I’m generally perplexed by readers who devote themselves to one genre only. For me, I need breaks from the strict tropes required by a narrow genre, even one I enjoy, such as hard sci-fi. I get that not everyone feels the same and it’s far better to be a reader of one genre than not to be a reader at all. But there’s a lot to be gained through proactively stretching beyond those comfort zones.

Luckily, my house is littered with to-be-read piles of books I’m always planning to get to in the ever-distant near future, thanks to my long habit of indiscriminate purchases every time I enter a bookstore. That’s given me a diverse range of books to choose from for the Books & Bakes read-a-thon.

We’re a bit past the halfway point of Books & Bakes, with just under four weeks left. During the first half, I’ve experienced a hard-boiled noir, an occult thriller, two memoirs, two horror novels, a comic thriller, a sci-fi comedy, and a book of political philosophy.

Not bad for an overheated July.

Because I’m still spending a lot of time reading to meet my twenty-book goal, I thought I would do a quick halftime roundup on some of the recent books I’ve read. As you can see in the graphic, I’ve finished ten and have two more in progress (actually three, I started another one last night).

One thing I do want to note is my ranking system. When I rate a book three out of five stars, I mean that’s a good book and worth checking out if it sounds interesting to you. Four of five is a banger that has a little extra juice, in style or story or both. And a five-star book is a jaw-dropping work of craft that I believe everyone should experience.

I don’t have any one or two star ratings — life is too short to spend time reading books you don’t like and there is no shame in not finishing a book that doesn’t work for you.

American Myths and Legends

The Irony of American History has been hanging out in my collection since the Obama administration, one of my stretch goals for reading as Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous work of political philosophy seems fairly influential in center and center-right circles. Our current moment in American history seemed like a good time to finally take the plunge.

The “irony” Niebuhr identifies in American history is one of national self-conception, rooted in a once-rural nation focused on individual liberty but suddenly cast into the role of superpower by World War II and the Cold War. He says:

“Our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history. Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by counting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.”

Niebuhr is not completely wrong about America’s self-narrative (I can feel the political scientists out there rolling their eyes and muttering, “No shit”). But his take on the conflict between America’s virtuous self image and the hard realities of anti-communist realpolitik is deeply rooted in his religious faith, which is something that will lose me every time. And some of his observations from 1952 are flatly hilarious when living in today’s America:

“No powerful nation in history has ever been more reluctant to acknowledge the position it has achieved in the world than we.”

Or,

“Though a tremendous amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself in American culture, our political institutions contain many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist forefathers insisted upon.”

So much for Calvinist insistence.

But what I noticed early on in Niebuhr’s book and that got me more and more riled with every page is his absolute commitment to never mentioning slavery in all his examinations of America as a bastion of virtue. I will never understand how any serious historian or philosopher of America can write pages upon pages about Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal of American as a place of liberty, free of European tyranny and with a superior common class, without mentioning even as an aside that the man owned slaves and that his ideal was built on the institution of slavery.

Niebuhr quotes Abraham Lincoln on the “solemn joy” of sacrificing for freedom but doesn’t grapple with how that freedom wasn’t delivered on in Niebuhr’s own era of Jim Crow and lynchings. He quotes Andrew Johnson — the president who really fucked over America’s chance at becoming a freer nation for all after the Civil War — in support of America’s “Messianic Dream” but doesn’t once engage with the fact that the vast wealth of resources that fueled America’s “virtuous” rise were gained through the conquest and genocide of indigenous people.

I could go on about this for a long time but my main takeaway from this book is that the 1619 Project, so hated by conservatives for trying to center the story of slavery in America’s complex history, has morality and history on its side. The idea that one can write an entire book on America’s “innocency” as a new nation founded on individual liberties without engaging in one of the nation’s two original sins (the treatment of Native Americans being the other) is frankly enraging. It is a moral failing in a book that proposes a highly religious morality in its conception of our nation and its future.

This isn’t an argument that one should not read lauded works of the past or that every idea from the white establishment during the twentieth century should be ignored. It is an argument that we should read American history with our eyes open and with the understanding of why and how white America spent decades omitting the uncomfortable and despicable from the narrative.

Given how worked up I was upon finishing Niebuhr, I grabbed the copy of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which I had originally planned to read after the read-a-thon but now seems a necessary addition. I’m not finished yet but a few lines from the eminently quotable Baldwin spoke to me, especially because he was writing in the same era as Niebuhr.

“In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

And, of course, this famous one:

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, for exactly this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

We could all use a little more Baldwin in our lives these days. I’m looking forward to finishing this one and filling some more gaps in my reading (it’s criminal I haven’t read a queer legend such as Baldwin earlier).

Don’t forget, Books & Bakes runs through Labor Day. There is still time to make your pledge and support the great work of Cake4Kids, bringing birthday cakes and smiles to underserved children.

