Recent Stories in Literature

It's a relatively quiet week for the Seattle literary scene, due to the closure of all Seattle Public Library branches, and the hoopla of Bumbershoot. On the bright side, this means that no Library materials are due and no late fines are accrued, for a week. On the less bright side, the Library is closed! Oh, the horror. And there is horror aplenty on this week's calendar, with genocide, environmental destruction, and yet more evidence that U.S. immigration policy and procedure has been less than stellar for many, many shameful decades.

Next week there will be a happy, fluffy bunny reading if I have to make it up.

08/30/10 12 a.m. The Seattle Public Library
The Seattle Public Library system is closed Aug. 30 through Sept. 6
In order to help meet $3M in budget cuts, the entire system is shutting down for a week, saving about $655K. This year, as opposed to last, some online Library services will be available. To leave a comment for the city librarian or the Library Board, call 206-684-0471. Be polite.

08/31/10 12 p.m. Seattle Mystery Bookshop
Jayne Castle (Jayne Ann Krentz)
Midnight Crystal
The (not very) pseudonymous author will sign book three in her Dreamlight Trilogy.

09/01/10 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Book Company
Judith Armatta
Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic
I have to admit, the whole genocide thing really freaks me out. The last time I tried to read one of these sorts of books, I had screaming nightmares for weeks, after getting through only a few dozen pages. I can't imagine what the journalist who reported on Milosevic's trial could talk about that wouldn't send me back into therapy. I'm not proud.

09/01/10 7 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Matthew Kahn
Climatopolis
The author will talk about "Urban Life in a Hotter World." Soylent Green is PEEEEEEOPLE! You heard it here, first.... (more)

The big news this week is the release of the third Hunger Games novel, Mockingjay. The dystopian young-adult trilogy is among the best of the past two years' YA releases. Reminiscent of early Stephen King, Suzanne Collins' novels are gory thrill-rides set in an indeterminate future where political and economic power is wielded through gladiatorial reality-television contests. These stories are classic hero(ine)'s journey plots with contemporary set-pieces. If you want to know "what the kids are up to, these days," the Hunger Games books are it.

08/23/10 6:30 p.m. University Bookstore, U-District
Christine Hartzler, Dave Rowley, & Matthew Simmons
Best of the Web 2010
Maybe.

08/23/10 11 p.m. University Bookstore, U-District
Release Party
Mockingjay
Go celebrate the release of Suzanne Collins' new book with a battle to the death.

08/23/10 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Book Company
Daniel Burton Rose
Guerilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970's
Seattleites have been raising hell and speaking truth to power for over a hundred years. Burton-Rose documents the George Jackson Brigade's campaign against "corporate and state institutions" in the 1970s.

08/24/10 7 p.m. University Bookstore, U-District
Terry Brooks
Bearers of the Black Staff
The ever-reliable local fantasy author touts the first book in a new Shannara series. One has to admire the man's consistency.

08/24/10 10 a.m. Secret Garden Books
Mockingjay Release Party
SGB is celebrating the release of the third Hunger Games book with an all day party. Prizes with purchase, a raffle, and munchies promised.... (more)

After, lo, these many months, I am finally getting my act together to post upcoming readings, signings, and various related bookish events for those with an interest in such things. Assuming Michael (our brave and noble editor, long may he reign, huzzah!) approves, I will post every Monday. (Perhaps a bit of flattery will ease the way.)

This week starts off with the long-awaited opening of ticket sales for Hugo House's 2010-2011 literary series, and closes out with beers, steers, and queers at Elliott Bay Books. Okay, I lied about two out of three of that last. I think. "Who knows?" she said whimsically, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the evening referring to herself in third-person.

Monday, August 16th

12 a.m. Hugo House
Hugo House Literary Series
Tickets for the fourth season go on sale today. Get 'em while they're hot! Featured authors include Nancy Rawles, Stacey Levine, Laura Love, and many others that I shall not list here. The season starts with Under the Influence on October 15, 2010, followed by Mother Knows Best on November 19, 2010. The series continues on February 18, 2011 with Brief Encounters, i.e. Hugo House: The Musical, and concludes with Born in the U.S.A. on March 18, 2011. Season ticket buyers will save $5/event: what a deal!

1 p.m. Seattle Mystery Bookshop
Carl Hiaasen
Star Island
Hiaasen's books populate U.S. airport and hotel news stands like triffids. It must stop. 

7 p.m. Cafe Racer
Gillian Gaar
Return of the King: Elvis Presley's Great Comeback
Gaar joins Cafe Racer in a "death day" luau in honor of The Pelvis. Rather morbid, if you ask me, not that anyone did.

7 p.m. The Red Door
Charles Bukowski's Birthday Party
Obviously the writer will not be present, unless something very unusual happens before 7 p.m.

7 p.m. University Bookstore, U-District
Carl Hiaasen
Star Island
Fans will be pleased to know that Hiaasen will sign up to six books per person.... (more)

Boo hoo? Seattle's own Boo Davis has been making her heavy metal quilts for years now. Thanks to her tough but cutesy designs, Boo's quilts have been featured in everything from BUST to British Vogue to Ye Olde Boing Boing, as well as making the gallery rounds.

