This book isn’t new – it’s already out in paperback with “National Bestseller” emblazoned across the top of the cover, because apparently a book’s success in satisfying the impulsive book-buying habits of the ignorant masses is a selling point for when its newness wears out. But always a man behind the times, I just now read Adverbs by Daniel Handler, and the book fully deserves its bestseller status.Handler’s language is deceptively simple. You won’t be reaching for your dictionary. There’s an almost childlike quality to the way he structures his thoughts. But those thoughts are anything but childish, and the masterful prose dances around the page in loops of tangled logic and surprising but inevitable revelations. Handler has a comedian’s eye for observing everyday things in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but he is always reverential to the theme, and the humor serves the story, as opposed to existing for its own sake.

The best thing about Adverbs is the interconnectivity of its chapters. The novel doesn’t follow traditional narrative structure. Each chapter is almost a standalone story. Almost. Repeated settings, characters, and the one unifying, clearly articulated and repeated theme hold the novel together. It’s rewarding every time you notice some reference to something that happened earlier, usually buried in the middle of something else, and I’m sure that repeated readings would reveal even more connections.

Oh, by the way, this story is about love. Maybe not exactly about how love works, but how you’d think love would work if all you’d done was read the manual. A manual translated poorly from the Japanese.

This weekend is the third annual Urban Craft Uprising, a huge shopping extravaganza at the Seattle Center that sure isn’t your mom’s craft fair.

But you would know all about that if you’d read the Indie Craft Fair Guide. It lists similar events all across the country, so citizens of every metropolis can buy handmade this holiday season and beyond. I’m waiting patiently for I Heart Indie Weddings, coming to Seattle at a to-be-announced date. (Maybe by then I’ll be engaged?)

On a given day, how many things do you complain about? It’s too hot outside, too cold in the office. I hate traffic. My Cheez-Its are stale.

Well, it’s that one time of year when we’re supposed to cease in our petty malcontentedness, and pretend to be thankful for all those little things we usually ignore. In doing so, I realize I am thankful for a great many things, and in an effort to trivialize the process, here is a list of some of them.

1. Matt Fraction – Fraction writes comic books, mostly for Marvel, including The Immortal Iron Fist, The Order and Punisher War Journal, but his best work is his original creation Casanova. I’ll blog more about that later.

2. Haruki Murakami – My favorite author. His book After Dark came out in English translation earlier this year. It was very good.

3. Chris Potter – A world-class jazz saxophone player who has put out a couple albums recently. I’ve asked for them for Christmas. I’ll let you know more, like, when I’ve actually listened to them.

4. Seijun Suzuki – Japanese film director who made one of my favorite movies, Tokyo Drifter, known for his theatrical style and absurdity. I’m currently watching through his Taisho Trilogy, which is weird as frick.

5. The start of college basketball season.

6. Heroes – I don’t love this show, but I enjoy it, and more importantly, I’m grateful that television like this is successful.

7. Mr. T – Mr. T is awesome, and I dare any one of you to try to prove otherwise.

8. White Ninja Comics – This isn’t my favorite web comic, but it’s probably the one I laugh out loud (LOL) at the most. Check it out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

9. YouTube – Redefining entertainment two minutes at a time. In the case of “Chocolate Rain,” four minutes.

10. Friends, family and loyal readers – Puts a tear in your eye, don’t it?

Go now, eat turkey.

“Death On The Breeze”
A Danny Stark Mystery
by James Walling

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16

Danny scraped at a rock wall near what he hoped was the water’s edge, but only succeeded in bruising a shin and collecting moss under his fingernails as the current sucked him downstream.

He’d lost all hope of giving chase the instant he hit the water. The perceptible world was drowned out in the rush of rapids, numbness, and fear.

Danny gasped for air and craned his neck in search of a familiar sound. A blaze of white noise and echoed reverberations achieved the combined affect of total disorientation.

Somehow, he lucked onto a large boulder and lunged desperately for shore. Plunging his hands wrist-deep into sediment and sand, he wrenched himself out of the river and fell back heaving on a bed of pebbles and fir boughs.

Coughing and choking fiercely, he sat up, rubbed his numb palms together for warmth, and attuned himself to his immediate surroundings. He assumed his quarry had long since made it to the far shore and the highway beyond, but it never hurt to be cautious.