My first memory of Carrie was spotting the movie-tie-in paperback at Readmore bookstore in the Paducah Mall. I would have been eight at the time and I was terrified of it: Sissy Spacek drenched in blood and her eyes bulging and my uneasy thought, How could anyone read something like that?

Two years later, I was reading Stephen King’s The Shining and turning into a lifelong horror fan.

Tastes change quick when you’re young.

But as much of a King fan as I became, I didn’t really get into the book Carrie — his first novel, famously rescued from the trash can by his wife in one of the great sliding-doors moments of American literature. Despite the success of the book, it was Brian de Palma’s film adaption that had my affection. It’s pure horror as catharsis for young tweens and teens who can’t help but put themselves in Carrie White’s bullied and bloodied shoes.

It’s funny, in a way, that de Palma’s Carrie is also one of the most faithful adaptations of a King work ever made. Yet fans of the book have always complained about one particular aspect they see as unfaithful: That despite the iconic performance by Spacek, she’s not fat and she’s not ugly as she supposedly is in the book.

I started thinking about this when the teaser for Mike Flanagan’s new adaptation of Carrie dropped and immediately started online arguments about the new version of Carrie: Why is she not fat?! Why is she not ugly?!

Flanagan is one of the best, if not the best, adaptor of King’s work. He’s done a few, notably his highest-possible difficulty work on Doctor Sleep, King’s own sequel to The Shining. Flanagan managed to adapt that into a film that incorporated both Stanley Kubrick’s Shining (famously hated by King) and King’s novel in a cohesive, coherent movie that respects the artistic achievements of both creators.

So, I was pretty psyched when I heard Flanagan was doing a take on Carrie. I haven’t cared for the other two remakes — a TV miniseries that descended into laughable early-era CGI and the rather boring big-budget version with Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz — and I actively loathed the abysmal sequel to the original film, Carrie 2: The Rage. With Flanagan promising a miniseries that recontextualizes the novel’s teenage horror story for the age of social media, I believe this could be an interesting take on what it means to be in the panopticon of high school these days.

But those claims that the new Carrie, Summer H. Howell, a slight young woman who isn’t unattractive in the least but isn’t in the mold of Hollywood bombshells, should be fat and ugly to match the book stick in my craw just a bit.

I agree with the criticism that Hollywood films and series have spent decades enforcing unrealistic beauty and body standards for women. And I’ve been glad to see at least some change on those fronts in recent years, even if the old standards still hold the most sway.

But I’m not sure I’m sympathetic to those criticisms when it comes to King, who has a long history of using fatness to signal his characters’ degeneracy, sloth, or villainy. On top of that, King has a bad tendency to throw in “fat” minor or background characters whose weight and bodies are described in lurid, shaming detail. I’ve read just about every King novel there is, many of them multiple times, so I’m pretty familiar with this particular authorial tic.

So, given it’s Books & Bakes season, it seemed a good time to re-read the book where it all started and see just how justified the criticisms of the casting for Carrie are.

Unsurprisingly, it’s more complicated than you might think.

The case for casting a “fat” and “ugly” Carrie starts off fast on page four, in the high school locker room (one of the most terrifying places on earth):

She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off.

King also initially paints Carrie as rather bovine in her response to her gym teacher’s command to finish her shower:

Carrie looked up, her eyes slow and dazed from the heat and the steady, pounding roar of the water. “Ohuh?”

It was a strange and froggy sound, grotesquely apt, and the girls giggled again.

And again, during the infamous onset of her period and the pelting of her with pads and tampons:

Slow, helpless groans jerked out of her. Her eyes rolled with wet whiteness, like the eyes of a hog in the slaughtering pen.

This is all really brutal stuff in a story that is near universally known in American culture. Carrie’s first period, her abuse by both her schoolmates and her mother, her dousing in pig’s blood at the prom, and her subsequent revenge have become a modern myth of the teenage experience.

But is Carrie ugly and fat? Is she an unlikable person who exists solely to make us examine our own tendency to bully the weak and the less-than?

In the book, the answer to that depends on who’s telling the story. King’s novel contains a kaleidoscope of perspectives, with multiple POV characters, news story accounts, and official transcripts. In the opening locker room scene, the perspective is locked in as that of all the other high school students, with a running tally of petty cruelties they’ve visited on Carrie over the years. They see her as fat and ugly because she is the class scapegoat. They can’t see her any other way.

Contrast that with one of Carrie’s neighbors recalling her as a young child:

“She was such a pretty girl … I’ve seen some high school pictures of her, and that horrible fuzzy black-and-white photo on the cover of Newsweek. I look at them and all I can think is, Dear God, where did she go? What did that woman do to her? Then I feel sick and sorry. She was so pretty, with pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, and her hair the shade of blonde you know will darken and get mousy. Sweet is the only word that fits. Sweet and bright and innocent.”

