The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Slog: Books

Amy Tan Is Replacing Joan Didion

Paul Constant — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:56:07 -0700

We told you in Loose Lips this week that Joan Didion cancelled her upcoming appearance at Benaroya Hall, due to an "unforeseen personal conflict."

We just got a press release from Seattle Arts and Lectures announcing Joan Didion's replacement. It begins like this:

SEATTLE, WA: Seattle Arts & Lectures’ 2012-2013 Literary Arts Series concludes with Amy Tan on Wednesday, June 5, 7:30pm at Benaroya Hall. Unfortunately the previously scheduled speaker, Joan Didion, unable to make her appearance on June 5th. We are excited to announce Amy Tan as a replacement.

Amy Tan is well known in literary circles for her sensitive and witty exploration of the complexity of mother daughter relationships starting with her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club that was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her theme continued in her equally successful novels from The Kitchen God’s Wife to Saving Fish from Drowning to the Bonesetter’s Daughter. In addition, to her novels Ms. Tan co-produced and wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of the Joy Luck Club. Ms. Tan is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate, two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat and numerous articles for magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic.

Stranger Editor Christopher Frizzelle, who was going to interview Didion onstage, will not be interviewing Amy Tan.

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New Pearl Buck Novel to Be Published This Fall

Paul Constant — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:38:52 -0700

Like it says up there in large print, a new Pearl Buck novel is going to be published this fall:

The manuscript was stumbled upon in a storage unit in Texas and returned to the Buck family in December in exchange for a small fee, said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Open Road Integrated Media, the publisher.

Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book, “The Eternal Wonder,” shortly before she died of cancer in 1973, said her son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate.

I'm willing to bet that most Americans now know Buck best as an Oprah's Book Club-approved author. Many of these sorts of posthumous manuscripts are unpublished for a reason, but this one, at least, sounds like a complete manuscript, which increases its chances of at least being readable.

(Thanks to Slog tipper—and big Buck fan—Cienna.)

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The Sheltering Water Towers of NYC

Brendan Kiley — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:38:09 -0700

After reading about this NYC speakeasy hidden in a water tower...

Mr. Austin located a suitable water tower by scouring Buildings Department records for violations with egregious scaffold fines. That can indicate a neglectful landlord, he said, which meant it might be a vacant building ripe for adopting as one’s own.

One Saturday night last month, 12 guests squeezed through the trap door into the space. “The great thing about the upright bass is how it got up here,” said Dirby Luongo, one of Mr. Austin’s collaborators who played the doorman. “It’s like a ship in a bottle.”

... the first thing I thought of was Bigger Thomas using a water tower for shelter in Native Son. Whether your situation is as frivolous as a speakeasy or as dire as a fugitive, the water towers of American cities can be a shelter—but only temporarily.

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Amazon Legitimizes Fan Fiction

Paul Constant — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:14 -0700

This could potentially be a huge deal:

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.

The Kindle Worlds Self-Service Submission Platform will launch soon and enable you to submit your original works for publication.

I gave a talk a while ago at Nerd Nite suggesting that the publishing platform of the future would find some way to incorporate fan fiction into the platform. I also said that genre publishing platforms should encourage fan fiction by publishing the best stuff as canon and paying the author for the work. This is a smart way for Amazon to tap into a huge publishing ecosystem that already exists and is barely tolerated by the publishing industry. Maybe more importantly, it's yet another opportunity that traditional publishing has squandered.

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Meet Seattle's New Library on a Bike

Cienna Madrid — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:11:15 -0700

The Seattle Public Library launched a new pilot program today called Books on Bikes, which sounds exactly like what it is: A small, portable library hitched to the back of a bike.

SPL
The trailer is equipped with two shelves and an umbrella stand to protect books from the elements.

“I thought it would be great to combine two things Seattle loves: our libraries and bikes,” explained Jared Mills, the Montlake Branch Librarian who brainstormed the idea (full disclosure: Mills is my hilarious and talented friend. If that sounds like I'm bragging it's because I am bragging).

Throughout the summer, librarians will pedal around to parks, block parties, KEXP concerts at the Mural, and other neighborhood events throughout the city. Each place they go, they'll tailor their shelves to suit the needs of the community: think kids' books for pop-up story time in parks, or gay erotica for the Pride Parade, as well as an array of new and best sellers. Librarians will also be on hand to make book suggestions and sign people up for library cards—basically, they'll provide all the services of a brick-and-mortar library, short of accepting book returns.

If you want to track the Books on Bikes trailer this summer, follow the Seattle Public Library on Twitter, @SPLBuzz.

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Would You Like to Be Entertained for a Shorter Period or a Longer Period?

