Book: Women in Their 20s

 Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade, Harcourt Books, 2004

Provenance: Unsure, but from the pencil marking on the inside cover, I'd guess Half-Price Books. It looked like an overstock as opposed to a truly used book. 

Review: First off, bad title. The hair style of the title make is only glancingly noted, and references to bootleggers and speakeasies are mostly incidental. It doesn't exactly scream 1920s, but maybe. The secondary title is kinda incomplete as well, since we're going to be talking about four women who write as opposed to everyone else in the field. Only when we get to the third sub-title down do we address who we are talking about - Edna St. Vincent Milay, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Important female writers of the era.

OK, quick summary for those under 100 years old: Edna Ferber was a popular and award-winning novelist who is best remembered for her Broadway adaptations (like Showboat, which you may have seen in high school productions). The other Edna - St. Vincent Milay, known here as Vincent, was a popular poetess. Dorothy Parker made her way on essays, short stories and sniping reviews in the nascent New Yorker. And Zelda labored in the shadow of her husband F. Scott, who wanted to be more successful than he was. 

They were not a group. They were not a movement. They worked in different spheres. They attended some of the same parties, but direct encounters between them were few and unmemorable. They all worked in the hothouse environment of New York City literati in the 20s, a neatly-compacted decade that ran from the creation of Prohibition to the Crash. 

And we have a lot of information about these writers because they were wrote everything down - diaries, notes, letters, and stories on things based on their lives. Moreso, since they ran about with a bunch of other writers, we have all of their notes, diaries, letters, and stories as well. The end result here is a chatty, gossipy, personal, and in places honestly bitchy presentation of the 20s in New York City. And Europe. Because post-war France was a great, cheap place to escape to if you were a member of the Lost Generation and had the petty cash. 

The book itself travels through the decade year by year, and concentrates on the lives and adventures of its subjects. Alcohol and abortions. Insights and illnesses. Trysts and travails. It gives a good scan of their growth and success as writers, but also the pitfalls of their craft - writer's block and problematic relationships and too many house parties and summer homes. 

All of the writers have their own arc and some sense of resolution. Ferber got a Pulitzer and showed you could succeed both commercially and literarily and ended the decade hosting small parties at her penthouse. Milay ascended into poetic godhood, retreated to the country, and pursued a young muse with her husband's permission. Zelda suffered under F. Scott (who comes off as complete asshole here), who only started to support her when she went into physical and mental decline. And Dorothy kept plugging along through boom and bust times, just writing. Of the group she's probably the best-remembered, owing the wit and meme-worthiness of here poems and short works.

The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there. I'm a fan of the 20s, which dovetails neatly with my interest in the Call of Cthulhu RPG. From this volume I've picked up that a trans-Atlantic cruise was not THAT big a thing if you had the money, and at the time, writers were actually being paid more (An easy conversion was to multiply any figures within by ten). There are a lot of bits and bobs here that I may find use for elsewhere, and you might as well. 

In the meantime, I've excavated a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories from the basement library, and intend to curl up with that. 

More later,

Books: Seattle Time Capsules

 Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas, by Terra Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross, Sasquatch Press (at that time part of Penguin Random House), 2018

Filmlandia! by David Schmader, Sasquatch Books (at the time part of Penguin Random House, but soon to be sold toe Blue Star Press and given its freedom), 2023 

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces by James Rupp and Miguel Edwards, University of Washington Press, 2018

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography by David B Williams, University of Washington Press 2015

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook, Ballantine Books, 2013 (paperback 2023)

Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert, Akashic Books, 2009

Provenance: Various. I believe Seattleness and Art in Seattle's Public Spaces were gifts from the Lovely Bride (Seattleness has a Half-Price Books sticker on it). I found Too High and Too Steep at the Elliot Bay Bookstore when it was in Pioneer Square, The Mushroom Hunters was recommended by colleague Wolfgang Baur, and when I couldn't find it locally, ordered it from Amazon. Seattle Noir was a whim purchase at Barnes & Nobles when I was looking for something else, but it was shelved face-outward and caught my eye. I have no memory of where I found Filmlandia! - it just showed up one day and refused to leave until I read it. 

The Reviews: Books are times capsules. They can't help it. As soon as the last word is written, the final change is made, and the switch thrown and the electricity pumped into the presses, they are frozen in amber. They can be revised, they can be rewritten, but the sheer physicality of the book gives it permanence that no computer file can match. Historical books are trapped not only by their subject matter, but also that they represent the thinking of their times. Even those that want to be current (in PARTICULAR those that want to be current) are stopped at the point when they are finished. 