That’s before school and social ostracization take hold of her and begin shaping the perception of her, both by her peers and herself. Her own point of view shows how deeply her self-perception is influenced by others.

She was thick through the waist only because sometimes she felt so miserable, empty, bored, that the only way to fill that gaping, whistling hole was to eat and eat and eat — but she was not that thick through the middle. Her body chemistry would not allow her to go beyond a certain point.

That’s King edging toward his future use of weight as a shorthand for morality but in this case, it speaks to the fact that Carrie isn’t “fat” by traditional or modern sensibilities. She’s obviously not thin but her body and presentation are being mediated by high school cruelty, cruelty that Carrie absorbs and directs towards herself:

She hated her face, her dull, stupid, bovine face, the vapid eyes, the red, shiny pimples, the nest of blackheads. She hated her face most of all.

That’s a fairly typical teenage face for someone just going through puberty, described through a lens of misery. Is that ugly? Or is it self-loathing?

I believe over the course of the quite short novel, it becomes apparent that most of Carrie’s supposed ugliness is projected on her by others and herself. Probably the most important point for this is when the popular and ill-fated Tommy approaches Carrie to ask her to the prom, part of his girlfriend Sue’s atonement for what happened in the locker room. It’s worth quoting in full:

She looked up from her books with a startled wince, as if expecting a blow. The day was overcast and the bank of fluorescents embedded in the ceiling was not particularly kind to her pale complexion. But he saw for the first time (because it was the first time he had really looked) that she was far from repulsive. Her face was round rather than oval, and the eyes were so dark that they seemed to cast shadows beneath them, like bruises. Her hair was darkish blonde, slightly wiry, pulled back in a bun that was not becoming to her. The lips were full, almost lush, the teeth naturally white. A baggy sweater concealed her breasts except for token nubs. The skirt was colorful but awful all the same: It fell to a 1958 mid-shin hem in an odd and clumsy A-line. The calves were strong and rounded (the attempt to conceal these with heathery knee-socks was bizarre but unsuccessful) and handsome.

Tommy’s thoughts on Carrie’s supposed ugliness explicitly change because he changes the way he looks at her. And it is reinforced and fully confirmed when he picks her up for their prom date:

Finally, helpless, she said: “Do you like me?”

He said: “You’re beautiful.”

She was.

This isn’t a make-over story where Carrie suddenly becomes beautiful through the power of makeup and new clothes, although her making herself a dress that fits into the fashion expectations of the time can’t be ignored. Even with that, when she arrives at the prom, some of the girls adopt a very passive-aggressive, faux civility that shows again how her ugliness or beauty are intrinsically linked to who is perceiving her and why.

So, when someone posts online that “you know DAMN well Carrie is supposed to be a FAT white girl” or complaining that Carrie should be “ugly” I have to think they either haven’t read the book in a while or they’ve allowed their own POV and preconceptions to shape their perception. Because a truly fat, ugly, and off-putting Carrie is simply not what the book presents.

Again, there is an extremely valid criticism of Hollywood’s relegation of non-slender, non-white, and non-conventionally attractive bodies to sidekicks, jesters, and villains. But I don’t believe some of the early knives coming out for Flanagan’s casting of Carrie are justified based on the text.

I’m a big Flanagan fan, so I’m looking forward to his take on Carrie this October. Will it be good? I hope so. Will it be different from the book? It should be, otherwise what’s the point? It’s fun to see a book you love adapted for a screen and see the things you once imagined in your head writ large and near tangible. But that can change your experience of the book that you love — so many times I’ve gone back to re-read a book that spawned a famous movie only to find the images and characters I’d created with my own mind replaced by actors and effects I had nothing to do with. A less “faithful” adaptation can both entertain and leave my enjoyment of the original text unchanged.

But mostly, I’ll just be glad my high school days are so, so far behind me.

Any real estate agent who’s worked on more than a handful of home sales will have at least one horror story to tell. Usually more.

Mine aren’t too horrifying, as these things go, and generally involve unexpected people behaving strangely. A client and I went to one showing in D.C. where the condo’s occupant was at home — already a red flag — and once we were inside I clocked that he was likely on hour thirty-seven of a seventy-two-hour meth binge. I still showed the condo — you don’t pass up a great location because of a tweaked-out twink — but I made sure to place myself between my client and him at all times.

I’ve had an open house visitor slowly reveal themself to be a stalker. I’ve walked clients through a stunning home only to go into the basement and find enough mold to launch a season of The Last of Us. I have not found anyone hiding in the basement but my mentor certainly did. And a truly surprising number of agents have accidentally surprised people who are naked and/or having sex.

