Books, Portland Mercury

King of the Hill

Courtney Ferguson — Wed, 15 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Joe Hill's great new horror novel, NOS4A2, is a wild ride. by Courtney Ferguson

THIS IS GOING to sound like sacrilege, but Joe Hill is catching up to his pappy.

As many have noted, his dad is a little indie writer by the name of Stephen King—heard of him? Well, Hill is fully aware of his father's shadow; in the author's note to his new book he writes about a motorcycle ride he took with King, "following him along his back roads with the sun on my shoulders. I guess I have been cruising his back roads my whole life. I don't regret it." Nor should he—he's better for it. Hill's new horror-fantasy novel, NOS4A2 (sound it out like good little Renfields!), makes that abundantly clear with chilling, comically maniacal ease.

Hill is no stranger to horror epics; he's also the writer of the exceptional comic series Locke & Key, a mystery about an ancestral New England mansion full of magical keys. It's a beautiful collaboration with illustrator Gabriel Rodríguez, who also contributes his talents to Hill's new 700-page doorstopper.

NOS4A2 tells the story of a tough little cookie named Vic McQueen, who can use her trusty bike to find lost objects, no matter how lost. She makes "inscapes" in reality, using her bike and mind to bridge worlds. One day, in a teenage fit of rage, she sets out to "find trouble," and the 17-year-old gets it in spades at the doorstep of Charles Talent Manx III. He too can bridge realities—only he's not using his powers to find lost teddy bears. He steals kids and ferries them to his hideaway—an inscape he calls Christmasland, an amusement park filled with candy canes and endless repercussion-less fun. What follows is a decades-spanning game of cat-and-mouse between Vic and Manx, every dealing coming at a higher and higher cost to the world-weary Vic.

Hill's personal magical power is in making his characters likeable and broken and relatable, and then putting them into the most harrowing of scenarios. He understands that great horror is seeing someone you care very much about being stalked by a Rolls-Royce-driving monster. And if there are notes of King's style in NOS4A2, it's because Hill inherited an ear for dialogue and easy readability. This is a genetically blessed man who can write a mean story, and he does so in effortless prose that feels natural and breezy, even when he's chasing you down with an autopsy hammer.

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Intergalactic, Planetary

Erik Henriksen — Wed, 15 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

The Human Division: John Scalzi serializes the future. by Erik Henriksen

THE FUTURE IS COMPLICATED. As Harry Wilson—the closest thing The Human Division has to a main character—points out, "it's a hostile universe and we should be prepared at all times to kill anyone we meet." That's the cheery philosophy that's been drilled into him; as a soldier for the Colonial Union, he's supposed to be on the front lines of humanity's endless interstellar wars. But for Wilson, things haven't worked out that way: By the time The Human Division begins, the Colonial Union is in chaos, facing a group of unified aliens, the Conclave, not to mention a possible rebellion by Earth. Wilson, meanwhile, is stuck doing glorified tech support for the "band of not-so-lovable losers" onboard the Clarke, a beat-up diplomacy ship that gets the lousy jobs literally no one else in the galaxy wants.

In case all that exposition wasn't a big enough hint, The Human Division—the fifth in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series—probably isn't the best place to jump in. (That'd be 2006's Old Man's War, or 2008's self-contained Zoe's Tale.) For the initiated, however, this Human Division thing is one of Scalzi's best.

I say "thing" because The Human Division was originally released piecemeal, with a new "episode" released weekly and digitally. Now bound together, they create something that's not quite a novel—it's too wide-ranging, too segmented—but not quite a bunch of short stories, considering that a bunch of the episodes share characters, and all of them dovetail in an impressive feat of literary engineering. There's a drawback to the book's episodic nature—exposition gets repeated, a lot—but it's balanced out by the format's freedom. The Human Division is all over the place: There's military sci-fi! There are Nazis in space! Jokes about how terrible the Chicago Cubs are, even centuries in the future! Dog-eating plants! Salinger-esque sibling squabbles! Brains in boxes! Rush Limbaugh, pretty much! A murder mystery? A very patient alien dealing very patiently with those Nazis! "Never a dull day in the lower reaches of the Colonial Union diplomatic corps," Wilson cracks, and he's right: The Human Division's episodes are great, and together, they demonstrate not only how clever Scalzi can be, but also how good he is at thrills, comedy, politics, and making jokes at the expense of the Chicago Cubs. The fact that you never know what you're getting next in The Human Division is one of its perks. An even greater one is how well all those unknowns work together.

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Time Warp

Alison Hallett — Wed, 01 May 2013 04:00:00 -0700

More crazy, mind-melting brilliance from Dash Shaw. by Alison Hallett

DASH SHAW is kind of a weirdo genius. And while I don't know that he does tons of hallucinogens, it would certainly explain a few things. Shaw is preoccupied with perception and its limits: Take, for example, 2010's batshit crazy Body World, a jittery graphic novel about a drug that gives its users telepathy-esque powers to experience other peoples' feelings.

Similar territory is mined in Shaw's new graphic novel New School, just published by Fantagraphics Books. The plot hinges on the construction of an Epcot-like amusement park, where each section of park is dedicated to a different period of time or significant historical event. Every stoner who ever hazily concluded that time ain't nothing but a construct: This one's for you.

There's a lot going on in New School, but at its simplest, it's a story about a boy's love for his older brother. Young Danny looks up to his brother Luke, admires everything he does in that dumb, slightly masochistic way that young kids love their older siblings. So when Luke is sent off to a mysterious country (known as "X") to help train new employees at the time-amusement park, Danny eventually follows. Stranded in a strange land where they don't speak the language, Danny and Luke are perfect teenaged misfits, and they duly rebel against a weird society they don't understand. (A scene where Danny starts insulting strangers because he realizes no one speaks English is laugh-out-loud funny.)

