Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from December 18 - December 24

Monday, December 18: Chlorophyll Print Exhibition

See our event of the week for more details. Redmond Senior Center, 8703 160th Ave NE., 425-556-2314, http://www.redmond.gov/cms/One.aspx?portalId=169&pageId=742, 8:30 am – 9 pm, free.

Tuesday, December 19: Computer Science Book Club

Ada’s Technical Books hosts a monthly Computer Science Book Club intended for people with and without computer science experience. This month’s selection is How to Do Things with Videogames, a book about “the limitless possibilities offered by [videogames’] ability to create complex simulated realities.” Sounds like this could be a good discussion about the theory and possibilities of videogames. Ada’s Technical Books, 425 15th Ave, 322-1058, http://seattletechnicalbooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Wednesday, December 20: Storytime with Santa

Bring your kid and your best camera for this combination storytime/photo opportunity at the Mill Creek branch of University Book Store. Santa Claus will be in attendance. Yes, the real one. University Book Store Mill Creek, 15311 Main St., 425-385-3530. http://ubookstore.com, 3 pm, free.

Thursday, December 21: Literary Translator Feedback Forum

The Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society continues its partnership with the downtown private library Folio with a Feedback forum. According to press materials, “Translators working on poetry or prose from three different languages will share their works in progress and accept helpful feedback and questions from attendees.” If you, like me, are fascinated by the fact that it’s virtually impossible to create anything resembling a truly 100% accurate translation, you’ll likely find a lot to think about at this event. Folio: The Seattle Athenaem, 324 Marion St., 402-4612, http://folioseattle.org, 5:30 pm, $5.

Friday, December 22: Inside/Out Reading

This is a launch party for podcaster Joe Osmundson’s latest poetic memoir, Inside/Out. Garth Greenwell says the book “explores how vulnerability, need, and shame echo across a life, and meditates on the complexities, both emotional and ethical, of writing that life.” University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/, 7 pm, free.

Saturday, December 23: Storytime for Kids

If you’re looking for ways to entertain your kids now that they’re out of school on winter break, now’s one of your last chances to attend a storytime before Christmas happens. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com, 11 am, free.

Sunday, December 24:

It’s Christmas Eve. Do something nice for yourself.

Literary Event of the Week: Chlorophyll Print Exhibition

As the first Poet Laureate of the city of Redmond, Shin Yu Pai worked hard to bring poetry out into the civic space. She created a beautiful and elaborate combination of poetry and fabric art in response to a hate crime. She had another poem animated and projected onto the side of a building. She’s demonstrated new ways that poets can interact with the public.

Now Pai’s term as Redmond’s Laureate has come to an end, and one of her final public exhibitions is available for viewing through this week. Until December 21st, you can visit the Redmond Senior Center for an exhibition of a dozen chlorophyll prints that Pai created in collaboration with the artist Megan Bent.

As part of this project, Pai dug deep into the city of Redmond’s archives — “I must have sorted through thousands of images,” she says — to find photographs of city history. She selected images of Redmond woodcarver Dudley Carter, and of a bicycle festival that happened in Redmond annually for years, and of the city’s logging past. Then — using a more sophisticated version of the same technique she employed to grow words on apples in Carkeek Park — Pai then transferred those images onto leaves. The end result looked like this:

This is the second exhibition for the chlorophyll prints. Over the summer, Pai showed the leaves in specially designed light-safe boxes. They installed the boxes over the weekend, she tells me in a phone interview, and “we came back that following Friday for the opening, and it was real interesting — even in that short amount of time we noticed that some of the leaves had begun to shrink.” In fact, the leaves were changing in a multitude of ways: “there was browning, and there was subtle changes in color that were occurring,” Pai tells me.

Pai has worked with organic materials before, so she knows that some change is a part of the process. But she still tried to keep the leaves as lively as she could: “we tried to protect them from the light as much as possible. The degradation didn't happen as quickly as if they were in the sun that entire three-week period that the exhibition was up, but definitely they began to alter and change.” Because the physical leaves have degraded even further, the exhibit at the Senior Center, then, is made up of photographs of the leaves that had photographs burned into them. Pai admits with a laugh that this work represents “lots of layers” now.

It’s a dense project: a poet, recording a history of logging on the leaf of a tree that managed to not be cut down. It’s an attempt to preserve history on one of the most ephemeral objects in all of nature. (One of the easiest ways to mark the change of a season is to look at leaves.) And since the vast majority of all poetry in history has been written and published on wood pulp, you could also view the project as Pai’s attempt to forge a new truce between poets and trees. These poems don’t require the wholesale destruction of trees in order to live. They’re a new kind of collaboration between human and nature.

Redmond Senior Center, 8703 160th Ave NE., 425-556-2314, http://www.redmond.gov/cms/One.aspx?portalId=169&pageId=742, 8:30 am – 9 pm, free.

The Sunday Post for December 17, 2017

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles we enjoyed this week, good for 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.

The Case Against Reading Everything

It’s easy to win an argument if you’re the only one in it — a privilege I’m claiming, I guess, just as much as Jason Guriel does in this essay urging that we read with passion, and only what we’re passionate about.