That last one is an indicator that people selling their homes really need to pay attention to their calendar notifications.

I’m lucky that the one horror story I don’t have is a nightmare client. I’m not saying that just to be nice. Anyone can be a little difficult at times when they’re borrowing three-quarters of a million to buy their “starter home” — that’s human nature. Navigating that in a way that preserves their sanity is just part of my job.

Given the absolute cut-throat world of the real estate market in the DMV over the past few years I’m surprised more buyer clients haven’t gone completely insane after losing their fifth or sixth or seventh dream home to yet another all-cash, no-contingencies offer. And what if someone did lose their mind?

That’s the question posed by Marisa Kashino’s novel Best Offer Wins, a very dark comedy about one woman’s increasingly wild attempts to purchase her dream home just across the District line in a tony Maryland suburb.

Margo Miyake is desperate to get out of the U Street one-bedroom she and her husband, Ian, rented as a temporary residence after selling their D.C. townhouse to finance a suburban single-family house. Problem is, they’ve lost again and again as every house they see come on the market is inundated with twenty or more offers they can’t compete with. Months have passed and the pressure is mounting on Margo and her marriage.

When she receives a tip that a gorgeously remodeled colonial will be coming on the market soon, Margo hatches a plan to get to know the owners so she can buy the house before it even goes on sale. If that sounds like a bad plan, it’s because it is. But Margo has a single-minded vision for her future: a beautiful home, a successful career, a trophy husband, and a newborn baby.

It’s no surprise that there’s underlying trauma driving Margo’s increasingly unhinged efforts to land her dream home. Best Offer Wins often abandons the comedy to just go full dark. It’s been repeatedly compared to Gone Girl for obvious reasons. While reading it I found myself thinking the book was taking a long time to start being Gone Girl but then I remembered that Gone Girl took its time before going full, well, Gone Girl.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot, since most of the fun in the book is discovering how far Margo is willing to go. There is a good amount of cringe comedy — an early dinner party with the owners is supremely uncomfortable and devolves into a social disaster that would deter any rational person from going further. For those of us familiar with the local real estate market as buyers, sellers, or agents, Kashino invokes both knowing eye rolls and emphatic WTFs as Margo’s quest escalates.

A great beach/pool read for the summer season, unless you’re in the middle of a home search, in which case you may want to wait until after you’ve finished that. I don’t want anyone getting any strange ideas about how to get ahead of the competition.

Coming Up

Last week, while surfing through the online book sphere, I realized I’d never read Joan Didion, an author of nearly totemic status for many but whose work I’d just never gotten around to. Books & Bakes seems like a good time to change that, so I ordered a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of the year following the death of her husband at their New York City dinner table after visiting their comatose daughter in the hospital.

It is not light reading. I’m not sure a memoir of grief was what I mentally needed at the moment — is it ever? — but it has me thinking about many, many things in my own life. I’ll have more on it soon and I promise not to be completely depressing about it.

I also finished Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, which I previewed earlier, and I’m glad I did because I needed a burst of good humor in the midst of all this. I’m still working on Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel, Zone One, but I may take a brief detour into something a little less heady. Maybe I’ll grab one of the many horror paperbacks I’ve bought over the years but haven’t gotten around to.

I’m still on track to meet my twenty-book minimum, so I’ll be keeping up the pace this week.

As always, to learn more about Cake4Kids and to make a pledge for Books & Bakes, visit seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes.

I came to Blood River Witch for one particular reason: it’s set in the rural Western Kentucky I still consider to be where I’m from. I rarely see the rolling fields of alfalfa, herds of languid cows, and tiny towns of a couple hundred people that I grew up with in the novels I read or shows I watch. So, it was hard to say no when I came across T. J. Martinson’s new novel.

It may seem odd that nostalgia drove me to pick up an occult thriller that opens with a gutted human corpse crucified upside down in an abandoned tobacco barn — that’s not exactly my experience of my home county. Although, the great Satanic Panic was in full swing during my teenage years. Not long after I left for college, I heard that a rumor had swept through the county that a Satanist cult was planning on snatching kids from the local schools, setting off a rush of panicked parents grabbing their kids out of school early.

When you have that many evangelical churches scattered across the towns and countryside, you’ll have plenty of people ready to see the devil’s hands at work.

In Blood River Witch, Deputy Alicia Moore bears the distrust and scorn of her hometown because of her teenage connection to an early aughts murder of an out-of-state trucker who was tortured, gutted, and crucified by a demon-obsessed classmate. She’s estranged from her father, the former sheriff, whose interrogation of her set off a chain of events that leads the town to whisper of her as the witch of the title. And now, in the present, an anonymous call brings her back to that same abandoned tobacco barn to find her former fiancé, mutilated and crucified.