Jen Graves — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:41:45 -0700

Courtesy Warner Bros
THICKER, UGLIER, BETTER Leo is becoming Brando by the minute.

After watching Baz Luhrmann's movie The Great Gatsby Saturday night (Paul's review), a local 12-year-old who had insisted even before the film began that it was too long decided to test whether she could read the book in a shorter time than it took her to watch the movie.

The movie lasted 142 minutes. She clocked in at 156. She declared the book better, with the added implication that she should not have been dragged to the movie. Yes, but then she wouldn't have spent her Sunday reading the book. She had to admit this was logical.

A few years ago at On the Boards, a New York theater company performed the entire book while reading it line by line onstage in a production called Gatz, and that took more than six hours. And people loved it.

Paul's written before about folks making time-to-entertainment equations for themselves to determine how much they think things should cost: That, say, a book offers more hours of entertainment than a movie or a play, so it should cost more. I've honestly never thought about it this way, and it seems batty. But everybody's busy, time is at a premium, etc etc (I don't even have time to flesh out this concept in this sentence, for instance), so... do you think time should be money when it comes to movies and books and theater? And if you do, is longer better, or is shorter and more "efficient" better?

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Overheard in the Reception Hall After the 50th Annual Theodore Roethke Memorial Reading Last Night

Christopher Frizzelle — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:20:53 -0700

One man was saying to a group of friends: "You'd be amazed what people share with their grocery person." On the other side of the room, a woman was saying to her friends, regarding the reading Kay Ryan had just given: "I hope that I got some of the jokes. I probably didn't." Later I heard someone say: "My main problem with ghosts is there are never dinosaur ghosts."

This was in a room on the second floor of Kane Hall, a high-ceilinged space with old-fashioned cluster lights and a huge organ at one end and a long banquet table down the center, piled with flatbreads and shrimp and tiny cakes. There was also a bar, serving complimentary wine. It had already been such a treat to see an hour-long free reading by the very wonderful Kay Ryan, who'd been introduced by the very wonderful Heather McHugh, that then to step into a room piled with free treats was, well, quite the treatment. Thanks, University of Washington Department of English!

"Thank you for that ridiculous introduction," Kay Ryan whispered to Heather McHugh as they walked into the reception. McHugh's introduction had been so dense with humor—poetry jokes and history jokes and many other kinds of jokes besides, plus some real-deal appreciation of Ryan's gifts—that Ryan's head, a few rows ahead of me, had been bobbing with laughter. And then Ryan got up and was very funny herself, so funny that afterward I felt exactly like that lady I overheard at the reception: I hope that I got some of the jokes. I love how intimidated that statement is.

"You cannot believe the eminences" the UW has invited to give the memorial Roethke reading since the 1960s, McHugh had pointed out onstage, and then looking at the list, she cracked: "They made one or two mistakes." Among the greats: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill. Ghost dinosaurs all, it occurred to me later.

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In the UK, Amazon Is a Welfare Queen

Paul Constant — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:01:08 -0700

Zeljka Marosevic at Melville House tells us about a meeting yesterday that was held to discuss Amazon.com's taxes, or lack thereof:

“What people will find particularly galling is that the amount Amazon is paying in tax is actually less than they are taking from UK taxpayers in the form of government grants. Companies like Amazon should pay their fair share of tax based on their economic activity in this country and the profits they make here...

Why is it people get ridiculously upset when someone on the internet sees a young mother of three buying some mildly unhealthy food with food stamps, but when Amazon sucks at the welfare teat on an exponentially larger scale, it's at best considered to be the free hand of the market and at worst just shrugged off as the way it is nowadays?

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Kay Ryan Reads Her Poems Twice (Kay Ryan Reads Her Poems Twice)

Molly Morrow — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:57:00 -0700

A year or so ago, Kay Ryan went to Italy, and it made her think about the sometimes-painful, always-disorienting work the mind has to do when it arrives in a new place. Last night at Kane Hall, she read to us a poem that described this problem of being somewhere new, but not knowing how to be new yourself, as if you had put up an “interior tent,” only to find that “the new holes aren't where the windows went.” The poem settled as she leaned into the podium. “I bet you'd like me to read that again,” she said, and the audience fairly moaned yes. Yes, Kay Ryan, read it again. The sheer delight Ryan took from examining her own work—as though it were not her own but the work of some dear, deranged friend—gave the reading a wondrously funny edge, and allowed the audience to see Ryan not as the intimidating literary giant that she is, but as a warm, comic entertainer of the highest sort, able to humble herself through a kind of soft, conscious mocking. (After the first poem of the night, she mused, “I find that a very touching poem, but I'm ready to go on.”)