I’m all in favor of diving for the bottom with a favorite author. But for god’s sake yes read widely too. Read with intention, and then with abandon. Read what delights you, then read what unsettles, what angers. Read what bores you — what the hell, for the discipline if nothing else. Don’t leave it to someone else to map the vast and beautiful wilderness of ideas on your behalf. That way lies, if not madness, at the very least Brietbart News.

The call to “read widely” is a failure to make judgments. It disperses our attention across an ever-increasing black hole of mostly undeserving books. Whatever else you do, you should not be reading the many, many new releases of middling poetry and fiction that will be vying for your attention over the next year or so out of some obligation to submit your ear to a variety of voices. Leave that to the editors of Canada’s few newspaper book sections, which often resemble arm’s-length marketing departments for publishers. Leave that to the dubious figure of the “arts journalist.”
On Not Going Home

This is the time of year when many of us do, or try to. For fellow wanderers who will soon walk off of a plane and into a once-familiar landscape, an uncanny valley of memory and emotion, here’s a gorgeous piece by James Wood about exile, homesickness, and the lasting contrail of early choices.

When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life — is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.
What I Learned While Staring at Neil Young’s Flannel Shirts

Amanda Petrusich writes briefly and charmingly about exploring a collection of Neil Young’s possessions intended for auction.

The narratives offered by objects are usually faulty — no one has ever said that used microphone preamplifiers are a window to the soul — but these pieces can nonetheless feel intimate and revelatory as we behold them, as if there were ghosts to be coaxed from these machines. Besides, actually knowing (and being known to) another consciousness can be exhausting. Who among us has not wanted to give up and say, “Christ, just look at my paperbacks”? Neil Young never unwrapped his VHS copy of “Mastering the Theremin.” Sometimes, we all bite off more than we can chew.
Spies, Dossiers, and the Insane Lengths Restaurants Go to Track and Influence Food Critics

This is so awful and yet so delightful. Jessica Sidman gives us an inside look at how top-flight restaurants engineer a perfect dining experience for restaurant reviewers, gaming the system to achieve the highest possible grade. While the press at large struggles to maintain any sort of influence in this insane political environment, some of its members have matters well in hand when it comes to a good night out.

At one point, Sietsema noticed a table to his right filled by a smartly dressed couple having the best time of their lives. Hundreds of meals later, Sietsema still remembers how the blond woman kept looking over and smiling. Le Diplomate had purposely seated regulars who it knew would be having a good time within the critic’s vicinity.

Managers were equally intentional about who took Sietsema’s order, ran his food to the table, and bussed the dishes. The best server — a charming Moroccan guy who trained other staff and was known for being extremely knowledgeable and polished — saw to Sietsema’s group and maybe one other table. Actual servers with food-running experience took over for the regular runners and bussers. Sietsema noted a lot of suits stopping by.

The bar staff was also sweating the details. When the group started with a round of cocktails, the bar manager made duplicates of each and sent out the prettier versions. The wine director personally poured a bottle of Domaine Cros Minervois Vieilles Vignes 2000.

Back in the kitchen, chefs prepared two foie gras parfaits, two steak frites — two of everything Sietsema’s table ordered. The nicer-looking plate was sent out, while at least four senior staff sampled the duplicate to reassure themselves that nothing tasted amiss.

To Unlock the Brain’s Mysteries, Purée It

Ferris Jabr’s profile of neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel is packed end to end with surprise and delight, reflecting what seem to be the hallmarks of Herculano-Houzel’s career: curiosity, irreverence for conventional wisdom, and a willingness to explore deeply messy ideas en route to knowledge.

She began experimenting with rat brains, freezing them in liquid nitrogen, then puréeing them with an immersion blender; her initial attempts sent chunks of crystallized neural tissue flying all around the lab. Next she tried pickling rodent brains in formaldehyde, which forms chemical bridges between proteins, strengthening the membranes of the nuclei. After cutting the toughened brains into little pieces, she mashed them up with an industrial-strength soap in a glass mortar and pestle. The process dissolved all biological matter except the nuclei, reducing a brain to several vials of free-floating nuclei suspended in liquid the color of unfiltered apple juice.

Seattle Writing Prompts: (De)construction

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.

Oh, look at that. Another massive site in Seattle where something is being torn down, to be replaced with a giant drag queen platform boot. The old Rainier Square, a weird mall, is now torn asunder by pickers and pokers, and after a few days more, it will be a dusty hole in the ground.

The new tower, which will be the second tallest in the city (for a bit, in any case) and will hold the highest residences in all of Seattle, closed one of the largest commercial lease deals in the history of Seattle, and Amazon is going to move in to all 722,000 square feet of office space. I'm sure that made the developer very, very happy.

Who is, by the way, working for one of the largest single downtown land owners in Seattle: the University of Washington. When the University moved to its current campus — the spot of the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exhibition — around the turn of the 20th Century, the regents found that if they sold the land, it would be far below its appraised value. So, they made the choice to lease.

How much land does the University of Washington own? The so-called Metropolitan Tract runs from 3rd to 6th, Seneca to Union.

So, now the University of Washington owned, developer managed, Amazon leased building, which will open in 2020 or so, is to once again move the character of Seattle forward. Whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective. I hold both views, sometimes. I've been in Seattle long enough to remember ye olden days, when rent for a seven room house with a soundproofed practice room for your band was $1200 a month (Really, that was the first house I lived in here), but I also don't miss some of old Seattle's colloquialness.