Is it a copycat? Was there another killer left undiscovered? As Alicia tries to find her way through an investigation her sheriff and the State Police would rather her not be a part of, her role as town scapegoat and suspected villain take an even greater toll on her job, her marriage, and her relationship with her young son.

While the novel is structured as a mystery, the story is fascinated by the long memories of small towns and the way those towns pressure people to conform and belong, to share the same beliefs and long for the same nostalgic past. Oh, and to assign blame and guilt over generations.

Now that part I definitely remember from back home.

It was fun to actually read something that takes place in my old back yard — when you live in a big city, you get used to your home being a stage. Blood River Witch is the first time I’ve ever come across the road I grew up on in a work of fiction. Granted, that road was Highway 641, which isn’t exactly a poetic gift to fiction but I’ll take what I can get.

But part of me felt a little sad, viewing my home through the window of the twenty-first century. I left home for college in 1985 at age 17 and by 18 my accent was already changing under the pressure of private school privilege and my embarrassment of being seen as a hick or hillbilly. Where once I would say tin in reference to both a roof and a number, I began to smooth it out to ten when needed. Those high-pitched border-South vowels of Kentucky flattened and stretched into the mid-Atlantic Southern voice I aspired to so people wouldn’t look at my feet to see if I was wearing shoes.

It wasn’t just my voice, it was what I allowed myself to say. I don’t think it’s quite as bad these days but being from backwoods Kentucky came with certain cultural assumptions of low intelligence and cousin fuckin’. While some of those stereotypes arose from the willful bigotry that comes from being a state that’s biggest regret was not being part of the Confederacy, it’s not an entirely fair thing (even if they did inflict Mitch McConnell on the world). I overcorrected and ran as far as I could from that cultural heritage, settling in D.C. and always being grateful that I could punch down on West Virginia.

These days I can’t even fake the accent I grew up speaking, unless I’m very angry or very drunk. I’m no longer fluent in the language of my home. Parts of it are recognizable to me in Blood River Witch — primarily that deep-seated belief among rural Kentuckians that things were better in the past and that the outside world looks down on them. But the rest, from the formerly dry counties gone wet to the metastasizing MAGA mindset to the ongoing destruction of the opioid epidemic, those are foreign lands to me now.

I’m still from there. I still have family and people I love there. But western Kentucky isn’t who I am anymore, even if I mourn a little all the things I once ran from.

If that sounds like a lot to put on a mystery novel, it is — though Martinson isn’t just doing a genre exercise, he’s obviously interested in all those aspects of what it means to be from that place. This is a highly literary tale of violence and memory, not a simple potboiler. But that’s the fun of reading, you never know what you’re going to find even when you think you know what you’re looking for.

Coming Up

I’m off to a pretty good pace with Books & Bakes, over the weekend I finished my fifth book. My minimum goal is twenty books by Labor Day, which will put our total pledges somewhere over the $2,000 mark.

My initial thought was that if I raised a couple hundred bucks for Cake4Kids that would be a great success for my first year. So, going well past that with about nine weeks to go makes me grateful to those who’ve pledged their support through Books & Bakes. You can find them at seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. This whole effort wouldn’t exist without them.

So let’s aim to get that number even higher. There’s still plenty of time to make your pledge and add your name to the list. Visit the web site and make your pledge of $1, $5, or $10 per book. Don’t forget, you can set a cap so if I go wild in the bookshelves during July and August you won’t feel like you’re getting hit with big bill. A read-a-thon should be fun, not stressful.

I’ll be back on Friday with a review of Marisa Kashino’s Best Offer Wins, a very dark comedy about the real estate market in D.C. and what lengths someone may go to to get their dream home. Think Gone Girl in a multi-offer competition for a 5-bedroom, 4-bath upscale colonial. It’s brutal out there.

Until then, grab a book and enjoy reading!

There is empathy and then there is experience.

For the past twenty-five years I’ve been part of the Vietnamese family I married into, learning about their journey to America as refugees. I’ve seen how the traditions of a homeland thousands of miles away and decades in the past have faded over generations, from the parents who spoke little English to their bilingual children who still sport accents to the fully Americanized grandkids fluent only in English and memes.

I’ve stepped into a quasi-parenting role, helping raise my nephew Andrew after the death of my brother-in-law and running headlong into the competing ideas — immigrant versus white — of how that raising should actually happen.

And I’ve learned about the various racist aggressions, micro and macro, they’ve experienced, the random taunts of “chink” and “gook,” the condescension from white Americans who hear accents as affronts, the stereotypes that vacillate between “model minority” and “threat to the nation.” When Andrew was in high school working a carnival booth in Hershey Park, a group of white teen boys yelled “Chopsticks!” at him and laughed. He told me this with his own laugh because he thought it was silly; I silently seethed with a pointless desire to track the little fuckers down and teach them a lesson.