Due to some printing delays in receiving hard copies of the book, I had to read New School very quickly in order to meet my deadline for this article. It was easy enough to do: The oversized volume features plenty of big panels and wordless spreads. But reading New School too quickly is a mistake—this is a complex book, both visually and conceptually. As Danny grows from boy into man, Shaw layers colors and patterns over what began as a simple, black and white story. The experience of reading New School is like temporarily inhabiting the body and brain of an artist: This is what growing up might feel like for someone who lives and breathes colors and shapes.

Back in 2008, Shaw published Bottomless Belly Button, a great, relatively not-weird brick of a graphic novel about adult siblings whose parents announce they're getting a divorce. His follow up, Body World was funny and strange and brilliant, but it didn't quite have Belly Button's heart. New School is located somewhere in between: It's heady, hallucinatory, and bizarre, but it's grounded in the simple experience of growing up in the shadow of a beloved older sibling.

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10-Year Itch

Alison Hallett — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

A handy guide to the Stumptown Comics Fest, and some unsolicited advice for the festival. by Alison Hallett

A DECADE AGO, the Stumptown Comics Festival threw open the doors of an old church and became Portland's first creator-focused comics convention. This year, Stumptown celebrates its 10-year anniversary at its more recent home, the Oregon Convention Center. Over the years, the festival has hosted guests like web cartoonist Kate Beaton, Blankets creator Craig Thompson, Essex County's Jeff Lemire, and Bone creator Jeff Smith—as well as countless independent creators of comics and zines.

"Stumptown is and has always been an arts festival, focused primarily on the art form of comics and the people who create them," says Shawna Gore, chair of Stumptown's board of directors. It's a place to reliably meet your favorite creators, discover new artists, hear interesting panel discussions, and score unique, reasonably priced prints.

It's also a festival that has long struggled with organizational and personnel issues. This year, longtime festival director and founder Indigo Kelleigh passed the reins to a new set of (mostly volunteer) organizers. It's clear that some balls were dropped in the transition: Invited panelists took to Twitter to gripe about not knowing their schedules a mere week before the festival, and local media (myself very much included) aired similar grievances when the festival's schedule wasn't posted in a timely fashion.

No one wants to say anything on the record—this is a small town, after all—but many in Portland's tight-knit comics community have expressed concerns about the festival's organization, or lack thereof. Plus, Stumptown is no longer the only game in town: Within the last year, Portland saw the debuts of both the well-attended, pop culture-oriented Rose City Comic Con and the small, artier festival the Projects.

Stumptown's Gore stresses that Stumptown isn't competing with Rose City or any other local convention. "Stumptown has always been more focused on the people who create comics and on opening that world up to people who are fans of the medium," she says, rather than the more pop culture-focused aspects of the comics world. Time will tell whether audience members feel the same way.

This year, Stumptown Comics, Inc., officially became a nonprofit. This means more access to grants, says Gore, and the implementation of year-round programming and educational efforts. Here's hoping a little organizational house cleaning happens along the way. In the meantime, here are a few unsolicited suggestions for Portland's favorite comics fest on its 10th birthday.

Consider a New Venue

Sure, at its current size, the Oregon Convention Center is the best place for the festival—but who says an indie comics festival needs to be so damn big? What about a smaller, more curated festival in a more appealing venue—Southeast Portland's YU, say? The Convention Center is where fun goes to die.

Drop Ticket Prices

Ten bucks a day seems a little steep, considering I'm only going to spend more money inside. (For comparison, Wordstock is $7 a day.)

Expand Outreach Outside of the Comic Book Community

This year's festival outreach seemed to take place mostly on the festival's website. There are obvious problems with this as an outreach strategy.

Renew Focus on Publicity and Marketing Efforts

On a similar note, this year's publicity efforts were abysmal. Hire someone who can write a press release, and make sure they send it out with plenty of notice. And for the sake of attendees, press, and participants alike, post the damn festival schedule well in advance.

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Panel by Panel

Stumptown's Panels and Workshops

FLOATING WORLD COMICS proprietor Jason Leivian has become one of Portland's most reliable curators: He brings top-notch talent to his store for readings and signings, and back in October he successfully organized Portland's first international experimental comics fest, the Projects. Leivian put together the creator panels at Stumptown this year, and it shows: This year's lineup is excellent. There are also a number of workshops for artists and writers, targeted toward improving skills and sanity—those were curated by artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner, who has helmed comics workshops for kids at Cosmic Monkey Comics.

Here are a few of our picks—the complete schedule of panels can be found at stumptowncomics.com.

Trek in the Park: The Five-Year Mission

This year, Trek in the Park concludes their popular summertime theater series with a live production of classic Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Producers Adam and Amy Rosko join members of the cast and crew to discuss Trek in the Park's past and future. Hosted by Mercury News Editor Denis C. Theriault, who owns a Spock costume.

Sat 11 am, Room B114

Meathaus Reunion

This all-star panel brings together Becky Cloonan, Brandon Graham, Farel Dalrymple, and Dash Shaw, all former members of the Meathaus comics collective.

Sat noon, Room B114

Composing Comics

Artist Jonathan Case—creator of the charming Shakespearean monster tale Dear Creature, and artist on the chilling and acclaimed graphic novel Green River Killer, about the infamous serial killer—offers a workshop about composing comics page layouts.

Sat 1 pm, Room B113

Judge Dredd: Mega-City One and Beyond/Judge Minty screening

Panelists, including New York Times comics critic Douglas Wolk, discuss the long-running Judge Dredd comic; plus, a screening of the fan-made film Judge Minty.

Sat 3 pm, Room B117

Willingham Speaks

Apparently, Fables creators Bill Willingham likes to talk. Here's a panel where he does just that.