And now in anticipation of her upcoming quilting book, Dare to Be Square Quilting: A Block-by-Block Guide to Making Patchwork and Quilts, she's landed a piece in the Style section of today's New York Times. In it, the quiltress dishes about her Quiltsryche made-to-order studio, veganism, crafting, and, of course, metal. Plus there's a slide show!

Boo may have toned down the hard rawk overtones--in the book, there's no devil's horn quilts, nor one with the phrase "rock out with your cock out," but she's still kept her quirky, design-friendly aesthetic, while giving good tips on how to quilt, using simple shapes and patterns (as in only squares and rectangles), even if you're just a beginner. The book's available August 31.

Author Doug Dorst reads from his collection of short stories, The Surf Guru, Thursday, July 22, at 7 p.m. at the Elliott Bay Book Co.

Doug Dorst is a three-time Jeopardy! champion, which may help explain why his collection of short stories, The Surf Guru, touches so convincingly on the details of wedding cake manufacture, painting at the time of van Gogh, botany, reptiles and their venom, and of course surfing accessories, over the course of 275 pages.

While his debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, was set in San Mateo County, in northern California, Dorst does not spend that much time in familiar waters, here. Outside of the eponymous story, seaside is scarce. As it turns out, the limpidly predictable "Surf Guru" is not even the collection's strongest work. (Only two stories fail to deliver: the brief rant of "Jumping Jacks," and the sketchy "The Candidate in Bloom.")

Where Dorst shines is when his characters are balancing on the knife edge of losing their shit entirely or breaking through to a new life. Contrasted with the inter- and intra-personal gore is Dorst's flatly casual prose: "Kacy heard bone crunch," "I hear the crunch of bone."

Women star in two stories. "Dinaburg's Cake" starts off Texas-quirky about a wedding-cake maker but packs a novel's emotional depth by close. The bob-and-weave toward the future is slightly less punchy in "Astronauts," as a young woman juggles break-ups, hook-ups, and housesitting while studying for her commercial truck driver's exam.

"Vikings" and "What Is Mine Will Know My Face" (featuring the same characters) may unearth uncomfortable memories of post-collegiate floundering, as life seems to get away from his dynamic-but-bedraggled duo. They're first stranded in the Mojave, meaning to head north to Alaska for easy fishing money, when they temporarily come into possession of a baby.... (more)

Elliott Bay Books (1521 10th Ave.) will host Kate Veitch on Monday, July 19th, at 7:00 p.m. Ms. Veitch is promoting her second novel, Trust, published by Plume Books. Without a Backward Glance, Veitch’s first novel, was a Library Journal Best Books 2008 selection.

Soap operas are the most popular form of television drama in the world. Nearly every country on the planet produces soaps, and programming is exported across cultures in a lightly regulated, media free-for-all that makes most industries green with envy. Step into any corner convenience store in Seattle and the odds are excellent that a television set behind the counter will be playing a serial, whether from Southeast Asia, Latin America, or the U.S.

There is now an all-soap T.V. network; soap magazines are one of the few periodicals that are not experiencing declining readership; hundreds of thousands of websites are devoted to the genre as a whole, to particular types of soaps, and individual programs have multiple fan sites where viewers can follow the doings of characters, actors, and producers. A keyword search on "soap opera" will produce over six million hits. Serial dramas contain some of the world’s longest-running programs and are the single most successful advertising vehicle ever created.

It should be no surprise, then, that the soap opera formula has crept into novels. Called domestic fiction, women's literature, or chick-lit, these novels owe more to Guiding Light than they do to Pride and Prejudice. The formula incorporates weddings, funerals, infidelity, natural disaster, mistaken identity, comas, soft-core sex, rivalries (personal, professional, political, familial...take your pick), and a handful of other tropes that even those who don’t watch soaps can easily name.

Trust includes all of the above and meshes them into a light, entertaining novel that owes much of its interest to minor characters. The novel opens on the heroine, Susanna Greenfield--wife, mother, art teacher, and doormat--playing doubles tennis with her husband, Gerry Visser, and another married couple. Susanna is overmatched and knows it: "As they played on Susanna managed several decent, practical serves,...but she felt besieged. Joe and Wendy were not just stronger but also more strategic players than her...." Susanna nonetheless soldiers on.... (more)

Vendela Vida is founding editor of The Believer, a literary magazine. The Lovers (Ecco Books) is her third novel. She will be at the University Bookstore (4326 University Way NE) on Thursday, July 15th at 7 p.m. to read and sign, and probably answer questions.

A few weeks ago I was in the electronics department of my local Costco when I realized that I was a time traveler. Somehow, without even noticing what was happening, I had skipped a decade: the world that I thought I knew had changed, and I knew nothing. I was as adrift as a headhunter in a Safeway. It was terrifying, but I survived.

I remembered that moment, and all the moments in my life when I've felt lost among the superficially familiar, while reading The Lovers, Vendela Vida's stark and graceful novel set on the Turkish Riviera.

With simple, restrained language Vida sketches out a few days in the life of Yvonne, widowed, purposeless, and simmering with an anger that she refuses to acknowledge. Her aimlessness lands her in Datca, in pursuit of memory, or the memory of a memory.

Though the room was empty, it still felt alive, as though a great number of people had congregated there the night before and departed in the early hours of morning.