Above the din of the river, he could make out the passive music of the empty wood around him. The resident animal life had been frightened underground or into flight by the sputtering human in their midst; a light breeze rustled the trees, but no human sounds penetrated the relative stillness.

Danny was soaked to the core and stone cold. He gathered his strength and resolved to make his way upstream toward the spot where he’d tumbled into the river. He hadn’t marched ten paces when he heard the plaintive wail of police sirens off in the distance.

*      *      *

Shouted instructions greeted Danny as he emerged from the brush behind the trailer ten or fifteen minutes later.

“Hands in the air,” barked an unfamiliar voice. “Right now!”

José Poveda recognized Danny—sodden as he was—and waved off his deputy.

“That ain’t him,” Poveda yelled, sounding a little disappointed. “Lower your weapon, Sanders.”

The deputy holstered his gun.

Poveda approached Danny and guided him to a squad car. Deputy Sanders draped a wool blanket over Danny’s shoulders.

“Bill Fox is on his way to the hospital,” Poveda grumbled. “Matter of routine.”

“Is he alright?”

“Minor injuries. Your other friend is on his way back to the station with two of my deputies—and that woman.” He pronounced that woman like he was identifying a witness in court.

Danny slid into the backseat of the cruiser. Poveda slammed the door shut and climbed behind the wheel of the car.

Poveda rolled down a window and signaled to his deputy as he turned the key in the ignition.

“Post a watch with Jackson,” he instructed. “I doubt that sonofabitch is coming back…but you never know.”

“Will do, sir.”

Poveda backed the cruiser out of the driveway and motored slowly down the private road toward the highway. A thin pane of Plexiglas separated the man from Danny. Poveda opened it a few inches so they could talk.

“How’d you end up in the drink?” he asked Danny.

“Nice day for a swim.”

Poveda chuckled grimly.

“Fuckload of buckshot back there,” Poveda said, taking a different tack.

“I noticed that.”

“You did, did you? That’s good, very observant of you.”

Danny noticed for the first time that he was shivering. The blanket seemed to provide no warmth at all.

“Who is he?” Danny asked.

“Who?”

“The guy with the shotgun,” Danny snapped impatiently. “What’s his name?”

Poveda merged onto the two-lane highway behind a logging truck. He took his time answering.

“James Elmer,” he stated matter-of-factly. “AKA Jimmy. Lady on her way to the station is his mother.”

“Locals?”

“Mother is,” Poveda answered. “Son was released from Sheridan last August. You wanna tell me what you and your buddies were doing out there in the first place?”

Danny ignored the question.

“What’d he get sent up to Sheridan for?” he asked. “That’s a federal prison, right?”

“Hit his local credit union for a no-interest loan.”

“Bank robbery?”

“Uh, huh. Wasn’t too successful though, blabbed to a barroom full of buddies and one of ‘em turned him in for the reward. Been up here doing odd jobs for Tommy Thompson off and on for six months.”

And how does he know that? Danny wondered.

“Same Thompson builds shitty houses outta particle board for yuppies?” he asked.

”That’s the one.”

“How’d he hook into that?”

“Hard to say.”

An awkward silence passed between them as they barreled down the highway. Poveda swerved out of his lane to pass the logging truck and steered right back behind it as an oncoming Datsun appeared around the nearest bend. Danny pulled the blanket close and focused his attention on stilling his shivering body.

The silence lasted until Poveda pulled the cruiser into a reserved parking space behind the police station and killed the engine.

“Alright, Stark,” Poveda said, turning to face him. “Why don’t you level with me before we go inside?”

“Did you have your eye on this Elmer bastard when my friend Bean went missing?” Danny asked, his voice full of venom.

“What were you doing back there, Danny?”

“Answer the question.”

“You first.”

Danny grinned at him and threw up his hands.

“I plead the fifth,” he said, through chattering teeth.

Danny could feel Poveda’s eyes burning into him.

“Your pal Fox has quite the record.”

“You know Fox,” Danny said with a shrug. “Got a heart o’ gold and a hard-on for personal liberties.”