Anyway,

I've lived in Seattle (OK, a suburb of Seattle) for longer than I've lived anywhere else. I've got my 25-year chip, which allows me to complain about new people moving into the state. But I still have that newcomer's vibe of interest in the area, and picking up what I may have missed before I got here. So I've been accumulating books about Seattle, not out of a passion, but just finding them along the way.

So here are some books about my current home town:

Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas is an infographic book, in that it takes stuff about Seattle and its history and presents it in a variety of graphics - charts, maps, and tables. Some of them are cool. Some of them are obscure, some of them are historical, some of them are time capsules in that they are no longer applicable (listing of pinball parlors in Seattle, most of which are gone).

The infographics are good-looking, but are often more graphic than informative, and you have to do a little digging to understand what they are saying. But, it is immensely browsable, and worth keeping around, even as it slowly moves into the past. 

(They do hit on one subject that always irritated me - they talk for several pages about Shadowrun's Seattle. In the Shadowrun future, a virus transformed a large part of the population into orcs, elves, and dwarves. The orcs took over the Underground. The problem is, the REAL Underground (and Seattle has one), is located beneath Pioneer Square (created when they raised the streets), and FASA put a corporate pyramid on top of it. That's a nit, but in its defense I will point out that FASA, Shadowrun's publisher, was based in Chicago at the time.)

Filmlandia! A Movie Lover's Guide to the Films and Television of Seattle, Portland, and the Great Northwest. has a subtitle that pretty much describes it in full. It is a collection of short bits about productions filmed and/or set in Seattle area and the greater PNW.  Twin Peaks. Northern Exposure. Frasier (though only for one episode), Grey's Anatomy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 10 Things I Hate About You. Even the risible McQ in which John Wayne gets in a car chase up I-5 to South Lake Union, and there's no traffic. David Schmader was a columnist for The Stranger back in the day and does a good job. Yep, with all that old movie lore, it's a time capsule.

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces. Seattle is a land of public art. You're walking along, minding your own business, turn a corner, and BOOM! there's a mural or a statue or an installation right in your line of sight. In part that's because Seattle and King County have a 1 Percent for the Arts ordinance, where 1% of the budget for capital project improvement funds go to art. Nice plan, and it often means you get some monumental artwork (one my favorites is parked outside of Safeco Field, a Tsutakawa piece of a baseball glove with a hole in it. For many years, this was appropriate for the Mariners outfield). 

The book deals with public art in Seattle from SoDo (SOuth of DOwntown) to South Lake Union (now called Amazonia). Lots of pictures, ranging from the big orange Calder stabile in the Olympic Sculpture Garden to the Hammering Man outside the SAM to the Ken Griffey Jr statue outside Safeco. It includes plaques, large installations, and internal pieces within the city's buildings. The presentation is broken up by zones, south to north, and while massive, leaves out a lot of public works not in the city center - like Totten's Changing Form on Queen Anne Hill, Noguchi's Black Sun in Volunteer Park, or Beyer's Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont. 

What makes it a time capsule is that, despite the size of some of these art pieces, they do tend to move around. Pieces are sold, moved, reinstalled. The cover displays Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, which is, well, a gigantic typewriter eraser. Owned by the Paul Allen family, the sculpture was at one time near the Sculpture Park, but moved to Seattle Center, outside the MoPop (Museum of Popular Culture), and was then sold at auction after Allen's death. I cannot find out who bought it or where it went from there. There are similar/duplicate pieces in Washington DC and Las Vegas, but that one was Seattle's.

(Should I ever win the lottery (fat chance), I'd like to create a web site listing all of the publicly-viewable art in Greater Seattle, because I think it deserves it).

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography. Denizens of the Pacific Northwest have a reputation for being love-the-land tree-hugging environmentalists. But we've engaged in a lot of terraforming over the years, making low places higher and high places lower. This books hits the major ones - filling in the tidal flats south of the city, the Montlake Cut which dropped the level of Lake Washington 8 feet, and in particular the Denny Hill Regrade. 