Sat 4 pm, B114

Dylan Williams Tribute Panel

Friends and colleagues of the late Sparkplug Comics creator Dylan Williams share stories and commemorate Williams, who died of cancer in 2011.

Sat 5 pm, Room B114

Freelancer Panel

Comics creators Matt Bors (Life Begins at Incorporation), Erika Moen (DAR!), Natalie Nourigat (Between Gears), and local attorney Katie Lane provide practical advice on freelancing.

Sat 5 pm, Room B117

Kickstarter + Indie Comics

Kickstarter is an undeniable force in the comics world these days—so if you're eyeing it for your own project, you won't want to miss this panel with Kickstarter's project specialist for comics, Jamie Tanner.

Sun 2 pm, Room B117

Boulet Spotlight

Influential French cartoonist Boulet makes a rare North American appearance, for a discussion about his process, sensibilities, and views on publishing.

Sun 3 pm, Room B117

Queer Culture in Comics

Ed Luce—of the fantastic Henry & Glenn Forever and Ever, about the love affair between Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig—joins Andy Mangels, Erika Moen, Terry Blas, and others to discuss queer identity in comics.

Sun 4 pm, Room B114

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Who's Who

Parsing the Guest List

Portland is silly with comics creators—look no further than downtown's Periscope Studio for a dizzyingly talented array of writers and artists. We mean no disrespect in focusing on the out-of-towners in our highlights reel of festival guests; it's just that we're lucky enough to have people like Jeff Parker, Ben Dewey, Erika Moen, and Colleen Coover to write about all year-round. (Full disclosure: Many of those very same locals have appeared in Comics Underground, the comics performance series I produce with Mercury Senior Editor Erik Henriksen.)

Dash Shaw

Dash Shaw is still probably best known for his popular autobiographical comic Bottomless Belly Button, though I'm more fond of the batshit crazy BodyWorld, which blurs the line between narrative fiction and hallucinogenic drug experience as well as anything Burroughs ever wrote. Shaw's got a new book out, New School, which he'll be hawking at Stumptown.

Bill Willingham

Bill Willingham's beloved and long-running Fables is one of those books that everybody likes. If you haven't read many comics, Fables wouldn't be a bad place to start−it's an engaging series populated by familiar fairytale characters.

Hope Larson

Hope Larson's lovely, dreamy graphic novel Gray Horses is absolutely great, while her recent adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time was a best-case version of a book that probably didn't need to be adapted in the first place.

Becky Cloonan

One of the cool kids of comics, artist Becky Cloonan has done noteworthy work on such titles as Demo (with Brian Wood) and Batman.

James Kochalka

For 14 years, James Kochalka has documented his life, day by day, in the popular diary comic American Elf. He's also the cartoonist laureate of Vermont!

Brian Hurtt

Artist on such acclaimed and badass titles as Queen and Country (written by local Greg Rucka, also appearing at Stumptown) and Sixth Gun.

Boulet

Influential and prolific French cartoonist Boulet makes a rare stateside appearance—sponsored by the French Embassy, so you know this shit's fancy.

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A Black-and-White World

Courtney Ferguson — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Venturing into childhood with the very adult Gilbert Hernandez. by Courtney Ferguson

GILBERT HERNANDEZ has been living in a clean-lined world of his own making for 30 years now. Longer if you count all the time he spent with his nose in comic books as a kid. The inestimable comic book pioneer, co-creator of the seminal Love and Rockets, is used to seeing things in black and white, but what used to be a cut-and-dry fact—kids probably shouldn't read his comic books, raunchy and awesome as they are—has been upended with his new all-ages comic book Marble Season.

I spoke with Hernandez on the phone from his home in Vegas, and while I giggled like a dunderhead, he was charming and erudite about his semi-autobiographical foray into funnies. "I'm really happy with Marble Season. I can actually show people my comics. At least my daughter anyway, she's 12. So she has to wait [to see my other comics]." Um yeah, just like I'm probably going to hold off on introducing my niece to the big-boobied, gun-toting, sex-filled world of Fritz Martinez in 2010's High Soft Lisp. But Marble Season is great for kids, and especially for adults who remember being kids.

It's an appealing book, autobiographical in that Hernandez took chunks of his childhood in Oxnard, California, and interspersed them into a drugstore comic book world, à la Little Lulu and Dennis the Menace. But unlike those static comics, Hernandez's characters learn and fight and change like real kids. Marble Season's vignettes center on Huey, a comics-lovin' kid with a panache for storytelling, as he and his brothers get into suburban neighborhood adventures with their gang of friends. "I took the more amusing bits of my childhood and strung them together in a story. I wanted to be specific... specific TV shows, specific commercial jingles, specific songs of the era," he says. "I do fudge it a little bit though. It takes place in a generic 1964, but some of the things they refer to didn't happen for another couple years."

In many ways, Marble Season is not that different from Hernandez's amazing Palomar stories from Love and Rockets. Okay, well, it's hugely different—it's not an epic, there's no serial killers or big boobs or magical realism, no Luba—but the underpinning is the same. All of Hernandez's all-ages characters are curious, thoughtfully nuanced, and full of the vivid expressions and body language of his adult worlds, as if the Riverdale of Archie Comics suddenly acquired a previously unknown depth. Or Little Archie & Co. came face to face with the fact that it's super frustrating to be a kid and like Huey, your mom might trash your prized and near-complete collection of Mars Attacks trading cards. "That's a funny story because that's very accurate to what really happened. I like to rub it in—I tell her, 'You know how much those Mars Attacks cards are worth now!?' Oh my god, if she knew what they were worth..." Hernandez says.