She began the evening with a set of new, unpublished work on subjects including but not limited to W.G. Sebald, frogs with dual pupils, octopuses, Thelonious Monk, and 17th-century Dutch still-life painting. Much of it she flatly insisted on reading twice, claiming that “if it's a poem, it should bear a second reading,” when in truth Ryan's poems not only bear a second reading, but seem to require it – so dense and rich with these double meanings you could feel the audience leaning in and curling around them, straining to catch every word and every space between words before the moment passed. (More than once I looked around and saw the people on either side of me listening with closed eyes.) Sometimes the second reading seemed to be as much for Ryan herself as for us, and the second reading would inevitably give a second meaning. This twinned reality—what Ryan calls “doubleness”—was the predominant theme of the evening, much moreso than the Northwest theme Ryan half-heartedly attempted, but (gloriously) abandoned. One new poem in particular, a beautifully creepy thing entitled “Ship in a Bottle,” possessed this doubleness in spades. Ryan introduced it by saying that the poem is still a mystery even to her. (Not being able to see the poem on paper, I‘ve inserted line breaks where I sense them, sacrilegious as that feels):

It seems impossible
Not just a ship in a bottle
But wind and sea
The ship starts to struggle
An emergency of the two realized
We realized
We can get it out but not
Without spilling its world
A hammer tap and they're free.
Which death will it be,
Little sailors?

“I'll read it again. It's a mystery to me,” she repeated. “I mean, it all makes sense, but I'm not sure what it's getting at.”

The dark exhilaration of this new work passed naturally into much-loved older work, more familiar, and perhaps safer, but no less moving. (I recommend, before you die, hearing Kay Ryan read her poem “Train-Track Figure” in a semi-dark room with good acoustics. Those three lines toward the end, pronounced with perfect rushing speed, so that the syllables mimic exactly the sound of a train clipping over the tracks: “If it's a person/if it's a person/if it's a person.” Only great poetry can make trains more real than actual trains.

Perhaps the highlight (but there were so many highlights!) of the night came after a reading of the eerie poem “Pentimenti,”—which Ryan says is “much more terrible than you think”—when she did an impromptu literary analysis of the rhyme scheme. Ryan loves rhyme, obviously, but more specifically she loves “homemade rhyme.” In “Pentimenti,” she performs a version of homemade rhyme that she has named wedge rhyme. You can hear it in the lines “through which/who knows what/exiled cat or/extra child/might steal.” Exiled. Extra. Child. Ryan has wedged a neat cluster of syllables into the skinny frame of that word, exiled, to create a longer sister-phrase that doubles it. “Probably not particularly gratifying to you,” she remarked of the analysis, as if by way of apology. But one man toward the back of the auditorium summed up what the rest of us were feeling with a loud, appreciative whoop.

Probably not particularly gratifying, no. Not gratification - something much, much better than that.

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Trolololol

Paul Constant — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:19:11 -0700

(Travis Nichols reads at Elliott Bay Book Company on Sunday, May 19 at 3pm. It's free.)

I saw the weakest minds of my occupation destroyed by blog comments, hate-eating hysterical shivering, dragging themselves through message boards at dawn looking for a troll to fight. I started writing professionally about eight years ago, just as comments became less a curiosity and more a given. But many of the journalists I met who'd been in the business before the arrival of comments could already become flushed with outrage about the very existence of reader feedback. Their faces would get red and they'd scream—and, yes, sometimes sob—about every mean thing someone left in the wide-open space below their stories.

Sure, sometimes a negative comment hooks into the meaty part of you. But it's not like the readership changed, that an imaginary army of cheering, adoring fans disappeared when the comment threads were installed, only to be replaced by a cantankerous mob of cretins. Now you get to instantaneously see how a small-but-vocal portion of your readers reacts to your work. Readers didn't have any unchallenged platform at all before, and now they do. Isn't that, on balance, really kind of cool?

When novelist and poet Travis Nichols worked for the Poetry Foundation, one of his jobs was to oversee a project in which comments were allowed on poetryfoundation.org. Perhaps the foundation expected an Athenian discourse about the nature of poetry and art in the digital age. And I'm sure the comment threads inspired some of that. But they also fomented a slew of bullies, off-topic comments, conspiracy theories, ax-grinding, and treatises on the sad state of American poetry. In an interview with Paul Killebrew, Nichols admitted that the negative comments made him feel "deeply, deeply bonkers for a few months, largely because I took a lot of the rote online bullying personally." The comment section was soon scrapped entirely, which caused several angry commenters to create their own sites accusing Nichols of fascism.