And those are the types of feelings I have to guard against — not the desire to protect but the feeling that any pain for them also belongs to me. The empathy is mine, the experience is not.

I am not always successful.

That’s the tension I brought to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces, the story of his journey to America as a very young child with his parents and his fitful assimilation into “AMERICA^TM.”

His parents, Ba Má (father and mother), settle in San José and open a Vietnamese grocery store, SàiGòn Mới. Walking to the store one day, he sees a vacant shop window with a sign: “Another American Driven Out of Business by the Vietnamese.” Then, on Christmas Eve, Ba Má are both shot during a robbery at the store. While watching cartoons, he gets the news from his brother and finds himself at a loss for emotion that will follow him into adulthood:

Ba Má have been shot, he says again.

I

What’s the matter with you?

stop

Why don’t you say anything?

laughing.

Don’t you feel anything?

Honestly, no.
Is numbness
a feeling?

Your brother, seven years older, is crying.

You keep your gaze fixed
on the television, saying
nothing, which you
will excel at.

Ba Má are back at work within days.

A Man of Two Faces isn’t a standard memoir. Nguyen goes on a journey to reconstruct his own memories, trying to recover what he’s forgotten or repressed, moving from prose to blank-verse poetry and back in a beautiful flow that captures his own uncertainty at times and his white-hot anger in others.

Part of my investment in Nguyen’s story actually does come from experience. He and I are roughly the same age, GenXers who grew up in the seventies and eighties. While we grew up on opposite sides of the country, I remember the world he was fighting to both be a part of and to resist. The Vietnam war and its aftermath hung like a cloud over the country. Vietnamese refugees were a reminder of that, rarely a welcome one regardless of the stories we told ourselves of being a melting pot. Hardworking immigrants were great, as long as they were in someone else’s neighborhood.

The other investment is the one I have to struggle with. I see my late mother-in-law in Nguyen’s family stories. I see the harrowing escapes of Vietnamese friends who survived gunfire and sinking boats in Ba Má’s flight from violence to an American refugee camp. I see the endemic racism that devalues people I love in Nguyen’s experience of enduring racism in AMERICA^TM’s propagandistic media. That’s my empathy, not my experience.

I may overemphasize this empathy versus experience point, especially given that both are important parts of treating each other with love and compassion (and empathy is far too lacking in the current moment). But I have experienced white people who over-identify with cultures not their own. That way lies white savior syndromes and infantilizing grown-ass people who don’t need the condescension. And Nguyen has a whole chapter on “white and other saviors” that I have no desire to be a part of.

But I cannot recommend A Man of Two Faces highly enough. It is a gorgeously written story of loss and anger, struggle and success, childhood and fatherhood. I knew how good Nguyen was from his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Sympathizer, but this feels like an entirely different level. I was in tears by the end, not a state I often find myself with a book. I have not and likely cannot do it justice here but small moments throughout the book simply stab me in the heart:

My mother is mine and my
mother is also Other to me.

…

I remember Má loved me.

Everything else

I can forget.

Whether we come to it through empathy or experience, we have that love from the people we care about. That’s ours to keep. And to give.

Coming Up Next with Books & Bakes

Two more reviews coming up: T. J. Martinson’s western Kentucky mystery-thriller Blood River Witch and Marisa Kashino’s very dark comedy about the D.C. area real estate market Best Offer Wins.

That brings my current number of books read for Books & Bakes to four, not a bad way to wrap up the first full week! Remember, you can make your pledge at seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. Your donations will help Cake4Kids provide birthday cakes to underserved and at-risk youth. They are an amazing organization that I’m proud to bake for.

And don’t worry, you can cap your pledge if my pace gets too fast. My goal is twenty books by Labor Day, perhaps a few more if time allows. The point is, any pledge makes a difference!

What’s on tap next? First up, I’ve started on Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, a fantasy-comedy twist on MacBeth featuring a trio of witches — Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and newcomer Magrat — who provide toil and trouble (but only if you deserve it). Then, I’m excited to dive into Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, a novel set in post-zombie-apocalypse Manhattan and the crews tasked with clearing out the remaining undead. Whitehead is a Pulitzer winner known for his novels The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys — I love when “literary” writers do genre without the winking.

Today, young gays exploring their sexuality have Pornhub and Grindr. Gen X had the Sears catalog and the underwear ads in the back of GQ.

So just imagine the impact I felt when I first saw the video for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with its cast of scantily clad prep school boys dancing in animal skin loincloths in the dim (but not too dim) moonlight. I can’t call it a sexual awakening — at 15 I was already many years into the secret knowledge I was gay and the furtive seeking of images that I desperately wanted to see — but it certainly was a blossoming.