And if all-ages comics aren't your normal Gilbert Hernandez bag—no matter how well done—then hold onto your britches 'til later this year when he burns his family-friendly bridge with Maria M., "an ultra-violent gangster saga" with tons of sex and violence, he promises. But for now, Hernandez revels in the simple pleasures of a neighborhood where little girls swallow marbles, war games prevail, and comic books are king.

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A Life in Food

Alison Hallett — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

The slightly insufferable graphic memoir of a life-long foodie. by Alison Hallett

I WANTED TO LIKE Lucy Knisley's Relish much more than I actually did. Despite clean, cheerful drawings and an upbeat tone, this little graphic novel about Knisley's life-long immersion in New York's food culture feels less like a memoir than a surface-level catalog of Lucy Knisley's Awesome Foodie Life.

Knisley was raised by food-loving parents immersed in New York City's then-nascent food scene, and she grew up around people whose lives, and livelihoods, revolved around food. She captures an interesting moment in New York's food scene (before a flood of culinary school grads professionalized the city's kitchens), but Relish is light on personal reflection and heavy on sentences like, "My mom would occasionally help cater big shoots for Annie Leibovitz, the famed photographer." Anecdotes about begging foie gras from guests' plates at a dinner party or trying to hail a cab in upstate New York all carry a slightly exhausting waft of self-satisfaction—like a beloved child repeating well-worn anecdotes from a family's cherished mythology.

The recipes at the end of each chapter are gems, clearly explained and cleverly illustrated—I'll be making a few batches of Knisley's sangria this summer—but if it's memoir Knisley wants to write, she needs to dig a lot deeper.

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Mommy Wars

Alison Hallett — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Portland spawns Monica Drake's new novel. by Alison Hallett

"IF NEW YORK IS THE CITY that never sleeps, Portland is the city that never throws anything away," Monica Drake writes in her new novel The Stud Book. And "Portland is a city of vocalized opinions and insta-activism"; and "In the winter, even the days were dark in Portland."

It's not quite accurate to say that our fair city is a character in Drake's newest—The Stud Book is a book about motherhood, and so it seems more fitting to describe Portland as the womb in which Drake's characters gestated, where in utero they absorbed grunge music and Henry Weinhard's beer, and learned how to separate the recycling.

The Stud Book opens on a zoologist observing a pregnant worm, musing on its resemblance to a foreskin—it simultaneously establishes an anthropological bent to the novel's action, zeroes in on reproduction as a central theme, and establishes Drake's cheerful willingness to use the male anatomy as the basis for even the most unflattering comparisons.

The group of four female friends at the core of The Stud Book are lifelong Portlanders who grew up with Satyricon, blown-out warehouse districts, and dive bars that didn't card. Now middle aged, some of them have weathered Portland's transformation into a finicky bourgie burg better than others. They variously have, want, and don't want children; those with husbands struggle to navigate a route between fidelity and routine, and those without dabble in prostitution, or forge on alone.

The Stud Book is a big, digressive novel, and there's a recklessness and randomness to its plot that some readers will find frustrating. Drake is more interested in how and why people do what they do than in tidy storylines; her characters crash into each other for sex and comfort and companionship, like the big animals they are. Some story threads resolve and some don't, and there aren't so much narrative arcs as narrative eddies, little moments that swirl and disappear without a trace.

More problematically, The Stud Book reads a bit like a serious novel that was conceived as a comedy, still carrying traces of a snarkier, more satirical first draft. And so characters end up with names like Arena, Humble, Nyla, and Celestial—jokey names for serious characters, for what is ultimately a serious novel. One character runs a sustainability-focused store where nothing is bought or sold, and while perhaps the point is to poke a little fun at a dreamy, privileged sort of activism, it reads like a vestigial joke, unsuited for the big, grownup novel it's attached to.

The Stud Book is vulnerable to the same criticisms as Portland itself—this is very much a novel about quirky white people. What saves Drake's novel, though, is that she ultimately avoids the easy Portlandia punchlines in favor of a view of modern-day Portland that's squarely rooted in the city's past.

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Brevity's Playground

Matt Stangel — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Scout Books and Future Tense team up for a pocket-sized series. by Matt Stangel

A FEW WEEKS BACK, we reported on the first book of poems in a series to be jointly released by local publishers Tin House and Octopus Books, and now the local literary cross-pollination continues: independent press Future Tense Books has combined forces with tiny-book-makers Scout Books to produce a series of pocket-sized quick reads.

The collaboration makes a lot of sense. Scout Books specializes in size: 32-page, 3.5" x 5" blank notebooks and various projects utilizing those standardized dimensions, like their illustrated makeovers of literary classics or their palm-sized collections of cocktail recipes. Meanwhile, Future Tense has a decades-strong reputation as a publisher invested in experimentation and new voices, willing to take risks like Gary Lutz's A Partial List of People to Bleach or Jamie Iredell's The Book of Freaks—seamlessly moving between collections of poems and short stories, scrappy chapbooks and perfect-bound full-lengths.

A publisher with Future Tense's versatility has the right personality to explore Scout Books' standard print dimensions, to make a playground of brevity.

Out of the three chapbooks released to kick off the new series, Sommer Browning's The Presidents (and Other Jokes) feels like the most appropriate fit for the Scout Book format. The Presidents starts with one-liners about each of the 44 US presidents—for example, "They had to impeach Andrew Johnson twice before he agreed to change Extreme National Makeover to The Reconstruction"—while the second half of the book presents a laundry list of non sequitur wisecracks and tweet-length observations: "Cemeteries are full of has beens," or, "Hard to believe G.G. Allin and my grandmother were the same species." Throughout are illustrations and drawings by the author and her sister, Casey Browning.