Other characters drift into what is indisputably Yvonne's narrative: they speak, drink tea, act as semi-mystical guides, then drift away, leaving barely a dent in Yvonne's internal dialogue. Yvonne is so cocooned in the stories she has told about her life that she has stopped seeing the reality of it: "She felt she was tracing an unravelled ball of string to its source. She had been so happy at the beginning." This schism gives the novel a sense of detachment that emphasizes the drama of the climax.... (more)

Ivan Doig (Photo: A. Wayne Arnst)

The author Ivan Doig lives near Richmond Beach, just north of Seattle, but his heart is always in Montana. [Ed: Doig reads at the University Bookstore tomorrow, July 14, at 7 p.m.]

"Mississippi was William Faulkner's muse," Doig said, when we spoke by phone. "I guess Montana is mine."

Montana, specifically the Butte of 1919, is the setting of Doig's newest novel, Work Song, his tenth work of fiction over twenty years. It's a skittish, fast-moving novel that follows the exploits of Morrie Morgan, a dapper dandy with a bit of the scalawag in him. Morrie narrates the story in the best Dickens style; it's the musings of a rogue, and the reader can delight in Morgan's victories both intimate and large. 

Doig's novels are impeccably researched and filled with intriguing characters. In Work Song, his portrait of a frontier Butte is close to perfection. If the Butte of 1919 wasn't like this, it should have been.

"When researching books," he told us, "I like to go where Google doesn’t go. For Work Song, I went to Butte's old archives and dug through the nooks and crannies."

At the Butte Historical Society, he found an old photograph of the Butte Public Library in the early 1920s. That image, he said, "Went off in my mind like a firecracker." The library is a central location in Work Song, a place where Morrie finds a job and learns the town.

The reader follows Morgan as he weaves his way into the city, charms his landlord, the widowed Grace Faraday, and lands odd jobs here and there. He is a wholly original character, at once a walking encyclopedia and a brass-knuckle-carrying hard case. You can feel Doig's love of the character, who first appeared as a secondary player in Doig's earlier novel, The Whistling Season.

"Readers fell in love with him," Doig said. "When he's around, unexpected things happened. Morrie has flights of inspiration. I thought it would be interesting to see things through his eyes."

Doig is clearly a devoted storyteller. When he talks about the characters in his books, he speaks of them as living and breathing souls. Morrie Morgan is a particular type of early-twentieth-century characters. At times, he's a step or two away from the Harold Hill of The Music Man, but you feel he is also a provocateur who likes to stir the pot, not for personal gain, but simply to see how it'll work out. He's restless, easily bored.... (more)

Phil Campbell

Grassroots is based on a book called Zioncheck for President, by erstwhile alt-weekly reporter Phil Campbell. It's a hilarious, scarring, gadfly of a book built on the premise that all politics is local loco. Or maybe it's just that the people who decide to go into politics are "tetched" in some way to begin with.

Campbell contrasts his management of Grant Cogswell's ill-fated City Council campaign with the rise and all-too-literal fall of U.S. Rep. Marion Zioncheck, a Depression-era Washington state firebrand. Nothing is airbrushed out.

Campbell was at work at his day job in late 2006 when he got an email from his editor at Nation Books, saying that Stephen Gyllenhaal had read Zioncheck and was interested in making a movie from the book. After meeting up with Gyllenhaal at a hotel bar, Campbell signed away all the rights--"He can make the movie he wants. I didn't want to impose any restrictions on how so-and-so had to be portrayed, me or anyone else."

The movie's cast now includes Jason Biggs (American Pies), Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under), Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother), Cedric the Entertainer (as Richard McIver), and Tom Arnold (as the bartender). Presumably Capitol Hill's cafes and bars--in which much campaign strategizing takes place--will play themselves.

Campbell himself is visiting town this week--he lives now in Brooklyn, and works in Manhattan--for an appearance at the Sorrento's Night School series with The Stranger's philosophical eminence Charles Mudede. It'll be a "discussion about capturing the spirit of time and place in both words and film," and Campbell will also read from his new satirical novel set in Memphis in the age of global warming. It's this Thursday, July 8, and doors open at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free, but you must RSVP to kerri.benecke@hotelsorrento.com.

Tell me a little about your new book....

Last March, Kevin Malcolm and Spencer Fornaciari recorded the first episode of the Backroom Comics Podcast. Since then, they've recorded 71 episodes, covered the Emerald City Comicon twice, road-tripped to cover the Spokane Comicon, and expanded the show to include five more hosts. 

Kevin himself has gone from comics commentator to comic creator, scripting a story for ONI Press's compilation JAM! Tales from the World of Roller Derby. Kevin interviewed me about raising a kid on comics for the Father's Day episode of the podcast (forward to 16:50 above if you just want my smilin' face); I figured turnabout was fair play.

What are the secret origins of the Backroom Comics podcast? 

While listening to a podcast during a stormy Seattle day I was struck by lightning, and instead of injuring me it gave me the super power to ramble on and on about Metamorpho, Jimmy Olsen and Archie Andrews for hours on end. 

What makes your show different from other comics podcasts?