And now, finally, Nichols gets his revenge, in The More You Ignore Me, a novel in the form of one ridiculously long blog comment posted by our narrator, known only as linksys181...

Keep reading >>

"What would you consider the number one priority in the making of Atlas Shrugged Part III?"

Paul Constant — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:00:57 -0700

The filmmakers of Atlas Shrugged Part III want to know, so they've opened up an online survey.

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Stephen King's Son, a Novel Written by a Troll, and the History of a Hurtful Book

Paul Constant — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:25:20 -0700

Tonight: If you're not going to see Kay Ryan tonight, you have a few other attractive readings options. First, Gary Greenberg is at Town Hall reading from The Book of Woe: The Making of DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, which is a look at a book that has done a whole lot of damage to a whole lot of people in the last century. Second, Claire Messud reads The Woman Upstairs, which is a novel described as a "tour de force." Considering this is the very good Messud, that's saying something.

And there's another event tonight at a non-traditional reading venue, too. Hollow Earth Radio’s Furnace Reading Series is a quarterly performance of adventurous literature, using music and other sound effects to enhance the experience. The latest performer, Kathlene Postma, is editor of the Silk Road Literary Journal. She’ll be performing a new short story titled “Fetch” with some sort of aural accompaniment, which should make this a unique performance experience.

Saturday: B. Ruby Rich will discuss New Queer Cinema at SIFF's Film Center at 4 pm, which should be an enjoyable way to ease into the first weekend of SIFF. Joe Hill will be at University Book Store at 4 in the afternoon. Hill, who is Stephen King's son, will try to make asshole book reviewers stop referring to him as Stephen King's son with his new novel, NOS4A2. And the evening belongs to Eve Ensler, who's reading at Benaroya Hall. The Vagina Monologues author/playwright/performer has a new book titled In the Body of the World that discusses Ensler’s personal experiences with cancer. This event is a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood, too, which makes it extra-recommendable.

Sunday: Travis Nichols reads at Elliott Bay Book Company at 3 in the afternoon. The More You Ignore Me is a novel narrated by a comment-thread troll. You can find my review of it over in the book section this week, but the short version is that it's a well-written book about a very modern situation, and it's well worth your time. And Ilina Sen is at Town Hall at 5:30 pm. Sen is a "feminist scholar, human-rights activist, and author" who is globally admired. Here's an excerpt from her book, and here are links to all the Democracy Now! shows featuring her commentary. It should be a great cap on a great weekend.

There's plenty of other stuff, going on, too. Visit the full readings calendar for all the details.

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The Birth of Partying

Paul Constant — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:22:02 -0700

Electric Literature's blog The Outlet brings this to our attention:

“Using ‘wicked’ as a term of approval” was first recorded in Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, said Churchwell. And the act of partying (as a verb) was first used by E. E. Cummings in a 1920 letter describing how he’d “partied” in Paris.

Which means in a roundabout way, we have Cummings to thank for Rebecca Black's "Friday." That's the kind of thing that'll break your brain if you think about it too much.

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Michael Pollan Is the Steve Jobs of Food

Unpaid Intern — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:04:36 -0700

Posted by news intern Ansel Herz

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Michael Pollan paced the stage and talked to an audience that seemed to adore him. He's tall, thin, and bald with wireframe glasses. He wore jeans and a navy-blue sport coat.

If he'd been wearing a turtleneck, Pollan could have been mistaken for Steve Jobs. Which is appropriate, because his critique of the food system is Jobsian—highly effective, technically on point, even cool. But snobbish and alienating.

The substance of Pollan's argument against the corporate food industry is solid. He began with an anecdote from early in his career that encapsulates it perfectly, when he visited an Idaho farm where potatoes have to off-gas the toxicity from pesticides for five days before they can be turned into McDonald's French fries.

So I was totally with him. But then Pollan received the biggest laughs and applause of the night when he called the microwave "the Ayn Rand of appliances." He recounted the experience of buying frozen meals from Safeway as if it was an adventure on an alien planet. Waiting for them to cook in the microwave was "soul-irradiating," he said. The food was gross.

Pollan juxtaposed this with his nostalgia for the family meal of yesteryear, when kids "learn to argue without screaming or fighting. They learn the art of conversation." Chicken kiev was his favorite dish made by mom each birthday. (Who eats chicken kiev on his birthday?)

For the affluent Benaroya audience, this seemed to be all well and good. Personally, my memories of the kitchen are less fond. In single-family households (mine was firmly middle class), kids take on a lot more cooking and cleaning duties. I remember being yelled at a lot. And I thought frozen King's Hawaiian Teriyaki Bowls and Marie Callender pot pies were absolutely delicious.