Where The Presidents can feel a bit like the digital world creeping into the analog, local artist Melody Owen's Dream Journals: When I Was Nineteen, I Was an Old Man has a pre-internet feel: composed of "dreams, memories and collages... taken from her journals circa 1989-2000," Dream Journals recalls a time when journaling was not a social activity, but a private record of the self. Owen's writings capture the fast-motion tectonic shifts of the subconscious, incorporating collages of dragonfly wings sprouting from lengths of firewood, or milkmen stalked by giant, murderous squirrels.

Perhaps the most traditional literary outing of the inaugural Future Tense-Scout Books releases, Aaron Gilbreath's A Secondary Landscape details a road trip through the Pacific Northwest that the author took with a close male friend at age 20. A buddy story, Secondary Landscape asks the big questions: Why are we here? How are we to understand ourselves in an indifferent universe? What, if anything, is the meaning of all this? Gilbreath searches for answers via drugs and nature, mysticism and observation—but after helping a schizophrenic woman evade imaginary assailants and partaking in some gnarly-sounding PCP experimentation, Gilbreath discovers the relationship between enlightenment and self-destruction, truth and distortion.

These new Future Tense titles will be celebrated this Saturday, April 13 at 7 pm at the Independent Publishing Resource Center with readings by the authors and intros from Future Tense's Kevin Sampsell and Bryan Coffelt. It's free, and there will be drinks!

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Magic School Bus

Alison Hallett — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Mary Roach takes you on a tour of the alimentary canal. by Alison Hallett

THE HUMAN DIGESTIVE SYSTEM is the most conventional subject matter approached so far by science writer Mary Roach—when you've written about sex, cadavers, and space travel, the alimentary canal seems downright tame. That Gulp is nonetheless bizarre, fascinating, and hilarious is a testament to Roach's personable writing style and endless curiosity. It's not so much that she chooses great subjects, as it is that she has a knack for finding what's interesting in any subject: Roach's genius lies in extending the scope of her material in surprising, creative ways.

And so we learn, in a chapter on taste, that catfish skin is covered in taste receptors, and that the fish are "basically swimming tongues"; a chapter on digestion touches on the nutritional properties of prune pits, leading to the revelation that Vancouver, Washington, once housed a pro-prune contingent known as the Prunarians. In a chapter titled "Up Theirs," Roach visits a prison and talks to a convicted murderer who's practiced in smuggling contraband in his anus. From there, it's but a brief jaunt to a court case where an inmate was "convicted of squirting a correctional officer with a feces-filled toothpaste tube, a violation of Iowa Code section 708.3B, 'inmate assault—bodily fluids or secretions.'"

By necessity, there's lots of spit, poop, and butt talk in Gulp, and those with extreme cases of squeamishness might want to sit this one out. It could be worse though! "I have tried, in my way, to exercise restraint," Roach promises. "I am aware of the website poopreport.com, but I did not visit."

Roach is an engaging writer, but her need to entertain can distract from the subject matter at hand—footnotes double as extended riffs, and at times they carry the air of a a slightly desperate soft-shoe.

But if the sharpest critique of a popular science writer is that she's too funny and engaging? That's really not much of a problem. Gulp is a Magic School Bus of a book, and Roach our dirty-minded, pun-loving Ms. Frizzle, guiding the reader on a digressive yet thorough journey down the alimentary canal, beginning with the relationship between smell and taste, and ending... well, you can probably figure out where it ends.

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Bitter Greens

Joe Streckert — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Weed eating gets cosmic in Rebecca Lerner's Dandelion Hunter. by Joe Streckert

"IT TASTES LIKE bitter arugula," said a friend of mine, eating a dandelion leaf. "It's not bad." Several of my friends tried both the leaves and the stalks, and after having eating it plain I tossed several of the leaves with olive oil and balsamic. It tasted like a salad. I also roasted and ground the roots and used them in a coffee drink. It tasted like coffee, but slightly more earthy. The contents of my yard are completely edible.

Dandelion Hunter, just released by Portland author Rebecca Lerner, inspired my experiment in weed consumption. The Portland-centric memoir about urban foraging manages to encapsulate everything that's right and everything that's forehead-slappingly wrong about the culture and attitude of a certain type of person who forages for food.

The book starts out well enough. Lerner attempts to feed herself with things growing out of the sidewalk of NE Alberta, and she has a few notable adventures with eating insects, roadkill deer, and dumpster fodder. Lerner also interviews a fairly eclectic crew of people whom she meets in the urban-foraging community, and early on I found Dandelion Hunter to be a fun piece of journalism about eating things that are normally killed with Roundup. However, the book pretty quickly goes off the rails. The section on herbal medicine doesn't have any real substance: Lerner describes, for instance, making herbal medicine, taking a few drops, and then not being sick a few days later. But lots of diseases go away after a few days—knowing that correlation and causation don't really go together is pretty much Research 101. A little more rigor and a control group or two would have been nice.

What's infuriating about Dandelion Hunter, though, is that precisely what Lerner seems to see as a powerful climax—a chapter on spirituality and plants—is also what undercuts her the most. She's a perfect example of a certain kind of nature lover who doesn't seem to realize that her own spiritual rhetoric is alienating to people who don't already share her views.

And yet, Lerner does have something of a point. What we eat and don't, what is considered a salad green and a weed: A great deal of that is just social convention. I loved turning my weeds into food, but I'm not going to pretend that has any broader, cosmic implications.

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Self-Construction

Alison Hallett — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Scott Nadelson's great memoir The Next Scott Nadelson. And a Portland appearance from "JT Leroy." by Alison Hallett

ONE OF THE PLEASURES of reading local writers is seeing the familiar sights of your home through a new set of eyes. The Southeast Portland attics and basements that Scott Nadelson describes in his new memoir The Next Scott Nadelson are familiar terrain—and like Nadelson, I've clocked many trips on the mobile halfway house that is the #15 bus.