That's something we've been struggling with a bit because there are quite a few very good comic related podcasts out there that cover anywhere from comics in general to ones that just focus on reading Silver Age Flash stories. But I think we differ in a few areas from a lot of the other 'casts out there. We've made a concerted effort to not do fan-boy-message-board ranting and instead replace it with thoughtful, fun discussions on the comics we dig. We'll still talk about problems we have with individual issues or writers but it'll never just be, "Frank Miller is sUX0R!!!!" Also, the interests and knowledge of everyone that we've added to the show is quite diverse...oooh wait, you're asking about this in the next question...

How did you assemble your collection of hosts, and what perspective does each of them bring to the table?

Would you believe Quiz Night at the Old Pequliar? Spencer (BRCP's producer, camera-person, editor extrordinaire) and I quickly realized that just having me blather on about comics with no one to bounce off of would get boring very quickly, so we asked Greg (who I had met at OP trivia and befriended a year earlier) to come on board and then Pete and Jason (who I met at trivia as well) followed about 6 months after that. Ahe was a friend of Greg's, and Chris (our newest addition) was an old friend of Pete's. Each of the crew certainly does have their own "super power" and if I were to assemble an super-team based on their attributes I think it'd be:... (more)

If you have ever moved to The Big City, as I suspect you have, you will derive common cause and laughs from Sloane Crosley's collection of humorous essays, How Did You Get This Number. (No need to address your literacy issues--Crosley herself will read the essays to you tonight at 7 p.m. at the Sorrento Hotel and tomorrow at the University Bookstore).

Big cities lure ambitious people in search of conquest, much as they once lured marauders bent on same. Yet just as an invading army suffers from a long supply line, the big city interloper finds herself searching for the comforts of  that was so easy to find back home. The search for belonging can be a source of despair.

In a series of essays mostly about travel and being young in New York, Crosley deftly converts her confusion into thoughtful comedy.

Every once in a while, time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put on every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because ... Ooooh. Shiny.

For Crosley, The Big City was New York. Perhaps for you it is Seattle. Either way, you've probably experienced the shock of realizing that whether you achieve your big city dreams or not, getting the things that truly sustain you--friendship, love, and community--cannot, like professional success, be achieved through precocity or hard work. Hey! They didn't tell us that in Freshman Writing Workshop!... (more)

From the cover of the July/Aug 2008 issue of "Poets & Writers," back issues of which can be purchased here. And come on, if there was ever a frameable magazine cover, this is it!

Saturday last, I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn, doing my best to pub-hop NYC's Bloomsday festivities, which organizers had the good sense to move to the weekend. I didn't make it to more than a couple pubs, but still, it's something else to find yourself in a crowd of beer-swilling literati taking turns reading from one of the most famously difficult-to-read books in the English language.

Set 104 years ago today, James Joyce's Ulysses didn't do much besides follow the mentally anguished Leopold Bloom as he wanders Dublin for eighteen hours or so. But in the process of exploring Bloom's tortured emasculation, Joyce pushed the boundaries--or rather, shattered them--of what a novel could do, or even should be. Epic, multi-layered, densely referential and complex, it stands out as perhaps the greatest achievement of literary Modernism, and every June 16, around the world, people get together to celebrate the day that changed literary history.

Seattle, unfortunately, doesn't have a pub crawl. However, it does have the Wild Geese Players, a small volunteer company that gets together every year to do public readings from Ulysses for Bloomsday. Tonight starting at 7 p.m., they'll be taking the stage at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford to read from the "blue" chapter of the novel, Part II, Episode 15: Circe, which follows Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the red-light district. (The event is intended for adults--or at least mature audiences--only.)

If you've never actually been to a Bloomsday reading, I highly encourage it. Like too many people, I've never actually finished the novel, because the dense allusions and complex prose eventually overwhelm my ability to enjoy it in its own right. But despite all that, Joyce was also a master of voice and tone, and listening to it read out loud (the Circe episode is actually written as scripted dialogue, too) can add immensely to your experience and enjoyment.

Unfortunately, I don't know that they'll be serving drinks during the reading, but if a pint of stout or a Bushmills rocks is a necessary component of your Bloomsday entertainment (of course it is!), Good Shepherd's not too far from Murphy's Irish Pub, which should be having its Wednesday night music showcase to boot.

• Matthew Crawford talks about his now-in-paperback book Shop Class as Soulcraft at 7:30 p.m. tonight, May 12, at Town Hall.

I reviewed Matt Crawford's book when it came out in hardback when I was writing for the other site. I'm going to assume I feel the same way about its paperback version, but with the added bonus that the people it's intended for can now afford to buy it. Here's the slightly repurposed take:

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft is a peculiarly engaging read--it's a polemic about the necessity for self-directed work, an "I did it my way" memoir about a political science Ph.D. who resigned from a thinktank to fix motorcycles, and an illuminating critique of the "knowledge worker" paradise.

Probably because of the motorcycle repair, it's getting comparisons to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but Crawford is equally happy to tackle the after-effects of Taylorism and Druckerism, too.

Crawford casts a jaundiced eye on the practice of "upskilling" everyone to become knowledge workers--for one thing, society needs people who know how to make (and fix) things. Plenty of occupations remain that can't be outsourced--no one in India or China can replace your basement's leaky pipes.