And I certainly won't miss the Rainier Square, with the exception of the plaza at the base of Rainier Tower, which was always a nice outdoor public space.

Ah well. One thing about constant change: it comes with great stories.

Today's prompts
  • It took a lot of magic to contain that nasty spirit under the mall of the Rainier Square, but the laced into the concrete pour was a charged latticework which created a powerful spell of containment. Of course, the magician who created that incantation during construction in the late 1970s was now long dead. And so, nobody was there when that spirit rose, once again, to the streets of Seattle, eager to cast the same economic woes on the city that plagued it before it was contained.
  • "So then the guy finds this box under the old cornerstone, and inside is this frog, and the frog can sing..." — "The frog can sing" — "Yeah, and the guy's gonna make a mint with this singing frog — "How you make a mint with a frog? What, you put it on YouTube or something?" — "No, he was gonna do show business, you know. Show it off." — "I'm skeptical you could make money in such a way" — "You want to hear about the cartoon or not?" — "I just want to know how a singing frog could lift me out of my career in construction and deliver me into the lap of luxury, as this cartoon seems to imply" — "You're a real fucking killjoy, you know that?" — "I have been told as much before."
  • She met him the day her parents were moving them into the new condo, way up top of that new building downtown. She was wondering through the garage after parking her car, her new keycard not quite working right to open the elevator. She saw him there, by the dumpsters, smoking. "You're not supposed to do that in here." Caught, he tossed the butt on the ground and stomped it out. "Sorry," he said. "I don't care," she said. "Can I have one?" He had a white apron on, it was wet. "You work in one of those restaurants?" she said. He nodded, and gave her a cigarette from his pack. "Cool. Want to see what the penthouse is like when you get off work?"
  • There is a story here I don't know how to tell. There is a team of retail leasing specialists. One of them closed what is maybe the biggest real estate deal in Seattle. Can you imagine how long that must have taken? What the lead time was like? The negotiation? What about when it closed, and the entire massive chunk of office space was leased to a single tenant?
  • Baby boy mouse loved to watch them tear down buildings. He would climb up on the wall on the building opposite, standing just above the heads of the humans who stood to watch, too. The dust raising from the collapsing concrete, the pickers reaching up and grabbing chunks to tear down, the water hoses tamping everything down. He stayed there and watched as long as he could, until he heard his brothers calling his name, trying to find him to do his duty and go steal crumbs from the little soup restaurant. He stayed as long as he could. He could hear the walls falling as he turned his back and went to work.

The Help Desk: Rumors of bad men

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.

Dear Cienna,

Have you seen the Shitty Media Men list? It started as a spreadsheet of sexually abusive men in journalism and literature that was crowdsourced by women in the New York media scene, but in the last couple of months, it’s gradually been read by more and more people. It’s anonymous, and it’s not sourced, so there are no guarantees that any of the information is real.

A friend of mine is reading at an event, and one of the readers is (allegedly) a Shitty Media Man. I want to mention this to her, but the reading is also a big deal for her and I don’t want to unnecessarily ruin a moment of success in her career. I also don’t want her to be in a room alone with this guy. Should I let her know, or should I show up to the reading and guide her to safety without telling her, or should I do something else that I’m not smart enough to think of just yet?

Bella, Hillman City

Dear Bella,

Yes, I've seen the list and yes, you should tell your friend that her fellow reader is on it. Don't think of it as shitting on her big night – if she's a writer, she's there for the audience and the chance to share her work more than the other readers. Chances are she'll have a great night filled with small talk and book talk and some inevitable empty laughter but she should have the luxury of being prepared to respond to a man who asks her to test out dildos with him, or to be forcibly kissed, or even to see a penis she never asked to see.

So do your friend the courtesy of a warning her but don't belabor the point. Remind her that the court of public opinion is non-binding and she's free to draw her own conclusions. Then help her celebrate her big night by showing up and supporting her.

Kisses,

Cienna

Aaron Bagley's Dream Comics: prog

Mail Call for December 14, 2017

The Seattle Review of Books is currently accepting pitches for reviews. We’d love to hear from you — maybe on one of the books shown here, or another book you’re passionate about. Wondering what and how? Here’s what we’re looking for and how to pitch us.

Portrait Gallery: Mita Mahato

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

Friday, December 15: Four Seattle Poets

The last author reading at Elliott Bay Book Company for the year of 2017 is a stellar lineup of debut poets. You definitely know Jane Wong, whose Overpour was the first big debut of the year. And frequent readers of the site also know EJ Koh, whose A Lesser Love is a genius collection that spans love and war. Mita Mahato is a paper-cut cartoonist whose first collection, In Between, is a milestone in the small-but-growing field of poetry comics. You might not know Montreux Rotholtz or her debut collection, Unmark, and that’s okay. Every great reading has some element of discovery to it, doesn’t it? Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free.

Future Alternative Past: where's the future wear?

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.

Fashion: Beep beep.

When I was little, my parents subscribed to Life magazine. It was our weekly dose of glossy photojournalism: enormous pages full of news and human interest stories. Though it’s been more than fifty years since I saw it, the Life article predicting 21st-century fashions still troubles my mind’s eye. I’ve lost the names of the designers consulted — famous ones, no doubt, given the publication’s prestige — and am left with a problematic whirl of brightly patterned muumuus, bald heads, and an inexplicable dearth of earbuds. Apparently Life was following a long tradition of magazines getting such predictions horribly wrong.