Nadelson's new book, his fourth from local press Hawthorne Books, is a thoughtful, bracingly honest collection of stories in which the Oregon writer reflects on a disastrous breakup, his awkward high school years ("Being invisible was the fantasy I indulged most consistently at 13."), and the personal and professional disappointments of his early 30s.

It's unusual to read a memoir built of short stories, but it works—instead of forcing a narrative arc onto his own life, as so many memoir writers do, Nadelson simply places these stories next to one another, allowing their edges to overlap, tugging the reader forward and backward in time. The results are funny, quietly compelling, and unflinchingly frank.

In the book's intro, Nadelson writes that the Scott Nadelson described in the book is "as close to the person who walks around in the world with that name as possible—as close, that is, as is possible for a combination of sentences to stand in for an actual human being."

Where Nadelson has built a golem out of paper and typeface, another writer appearing in Portland this week is best known for creating a flashy and elaborate hologram.

In the late 1990s, author Laura Albert created a character named JT LeRoy, animated JT with a sensational backstory involving drugs and gay prostitution, and sent her own books out into the world under LeRoy's byline, where they were met first with critical acclaim, and later wide condemnation, when the novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things were found to have been written not by a precocious teen, but by a dissembling middle-aged woman. (Albert calls JT her "avatar," and says the deception was necessary to help her deal with her own life issues.) Albert will be in town this week, at a benefit for the homeless nonprofit p:ear. Local authors Monica Drake and Arthur Bradford will read her work, and local publisher Kevin Sampsell will conduct an on-stage interview. If Nadelson's work is a faithful attempt to represent a life, Albert is best known for the opposite: draping her work in a phony authorial mystique. But hey, at least it's for a good cause.

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The Original Punk

Ned Lannamann — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Richard Hell's autobiography rocks. by Ned Lannamann

MANY INSIST that Richard Hell invented punk, including Richard Hell himself—not so much the music, although his hands are pretty dirty in that regard. Rather, the New York musician and writer is more or less responsible for kick-starting punk fashion in the early '70s: spiked hair, ripped clothes, safety pins. (Visiting Englishman Malcolm McLaren took note of Hell's fashion innovations and passed them onto a band he managed, a new group called the Sex Pistols.)

Hell's autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, is a superb read, largely because Hell doesn't shy away from claiming his achievements. It's a bold, arrogant book that details his Kentucky childhood, the death of his father, his troubled adolescence, and his years as a broke poet in Manhattan, back when it was possible to be a broke poet in Manhattan. Hell came to music late, and was never a driven musician; he approached the bass guitar on a conceptual rather than musical level, imagining the groups he formed with co-conspirator Tom Verlaine—the Neon Boys and the seminal Television—more as art projects than rock bands. Nevertheless, he wrote the undeniably classic "Blank Generation"; he formed the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids after splitting from Television; he rubbed shoulders with everyone from Dee Dee Ramone to Lester Bangs to the New York Dolls. The man's punk cred is obscenely high.

Hell's young adult life was consumed with art, drugs, and sex, and naturally these topics make for very interesting reading. Encounters with groupies and heroin are depicted truthfully and unglamorously; he's critical of his own discography to a refreshing degree. Hell once wrote a great song called "Love Comes in Spurts," and sometimes Tramp feels like it comes in spurts as well. The turbo-speed narrative becomes splintered and choppy—particularly during Hell's latter years of spiraling drug addiction—but Hell's writing is never less than elegant. He's thoughtful and reflective, cruel when he needs to be, and brutally honest about his own shortcomings. Like the best punk rock, Tramp is brief, energetic, and unsentimental.

Hell appropriately ends his book in 1984, when he simultaneously quit both music and drugs after becoming unable to separate the two. This shotgun concision makes Tramp a vital document of the downtown New York art scene of the early to mid-'70s that birthed American punk rock—CBGB, the Ramones, Blondie—but it's more than that. It's a terrific study of how disillusionment and frustration can birth great, explosive art.

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Turning Portuguese

Matt Stangel — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Brandon Shimoda's Portuguese is the first joint release from Tin House and Octopus Books. by Matt Stangel

IN THE EPILOGUE to Brandon Shimoda's newest collection of poems, Portuguese, the author describes the first time he rode a school bus: "Sitting in the seat in front of me is a fourth grader, skinny, with grassy blonde hair and the face of a horse. The seats are green vinyl. The fourth grader turns around in his seat, sticks his long neck into the aisle, looks at me, and says, in a squealing voice, Portugueeese, Portugueeese!"

Shimoda's racial makeup has little to do with Portugal—in his words, he's "half-Japanese," born in California—but it's this childhood memory of identity confusion that the poet cites as the impetus for Portuguese, the first book in a new poetry series from local publishers Tin House Books and Octopus Books.

Penned while riding buses in Seattle (as well as various locations on the East Coast and abroad), the poems in Portuguese draw from scenes encountered on public transportation.

"I spent time reading, while riding the buses, the words and writings of visual artists, mostly painters, especially Etel Adnan, Eugène Delacroix, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Agnes Martin, and Joan Mitchell, all of whom appear in Portuguese," writes Shimoda.

It's as if the thoughts of these artists and the voyeuristic snatches from Shimoda's bus rides are collected in a bucket, and from it the poems pour: psychedelic, expansive bursts of imagery and lyricism, punctuated with philosophical language and quandaries about art and poetry. As the keeper of this surreal liquid, Shimoda has an extraterrestrial kind of presence. He recognizes a couple making out as a face "bulging" from another face, or shows the reader a stack of poems stored in a refrigerator, and next to it, the author's bottled urine—turning, going teratoma.