Straight boys had the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. I had Friday Night Videos and Bonnie Tyler.

Hearing the news today that she’s passed certainly fills me with sadness. But I also feel a lot of gratitude for something she gave me that she may never have intended at the time (though I’m sure she’s heard enough from gay men of a certain age over the years to know the impact of “Total Eclipse”). That’s the great thing about art, you put your work out into the world and sometimes people find something beautiful in it you didn’t expect.

Whatever Tyler may have intended with the prep-school fever dream of the video, I definitely believe some, if not most, of the people who made it had some clear intentions. It is one of the gayest things in pop culture from the time. It wasn’t until a couple years later, away from home and freer to explore, that I stumbled on the work of famed French gay porn director Jean Daniel Cadinot, a product of the time when porn had higher artistic ambitions. (Note: that’s a mildly spicy link, if you’re thinking of clicking it at work or in public.)

Let’s just say, the aesthetic of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Cadinot’s Les Minets Sauvages (a.k.a. Wild and Crazy Boys) share a lot. Cadinot was as revelatory for me at 17 as Tyler’s video was at 15 and I find the crossover endlessly amusing.

So thank you, Bonnie Tyler, for all the gifts you gave us, especially to a young gay boy who was figuring things out in rural Kentucky. You’ll never be eclipsed in my heart.

If you have a paid-tier subscription, simply go to The Back Half homepage, choose the Perks from the menu and, presto, you can download your own e-copy of Boy Does World, ready to read on the device of your choosing.

Or, click here!

And, yes, if you’re a new subscriber via my Books & Bakes read-a-thon to benefit Cake4Kids, it’s your perk, too!

There will be some more perks coming in the next few months, including a previously unpublished short story that will debut here exclusively for paid subscribers.

Thanks for supporting The Back Half and have a great summer of reading!

A few years back when I sent my book, Boy Does World, out into the actual world, my publisher only offered a physical version of the book. Amazon’s Kindle was no longer new but it and other e-readers hadn’t reached the ubiquity level they enjoy these days, so the only non-physical option I had was a PDF version that didn’t work well so I decided to skip it.

Here we are today and I’m able to do it myself, no publisher needed. Which is a blessing because my relationship with that publisher was fraught. So today Boy Does World is officially available for Kindle.

One of the reasons I’m excited to have this e-book version available is precisely because of a bad decision that publisher made. When I started planning Boy Does World I reached out to my friend Tony Frye who had served as art director for Metro Weekly for years (D.C. folks have also seen his work from the Human Rights Campaign to Annie’s Paramount Steak House). He provided a striking and bold cover design, complete with the Tootsie Pop world that I’ve always loved.

But, when the time came for actual production, my publisher balked at the cover. Among other things, the didn’t want my name to be at the top above the title — apparently that sort of design is reserved for established, famous writers.

Bullshit, of course, but ultimately it was threatening the project so I acquiesced and told them to show me what they had in mind.

I had been very clear with them about the need to explain the topic of the book to their graphic designer. A couple people there had thought they were working on a travel book. Which, kind of funny, but not conducive to coming up with a marketing plan.

While that was happening, I flew out to San Francisco to do some pre-publication promotion at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention. When the plane landed I got an email on my phone with the draft cover attached. Wireless data speeds being what they were then, it didn’t finish downloading until I was at baggage claim where I saw it and started crying.

It was the ugliest fucking thing I’d ever seen. If it were designed today it would be posted as a “Graphic Design is My Passion” meme. Almost all green, it depicted a car driving along a road next to the Washington Monument, with a sprinkling of trees that looked like elf turds. The designer had gone the travel memoir route and made it hideous to boot.

To condense, I yelled a lot over the phone and a compromise version was created, keeping Tony’s Tootsie-Pop, at least. Still, the cover has always stuck in my craw as a half-assed version of a superior work.

Now I get to share it as originally intended, complete with my name on the top because I do not give a shit about hidebound publishing “rules” about where names can go. I’m happy that people can finally see what Tony created for me.

So, here are the details. Boy Does World is available through the Amazon Kindle store for just $4.99.

But! If you are a paid subscriber to The Back Half, you will receive a free Boy Does World e-book, readable on any EPUB capable device or app — so, Kindle, Kobo, iOS, Android, Mac, PC, and many more. Subscribe for just $5.00 per month (or make a pledge for my Books & Bakes read-a-thon benefiting Cake4Kids and receive a free six-month paid subscription) then visit The Back Half’s Perks section to download your copy.

Over the coming months, I’m going to be publishing some other work via Kindle and the same deal will apply for those. Those will include some “from the vault” stories plus some new work. So subscribe or upgrade now! Or get thee to Amazon. Either way, I hope it gives you a few good laughs.