Back at the turn of the previous century, the area north of Seattle's downtown was a large hill, which blocked future expansion and required too many horses to pull wagons up it. The answer from the city fathers was to use sluicing equipment from the gold rush to wash away the hill, load the dirt into barges, and take it out into the sound to dump it. By the time they finished, trucks had replaced horses as transport, and the area became a site of warehouses and used car lots for many decades until Amazon moved into the neighborhood (my first office at Amazon was on the 5th floor of a building on 6th Avenue, and I figure I was still under the original ground level). Williams, who writes a lot about nature in the Northwest, covers a lot of ground (heh) in describing the monumental early efforts that made Seattle what it is today. 

Seattle Noir is one of a series of local mystery novels offered by Akashic set in various cities, ranging from Baghdad to Baltimore and from Lagos to Las Vegas. It is collection of shorts set in the Seattle area, and it cool from the local angle - you've been in that neighborhood, you know what they're talking about, yeah, that feels like Seattle. And Seattle gives itself over to a lot of noir tropes - its power centers moving behind the scenes, its rain-spattered streets and continual gloom (mostly in October and November) creating a continual twilight broken by the neon of business and late-night lights of office workers. It sometimes feels like a city filmed in black and white. Noir town.

For me, though, noir is defined by people making ethical choices and being punished for it. Bogart loses the girl. MacMurray takes the rap. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. What is the morally right choice often goes up against the societal rules. And some of the stories fit that mode. Others, not so much.

Similarly, a lot of good stories are here that are "pure Seattle" - Duwamish tribal rites and Chinatown in the1900s and roadhouses at the city limits. Stories that embrace both our history and our outlook. But there are a few that, while good, you have to to fill in the locational blanks without losing too much of the tale. They're still worth reading, but don't hit the mark as Seattle tales. 

There are a lot of good stories here "The Wrong End of the Gun", "The Taskmasters" and "Blue Sunday" all have that hard-boiled edge. The protagonists are strugglers, the challenges down to earth. Some of the stories could slot in anywhere with a change of street names, but a lot of them feel very Seattlish. Best of that group was "Blood Tide" and "Center of the Universe".

So this is a time capsule in that a lot of the stories take place in that mythical ancient Seattle, But also the way the city has changed from the more recent dotcom boom and conflict between New Seattle and Old, in the evolving conflict since the book was published. It's worth looking at, but not too deeply.

The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money and (Mostly Legal) Adventures was written about ten years back, and reflects a Seattle of that age, with a rising food culture situated at the borders of a wilderness. Ten years later, the food culture is more established, and the wilderness pushed back a few more miles. 

The book is about the people in the wild mushroom business - those who go out and harvest them and those who sell them to the restaurants that feature them. These are no white buttons grown in a controlled atmosphere of a former coal mine. These are wilderness mushrooms - morrels and lobsters and chanterelles and white truffles, found in the more undisturbed parts of the PNW, sprouting up at rare times and only under certain conditions. It requires a lot of hiking, watching, getting up at ungodly hours and driving deep into the hinters. It also requires a flexible regard to local laws and trespassing signs. Langdon Cook weaves a tales of the mushrooms and the various people who hunt them out, from bus-loaded tourists on a spree to Vietnamese expats setting up their own claims.

Its only ten years ago, and I can feel the ground has changed. A lot of the restaurants mentioned on the receiving end of the mushroom train are no more, while others remain but have changed ownership. And likely the basics of the mushroom trade have remained, but are buried by more exurban and suburban sprawl. Its a good snapshot of an age and a business out here in Seattle.

And that's it - a whole collection of Seattle books that have popped up. More may show up over time, whether they are our history or are trapped in the amber of the moment that fingers strike the keys and the files are sent to the publishers. All in all, a good collection.

More later, 

Recent Arrivals: GameholeCon Swag

 So a few weeks back I wrapped up my final gaming convention of the year, Gamehole Con, in Madison, Wisconsin. I usually do only one or two conventions a year, but with the 50th anniversary of D&D, I ended up at five of them. For me, that's a lot of travel.

Oh, the name? Well, Gamehole Con is run by an attorney named Alex Kammer. He also owns a restaurant in Middleton called the Free House, built into a historic building. The stairs to the second floor were too steep to use for a restaurant, so it became his gaming group's hang-out - the Game Hole. In it Alex has collected a huge amount of old gaming material, including the original TSR Forgotten Realms map. And he oversees Gamehole Con, which has been in the Alliant Energy Center to the south of the city. It's a really good convention, incredibly well-run. High marks all around.

And one of the things I like about going to conventions is seeing what is out there as far as new games are concerned. While our local game stores are good, they don't always carry the depth and variety I see at conventions, in particular from small publishers. So I tend to go indulge in a bit of shopping therapy. Plus, you're often buying from the publisher and sometimes from the creator, so that's nice. 