The structure and constitution of these poems simultaneously examines and obliterates the line between art and life—the two forces are so well mixed as to be, at times, indistinguishable. But Shimoda's project doesn't seem to be interested in clear delineations or didactic takeaways. It's more about perceptual dissonance−how you leave the house knowing you're Japanese until a horse face whinnies, "Portuguese."

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Frigging Sam Lipsyte

Alison Hallett — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

The Fun Parts collects short stories from one of the funniest writers in America. by Alison Hallett

THE SHORT STORY is having a moment.

The hottest-ticket writers to roll through town lately have been peddling story collections: There was George Saunders' satirical masterpiece Tenth of December; and then We Live in Water, collecting Jess Walter's grimily beautiful little stories of life on the margins of the Pacific Northwest. On some unwatered strip of grass between Walter and Saunders, there sits a sun-bleached lawn chair with a warm PBR in the drink-holder—this is where Sam Lipsyte has staked out his territory. More grounded than Saunders, more satirical and voice-driven than Walter, the stories in Lipsyte's The Fun Parts catalog self-delusion, failure, and Dungeons & Dragons.

The fun of these stories is less about plot or characters than the juxtaposition of Lipsyte's darkly hilarious worldview with some of the most carefully crafted prose being written today. Lipsyte writes excellent sentences, and they are tuned most frequently to acerbic comedy, with occasional jolts of pure, unexpected poetry. Exhibits A, B, and C:

A junkie whose father was a sportswriter decides to write his own book about sports: "Probably it's like when your father is president. You think, If that fuck could do it..."

A story's character begins to chafe at his own textual constraints: "Exactly whose colostomy bag must I tongue wash to escape this edgy voice-driven narrative?"

An ex-junkie pursues new highs through exercise: "Her friends, the endorphins. She wanted to leap off a boat and swim with them."

Lipsyte's skill is particularly apparent in his deployment of odd sexual euphemisms: "frig," for example. Does anyone use "frig" as a verb outside of Sam Lipsyte stories? And there are crude euphemisms aplenty: a high-school coach chides his team to stop thinking about Mindy Richter's "snapperhole" and focus on the game. These goofy word choices aren't a sign that Lipsyte is tragically out of touch with the sexings of today's youth—they instead serve to add a little frisson of embarrassment, of what-did-he-just-say discomfort and mirth. You know, like when we were kids, before we were all sex-positive and dabbling in polyamory; back when sex was weird, and funny, and strange.

The Fun Parts isn't Lipsyte's best work—that, for my money, is 2010's novel The Ask, which satirized office culture, academia, and the generally tattered state of the American dream. In The Ask, Lipsyte created a character and sustained a voice that were such hilarious pleasures to spend time with that the high-wire plot was almost incidental. In The Fun Parts, there are a lot more plots to contend with, and a lot more characters demanding our sympathy, and some work better than others. Still though, it's a solid offering from one of the funniest and most skillful prose stylists writing today.

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Smallpressapalooza

Alison Hallett — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Small presses do what the big ones can't. by Alison Hallett

SINCE 2010, the website VIDA (vidaweb.org) has issued an annual breakdown of the number of male and female writers represented in literary publications. This year's count paints a depressing picture of a lit-pub landscape solidly dominated by male writers. (Portland's Tin House magazine was one of the few publications surveyed that achieved gender parity. A+, Tin House!)

It's a grim scene when even presumably enlightened publications like The New Yorker and The Paris Review can't get their shit together. But alternative models assert themselves at Smallpressapalooza, Powell's sixth annual celebration of small-press authors and publishers.

By definition, zines and small presses don't have the same cultural and institutional barriers to entry as large publications—representing voices that fall outside the mainstream is pretty much the answer to the question "Why small press?" (Women don't exactly constitute a non-mainstream category, of course, but you wouldn't know it from looking at bylines in Harper's.) So, because I am a woman and because I can, here are some of my picks from the well-represented female authors at Smallpressapalooza:

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Carrie Anna Seitzinger, 6 pm

Nominated for an Oregon Book Award for her collection Fall Ill Medicine, Seitzinger's poetry is personal, visceral, and provocative. (She's a great reader, too.)

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Chloe Caldwell, 6:30 pm

Caldwell's first essay collection Legs Get Led Astray is by turns revealing and infuriating; she continues to sharpen her personal essays writing for outlets like the Rumpus.

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Nancy Rommelmann, 8:30 pm

Rommelmann is best known as a journalist—she's done a number of killer long-form pieces for outlets like the LA Weekly and the Portland Monthly—and her new story collection Transportation is a bold, lurid, brainy affair.

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Janey Smith, 9:30 pm

...and here's where it all falls apart. Janey Smith is a pseudonym, and that pseudonym wrote four short stories about animals in Animals, stories marked by a mercilessly deadpan sense of humor. I think Smith is actually a dude? This uncertainty probably wouldn't fly in the New Yorker.

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Smallpressapalooza's readings are staggered every 15 minutes for about four hours. While you're there, check out Aaron Dactyl reading from his train-hopping zine Railroad Semantics (8:15 pm); Scottish writer Barry Graham reading from his novel The Book of Man (8 pm); and the unsettling poetry of Donald Dunbar (9 pm). For a full schedule, see powells.com.

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Inspiration / Intoxication

Alison Hallett — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0700

Profiling illustrator and comics artist Maryanna Hoggatt. by Alison Hallett

IN THE MINI-COMIC Adult Babysitting, Maryanna Hoggatt offers a bartender's-eye view of her years slinging drinks at a Southeast Portland dive. With graceful, observant drawings, Hoggatt illustrates scenes of drunken debauchery and barroom camaraderie, peppered with jokey asides that anyone who's ever tended bar will appreciate. (She even sells patches for the "League of Adult Babysitters"—for "bartenders, servers, bouncers, and other service industry comrades.")