Has SFFH fared any better?

My favorite antidote to the unease Life stirred up in me is Samuel R. Delany’s brilliant, multiple award-winning novelette “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” What works best for me is an early throwaway line about “a crowd of giggling, goo-chewing schoolgirls with flashing lights in their hair, all very embarrassed at wearing transparent plastic blouses which had just been made legal again” — that “again” signifying the undeniably cyclical nature of fashionableness.

And really, despite the sober idiocy of the formfitting unitard look promoted by matinee serial fodder like Buck Rogers, and the camp idiocy of the shoe phone used in the semi-futuristic TV series Get Smart, that’s what the genre has consistently gotten right: the inevitability of repetition and change. Another example: characters in Bruce Sterling’s 1998 novel Distraction wear hats as routinely as actors in a Frank Capra film. Headgear’s a given, barely remarkable — our current hatlessness is noted as a brief historical aberration. Actually, who’s to say it isn’t?

Speaking of shoe phones, while they were one of Get Smart creator Mel Brooks’ finest standing (ba-dum-BUM!) jokes, they do reflect an emerging reality: wearable communication and computation devices. Google Glasses have not taken the nerd community by expected storm, but their sfnal prototypes are popular, from William Gibson’s cyberpunk through Accelerando and related works by Charles Stross.

Another sartorial SFFH trope — disposable clothing — seems even further from realization. So far, 3D printers are no help. The kicky-mod-paper-dresses of the 1960s have given way to hazmat suits and adult diapers. And ubiquitous though recycling hoppers are on many fictional space stations and starships (I oughta know, having installed them in a few of my own stories), the process by which their contents get reconstituted into wearables is never explored. Therefore, we’ll score this concept as pre-execution.

A final kind of fashion in which SFFH takes the lead: body modification. Representations in imaginative literature range from integrated technology such as the “Zeiss-Ikon” eye-cameras in Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” through the race-encompassing genetic modifications enabling my “Maggies” to work unprotected on an alien world, to the DIY anti-hallucinogen-manufacturing brain implants employed by the biohackers in Annalee Newitz’s novel Autonomous. Call me bereft of acumen, but I’m betting we’ll always want to improve ourselves, always be willing to revise our bodies and genomes. And that the sorts of revisions we make will vary with our abilities, but also, naturally, with what we perceive as new and cool.

Recent books recently read

Anna Kavan’s Ice (Penguin), out now in a spiffy “50th Anniversary Edition,” is ultra-cool, and experimental enough that it will always in some way be new. This surreal proto-feminist account of a nameless male bureaucrat questing after a nameless female fugitive in the down-crashing shadow of a global eco-catastrophe is an astonishingly easy read, given its uncompromising weirdness. Lyric simplicity underlines the glacial starkness of the coming of a worldwide winter:

Banks of solid ice edged the narrow channel of blackish water, fringed with grinning icicle-teeth. I jumped ashore, snow blew out in great fans, the launch disappeared from sight. There were no goodbyes.

Conflating the crystalline fragility of the fleeing woman with the overwhelming power of the encroaching glaciers, opening up narrative discontinuities like bottomless rifts in a polar icepack, Kavan earns every iota of the respect paid her work by Anais Nin, Christopher Priest, Brian Aldiss, and Jonathan Lethem, author of this volume’s awestruck introduction.

Renowned multiple award-winning anthologist Ellen Datlow has edited dozens of books stuffed full of good stories. Her specialties are dark fantasy and horror, and her latest, Mad Hatters and March Hares (Tor), provides a new way of combining these genres in her authors’ original tributes to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Unusually, Mad Hatters’ Table of Contents includes more females than males. Perhaps that’s due to the femaleness of the original series’ main character? If so, the point remains unbelabored. The spotty magic of Priya Sharma’s “Mercury” poignantly underlines capitalism’s careless reliance on toxins and its heartless expediency in the light of loss or damage to the lives of its creators. Catherynne M. Valente recounts a braided tale, “The Flame After the Candle,” in which an adventurous schoolgirl climbs through an old, neglected mirror to find relics left by a New York encounter between Alice Lidell — the real-life model of Carroll’s heroine — and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the boy on whom J.M. Barrie based Peter Pan. These and Andy Duncan’s brilliant “Worrity, Worrity,” which soaks the dry biographical material of Carroll’s illustrator, Sir John Tenniel, in an elixir of fabulous coincidence, are the strongest stories in an anthology featuring strength after strength.

Two authorial decisions make newcomer Julie C. Dao’s Forest of a Thousand Lanterns (Philomel) a standout. First, no wypipo: in this fantastic China analogue, the closest readers come to a Caucasian viewpoint is the occasional mention of “barbarian” violins. Not that the realm of Feng Lu is suspiciously isolated; an ambassadorial entourage from the Nipponesque land of Kamatsu plays a major role in helping heroine Xifeng attract her emperor’s romantic regard. Second, said heroine is actually our villain — at least, I’m betting that’s how the rest of this series will shake out. Dao’s depiction of Xifeng’s struggle against the evil within is vivid and believable, her horror at her own burgeoning monstrosity always seems as if it might keep her from perpetrating her evermore dastardly deeds. Riveting inner turmoil sets the stage for an epic conflict to come.

