. I think it would be pretty pointless to spend the money and the two years if you're not at least going to try to do it every day for the rest of your life, whether you have any intention of anybody seeing that work or not. So that's what I tried to do.
Have you always been a cartoonist, then?
On and off. I did it a lot when I was a kid. I've never stopped reading comics, my whole life. Especially newspaper comics. I've been really steeped in newspaper comics, from the time I could read. I was born in ‘83, and Calvin and Hobbes ran from ‘85 to ’95, so I was right in my formative years in that point where Watterson was also publishing a new Calvin and Hobbes in the newspaper every day. I would read the Philadelphia Inquirer comics page every day and always save Calvin and Hobbes for the last thing I read right before I left to go to school.
And I read super hero comics, graphic novels, and pretty much everything else. I read Maus when I was about 10. I was making a lot of comics and writing a lot of bad stories, and doodling all the time when I should have been focusing on schoolwork.
Then I drifted away from it. I never stopped, but [comics] got relegated to something I would do during class when I should have been paying attention to my teachers, or that I would toss off as a joke for friends. The main portion of my artistic energy went to other things like playing music, or making videos with friends. Things that entailed a more, by definition, social aspect because I think that's what I needed at the time.
When I was in my early 20's and I was working a nine-to-five job after graduating from college I found my way back to really making drawing an essential part of my life and started taking it seriously again. It was a few years after that I decided to go to grad school at CCS.
So how did you get involved with Fantagraphics?
Two years ago, I was coming up to Seattle to meet my mom because she was going to be there on business — this was when I was still living in San Francisco. It seemed like a natural thing to do to take time off of work and hang out in Seattle for a little while.
I figured since I was going to be in Seattle anyway I would see if I could pull some strings and try to get my foot in the door to just meet the people at Fantagraphics. I was really looking at it as a networking opportunity to try to get on their radar: let them know who I was, see if they had any constructive feedback about my work, put my work in front of their eyes.
And it turned out that they were interested in working on something together, so then we started to discuss what form would that take. I had some pretty strong feelings about that. They pushed back when appropriate, but they were very easy to work with and very supportive of my ideas for how this project should take shape.
What were some of your strong feelings?
[Mountebank] is a facsimile reproduction of an actual sketchbook that I maintained for about two years. Because of the way that I conceived of and structured the work in that book, which was extremely organized and regimented and followed a strict set of rules, I felt that the work had to be presented altogether in sequential order, in the original order that it appears in the actual sketchbook, and that the concepts of the presentation should be a facsimile — as close as possible to the feeling that you're holding the actual book in your hands. A few people have commented to me, and I don't think that they're wrong, that [sketchbook reproduction is] a bit of a played-out concept at this point. Maybe the market got a little saturated with that kind of presentation, but I just felt like that was the only way to do this.
Working in a sketchbook has a very particular meaning for me. It's my preferred method of working and it helps guide my work in the direction that want it to go. I think that presenting this particular body of work — both because the pages do have a relationship to one another and because of the way they look on the original sketchbook pages — I think it's important that you appreciate that this is all coming out of a sketchbook.
It's kind of like finding that place where this work represents an overlap between comics and the physical feeling of the intimacy of leafing through someone's sketchbook, or seeing something that they're giving you permission to see that they've been carrying around in their bag with them for two years and scribbling in during their lunch breaks.
Yeah, I think there's an interesting relationship between cartoonists and their sketchbooks and their broader body of work. Nobody can really deny that Robert Crumb’s sketchbooks, which Fantagraphics has reproduced, have become a central part of his work.
Right. I've heard through the grapevine that Crumb himself was really skeptical about that concept. He thought it was kind of a dumb idea. I don't know if I have that exactly right, but he wasn't really into that idea. And people love those, right? [His sketchbooks have] become a central aspect of his entire body of work now.
Yeah, and there are other cartoonists, like Seth for instance — I prefer his sketchbook stuff lately to the stuff that he’s more intensely rendered.
I can see that. I don't know if you'd agree with this, but I think with that with him, his most recent comics have gotten so designerly. Which, obviously, he's one of the most talented designers alive. But they're so designerly and so polished that you end up kind of responding to that more than the emotional content, or the narrative content. Whereas with the sketchbooks there's like these flashes of really powerful emotion or something that cut through a little more sharply.
I'm trying to create a space where the work in the sketchbooks is the finished work, or there is no finished work.
Yeah, and there's a lack of self-seriousness in his sketchbooks that I like in contrast with his other work. But somebody like Chris Ware, who is really into design — I like his sketchbooks, but they are not as significant as Crumb's or Seth's.