But Crawford also draws a distinction between the managerial cubicle worker who devotes their efforts to team performance, and the kind of person who needs to see their accomplishment to feel rewarded by work. A month's uptick on a graph doesn't fill them with pride the same way. His focus on the rewards of working with your hands is an interesting one, because it turns preconceptions about the social status of work on their head.

You're not sorting people into book-smart and non-book-smart piles. Still, how would you console a parent whose full-of-potential kid read your book and decided to forgo academia for learning a trade?

I taught high shool Latin part-time for a year at a public high school. Maybe one kid out of 30 had a real interest in the language; the rest had been told they had to take it to get their SAT scores up. Some of these kids had flunked out of first year Spanish. The SAT-boosting rationale doesn't generate real engagement, and unless you're extremely disciplined it can't sustain the kind of effort it takes to memorize Latin noun declensions.... (more)

Free range isn't all it's cracked up to be when the grass is too wet from rain.

As the son of a little old Englishwoman who still raises chickens in her backyard, I read with interest the small book left to us by former Bainbridge Islander Minnie Rose Lovgreen, titled Recipe for Raising Chickens, now available in a third edition from NW Trillium Press. 

Subtitled "Simple, economical ways with eggs, chicks, broody hens, laying hens, general chicken care," the bookish pamphlet (or pamphlet-ish book) delivers on all fronts. Attendees of Tilth's annual City Chickens Coop Tour ("Did you know that Seattle has become known as a world-class chicken destination?"), chicken-raising noobs, and even Seattle University students will want to get in on Lovgreen's last words on poultry care.

Like Lao-tzu, Lovgreen saved up her pithy insights--"The main thing is to keep them happy"--until it was almost time for her to depart the earth. In 1975, she was diagnosed with cancer. It was thanks to Nancy Rekow, who tape-recorded interviews with Lovgreen in her hospital room, then edited and hand-lettered the text, that the book exists at all. (Another friend and neighbor, Elizabeth Hutchison, provided the pen-and-ink drawings that illustrate the book.)

Chapters are titled "The Broody Hen And Her Eggs," "Baby Chick Care," "Room And Board For Chickens," "Eggs," and "Virtues Of The Bantam Hen." (Lovgreen rates the bantam hen highly for egg-laying and chick-raising: "A bantam hen can cover as many as 18 to 20 chicks," she notes approvingly, adding, "A good-sized bantam can hatch out about 5 duck eggs, or 2 or 3 goose eggs, or 11 guinea eggs, or 9 turkey eggs. She'll even turn the large goose eggs over every day!")... (more)

This is what William T. Vollmann tells me about death and getting the story. We are at the bar at Sazerac downtown, and are just wrapping up a long talk over the Scotch he generously ordered (Highland Park, him; Laphroaig, me):

One of the great things, I think, about death, is that as we get closer to death we start to sense our own aloneness, and so, whatever the story is, even if we want to hide it from ourselves, it has to come up. So it's always great to talk to dying people, too. 

William T. Vollmann

Just past 50, Vollmann is no longer a have-gun-will-travel enfant terrible--but most except the enfant still applies. (When we spoke for this interview,his hazard-pay-worthy travels in Iraqi Kurdistan article had just appeared in Harper's, and he'd just finished writing another piece for Harper's on policy advances in suicide, with stops in Oregon and Switzerland.) His granite block of a head is topped by a buzz-cut stubble, his face weathered, and he couldn't have been a more agreeable former National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, telling me to call him "Bill."

Violence and Vollmann go together, not least because of his idiosyncratic, magisterial Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, 7-volume examination of humanity's "moral calculus" as it applies to violence that more or less exhausted McSweeney's Books entire publishing budget that year. His first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World grew out of a youthful, action-seeking sojourn to Afghanistan in 1982.

If you mention trips you regret not taking, he says things like, "I went to Iraq in '98 for Saddam's birthday, and I wish I had taken the trouble to go to Babylon. He had it rebuilt and each brick was stamped with his name. I would have enjoyed seeing that." Your story was about study abroad, and you shut up and sip your Scotch.

So it might surprise you to learn that his latest book centers on esoteric Noh theater. Anyone familiar with Vollmann's prolixity will smile along with his his tripartite title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater: with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines.

He's not kidding, of course. The list underscores that omnivorous Vollmann appetite for empathetic connection. In conversation, when cites someone else's opinion, he habitually takes up their voice and quotes them. It may be a paraphrase, but it's not derisive. He mentions several times how "alien" Noh is, and I hear, in part, a gratitude for the challenge of it. 

As a classical Japanese art form, Noh theater doesn't seem to have a Western equivalent. Vollmann and I talked about whether opera is similar, but I got the feeling that, in terms of accessibility, our opera is more like Kabuki. ("Noh is for the warrior," a Kabuki actor told Vollmann. "Kabuki is for the general public." To which Vollmann later appends: "Noh's violence has most often to do with the severance of ties.")

You have to imagine an alternate universe where opera split at the time of Monteverdi, and a branch that distilled opera to its essence grew. Noh is music drama: it has a canon of plays; men play the parts of men and women, with masks and costumes; and its performance is ritualized and highly demanding of both performers and audience.