Couple of upcoming cons

Seattle’s Rustycon has been happening for over 30 years. In addition to the usual writer and author Guests of Honor, they’ve invited a Gamer and a Furry as GOHs. Membership runs between 500 and 700 people, so this will be a small crowd of fandom's usual suspects. That’s January 12 through 14; mark your calendars.

On the following weekend, in fabled, far-off Detroit, I’ll be the Fan Guest of Honor at ConFusion Through the Looking Glass, latest iteration of the first con I ever attended. Back then, I dressed up as GOH C.J. Cherryh, my idol; now, I’m joined in playing myself in that role by several big names, including two who are also my friends: Annalee Newitz and Kate Elliott. Though I’m a little worried about the acclimatization of Kate, who currently paddles a blissful Hawai’ian kayak. At least she’ll have her fantasies to keep her warm. You too?

Thursday Comics Hangover: Kids these days

Writer Matthew Rosenberg and artist Tyler Boss’s 5-issue crime miniseries 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank is finally available in collected form, and you need to hunt down a copy immediately. Kids has so far managed to evade mainstream acclaim somehow, but its moment will come. The book is too goddamned enthusiastic, too exuberant, to ignore.

Kids is a comic about four children who become tangled in some very adult dealings, up to and including a bank robbery. They’re relatively normal kids — maybe a little more clever than the average child, but not obnoxiously so — and so they go about a life of crime in the bumbling way that children go about anything: they only understand parts of what’s going on around them, and they laugh at inappropriate things, and they are excitable in exactly the wrong ways. While they understand that they’re in a life-or-death situation, they might not understand exactly what a life-or-death situation entails. (Four of the five issues open with fantasy sequences of the kids playing video and role-playing games, where all the consequences can be wiped away with the click of a reset button. This is no mistake.)

Rosenberg and Boss match the kids enthusiasm for enthusiasm. Rosenberg’s script is a little overbearing — it is indisputably dialogue-heavy, though the text is zippier than in your average crime comic — but it is clever and funny and the characters feel real, by which I mean they’re not always likable.

Boss’s art leans on the minimalist side of gorgeous. He’s good at stepping back and choosing just the right line to tell a character’s story. And he experiments in all sorts of fun ways. Get a load of the way he incorporates Katsushika Hokusai’s painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa into this panel:

The way he uses the curvature of the painting to add to and emphasize Paige’s inner strength is downright masterful. In this one panel — and even without any of the dialogue — we have a sense of the role she plays in her peer group and the intensity of her character. This is the kind of thing that a novelist would have to spend dozens of pages to build up, and Boss just lays it plain in the space of one little box.

Kids is crammed full of smart-asses and crotch jokes and all kinds of puns and witty dialogue. You get the feeling that if you were to tip it upside down and shake it, some of Boss and Rosenberg’s good ideas would fall out of the book like glitter because it's so overstuffed. But it’s affecting, too — particularly in one particular parental relationship that I don’t want to expand on for fear of spoiling the story. There’s an emptiness, an airiness in the relationship that can only be left by another human being, and that ache pulses off the page.

In the end, I can’t talk about Kids without repeatedly evoking the two words I used at the beginning of this review: exuberance and enthusiasm. Rosenberg and Boss demonstrate the kind of glossy-coat enthusiasm for the magic of graphic storytelling that only talented artists at the very beginning of a comics career can muster.

But I could show you landfills packed with enthusiastic books that are no damn good at all. It’s Boss and Rosenberg’s exuberance for the characters, and for storytelling, that make it all work so well. They’re not showing off for showing-off’s sake: they’re honing their excitement and their obvious love of the craft to best serve these characters, and to best tell this story. If it’s been a while since you read a book that was purely an act of love between artists and their medium, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.

Go talk comics at Zanadu tonight

As I reported last month, Zanadu Comics, the second-oldest comics store in Seattle, is closing in January. Tonight, you'll have an opportunity to come start saying your goodbyes to the store. Zanadu employee Casey is hosting the final edition of Discussions from the Longtable, a comics conversation group, tonight at 6:30 pm. It promises to be an emotional time.

"Customers and employees would sit around the table and rant and rave about this or that while verging on sugar overdose from all the free candy...I love connecting with customers on another level and sharing not only our mutual joy of comics, but the energy that lies behind the covers," Casey writes in a Facebook post.

Casey concludes, "So be there TONIGHT at 6:30 for one more chance to eat lots of candy and rant and rave about comics!! Bring a friend!"

Harry Potter and the Predictive Text

"The castle grounds snarled with a wave of magically magnified wind," the Harry Potter book begins. It continues,

The sky outside was a great black ceiling, which was full of blood. The only sounds drifting from Hagrid’s hut were the disdainful shrieks of his own furniture. Magic: it was something that Harry Potter thought was very good.

This is the opening passage of Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, an artificial intelligence-created text generated out of the Harry Potter novels. The excerpt was created by Botnik, "a community of writers, artists and developers collaborating with machines to create strange new things." One of the Botkin brain trust is Bob Mankoff, who until recently was the cartoon editor at the New Yorker.

Like all predictive text strings, the excerpt sounds relatively human at first. The first sentence is inartful, but it makes sense. The second sentence loses a little bit of its way, though the idea of the sky as a black ceiling full of blood seems entirely acceptable in fantasy fiction. It's when you get to the shrieking furniture that the wheels start to come off. That last sentence, though, is so tone-deaf that it's actually hilarious.