You know what? I totally agree with that formulation. I think you're right about that. Ware, I do like the finished work better.
It's very interesting that sketchbook art is becoming part of a cartoonist’s career and body of work.
I think you're right. And so with me, to jump ahead a little bit, I'm trying to create a space where the work in the sketchbooks is the finished work, or there is no finished work. Choosing to work in the sketchbook doesn't mean that this is supposed to be private, or unpolished —although it probably does allow me to get away with a lot of mistakes that I wouldn’t be happy with if I was doing it in a different context.
I think you’re the first cartoonist Fantagraphics has published who they've made the sketchbook before the “real” book.
You might be right about that. If that's the case, that was them being really amazing, thoughtful, cooperative, collaborators.
Is the book that I am holding in my hand, literally right now — is this basically the object that you brought in to Fantagraphics when you visited two years ago?
Yeah. I brought in about three or four sketchbooks to show them, including the one that you're holding right now. That was the one that I always had my eye on. Even at that point, I thought ‘I want this book to be presented by somebody, hopefully Fantagraphics, as a complete work.’
From the movement that I conceived the structure for that book, and designed the system that would guide the content and flow of the book, I had always envisioned that particular sketchbook as being a unified work that would hang together as one object.
So to answer your question more fully, if I were to hand you the original sketchbook, which I'd be happy to do sometime if we ever were to meet, and you were to place it alongside your copy and flip to the same page it would be virtually indistinguishable except by touch.
I can't triangulate your work by just having this one point to work with. Do you develop individual ideas in individual sketchbooks? Does your style differ depending on where you sketch?
I sort of change the channel depending on what sketchbook I'm in. There are different sketchbooks that serve different purposes, and represent different meanings or contexts for me. I always maintain at least one sketchbook where I do stuff I probably wouldn't necessarily ever print, or maybe even wouldn’t show to somebody — real raw. Just letting my ID roam around the page and morad around and see what it can catch. Then with Mountebank, which was the name of the sketchbook — you know, you have to name your sketchbooks — Mountebank was conceived as the opposite of that.
Even though it was in a sketchbook, I wanted it to be a unified body of work where you do go on this journey as you flip from one page to the next, and before I ever made a single mark on the first page, I conceived of the system that would guide the rules and the content and the structure of what criteria have to be met on every page, and the order in which the pages go. I drew up a whole matrix to tell me when I got to each page, which criteria and rules had to be honored on that page.
Then, I would have to respond to those rules I had set for myself in the context of where I was at that point in the book and create that page accordingly so I would have room to improvise and play around. Going straight to ink, as I do, but would also have to be mindful of those rules and build everything I was doing around those rules so that each individual page would stand on its own compositionally, but would fit into the larger structure of the piece by obeying the rules of the matrix.
It's a really impressive book. I intend to come back to and reinvestigate it. But it seems like there are a lot of layers going on here.
Yeah, and I hope that not knowing what they all are and not understanding all of the criteria would be part of the act of enjoying the work. I don't want you to have to know all that stuff in order to understand the book.
Yeah, but it does seem like there is a definite form of logic.
There's one in my head. I know exactly, in my head, how it works. But to me, all of that logic, and the system, is a jumping off point for how to get started making the work, and how to direct my energy within the process of making the work. But in my opinion, it’s absolutely not essential, or probably even interesting, to someone who just wants to flip to a page and enjoy looking at the pretty pictures. You know?
Towards the middle of the book I you embark on what feels like a real investigation into the idea of what a panel is and what a panel can do.
Totally! The panel thing is huge. That was a big thing for me. You put that really beautifully, too.
You could view the entire page as a single panel or you have the lines in there that can be seen as sort of breaking it up.
Right, and sometimes the panel borders are respected as blocking off each panel as the discrete area, and sometimes they're not. So sometimes the breaking up of things into panels could, at the same time, make you want to look at each panel and "read" each panel in sequence. And then at the same time it might make you want to step back and look at the larger composition, because certain aspects of the composition respect those panels and those panel borders, and then other aspects freely traverse [the panel borders] with no respect for them. So that hopefully the entire page would hang together as an entire composition while also being readable, as it were.
And then also I think you could also view each individual square on the graph paper as its own panel.
I think in some cases I got away from that as I went on. I think towards the end of the book it got sort of zoomed out a little, which you could also say that about the book itself. So I guess you could look at it in these units of individual squares, individual panels, individual pages — and at every one of those levels I'm always also thinking about the level above. So as I moved towards the culmination of the project and was trying to get to the page count that I wanted for the final submission, I think I was getting a little broader in scope and starting to think more like a designer and less like a cartoonist.