This is where we begin to see that Pollan is selling an image to the upper crust (pun intended, I guess). Others have already noted the way he glosses over class, race, and gender issues in his new book, Cooked. Farmworkers—the millions of poorly paid folks who pick most of the healthy fruits and vegetables Pollan promotes—didn't get a mention last night, until I asked him about it.

He shouted out the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which is an amazing organization, but one based at the opposite end of the country, in Florida. When I tried to mention a similar group based in Bellingham that people might benefit from knowing about, Pollan cut me off and moved on. That brusqueness, too, reminds one of Jobs.

The last question of the night came from a young woman who talked about how much she looks up to him. "What can one person do to make a change?" she asked, almost pleading.

Pollan smiled and gestured with his long arms. "This is the challenge of all politics...I think we are making a change, and that change is coming out of a changes in behavior. I call it voting with your fork. This book is really about changing your identity as a consumer."

That's the essence of the Jobsian approach: purchase the absolute best products, and feel justifiably smug and enlightened about it. I actually think that's fine when it comes to technology—Apple devices tend to be objectively better than their competitors (the dark side being, of course, working conditions in China). It works less well as a political vision challenging the food industry, because it's not inclusive or about collective power.

I doubt the problems in the food industry will be solved by Pollan and his converts any more than global warming will be by people buying Priuses. I wish it was that easy.

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That Sounds Like an Enriching and Highly Artistic Process

Paul Constant — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:06:08 -0700

Publishing Perspectives explains the weird lengths to which a publisher has gone to produce an Italian edition of the new book by the author of the Da Vinci Code on the day of the book's global launch:

For nearly two months, 11 people were kept tucked away in an underground “bunker” near Milan, Italy, (actually a windowless high-security basement at the Milan headquarters of Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing company, owned by Silvio Burlusconi) where they worked seven days a week until at least 8pm each night; all to translate Dan Brown’s new book, Inferno, into French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Portuguese in preparation for its multi-nation simultaneous release on its publication date of May 14.

The “translators 11” worked from February through April 2012. They were forbidden from taking mobile phones into the “bunker.” They were guarded by armed security personnel. Their laptops were secured to their workstations, and they were only allowed access to the internet through one, supervised, communal computer. They were banned from taking any notebooks or papers out of the bunker, and had to turn in the manuscripts they were working on each evening. Minibuses took them to and from their hotel.

A good translation is a work of art. This doesn't sound like it could possibly be a good translation, although a mass-produced translation of a Dan Brown novel might be some kind of double-judo-flip back into the realm of art.

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Daydreaming About Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate

Sarah Galvin — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:20:00 -0700

Mike Force
Kay Ryan will be at Kane Hall at the University of Washington on Thursday, May 16.

I want so much to go on a bike ride with Kay Ryan. We'd have pizza and then take my favorite route through the Arboretum, slalom between families of ducks and guys cruising in the bushes, and ride out to the middle of that abandoned tract of freeway people call the Bridge to Nowhere. We'd lean our bikes (I've read she favors a mountain bike) by the spot where swimmers leap 30 feet into root-beer-colored water, where someone spray-painted "jump, pussy" on the cement in pink letters. I'd open a bottle of whiskey and start our conversation with a few questions about bikes.

It was on a cross-country bike ride that Kay Ryan, then 30 years old, realized she was destined to be a writer. She had recently begun a PhD in literary criticism at UC Irvine, but as she once said in an interview, "I couldn't bear the idea of being a doctor of something I couldn't fix." On this cross-country ride, she simply asked herself whether she liked writing poetry, and the answer was yes. When she returned home, she began to write, drawing inspiration, at first, from Ripley's Believe It or Not! She was named United States poet laureate in 2008, and next week, on May 16, will deliver the 50th annual Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading at the University of Washington, in the Roethke Auditorium.

I like bikes that resemble Ryan's poems—compact, streamlined, with an appearance of mechanical simplicity that belies their power. She often makes seemingly obvious or straightforward statements that, in the context of the poems, become complex. Similarly, she can use the same line, or nearly the same line, twice in a poem in such a way that they mean completely different things each time. For instance, in her poem "Lime Light," the meaning of "lime light," at first synonymous with "spotlight," is complicated by the introduction of an actual bowl of limes. If this sounds too simple to work, consider the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or the gin and tonic, and then of course read the poem.

If You and Joan Didion Were Onstage Together in Front of 2,000 People, What Would You Ask Her?