I have no doubt that one day AI will successfully write fiction. Newspapers already employ robots to write simple sports and business stories. I'm not saying that these AI-produced romance or sci-fi novels will be especially good, but that's not the point. All they need is to make sense. If a computer can slap together a thousand romance novels in a minute, and then if an algorithm can sell a hundred copies of each of the books to readers for three or four bucks a piece, you're dealing with a kind of volume — in production and distribution — that the publishing industry has never even imagined.

Looking for a holiday gift book? Bharti Kirchner recommends All the Old Knives

Every Wednesday between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we're asking some of our favorite Seattle authors to recommend the books they're most excited to give as gifts this holiday. Our third author is novelist and cookbook author Bharti Kirchner.

All the Old Knives by Olen Steinhauer is at once a spy novel and a heartbreaking love story. It takes place, surprisingly, over a long dinner in a fancy restaurant at Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Thanks to Bharti Kirchner for her intriguing recommendation. You should also buy the gripping first mystery in her Seattle-set series, Season of Sacrifice: A Maya Malick Mystery. For more information about Bharti Kirchner and what she's reading, you can follow her through her website.

Here's the Seattle Public Library's must-read tweetstorm on criminal justice reform

As a rule, I'm against embedding threaded tweets onto a website. Besides the fact that a series of embedded tweets is pretty ugly, there's also the fact that if a so-called news organization posts an entire thread by an author into a blog post, they are publishing an essay and they should pay the writer for their work.

But I recognize that many of you are not on Twitter — good choice, by the way — and you should read this amazing thread by the Seattle Public Library about their recent criminal justice, equity, and inclusion program. (If you are on Twitter — horrible choice, by the way — you should definitely follow @SPLBuzz because they are doing the people's work and they are clearly having a good time while they do it.) Here it is:

Book News Roundup: Big money

  • Congratulations to Seattle poet Jane Wong, who won the 2017 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award. The award is $50,000 — one of the biggest available to writers in the area — and Wong will have the opportunity to present her work at the Frye Art Museum. We'll have more news about that exhibit when it gets closer to happening.

  • Former Gawker writers are now running a Kickstarter campaign to bring Gawker back as a nonprofit. They need half a million bucks to get the site going again. This is a big deal, because Gawker was a very important website, when it wasn't busy being a very bad website. For me, the good far outweighed the bad. You should do your own math, and if it works out in the positive, you should donate what you can.

  • A paper manufacturer named Northern Pulp convinced a Nova Scotia bookstore to uninvite an author of a book that's critical of Northern Pulp. Pretty fucking sketchy.

  • A good short story by Kristen Roupenian in the New Yorker has gone viral. The story, titled "Cat Person," caused a stir on Twitter over the weekend. It seems that people — men, to be clear — love to judge the protagonist, a young woman who has sex with an older man. Plenty of men online are accusing the protagonist of being manipulative, without realizing that they're maybe telegraphing some of their deeper-seated neuroses about women for all the world to see. The Twitter account "Men React to 'Cat Person'" is one of the most delightful single-serving social media accounts I've seen in a long time. Megan Garber at The Atlantic sums up the situation quite well:

So many of American culture’s creaky misogynies have a way of leaking into fiction. There’s the wearying, and longstanding, mandate for writers to create female characters who are likable. (Claire Messud: “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”) And the common tendency to dismiss the literary products of women writing about women’s lives as “chick lit.”
  • Happy Hanukkah to all! Here's a delightful celebration of the holiday:

Poem About Bugs

Let’s begin with bark beetles, sugar pines and sap. I am twelve,

and as high as I can get in the tree behind our double-wide

mobile home. I’m peeling bark back by my bare hands


to see bug tracks, small iris-like engravements canyoned

into the tree’s meat like a secret message or a promise

from the maker of trees: Your eye will not purple


like your mother’s. Her cries are faint from this lofty height —

breezy, though more shrill than moan. My aunt has a soft whine

when she’s dragged by her hair down a hallway. I don’t cry


for her or for my mother. I’m too scaly to know

that the tree’s diseased, that these gnawings are evidence.



    Sarah Jones is our December Poet in Residence.


    Previously: Relish.

Don't wait for an engraved invitation

A million thanks to Arundel and Chatwin Books for returning to sponsor the site this week and for tipping us (and you) off to their holiday party, coming up this Friday. As always, the celebration is shaping up to be something special, particularly this year's featured guest: Carl Montford, well-known local wood engraver and extraordinary artist and craftsman.

Montford's prints are on display all month at Arundel's Pioneer Square shop, and you should absolutely stop in and see them (and get some Christmas shopping done while you're there; originals are shockingly affordable). But there's only one night on which you can also meet Montford in person, talk to him about his craft, and hear him play a little music as well. Books, music, art, and wine — don't wait for an invitation; come out this Friday, December 15, and celebrate the season in true Northwest style.

Sponsors like Arundel Books make the Seattle Review of Books possible — and it's part of our commitment to make internet advertising 100% less terrible. We'd love to feature your book, event, or opportunity on the site. Reserve a date now.

Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from December 11 - December 17

Monday, December 11: African-American Writers' Alliance

Members of the “diverse and dynamic collective of Seattle-area writers of African descent” present new work at this reading. This is a great opportunity to celebrate Seattle-area writers of color and to see what the African-American Writers’ Alliance is up to these days. Third Place Books Seward Park, 5041 Wilson Ave S, 474-2200, http://thirdplacebooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Tuesday, December 12: Navigating Seattle Transit without Losing Your Mind

Town Hall teams up with the Seattle Department of Transportation and TransitCenter to discuss why our traffic is so fucked and how you can help yourself slightly un-fuck the traffic. Hopefully, they’ll also discuss ways to leave your car and get more transit to your neck of the woods in a shorter timeframe, because that’s the only way we’re really going to make a difference around here. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, http://townhallseattle.org, 7 pm, free.

Wednesday, December 13: Puzzle Club

The good people at Ada’s Technical Books host a monthly club for local logic puzzle fans. On the website, they call the Puzzle Club “a startlingly kind and clever group of people” who join together for “collaborative puzzle solving.” Ada’s Technical Books, 425 15th Ave, 322-1058, http://seattletechnicalbooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Thursday, December 14: *theMystery.doc Reading

See our Literary Event of the Week column for more details. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free.

Friday, December 15: Four Seattle Poets

The last author reading at Elliott Bay Book Company for the year of 2017 is a stellar lineup of debut poets. You definitely know Jane Wong, whose Overpour was the first big debut of the year. And frequent readers of the site also know EJ Koh, whose A Lesser Love is a genius collection that spans love and war. Mita Mahato is a paper-cut cartoonist whose first collection, In Between, is a milestone in the small-but-growing field of poetry comics. You might not know Montreux Rotholtz or her debut collection, Unmark, and that’s okay. Every great reading has some element of discovery to it, doesn’t it? Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free.

Saturday, December 16: Counting Time Like People Count Stars Launch Party

This event is a documentary and book launch highlighting the poetry of the girls who live at Our Little Roses Orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Local authors including Luis Rodrigeuz, Lydia Valentine, Tod Marshall, Claudia Castro Luna, and more will read poems from the book. St. Peter’s Episcopal Parish, 1610 S King St, http://stpeterseattle.org, 4 pm, free.

Sunday, December 17: Story Time for Grown Ups

Seattle Public Library celebrity librarian David Wright reads two Christmas-themed stories for adults: John Cheever’s “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” and Donald Westlake’s creepy “Nackles.” Third Place Books Seward Park, 5041 Wilson Ave S, 474-2200, http://thirdplacebooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Literary Event of the Week: TheMystery.doc at Elliott Bay Book Company

In the wrong hands, Matthew McIntosh’s second novel, theMystery.doc, could be a murder weapon. The thing is immense — over 1500 pages, a giant blue bludgeon of a book. Once you stop wondering at the sheer size of the thing, your second question is probably: is it any good? And, uh, can you close Instagram and set down your phone long enough to read the damn thing?

You’ll have to trust me when I say that theMystery.doc is surprisingly readable. You might groan when you pick it up and put it in your lap, but you’ll whip through it so quickly that page 100 will arrive before you even know it. And then the rest of the book comes tumbling after.

All of theMystery.doc’s pages are not loaded with text. There’s a lot of blank space, and photographs, and chunks of text broken up into long poems that require the reader to turn pages every few syllables. The rhythm of reading it is a staccato beat, with occasional pauses to refresh. The book simulates the act of trying to read a book in 2017: readers are continually “distracted” with text messages and digital alerts and bizarre images.

theMystery.doc is about a man who wakes up with no idea who he is. He doesn’t know the woman in his bed. He doesn’t know his neighbor’s name. He barely recognizes himself in the mirror. On his computer, there’s an empty document, titled "theMystery.doc." He tries to figure out his identity, and he attempts to unravel the mystery of theMystery.doc. More than just an amnesia thriller, it’s a story of a narrative trying to will itself to life.

This Thursday, McIntosh is making a rare public appearance in Seattle, at Elliott Bay Book Company. Much of the book is set in the greater Seattle area — in Federal Way; on a tour of the thrift stores of the north side, from the Lake City Value Village to the Deseret Industries on Aurora — and so this event has a special meaning to the author and the book. He’ll be showing a short film inspired by theMystery.doc, and then I’ll join him in conversation about his big, ambitious novel that is actively trying to eat the world. This should be a lot of fun.

Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free.

The Sunday Post for December 10, 2017

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles we enjoyed, good for 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.

Libya's Slave Trade Didn't Appear Out of Thin Air

You should read this piece by friend-of-SRoB Rahawa Haile multiple times (as I just have), and you should also trace each link, each video, and each photo in Haile’s footsteps, looking with careful attention to see what she saw. Haile effectively documents the connection between Libya’s slave trade, immigration policies worldwide, and racism. Throughout she drags the reader’s focus back to small moments in her research where she connected with another human’s suffering. It’s deeply unsettling: we’re familiar with how journalists write about terrible things, and we know how to take it — how to digest their words safely. Haile doesn’t write to keep herself safe, or us.

In 2016, several articles spring up about slave auctions in Libya. A year later, video of an auction goes viral. Black men sold for $400. The president of the U.S. calls those who reported the story purveyors of "fake news"; a Libyan broadcaster latches onto those words to discredit the video. African leaders, European heads of state, and the United Nations feign ignorance, but they have known. And we, of the African diaspora, have done our best to tell these stories. What those in power can't name is the way the world has become too much at all times for them.
On Being Queer and Happily Single — Except When I'm Not

Brandon Taylor writes reflectively and eloquently about desire, especially navigating a kind of longing that looks quite different from what anyone else expects.