We literally had artists from every continent in the world, including Antarctica, in one comic anthology.
You are an editor of an anthology titled Irene, and I wanted to ask you about that. I've only interviewed a few people about editing comics. Generally they are very sort of blasé about editing in a way that literary editors are not. Like [Fantagraphics publisher] Gary Groth, for instance. He told me once that he did very little editing once the pages came in to him, because there's not much an editor can do with a drawn comics page, as opposed to working with text. I just want to ask you what it's like working on your book as an editor, and what kind of an editor you're like. I think that's a couple questions at once, sorry.
I can certainly answer the first part easily. In terms of working as an editor, I'm working alongside two of my closest friends in the whole world, and two of my favorite artists, Andy Warner and Dakota McFadzean. We are together editing and publishing this book that we co-founded, the three of us.
We're also designing the physical look of the book: we're doing the cover, the end pages, and the table of contents for every issue. We are talking to one another during the initial gearing-up phase for any given issue — who do we want to invite for this issue? We're all bringing different sensibilities to that, because we're three very different cartoonists in terms of styles, contexts, and communities that we work in. We're really close and we all respect and feed off of one another's work and respective aesthetics. But we're also all three of us connected to wildly different areas of cartooning as a medium.
So we're all feeding into this common stream, and then we're sifting through it: who do we want to invite, what overall aesthetic do we want to cultivate for a given issue, do we want more of one kind of artist over another?
Issue six, the most recent issue of Irene, we literally had artists from every continent in the world, including Antarctica, in one comic anthology. Which, we can't prove it, but we're pretty sure that's the first time that anybody's ever accomplished that with a comics anthology. We don't think anybody else has gone through the trouble to find cartoonists from Antarctica before.
So, there's that process of starting to put the issue together and conceiving of what it might be like. Then when the work starts to roll in, that's the most fun part. Because to echo Gary's comment on that — especially since we're asking people to be in this book and we're telling them up front that they have free reign once they've agreed to do it, to do whatever they see fit — we don't think we're in a position to push back and make changes or edits at that point. When they hand in the finished work we take what they've given us.
Along the way we have often had contributors who have asked us for editorial feedback while they're working on the project, and we love engaging with that and trying to be helpful with that where we can. But once the finished work has come in and we have all the work that we need to put an issue together the most fun part is the three of us getting together and debating the structure and sequence of the book. Like, ‘I really feel strongly that this particular story should be the opener because it will start off on a really strong note and it will set this or that tone for the book.’ Then choosing the last story is really fun. Every single issue we have one artist do all of the interstitials so that as you finish one story and begin the next there's a little breather page. We like to have one person do all of those interstitial breather pages for the whole issue. So that becomes this whole aesthetic consideration.
Yeah, and we're putting it together in this sequence that feels right for us and then the three of us are doing this sort of design and presentation for what the cover and end pages, and table of contents are going to look like and how they're going to create a functional house for all of those lovely comics.
The Sunday Post for October 8, 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.
“Like Sonny Liston”: An Appreciation of Tom Petty
The best thing about this piece by the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood is not his apt and lyrical assessment of Tom Petty’s achievements as a musician, or the wry anecdotes (Petty and the Replacements trading barbs on stage, Hood napping through a one-time chance to meet his hero). It’s how he articulates the different kinds of grief he felt last Monday: the devastating grief we all shared over the grotesque fucked-up-ed-ness of the shooting in Las Vegas — and our government’s continuing permission of such events — and the lesser but still painful loss of a much-loved musician. Many encomiums to Petty have ignored Las Vegas entirely, as if nothing else happened that day.
Thanks for not doing that, Patterson. Play on.
My pain and anger at all of this are so out of control and unfathomable that I don’t even know how to begin to process them. I don’t know how to address it. I sure as hell ain’t going downtown to raise a glass about it. I’m hoping that in time, maybe someone will wake the hell up before it’s too late (if it’s not already) and bring about some kind of real change in our bloodthirsty gun culture. I hope it happens before a massacre occurs in front of me or to one of my loved ones. When members of our government say that they are praying for the victims, I say, Save your prayers for yourself and the hell that I’m certain awaits you. Thoughts such as this are not constructive or helpful, but it’s all I have right now.
And Tom Petty has passed away. I can’t really fathom living in a world without him, but I know for a fact that I’ll never really have to. He lived a full life, not long enough, but fuller than most ever dream. He was loved by millions and left us a legacy of music that will live on for decades, perhaps centuries. He touched our lives and made each day, even the darkest ones, a little brighter and better.