Christopher Frizzelle — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:28:18 -0700

Joan Didion will be making a Seattle Arts & Lectures appearance at Benaroya Hall on Wednesday, June 5, and if you don't already have tickets, you need to get on it. I will be there, in a tuxedo, introducing her and asking the questions, which is an honor, as I am the Biggest Joan Didion Fanboy in the Universe™, although it's an honor tinged with anxiety, as she has been asked so many questions before. And, of course, she's already revealed so much about herself in her work. So I'm just curious: If you had an opportunity to talk about anything in the world with her, what would you ask?

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David Sedaris on The Daily Show

Dan Savage — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:41:47 -0700

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

In which you find out what Jon Stewart would do if someone served him frosting on another man's dick.

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How Sexist Are Book Covers?

Anna Minard — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:31:59 -0700

Years working in a bookstore will teach you a lot about book covers and how people respond to them—not only can you often tell when a book's good cover is selling it better than it should've sold, your own brain gets so used to the different tropes, you feel like you know exactly what a book will be by looking at the cover, the old adage be damned. That's mostly just you trusting publishers to correctly aim their product at the right reader, and it doesn't matter how many times you learn your lesson that they can really fuck it up, your brain loves an image. And it's not just about genre—if book covers consistently whitewash their characters, or use obnoxiously gendered design, it does have an impact on who reads what and how we think about books.

Earlier this week, young adult author Maureen Johnson tweeted this:

I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says, "Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can read it. - signed, A Guy"
— maureenjohnson (@maureenjohnson) May 6, 2013

And it kicked off a crowdsourced experiment in response to the fact that, like a lot of books by and about girls and women, her books get hot pink cursive and hearts and sexy white girl torsos on their covers.

She called her challenge "the cover flip" and asked people on Twitter and Tumblr to redesign existing book covers for the opposite gender, and then collected the best examples here. Check 'em out, some of them are really perfect.

Paul wrote about a similar conversation in the sci-fi/fantasy world last year.

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Werewolves, Cheap Wine, and a Pseudotreatise of Urbogony

Paul Constant — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:50:06 -0700

• Benjamin Percy is the author of Red Moon, which is a novel about werewolves. He's interviewed by local author Jonathan Evison, whose very good novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving is out in paperback, at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight. That reading is free.

• The Hugo House's final Cheap Wine & Poetry before summer features poets Jason Whitmarsh, Anastacia Tolbert, Jared Leising, and Samar Abulhassan, along with an open mic and lots of wine for a buck a glass. This reading is free, too.

• Tonight at the central branch of the Library, it's "An Evening with Ursula K. Le Guin & Mariano Martin Rodriguez." Le Guin and Rodriguez "discuss translating Gheorghe Săsărman's Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony." This sounds like a delightfully weird time, and Le Guin doesn't do many public appearances. Plus: It's also free!

• Eric Drexler is considered by many to be the founding father of nanotechnology. If you want to know more about tiny robots fucking with molecular structure, I'd advise you go to visit Town Hall tonight at 7:30 pm. This reading is $5, but it's totally worth it.

• On Friday, we have a working poet's discussion about work and being a poet at the Good Shepherd Center and a very good poetry reading at Open Books. On Saturday, there's a biographer of the man behind Ripley's Believe It or Not, a joint poetry reading at a gallery, and the celebration of a French pop art collection at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery with a special musical guest. On Sunday, Evgeny Morozov reads a book about how we think the internet can save everything, but really it probably can't.

• And so much more! As in, there are probably a dozen events happening this weekend that I haven't mentioned in this post. Visit the readings calendar to see the full slate of what's coming up this weekend and to find more information about all the events I mentioned above.

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Oh, the Good Art You'll Make!

Paul Constant — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:02:00 -0700

Here's Neil Gaiman's 2012 speech at the University of the Arts:

And here's Neil Gaiman's 2012 speech at the University of the Arts:

One is a $12.99 book titled Make Good Art, with just shy of 3000 words spread over a few dozen brightly lit pages, designed by Chip Kidd. The other is a free video that you can watch as many times as you want. (University of the Arts also published the text of the speech on their site, and you can read that for free as many times as you want, too.) The book even has the URL of the video printed in the front of it.

So why would you pay for something you can read, or watch, for free? Well, Chip Kidd's design is always interesting; this almost reads like a pictureless comic book, with the words spread all over the page to illustrate the meaning of the text ("liberating" is soaring alone over the top of a page, like it's been launched from a cannon, for instance). And Gaiman has a lot of completist fans. But let's not pretend this book is about art: This is obviously a play for the lucrative graduation book market, the distracted aunts and uncles who pour into bookstores every May to buy copies of Oh, the Places You'll Go! by the bushelful to give to the young high school and college graduates in their lives. And I suppose that this is a fine book for that purpose, but really: If you know a kid who's graduating high school, I bet they'd be happier if you gave them a card with money in it, instead. The odds are, they'll get another copy of the book from someone else. There's some good advice for artists in Gaiman's speech (the bit for freelancers is especially helpful), but it's not good enough to warrant a physical copy of the book, when the speech is everywhere online.