Sometimes, I say that I want to be with someone who I only have to see three or four times a week, and only to cook meals and go book shopping. I say that I want some flannel-wearing bearded man to descend from a rainy mountain in Washington State or Vermont, who smells like crushed ice and the sharp scent of pine sap, who will read Proust to me in French and drink from enamel mugs beside a firepit with me. That’s what I want. And what my friends say to me is that I want a best friend who dresses like Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and I say, yes, probably. But the look in their eyes is rueful pity, that this is not enough.
The Consent of the Ungoverned

As accusations and resignations and firings related to sexual assault, sexual harrassment, and just plain jackass behavior continue to roll out, it's hard to pick a single essay to promote. Right now the internet is doing something the internet does really, really well (yes, those things exist): a multitude of smart, experienced, excellent thinkers and writers are analyzing, arguing, negotiating with themselves and with each other — prodding the rest of us to think harder and not be complacent in our own righteousness and sense of outrage.

This week, Ijeoma Oluo is brilliant and angry and honest, as always, in her response to her hero Al Franken's resignation. The New York Times's breakdown of how Harvey Weinstein used his power and influence to silence women he had irrevocably wronged and the men who might have spoken up for them is chilling. Lucinda Franks, also in the NYT, talks with honesty and weight about revising her perception of her past — it's the other side of the male complaint that "things were different then," a side that hasn't been fully addressed. Jess Zimmerman responds to Claire Dederer's piece on "the Art of Monstrous Men" with one of her own about how gatekeepers not only determine what's good art, but what good art is. Josephine Livingstone argued with Allison Benedikt about what women will have to give up — what cherished fantasies and self-conceptions — if we continue, as we should, to walk through the door that Weinstein's accusers opened for us all.

So it's really a matter of personal taste that Laurie Penny gets top billing this week — Laurie Penny, our resident master of articulating inarticulate-able rage.

We know the world doesn’t work the way most of us want it to. We watch a bunch of badly-fitted suits stuffed with self-satisfied swagger frogmarch our nations down the road to economic calamity and climate destruction, and we try to tell ourselves that we chose this, that we have some sort of control, that there is a thing called democracy that is working more or less as it was designed to. We want to believe that some of this is our fault, because if it isn’t, then maybe we can’t do anything to stop it. This is more or less the experience of being a citizen of a notionally liberal, notionally democratic country these days. It is depressing and scary. And if we ever actually speak about it honestly we can count on being dismissed as crazy or bullied into silence, so it’s easier to swallow our rage, to bear up and make the best of things and try not to start drinking before noon every day. Being as furious as we want feels like it might be fatal, so we try not to be too angry. Or we direct our anger elsewhere. Or we turn it inwards. Or we check out altogether.

Sound familiar? That’s about how most women experience sexuality.

My Twentieth Century Evening — and Other Small Breakthroughs

It’s perfectly fair to wish the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature had gone to a writer who was nothing like Kazuo Ishiguro: a writer less expected, less established, in particular less powerful and privileged. Big prizes have muscle — muscle that could be used to shake the equilibrium of the literary mainstream, to break the vacuum seal and pull different voices into the conversation with a great whoosh of fresh air.

However, for readers who love Ishiguro and his quiet, terrifying sentences, who love Ishiguro and his quietly terrifying books — especially the ones that aren’t suited to a Merchant Ivory film — pfft on reasonable thinking: your man won. Here’s his Nobel Lecture, interesting for its insight into his process (cameo by Tom Waits!), his history, his hopes. I only wish Ishiguro had been, in addressing the imperatives for writers and readers right now, as quietly terrifying as our current political moment deserves.

So here I am, a man in my sixties, rubbing my eyes and trying to discern the outlines, out there in the mist, to this world I didn't suspect even existed until yesterday. Can I, a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation, now find the energy to look at this unfamiliar place? Do I have something left that might help to provide perspective, to bring emotional layers to the arguments, fights and wars that will come as societies struggle to adjust?
Hummingbirds Are Where Intuition Goes to Die

And now! Hummingbirds! Birds’ tongues are straight-up weird. If you pull on a flicker’s tongue, for example, the feathers on the top of their heads stand up. TRUE. (This is both difficult and rude — to the flicker — to test out in daily life, so please don’t.) Here’s another one: We thought we knew how hummingbird tongues work; turns out we were completely wrong. Also their flight style is insane, they can bend their beaks, and there’s absolutely no reason they should be able to thrive in the environments they prefer. Also science. This article by Ed Yong is pure joy.

Rico-Guevara handcrafted artificial flowers with flat glass sides, so he could film the birds’ flickering tongues with high-speed cameras. It took months to build the fake blooms, to perfect the lighting, and to train the birds to visit these strange objects. But eventually, he got what he wanted: perfectly focused footage of a hummingbird tongue, dipping into nectar. At 1,200 frames per second, “you can’t see what’s happening until you check frame by frame,” he says. But at that moment, “I knew that on my movie card was the answer. It was this amazing feeling. I had something that could potentially change what we knew, between my fingers.”