“And packing heat, incidentally,” Poveda interjected quickly. “You know he discharged a firearm—”

“Incidentally?” Danny laughed, interrupting him. “Didn’t you mention a fuckload of buckshot at some point?”

“You were on private property.”

“I didn’t see any signs, officer.”

Poveda grimaced.

“Cute,” he said. “But you’re in some very deep shit, Danny. You might as well give it to me straight while you have the chance.”

“What I’ve got,” Danny said, “is the right to remain silent. Now let me outta this fucking car. I’m freezing my ass off.”

Party with our friends at Crawl Space this Saturday night:
Crawl Space announces BAZAAR! a night of art, food, drinks and dancing to benefit Crawl Space artist-run gallery. Join us for hors d’oeuvres from local gourmets including Boat Street Café and Artemis, festooned servers (Brazilian Carnival meets Euro club kids), and a preview of this year’s exhibition of current works by Crawl Space member-artists.

This zany, lively event helps to cover a significant portion of yearly rent, utilities, and programming costs that our member artists aren’t able to cover out-of-pocket. The Bazaar! will be hosted by Seattle Art Museum Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary art MICHAEL DARLING, internationally recognized video art pioneer GARY HILL, and the Crawl Space Booster Club Kids.

Crawl Space
504 E Denny Way *behind a wooden fence
November 17, 6 to 9 p.m.
Donor levels at $1000 - $500 - $100 - $25

A while back, I extolled the merits of Coffee House Press, an exceptional independent publisher whose work I consistently enjoy. And it was to Coffee House that I turned after gorging myself on confections of escapist lit, like Matt Ruff’s Public Works Trilogy and Bill Willingham’s bah-rilliant Fables series of graphic novels, that I tend to consume during times of stress. I needed a palette cleanser and Coffee House had a novel among its fall releases—The Meat and Spirit Plan by Salek Saterstrom. Perfect, he thought, with ironic foreshadowing.

Perhaps it was my fault. Maybe I’ve simply grown too old for nihilism, maybe there’s something about crossing thirty relatively intact that renders nihilism a quaint preoccupation of youth. And though I’ve identified myself as a feminist since my sophomore year of college LO those many years ago, it doesn’t make the nihilism any more valuable when narrated by a woman. I hated it coming from the boys like Bret Easton Ellis and Nick McDonnell, and wasn’t convinced otherwise by Saterstrom just because the object of rape actually gets to speak. This is a coming-of-age tale set on a downward slope, through booze and passionless sex and disease and, frankly, Kathy Acker took it further and did it better a decade ago.

Which is not to say The Meat and Spirit Plan is not wholly without merit. I enjoyed its disjointed, poetic structure on the page, following a linear narrative with block, justified paragraphs, reading very much as an epic. And some of the discussions of art and sex and love and our relationship to our bodies were beautiful and rich. But the narrator is so detached from her life we see little more than her impressions, and while given to understand how gifted she is, we are denied any access to the genius of the genius we are asked to watch decay.

Even all of that could have been forgiven but for one thing. It is a personal prejudice I have, born of bitter experience, against ham-handed framing devices, and most especially so when they are revealed in the final moments. The exquisite The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq and Frank Wynne had absolutely transfixed me until the final chapter, three pages into which I gave up, content to erase the premise that the preceding chapters had been a historical document from my memory of this otherwise excellent work. Special Topics in Calamity Physics was already dead to me when the pop quiz of the final chapter danced on its grave, though the sin was no less grave. I can only hope that Saterstrom’s final paragraphs were forced upon her by the demonseed lovechild of M. Night Shamalamadingdong and Gordon Lish, because, really, I could have stomached “and then I woke up” better.

And yet I’m not unsatisfied. Maybe it was really the taste of bile that I needed to wash my palette. In which case, Coffee House served up a perfectly acrid cup of Joe.

Now I know what love is. Before, not so much, but definitely now, yes I do. And I owe it all to Fletcher Hanks. Who is this mysterious master of my emotions? Let me tell you.Fletcher Hanks was a comic book creator who froze to death on a New York City park bench in the 1970’s. Rewind 30 years, however, and you’ll find the source of my love, a little comic called “Stardust the Super Wizard”, penned by dear Mr. Hanks at the end of the Depression, as war spread across Europe, and America turned to primary-colored pages of crudely drawn fantasy for comfort – for escape. This was the Golden Age of comics. For those of you not geeky enough to know what the Golden Age is, it’s where Superman and Batman came from (Spiderman was from the Silver Age, about the same time period when Hanks found himself homeless at the start of a brutal Northeastern winter).