To that, I can raise a glass and toast.
An Epitaph for Newsvine
Newsvine, the Seattle-based news site that helped pioneer citizen journalism as a credible alternative to professional reporting (the latter should probably have quotes, air or literal, at this point), closed its doors on October 2. The decade-plus in which Newsvine operated saw seismic changes for the industry, mostly driven by the vast shift in media consumption via social media. Co-founder Mike Davidson’s brief comment on the site’s origins and evolution during this time is both interesting and insightful.
When we look at how the average person’s news and media diet has changed over the last decade or so, we can trace it directly back to the way these and other modern organizations have begun feeding us our news. Up until 10 or 15 years ago, we essentially drank a protein shake full of news. A good amount of fruits and vegetables, some grains, some dairy, some tofu, and then a little bit of sugar, all blended together. Maybe it wasn’t the tastiest thing in the world but it kept us healthy and reasonably informed. Then, with cable news we created a fruit-only shake for half the population and a vegetable-only shake for the other half. Then with internet news, we deconstructed the shake entirely and let you pick your ingredients, often to your own detriment. And finally, with peer-reinforced, social news networks, we’ve given you the illusion of a balanced diet, but it’s often packed with sugar, carcinogens, and other harmful substances without you ever knowing. And it all tastes great!
If you're looking for more on the media, and you've somehow avoided an outraged adrenaline spike this Sunday morning, try this: Buzzfeed's Joseph Bernstein on how Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos made it okay to be a Nazi.
Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks
All of Eaters’ essays on the decline of the great American chain restaurant are excellent; the series is a delight to explore. But it’s Helen Rosner’s piece on the Olive Garden that won the Internet’s heart this week.
At first I thought that was just the web’s ongoing fascination with the OG. As an Applebee’s girl from childhood, I find this inexplicable (contrariwise, Chip Zdarsky’s gentle, loving mockery of his local Applebee’s has long been my favorite bit of restaurant irony).
But man, now I get it. Rosner’s essay is so good. It’s got art, metaphysics, memoir. It’s funny, contemplative, and knowledgeable. And it holds the menu hack to unlock a magical plate of toasted ravioli.
In the infinity of Olive Garden meals that make up my life, one stands out from the great glutinous mass of memory. It took place outside of Madison, Wisconsin, off a commercial strip that I vaguely remember abutting a retaining pond that was home to an extremely aggressive paddling of ducks. At this meal, two great things happened.
The first is that my boyfriend introduced me to toasted ravioli. This was — and remains — the single greatest thing Olive Garden has ever sold. “Toasted” is a euphemism for fried: The breadcrumb-coated squares of pasta are simultaneously crispy and chewy, filled with a savory meat paste that’s not dissimilar to the inside of a mild Jamaican beef patty. You dip them in warm marinara sauce, which comes in a ramekin on the side.
My boyfriend and I broke up a few weeks after we shared that meal, and when I next entered one of the many doors of the infinite and singular Olive Garden, I wanted the toasted ravioli appetizer, but I couldn’t find it on the menu. The toasted ravioli turned out to be a parable: I scanned the name of every dish on the menu, hoping the next and the next and the next would turn out to be the one I was looking for, and came up with nothing. Here’s the secret: They were right at the beginning all along. Tell your server you want to Create A Sampler Italiano, the very first thing listed on the menu, which involves selecting two or three items from a set of options, toasted ravioli among them, listed in the description in quotidian roman type. Then make every single choice the toasted ravioli.
The Touch of Madness
Nev Jones, a brilliant young philosophy student, noticed one day that a nearby stone wall was both solid and infinitely porous — so much space between its molecules that you could almost blow it away with a puff of breath. It sounds like typical college-kid pretension, but for Jones, it was the first note in a symphony of mental disorder. Writer David Dobbs paired up with Jones (now a successful psychologist) to document America’s self-defeating, isolating response to madness and how it leads us right to the outcomes we’re most afraid of.
Monday, April 21st, 2008, was a particularly fine spring morning in Chicago, with a warming sun and magnolia blossoms scenting the air. The kind of day that, after a tough winter, can seem a miracle, lifting one's spirits and hopes. Jones, ready to start the week's classes and only a few weeks away from summer, was enjoying the walk to campus when she noticed she had a voicemail from Dr. Holland.
Holland seldom had reason to call. Jones became anxious as soon as she saw the message. She would later see the call, and the news it relayed, as the moment in which she went from clinging to a safe place within a small subculture to being flung away from it. The effect would prove catastrophic and lasting.