Not everything here is from the convention. one is a local purchase and one from a kickstarter. But the bulk are from the convention, so let us start with those:

Gamehole Con swag: Program Book and a Rust Monster Plushie  The program book is a spartan and effective twenty pager, with ads from the supporting sponsors, maps of the site, policies, and a list of exhibitors and guests (no bios, which is fine).. The events themselves are online with QR Code, which creates a nice versatility (the site itself is very searchable as well). The plushie is a standard for GHC as well, and a freebie to guests (I still have the Mimic from several years ago). The traditional Monster Manual rust monster is this year's plushie. The Lovely Bride has already named him Palladium. 

[Note from the distant past - when the Rust Monster first appeared in D&D, there was no illo to go with it, so, since it showed up with various oozes, I assumed it was a pile of rust with Cookie Monster googley eyes. We didn't hear about the plastic toy until later.]

Wardens of the Eastern Marches, Alex Kammer with Josh Hoyt and Jason Knutson, Gamehole Publishing, 28 page saddle-stitched digest, 2024. Gamehole Publishing (Yes, connected with the Gamehole con) is launching its own organized play at the convention, and this was a free giveaway. The Eastern Marches are the setting for a bunch of adventures they've published over the years (see next entry). This tidy little booklet gives an overview of the world, as well as the basic ground rules for their organized play. All the information in the book can be found here, but it's nice to have a hard copy.

The Brain Gorger's Appetite by Alex Kammer,  Gamehole Publishing, 40-page softbound, 2016, GHC Purchase. Into the Deep Dark by Alex Kammer, Gamehole Publishing, 46-page softbound, 2017, GHC Purchase, Trillium, City of Enchantment by Alex Kammer, Gamehole Publishing, 62-page softbound, GHC Purchase,  2018 All three of these were published over the years by Gamehole Publishing, and sold at the convention. I meant to pick them up last time I was there, and finally did so this time. The three adventures are part of a larger arc, set in what is now the Eastern Marches (see above), and involve a mind flayer brain gorger named Marlipp. The trilogy starts in the small town of Okney's Hold, journeys into the Underdark Deep Dark, and ends up in the faction-ridden city of Trillium. It's old-school adventures wired up for 5E action. 

Lands of Runequest: Dragon Pass by Jeff Richard, Greg Stafford, and Jason Durall, 190-page hardback, GHC Purchase, Runequest doesn't get as much coverage out here in the local hobby stores, so I'm always glad to see it at conventions. Dragon Pass has its roots Waaaay back in the White Bear, Red Moon board game, and it is a highly diverse chunk of land at the crossroads of Glorantha. Lottsa sentient creatures, factions, and politics rolling around. Dragon Pass probably has the greatest weirdness-per-acre of any location in Glorantha. Nice to see the update.

No Time to Scream by B.W. Holland, Bridgett Jeffries with C.L.Werner  Chaosium, 104-page hardback, 2024, GHC Purchase, Call of Cthulhu shows up in the local stores more often, but hey, I was there at the convention booth and they had a sale. No Time to Scream consists of three straight-forward one night-and-change adventures. Though aimed at novice Keepers/GMs with instructions and advice on how to play, the scenarios work well for pick-up games and (insanely) quiet evenings with more experienced players. Works best with pregens, which are provided and also available as an online download (which makes the assumption that the buyer has access both to a computer and a color printer (having a color printer readily at hand is one of the plus sides of the return-to-office push. That and free pens)).

The Order of the Stone by Jared Twing, Lynne Hardy, and Paul Fricker, Chaosium, 152 page hardback, 2024, GHC Purchase. This one feels like an old-school CoC scenario - three chapters, ancient cult, entrapped eldritch god, world-ending threat, hiking distance from Arkham. At first glance, it looks pretty good, with a collection of Lovecraftian set-pieces - ghost ship, small port town, rural wilderness. It's really good to see Chaosium do new old-style adventures in addition to updating the classics for the new system. Player handouts available online, which still has the challenge of No Time to Scream.

Seeds of Decay by Darryl T. Jones, Splattered Ink Games, 436-page hardbound, 2004, Gift of the Author. A big adventure about tiny heroes. The Dobbers are a diminutive people living in the Alwaysgreen Forest, threatened by an eldritch evil that is spreading like rot. Set up specifically for Dobbers and other tiny-size creatures, its two parts cozy game and two parts heroic horror. This is the deluxe edition (gold-foil on the cover). The author is also the artist, so it is a very good-looking product. The hat on top of it is for an upcoming product A Time-Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting. Nice hat. 