Hanks was, quite frankly, crazy as all hell. “Stardust” is the surreal story of a nigh-invincible superhero who harnesses the power of stars and uses his nigh-limitless array of rays to stop gangsters, in particular, from ending all of civilization, as gangsters are wont to do. Sometimes he crushes people. These stories are crude, and the artwork is cruder, and the vigilante justice meted out is the kind of thing that would raise red flags in school systems if a black trenchcoat-clad student were the artist. But at the same time they’re brilliant and so far ahead of the curve (Jack Kirby, eat your heart out) that if you didn’t know better you’d think they were a psychedelic creation of the 70’s (a time Hanks would never even get to see).

Why am I bringing up a 70-year-old comic, you ask? Because by the grace of whatever particular brand of divinity you ascribe to, and probably in its level of miraculousness owing to the combined power of all faiths everywhere, publisher Fantagraphics has recently released a compilation of Hanks’ work from his short-lived comics career in an absolutely stunning book edited by Hanks “scholar” Paul Karasik. It’s called “I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets.” The book features several “Stardust” stories, as well as the equally astounding “Fantomah – Mystery Woman of the Jungle.” Sometimes her head turns into a skull-head, which is simply amazing (even more amazing is the pseudonym Hanks used for the Fantomah comics – Barclay Flagg).

I haven’t explained the love yet. These comics are CRAZY with a capital every-letter. Let me give one example – the one when my heart swelled as I read. In the first story in the compilation, Stardust captures a group of spies, suspends them in the air, and then uses a special ray to summon the skeletons of the spies’ innocent victims, and has the skeletons hover in front of the already-hovering spies!!! Needless to say, this particular panel should be framed and hung in the Louvre. Did I mention that sometimes Stardust just crushes people with his bare hands?

From his blurb on the back cover of “I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets,” the late, great Kurt Vonnegut probably said it best:

“The recovery from oblivion of these treasures is in itself a great work of art.”

If it’s good enough for Kurt it’s more than good enough for the rest of us. Buy this book. Read this book. Make other people buy and read this book. It’s a little piece of forgotten culture that we’d all do good to unforget.

Halloween may be just a memory, but until Thanksgiving comes, it’s still the season for tricky treats. The Lolligags are like Hansel and Gretel, uncovering the sinister crunch of candy-sweet electropop.

Split by geography, the duo—Dallion Lollihag, aka Leslie, in Athens, Ga. and RG Lollifag, aka Ryan, in Nashville—composes music over the telephone. But lack of technology (synth man Ryan does not own a computer!) hasn’t hampered them, and a four-song EP, Wired, is out now on Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records.

Leslie’s new wave voice doesn’t completely belie the naughty content within: She sings “Creepy Things” from the perspective of a stalker’s stalker; “Staircase Mystery” tells a twisted fairy tale and “Kitten, Come Over” is a pouty invitation to sex. The band just played its first show ever last Friday and has two more November dates scheduled in Athens. Go check them out, but for safety’s sake, be sure to leave a trail of bread crumbs.

Get decked out in your Saturday night best and join RIVET’s publisher, the Shunpike, at the third annual Factory Party.

Here’s the scoop:
Once again, the Shunpike takes you back to 1970s New York, where the artists were the art, the vibe was DIY and the dress was retro even before it had been worn the first time. Most important were the parties, where the glamorous, the hip and the creative mingled and collaborated until the break of dawn.

And the deets:
Saturday Nov. 3
8 p.m.
At Lo-fi
429B Eastlake Ave E in Seattle

Admission is $15—mention RIVET at the door and half of that will go directly to your favorite Little Magazine That Could.

“It’s very ‘eco’.”

eco, adj., slang
1. Slang term, indicates environmentally sound manufacturing processes or practices.

2007: NPR Public Radio. I love this clothing line. It’s very eco.