Hoggatt recently quit her bartending job to pursue illustration and comics work full-time; her solo show Animal Battle will open at Pony Club Gallery in May. In the meantime, the first two issues of Adult Babysitting can be found at Floating World Comics, Cosmic Monkey Comics, Bridge City Comics, Pony Club Gallery, and other venues where small-press books are sold.

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ON BREAKING INTO COMICS: "I've always been a fan of comics, but I had no idea how to make one. I think autobiographical comics are a good way to break into it, because it's easy to talk about yourself. But when I started doing the bartending comic, I was like, 'Holy shit, this is a whole wealth of information!"

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HOW TO MAKE IT IN PUBLISHING: "Breaking into publishing takes a lot of luck. Not being an asshole helps. So does not being a total weirdo."

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BARTENDING DETOX: "I'm currently going through PTSD from the service industry. It's going to be a long time before I can go anywhere without projecting my feelings on the service."

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LAFFS: "I like taking tragedy and horrible situations and turning them into something you can laugh at. Because the best thing you can do when things are horrible is laugh at it. That's actually how I go through my entire life."

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INSPIRED BY: "Nature, animals, self-empowerment, bravery, chasing your dreams. That's what [upcoming solo show] Animal Battle is really all about. It's a big metaphor for taking the two sides of your brain—where you have the passion and the vision, and the ideas and the tools—and bringing it all together in a children's book style, because that's when I really became inspired. I think it's important to instill that kind of encouragement in a child. I don't think I'd be an artist today without it."

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ANY LAST WORDS?: "Tip well!"

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To see examples of Maryanna Hoggatt's work and shop her online store, see littlewolfblog.com.

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It's Alive!

Alison Hallett — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:00:00 -0800

Meddling with the genome in Frankenstein's Cat. by Alison Hallett

IN HER INTRODUCTION to Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts, science writer Emily Anthes tosses out a few examples of what genetically modified pets might look like one day. Imagine a cat that glows in the dark, she says—instant reading light! And forget remote-control cars—kids in the future might play with their very own remote-controlled rodent.

Anthes' tone is light, but the ideas seem designed to incite unease, even anger. Pets are products, as Anthes correctly notes, but once we've purchased them, they're family, and it's just downright discomfiting to think of someone tampering with a family member's genes. Sure, your English bulldog wouldn't exist if it weren't for humans meddling with the gene pool, but that's different than actually introducing foreign DNA into an animal's genome... right?

Anthes has set up this initial discomfort only to dismantle it, and she dials back the shock factor almost immediately. The first chapter of Frankenstein's Cat focuses on a genetically modified pet that's already on the market: GloFish carry a gene borrowed from jellyfish, causing them to light up under a black light. The fluorescent fish are sold in pet shops nationwide; they're an innocuous-enough seeming innovation, and Anthes offers their existence as a way to defuse the "yuck factor" of genetically modified animals.

"Maybe there are some people out there who went into pet stores expecting something monstrous and came away thinking that GloFish were not only harmless but actually downright cool," Anthes writes. "It's what can happen when we get the opportunity to have close, personal encounters with biotechnology."

Anthes' book explores a range of current and possible uses for transgenic animals (animals that have foreign DNA in their genome). The projects explored here are mind boggling, fascinating, and complex, from noble attempts to reduce diarrheal disease in children by feeding them genetically modified goat milk to a downright creepy project that turns insects into tiny flying cyborgs.

Anthes is clearly a proponent of thoughtful and well-regulated biotechnology, but she doesn't shrink from the ethical concerns inherent to the subject. Sure, there are readers for whom the very suggestion of genetically modified animals is anathema—who can't conceive of any reason to tamper with god and nature on the scale Anthes is describing. (There are also readers out there who think fluoride has no place in our drinking water.) For the rest of us, though, Frankenstein's Cat is a thorough and accessible starting point to a conversation that's only just getting started.

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Down and Out in Portland and Spokane

Alison Hallett — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:00:00 -0800

Jess Walter's We Live in Water is essential regional reading. by Alison Hallett

THERE'S MORE TO SUPPORTING the local creative economy than going to Crafty Wonderland once a year. It should be a point of pride among literate Portlanders to know the names of the people writing stories, essays, novels, and poems in and about our city. And regionally based reading habits are even more rewarding if you extend your definition of "local" to encompass the entire Pacific Northwest—then you can add excellent Washington writers like Sherman Alexie, Jim Lynch, and Jess Walter, whose new story collection We Live in Water is firmly rooted in the region.

"I was born in Spokane in 1965," National Book Award nominee Walter writes in the short story "Statistical Abstract for My Hometown." "Beginning in about 1978, when I was 13, I wanted to leave.

"I'm still here."

The stories collected in We Live in Water have been published in journals and magazines over the last seven years. They're set in Spokane, Portland, and Idaho, and they range in subject and tone from devastating profiles of broken men who can't seem to fix themselves, to what I hope will be the last short story about a zombie I ever read in my life.

For all that Walter is frequently lauded as a humorist, the best stories in We Live in Water play the simple emotional chord of men just trying to do their best. In a story called "Thief," a father tries to figure out which of his children is pilfering quarters from the family vacation fund. In 12 short pages, Walter explores the financial and emotional burden of supporting a family, the toll taken by earning a working-class wage, and what it's like to be disappointed by your own child. (And, obliquely, to disappoint your own parent.) In the more circumspect title story, Walter introduces the parallel storylines of a father and son, in the same North Idaho resort town but separated by more than 30 years. Incrementally, profoundly, brutally, he pulls back the curtain on what happened to them. It is a great story. It should win things. We Live in Water is a great collection, in fact, and an important contribution to the literature of our region.

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