The book touches on many things besides, but its general preoccupations are with how we see and represent the feminine, the transience of life and the immortality of art, and empathy. Knowing of his 20-year construction of Rising Up, I asked how long Kissing the Mask had been germinating, and he told me, "I guess you can say I've been working on the book since, you know, 1975." ... (more)

• Author Kim Severson gives a book reading this Monday, April 26, at 7 p.m. at the University Bookstore.

Kim Severson (Photo: Soo-Jeong Kang)

I’ve started to grow a little weary of food memoirs. Publishers seem to be churning out the life stories of culinary neophytes at warp speed, each with an increasingly dubious premise, and an ever-younger author.

Needless to say, I was delighted to receive Spoon Fed, New York Times food writer Kim Severson’s honest-to-goodness culinary memoir, a book that chronicles Severson’s growth, away from alcoholism and towards a happier existence, but also delivers eight chapters of dishy profiles of cooks like Alice Waters and Rachael Ray, and even Severson’s own mother. Severson is a veteran journalist, a great writer and a woman with stories worth reading (and recipes worth cooking).

The narrative of Severson’s own evolution ties the book together, but it is in her individual portraits of other cooks that Severson really shines. She renders her subjects in a light both candid and forgiving, such that a reader could never doubt her journalistic creed to always tell the truth. When she writes about Rachael Ray, a woman reviled by many "serious" cooks, she praises Rachael Ray’s work ethic and success, Ray’s sheer ability to get people to actually cook something, without glossing over her culinary shortcomings.

In writing about Alice Waters, Severson is able to capture and explain what is so aggravating and yet vital about the mistress of Chez Panisse. She writes: "The power and madness of Alice is that she operates outside the reality-based system most of us use. She has a way of demanding things that seemingly can’t be done...because it is simply the best way to do it." (When I lived in New York, I went to a lecture in which Alice Waters told us that we should be taking our compost to the Union Square Greenmarket. Yes, that’s right, she was proposing that we take our garbage with us on the subway--but on the subject of composting, she was right.)

Severson also takes the time to write about people like Leah Chase and Edna Lewis, enormously important but largely unknown cooks. Both Southern women, Leah Chase is the owner of Dooky Chase, a restaurant in New Orleans where she makes her famous Gumbo Z’Herbes. Edna Lewis is the author of several cookbooks* and is largely regarded as the Grande Dame of the Southern cooking. I asked Severson about her decision to include these women: "I wanted people to know these women who never had a TV show and aren’t great pop culture figures but had a great influence on how the nation cooks."

Retracing our culinary influences is an interesting theme with Severson. In a favorite New York Times piece from 2007 (a piece that reemerges somewhat in Spoon Fed) Severson goes to Italy on what she terms "the red sauce trail" to try and unearth the roots of her mother’s red sauce. It’s a piece that combines Severson’s own culinary roots and her own cooking passions with journalistic research. It’s some of her best writing. In Spoon Fed she chooses to write about the women who directly exert influence on the way we cook, cookbook authors, teachers and of course, her own mother. It’s a decisive turn away from restaurants and flashy chefs towards the sphere of home, family and personal life.... (more)

• Novelist Yann Martel reads from Beatrice and Virgil tonight at the Seattle Public Central Library. 7 p.m., Microsoft Auditorium, free.

While not working on the screenplay to Life of Pi, Yann Martel has been keeping busy as a novelist. His follow-up to his 2002 Man Booker Prize winner is titled Beatrice and Virgil, and it has left New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani feeling disappointed and perverted. She's right, the bright-eyed magical fabulism of Pi is nowhere to be found in Beatrice and Virgil, but she's also wrong.

Beatrice and Virgil is less a book than a ticking, butcher-paper-wrapped package, whirring with gears and cogs--like an orrery of art's relationship to unspeakable catastrophe. A slim 200-plus pages, the novel is yet a genuine attempt to move beyond the novel "format," and there is a richness to its perversity.

The first 30 pages deal with a novelist, Henry, and his attempts to publish a book about the Holocaust that combines an essay with a fictional story. "If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian," Henry argues, during a publisher's meeting. "With the Holocaust, we have a tree with massive historical roots, and only tiny, scattered fictional fruit. But it's the fruit that holds the seed!"

In this, he's in opposition to the camp of Adorno, who said simply, "To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric." In the immediate aftermath, in the mourning, who could disagree? The word Holocaust could totalize the experience, but words could not. The poetry came, in time, but six decades and counting later, every artistic "use" of the Holocaust is still scrutinized.

Henry's book would have been "for the needs of people today, the children of ghosts." Martel describes him as crushed by his publisher's rejection, indulging himself in silence, until the day that someone sends him Flaubert's "Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator," about a vicious young man who grows up slaughtering animals.

That "someone" turns out to be a taxidermist, who wants Henry's help on a play he's writing featuring a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil (both after Dante's guides in the Divine Comedy.) When we first meet them, they have a conversation that goes:... (more)

"Books! For FREE!!" is Great_Beyond's reminded of how cool this whole "library" thing is.

Anyone who has watched Antiques Roadshow on PBS, or caught History Channel’s Pawn Stars or American Pickers, knows the inherent rush that can be had from digging through a pile of stuff to find something of value.