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Is Microsoft Looking to Buy Into the E-Book Business?

Paul Constant — Thu, 09 May 2013 06:08:00 -0700

Last night, Eric Eldon and Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch reported:

Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC, the digital book and college book joint venture with Barnes & Noble and other investors, according to internal documents we’ve obtained. In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college book division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets.

The documents also reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year as it transitions to a model where Nook content is distributed through apps on “third-party partner” devices.

For a while now, Microsoft has been the only major tech player without its own e-book storefront. This looks like an attempt to buy into the market with an already-established brand. I'm not convinced that the Nook e-bookstore is worth a billion dollars, but this certainly would be the easiest way for Microsoft to play catch-up with Amazon, Apple, and Google.

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Will Money Tear the Avengers Apart?

Paul Constant — Wed, 08 May 2013 07:50:25 -0700

Deadline Hollywood has a great piece up right now about how Marvel Comics' notoriously cheap business practices are running headlong into actors who feel they're worth more than they're getting for starring in Marvel's wildly profitable movies.

The issue going forward is how many of the Avengers stars and starlets are still bound by early agreements and longterm options which Marvel can continue to exploit individually. To counter, I’ve learned the Avengers cast are becoming united behind Robert Downey Jr who is seen as the “leader” – like “a big brother” in the words of one rep - for all the younger actors in the ensemble. “He’s the only guy with real power in this situation. and balls of steel, too. He’s already sent a message that he’s not going to work for a place where they treat his colleagues like shit,” one source explains. Another rep tells me, “I have four words for Marvel – ‘Fuck you, call Robert.’” As Downey himself has said publicly about his $50M-plus payday, ”I’m what’s known as a strategic cost,” adding that Marvel is “so pissed” he earned that much.

It's funny—this almost exactly mirrors the way that Marvel has mistreated comics creators for decades now. (Read Sean Howe's excellent Marvel Comics: The Untold Story for more information about the history of Marvel's shameful history with artists and writers.) But unlike comics, where Marvel successfully bet that fans wouldn't care who was drawing Iron Man as long as Iron Man comics came out every month, I don't think an Iron Man 4 starring, say, Joel Edgerton as Tony Stark will be breaking any box office records, although it might still be a profitable movie. Could you imagine an Avengers 2 with an almost-entirely new cast? This issue, rather than superhero fatigue, might wind up being the thing that upends the Marvel Comics movie universe.

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NPR's Ari Shapiro Is Coming to Seattle to Ask Me Questions About American Savage

Dan Savage — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:05:49 -0700

And I'm going to ask Ari questions about what it was like to fly all over the country on Mitt Romney's campaign plane and if the rumors about the Romney boys are true and why there are no pictures of Ari in leather on his Instagram account. And you're invited...

Since this event is taking place the weekend of Pride—the night before the parade—Ari has agreed to interview me while wearing nothing but a lime green thong. More info at Town Hall's website. Tickets available through StrangerTickets.

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Another Book About Romney's Failure

Paul Constant — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:52:10 -0700

A Romney adviser's tell-all about what went wrong with the Romney campaign is being published next week, according to the Boston Globe.

The book – “A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account” – is written by Gabriel Schoenfeld, who says he was a senior adviser to Romney from December 2010 through November 2012.

“The book illuminates the chain of errors that ultimately contributed to Romney’s defeat,” reads a summary of the 66-page book, which is being published next Tuesday as a $2.99 e-book by the Penguin Group.

By my count, this is the second book to perform an autopsy on the 2012 election. The first, Politico's The End of the Line, was published disgustingly quickly after the election and included a few notable bits of trivia. The account that everyone's waiting for, Mark Halperin's Double Down: Game Change 2012, is still scheduled for fall of this year. I hope there's some juicy stuff in there, but I honestly think the 47% tape will probably be the most scandalous thing to come out of the 2012 election; on a personal level, both Romney and Obama are pretty un-dramatic people who tend to accumulate boring people for their teams.

But still, I'll definitely be reading this one. I can't wait to see what Schoenfeld says is the reason for Romney's failure. I'm betting the most obvious fact—that Mitt Romney is totally unlikable—won't be in the book.

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I Hope We'll at Least Get a Stirring Courtroom Speech Out of This

Paul Constant — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:26:45 -0700

Because the weather is nice outside and you're feeling good about the world, here's a bit of depressing news to give you perspective: Harper Lee is suing to regain the copyright of To Kill a Mockingbird from her literary agent:

The lawsuit alleges that Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of Eugene Winick, who represented Lee for over four decades, took advantage of the 87 year old author’s declining health five years ago, when he “duped” her into signing documents she did not understand.