Mazes by Chris O'Neill, 9th Level Games, 240-page hardbound digest, 2022, GHC Purchase. I mentioned Sentai and Sensibility in an earlier write-up, and I found the core mechanic (a single type of die tied to each character class) intriguing, but buried beneath a pile of setting-specific verbage. So when I discovered the system this was based on at GameHoleCon, I had to buy it. This is a revised edition, and is based on the original fantasy version of the game. It is much deeper than Sentai, and uses a number of interesting new systems. I'm currently digging through it. Its presentation is excellent, and it feels like a solid game. 

Scurvy Buggers by Irene Zelinski, 9th level games, 76-page softbound digest, 2024 GHC purchase from designer. I got this from the designer at the Con, and we chatted. This was a pirate (I'm sorry - PYRATE) version of the game system, and it may be that I was already reading the Mazes game, but the rules went down a lot smoother for me than for Sentai and Sensibility. This is very much Black Sails and Our Flag Means Death with genderfluid pyrates. Zelinski expands the one-type-of-dice per class mechanic to include ship types as well. Neat idea. 

Dead Man's Cove, by Tyler and Luke Stratton, Limithron, 1-page folder scenario, GHC Purchase, Buried in the Bahamas, by Luke Stratton, 22-page saddle-stitched digest, The Sinking of the Cthgan, Limithron, 8panel fold-out scenario, all GHC Purchases. It may occur to many readers that I am a sucker for pirates. Pirate Borg was a definitely superior evolution of the Mork Borg system, reshaped to fit the curves of the golden age of piracy. I have these in pdf from the kickstarter, but I really wanted to get hard copy as well. They are radically different in approach, and reflect very much a "maker" culture of craft where the presentation formats are elastic. I think I can keep them with my core book, which is a challenge when you have so many different physical approaches to the supplements. 

The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett, Del Rey, 592-page trade paperback, gift from the author. I met Peter doing a livestream dungeon adventure on Saturday night, and he gave me a copy of the book. Imagine a world where demons show up every night in a twisted version of the initial day of a Minecraft game. The only thing that keeps them at bay are magical wards, and humanity sort of lies low behind its magical walls in the darkness. The Warded Man is the guy who manages to incorporate and utilized the wards, challenging the demons on their own ground. Yeah, this goes on my TBR pile. 

Shadow of the Weird Wizard by Robert J. Schwalb, Schwalb Entertainment, 288-page hardbound and Secrets of the Weird Wizard by Robert J. Schwalb, Schwalb Entertainment LLC, 296-page hardbound, 2024 Kickstarter. About ten years ago, Rob Schwalb wrote the very excellent Shadow of the Demon Lord. This is an update to the system and a new world for that system. Demon Lord was very grimdark, while Weird Wizard is much more in the heroic mode - still a deadly world, but not a doomed one. Call it Greydark? Without too much digging (and yes, it rewards digging), it advances the design of Demon Lord just as Demon Lord advanced the design of D&D Third and Fourth Edition (and in a case of ironies, Demon Lord showed up around the same time as 5th edition, and Weird Wizard showed up with D24 (Yes, I'm still trying to make that a thing). Secrets is both the campaign setting and monster book, and takes the entire system out for a spin. The thing I can dun them for is that the tables use a light grey typeface that is hard on these old eyes. But a lot is going on here, and I'm going to be spending some time with it.

Godzilla The Encyclopedia by Shinji Nishiakawa, Titan Books, 216-page softbound, purchased at Midgard Comics. I bought of copy of this a while back, gave it to a friend who is a BIG Godzilla fan (we plowed through most of his DVDs from the Showa to Millennium era), then went back and bought a copy for myself. Titan is known primarily for their comic book collections, but this one started as a series of articles and just expanded from there. It's write-up of almost every monster in the Godzilla films, and every version of Godzilla, Missing are those that had an original version elsewhere (Rodan is there, but only appears here for when he first fought Godzilla), and the American versions. The writeups are two-page spreads, beautifully illustrated, that cover both in-world facts as well as design discussions of how the various Godzillas changed over the years. This is an incredibly excellent book if you're a Godzilla/Kaiju fan.

That wraps it for now. And more things have shown up while I was putting this together, but for the moment, more later.