Hands down, the best place in Seattle to experience that treasure finding rush is at the twice-yearly Friends of Seattle Public Library Book Sale. And the spring edition of the sale is coming up this weekend.

The sale is open to the public on Saturday, April 17, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, April 18, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Magnuson Park in the big hangar known as Building #30. Magnuson Park is located at 7400 Sand Point Way NE, in Seattle. You can get there by bus on Metro routes 30, 74 and 75.

(There is a special members preview and rare book auction on Friday, April 16, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m.)

The Library Book Sale was originally set up a few decades ago as a venue where SPL could sell books that it was withdrawing from circulation due to condition, declining popularity or the purchase of newer, better copies.

It was also started as a way to generate income for the library by selling all the books and other items that are donated or simply left at libraries or in library collection boxes. Generally, few people want to throw books in the trash; they just want to find a good home for them. (If you can help it, don’t put your unwanted books in those collection boxes that you see in grocery store parking lots. The owners of those boxes cherry pick the valuable books, sell the best books, make a few donations to non-profits and grind up the rest. Yipes! Give them to a library if you can.)... (more)

• Author William T. Vollmann talks about his exploration of Noh drama and femininity, Kissing the Mask, at the Northwest African American Museum at 7 p.m. tonight; tomorrow he's at Third Place Books.

William T. Vollmann, author, gun owner

There are two kinds of readers in this world: those that know of William T. Vollmann, and those that can't handle the truth. You could argue there's a third group of people who know of him, but can't keep up with his output. He's written 21 books in 23 years, which includes Rising Up and Rising Down, a 7-volume exploration of humanity's rationales for violence. You can't find that one anywhere, it's sold out. Hobos, prostitutes, illegal immigrants, and terrorists have captured his attention. He's been a war correspondent, and burned off his eyebrows on a trip to the North Pole.

I'm halfway through his latest, with its duffel-bag-sized title of Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater with Some Thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries, and Venus Figurines. At 200 pages in, it's been mostly Noh, through the recollections, interviews, and research of an enthusiast (not an expert, as Vollmann is careful to emphasize). Though he has just hung out with a 60-something geisha.

Reading Vollmann may be an uneasy experience--he has a talent for putting himself into comprising situations, and for speaking his mind while in them--but this book is filled with an unusual passion and sincerity. Along with copious footnotes--you could dismiss Vollmann as a "holy fool," but for the knowledge he possesses, which (let's face it) few of us would go through such trouble to get firsthand.

The combination of his perverse/idiosyncratic lines of inquiry with the academic rigor of his observation often yields a bittersweet, bite-of-the-apple result: you're wiser, but the world is weirder than you thought.

If you've ever wanted proof that Seattle has a mysterious success-retardant effect in publishing, the case of Invisible Ink should do the trick. Screenwriter and story structure teacher Brian McDonald, a long-time Capitol Hill resident and good friend of mine, wrote his guide to story back in 2003. Then he shopped the book around for seven years. He went to publishers with to-kill-for quotes like these:

If I manage to reach the summit of my next story it will be in no small part due to having read Invisible Ink. (Pixar's Andrew Stanton)

I recommend this fine handbook on craft to any writer, apprentice or professional, working in any genre or form. (Dr. Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winner)

I’ve sat down with at least a couple of dozen books that swore they could help me with my craft. Invisible Ink is the first one I’ve finished. (Aaron Elkins, Edgar Award-winner)

Not one publisher bit. There's a scene in The Family Guy, the first episode back from cancellation, where Peter lists all the other failed shows that Family Guy had to "make room for." It's hilarious, but also sad. (Have fun! Create your own shortlist of books published since 2003 that didn't need to be.)

But finally, Invisible Ink is available in paperback (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), and you can check out an online copy at Libertary.

It grew out of McDonald's classes on screenwriting and story around town, at 911 Media Arts and Richard Hugo House, and his ongoing work with the animation program at the University of Washington. A friend of his, who used to write for Seinfeld, wrote a pilot for a TV show of his own and asked for notes. When he got through with McDonald's comments, he said, "You should write a book."

It also grew out of the hard-knocks life of a Seattle screenwriter, applying to contests and fellowships, waiting to hear back, and unsealing, often, letters of rejection.... (more)

(via TBTL, who are in the midst of their TBTL-athon)

Author Sherman Alexie has parlayed his Colbert Report appearance into real fame, as he's booked on TBTL today. With Colbert he discussed his opposition to a digital media that doesn't protect authorial ownership. With Luke Burbank, today at noon, he gets into "the plan he's hatched for monetizing art in the digital age, and how (on a totally unrelated note) pickup basketball is the only way for grown men to express their love to each other." [UPDATE: Twitter just sent me this link to three new poems by Alexie.

Kirkus Reviews calls Matthew Flaming's debut novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, "impossible to resist," praising its "marrying poetic prose with hints of steampunk aesthetics." Closer to home, the Stranger's Paul Constant labels it "just deadly dull," adding that "There's nothing in the central mystery to entice the reader on."

So clearly it sparks differences of opinion. For me, this Booklicious review nails down the general outlines, and discontinuities, of the work: "Part historical fiction, part alternate reality, and wholly romantic, Flaming’s novel is a conglomerate of popular publishing trends and timeless storytelling elements."