I'm trying to imagine something lower than taking advantage of Harper Lee's infirmity and I can't. Pantsing Judy Blume comes in a close second.

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Children Are Parasites Who Take and Take and Take

Paul Constant — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:23:28 -0700

I got an e-mail this morning detailing the perfect Mother's Day gift for mothers who also happen to be total assholes:

Make May 12th An Atlas Shrugged Mother's Day

For one week only, take 10% off of the Official Women's "Atlas" Pendant & Necklace or, the Official Rearden Steel Dagny Taggart Bracelet. This Mother's Day, give the perfect gift to the woman who first inspired you.

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Maggie Nelson Calls Karen Green's First Book "An Astonishment"

Christopher Frizzelle — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:46:25 -0700

Karen Green was married to David Foster Wallace, and she's the one who discovered his body after he committed suicide. As Nelson writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The tender things may be painful for Green to remember; due to her crystalline, sincere rendering, they are also painful to read about. Perhaps because this is not the memoir of a couple married for decades — Green and Wallace had been married for but four years at the time of his death — the love here conveyed feels hot, blooming, then disastrously cut short, tragically adumbrated by all the trauma and anger that constitute suicide’s ugly gifts.

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A Few Things to Know About This Weekend

Paul Constant — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:14:21 -0700

In addition to Free Comic Book Day tomorrow, there are a couple things you should know about this weekend:

1. Due to a mistake that is too complex and inane to discuss in-depth, tonight's reading at Jack Straw Productions (4261 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle) didn't make it into the online readings calendar. I apologize to the good people of Jack Straw. Tonight's event begins at 7 pm, the suggested donation is five dollars, and the readers include Jack Straw writers Jeannine Hall Gailey, Josephine Ensign, Emily Perez, and Jay McAleer.

2. On Sunday afternoon at Town Hall, local actors Paul Morgan Stetler and Stranger Genius Marya Sea Kaminski will read some of Willa Cather's letters aloud. This sounds like a great idea. Then, on Sunday evening at Town Hall, Joshua E. S. Phillips, who wrote a book called None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture, appears in discussion with Ian Fishback, the soldier who sent a letter to John McCain in 2005 that launched the public discussion about torture. The two of them will talk about how torture became normal, discuss the reasons that torture happens, and try to understand what torture does to us all.

3. There are quite a few other events going on all weekend long. Visit our readings calendar for the full rundown.

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Two Things to Do on Free Comic Book Day

Paul Constant — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:00:30 -0700

1. Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day! Those are always a lot of fun. If you don't know the routine: You can stop by any participating comic book store (Seattle has quite a few of them) and pick up some comics, for the low cost of absolutely nothing. And tomorrow's free comic book day is a special one, because Seattle's newest comic book store will be opening for business on Capitol Hill for the very first time at 10 am. Yesterday, I stopped by Phoenix Comics for a quick chat with owner Nick Nazar. The space, located right next to Dick's on Broadway, is going to need a lot of work to be ready to open tomorrow morning, but it's starting to come together; there's a new coat of paint on the walls and the carpet was just about set when I visited. The back room is stuffed full of boxes of board games, role playing games, and dice.

Nazar says that a big shipment of comics were delayed and won't be in the store by the time the store opens, but all the Free Comic Book Day titles are already onhand. The space, which Nazar says will be about 50% games and 50% comics (including monthly comics and trade paperbacks from all the major comics publishers and some local presses, too), will also have some comfy seating and tables in the back for people to try out games. Phoenix Comics will be open from 11am to midnight Mondays through Fridays, and 10 am to 9 pm on Saturdays. Nazar says the store will be closed on Sundays "for now." It's a tough business climate for comics shops, but Nazar has a great location and experience with these kinds of operations; he worked for Texas comics chain Dragon's Lair for years before moving to Seattle. Nazar is working on the Phoenix Comics website—after a year of planning, the location came together so quickly that the last two weeks have been a blur of activity—but for now Twitter is the best way to keep in touch with the store.

2. And after you've visited a few local comics shops, you should stop by Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery tomorrow night, where young comics sensation Dash Shaw will be showing a short film and debuting his brand-new book, New School. I just got a copy of New School in the mail the other day, and it's a big, beautiful book; certainly Shaw's most ambitious work yet. (I haven't been able to sit down and give it the time it deserves yet—it's dense like a novel, and not the sort of comic you can plow through in an afternoon.) It should be a great cap on a beautiful Free Comic Book Day.

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