The daily life of a turn-of-the-century New York subway construction worker is vividly evoked; the Kingdom of Toledo's founding by French pilgrims is carefully footnoted; the unlikely romance between young engineer Peter Force and math genius Cheri-Anne Toledo springs up amid their opposition to a powerful cabal starring J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison.

All is recounted by a peculiar old historian, closing up shop in Los Angeles, who is less convincingly elderly than reminiscent of that stodgy younger man you know who annoyingly litters his speech with literary archaisms. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, young men fond of archaisms, it's just not as significant of advanced age as it is of advanced bookwormery.)

There's an ambition to this agglomeration that isn't actually to write the ultra-selling novel, but to powerfully reimagine a splintering world as worlds of possibility colliding--this, sadly, is a task that exceeds Flaming's abilities, as yet, as a novelist. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.... (more)

Atul Gawande speaks Sunday, January 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 8th & Seneca. Advance tickets are $5 [brownpapertickets].

Atul Gawande, the Checklist Manifesto. At Town Hall on Sunday.

One of the most passed-around, must-read articles this summer among those interested in the future of health care was Atul Gawande's examination of McAllen, Texas, which has the distinction of being one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. [New Yorker].

Comparing the town's health care delivery system to that of its less pricey neighbor El Paso and to the Mayo Clinic, he revealed how entrepaneurial spirit, affinity for procedures, and reimbursement structures contribute to the county's extreme medical expenditures.

His conclusions were reassuringly frustrating (more doctor-patient time, less testing, and a centralized responsibility for the totality of patient care results in lower costs and better outcomes) and ominous (this model seems to be winning, nationally).

The article is emblematic of the lucid, evidence-based writing that Gwande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard associate professor, has regularly contributed during his decade-long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He appears as part of Town Hall's Future of Health Lecture Series tomorrow in support of his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto [amazon], a simple and effective response to the enormous strains resulting from the demands to make sense of the increasing complexity of scientific discovery.

Opening with surgical anecdotes sure to grab the attention of lovers of grisly medical mysteries and spanning beyond the operating theater to other fields, he aims to show the pivotal role of the checklist. The topic, while perhaps not the most riveting on its surface, has powerful and wide-ranging implications and seems especially timely in this month of resolutions for self-improvement.

Few authors are as successful in shape-shifting and genre-hopping as Michael Chabon. From the epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to the mind-boggling Jewish-Alaskan homage to crime noir, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, to the sword-swinging adventure tale, Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon has always shown an incredible knack for adopting and reinventing whatever writing style he takes on.

Chabon's newest book, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, shows off Chabon the essayist, thoughtfully dissecting and reflecting upon what it means to be a man in modern America.

"A father is a man who fails every day," Chabon writes in the book's first essay, "The Loser's Club." It is a line that serves as both a wonderful introduction to the stories ahead and as an invitation to the rest of us to go ahead and join the club. Nothing to be ashamed of in here.

While Manhood for Amateurs is certainly told from a male perspective, the book is by no means a boys-only tree house of stories. In fact, many of the essays are either about, or are at least inspired by, the women in Chabon's life. From his mother's support and eventual consolation following a failed comic book club, to the dazzling pride and adoration he feels for his own daughter during her bat mitzvah, Manhood for Amateurs is as much about being a man as it is an ode to the women we love, who have the patience enough to love us back.

In "A Woman of Valor," Chabon reminisces about one of his first flames, the little-known DC Comics superheroine, Big Barda. For nine edifying pages, Chabon takes us on a journey through the history of Barda and her contemporaries (Wonder Woman, Super Girl, Sheena) and proclaims, after much rumination and analysis, Barda to be the most perfect of the super heroines.

Lacking the usual chauvinist cliches--the "tininess" of Shrinking Violet, or the "insubstantiality" of Phantom Girl, or the nonsensical narratives (or lack thereof) of Wonder Woman and Super Girl--Barda was, according to Chabon, the first true female role model in the world of comics. Not only was she strong and vigilant and fully capable of kicking some ass, she was also intelligent, thoughtful, empathetic, and vulnerable only to those who had earned her trust and her love. Most importantly, Barda was submissive to no one.... (more)

Tonight at 7 p.m., Greil Marcus, one of the country's most astute cultural critics and music journalists, stops by Seattle Central Public Library to speak about his new work: A New Literary History of America (Harvard Univ. Press, $49.95), a doorstop anthology of work by the best and brightest in American letters, edited by Marcus.

The book is somewhere between pop culture compendium and Comp. Lit. wet dream: clocking in at over a thousand pages and featuring essays by everyone from Camille Paglia to Ishmael Reed, it ranges widely over the bric-a-brac of American culture. "Literature" is a bit of a misnomer, as the cultural products explored include everything from jazz to Mickey Mouse to war memorials, stretching from the Founding to Obama's election.

Marcus, a long-time music journalist who started his career in the early days of Rolling Stone before moving on to the Village Voice and others, has long since established himself as one of the most insightful writers in the country. He did more than most any other journalist to establish pop music writing as a serious endeavor, and has long since expanded his purview to everything from visual art to political culture. So even if the thought of dropping nearly fifty bucks for his book is a bit of a stretch, the talk along is worth hitting.