A few days back, a minor kerfuffle blew through the books crowd on social media as a handful of readers asked for writers to stop using “hard” words because they’re ableist. Things devolved as quickly as you’d expect — I’ll admit to wanting to burn down the world at the idea of pruning big words from prose — but it did lead to a different discussion about so-called “purple prose,” the ostentatiously florid literary style associated with some of the worst examples of fiction.

You’re correct to suspect that I have a weakness for dense and beautiful prose, which is generally what purple prose attempts to be but fails. I can’t help it, I love words. One of the many sins of Strunk and White was the admonition to “Avoid fancy words,” which makes sense for anyone engaging in day-to-day writing — not everyone will appreciate you dropping “obstreperous” into an email, especially if you’re referring to them — but not for creative writing where style and substance are on equal footing.

Note that I’m saying I enjoy fancy words, not that I use them particularly well. Eye of the beholder, and so forth.

That said, it is hard to write spare and simple prose that’s also gripping and entertaining. If it were easy, you’d see a hell of a lot more of it. Which brings me to the inaugural novel of my Books & Bakes read-a-thon, The Hunter, an early sixties noir crime novel by Richard Stark, a.k.a. Donald Westlake, famous for his razor-sharp sentences, spare paragraphs, and propulsive plotting.

The Hunter is the first in a long series of crime novels starring Parker, a professional thief and amoral hulk of a man. In his debut, Parker has been scammed, shot, and left for dead by his cowardly former accomplice, Mal. The opening paragraph sets the tone, character and location:

“When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell. The guy said, ‘Screw you, buddy,’ yanked his Chevy back into the stream of traffic, and roared on down to the tollbooths. Parker spat in the right-hand lane, lit his last cigarette, and walked across the George Washington bridge.”

Parker walks that bridge on a course for revenge. Having lost everything — his wife, his money, his jet-setting criminal career — he’s going to get them back. Well, except the wife, she was in on it, too. His pursuit of Mal and the collateral damage he leaves in his wake feels like the ur-text of anti-hero crime fiction, a heterosexual male power fantasy that leaves you feeling a little queasy when you hope he succeeds.

I’m not joking when I say this is one of the most heterosexual male things I’ve ever read and I paged through plenty of my dad’s Hustlers back in the day. Westlake may eschew similes and adverbs but he never lacks when it comes to describing the women, mostly “working girls,” that exist mainly to spice up the story for the intended reader.

“Her face had been chiseled with care, honed and smoothed to creamy perfection, slender brows arched over green eyes, aquiline nose, soft-lipped mouth with just a trace of lipstick, long slender throat and cameo shoulders. … He turned to look at the back view, the straight spine, the sides curving in to the waist, blossoming below in the long curve over the hips and sweeping away down the length of leg.”

I’m queer as a three-dollar bill but that’s some good stuff.

While the actual text is PG-13 at most, the violence against women may be too much for some even when judging it by the standards of its time. It is, of course, often the point, as the men who drive the story, whether the villain you’re rooting for or the villains you’re rooting against, are all criminals to the core, the essence of The Bad Man.

That’s the hetero power fantasy on display. Where the women are described in fleshy detail, Parker is hewn from harder stuff: “His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless.”

His relationship to women — and the fantasy of how some men want to be perceived by women — is captured as he walks across that bridge:

“The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree.”

I picked up The Hunter because Westlake’s work under the Stark pseudonym has always hovered on the edge of my literary awareness, serving as a muse to many of my favorite authors (Stephen King is a raving fan, because of course he is). I wanted to experience his famed precision and ruthlessness. I got what I asked for and then some, because I plan on reading at least another two or three of the twenty-four total Parker novels.

If there’s a technical flaw to The Hunter, I’d say it suffers from the same syndrome as just about every fantasy series I’ve ever read: the first book is all set up, to the point it reads like a prequel. Here, Westlake explicitly sets Parker up for continuing adventures with an ongoing set of antagonists as he plots to take on the mob.

But if you’re looking for a quick and cool read during this brutal heatwave, The Hunter has you covered. If you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts here at The Back Half, whether on The Hunter, hard-boiled crime, or your favorite crime writers.

On Deck for Week 2

For the coming week, I’ll be finishing T. J. Martinson’s western Kentucky thriller, Blood River Witch. After that, I plan on hitting one of two memoirs: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces, which I previewed here, or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her lauded memoir of grief.

I grabbed Didion’s memoir on impulse because her name cropped up in an article I was reading and I realized I’d never read her, which is something I feel I should rectify. Neither of these promise to be the lightest of reads but I want to keep things varied and interesting for the next few weeks of Books & Bakes.

I want to thank everyone who has already pledged their support for Books & Bakes. I had a very small goal in mind for this first year, thinking that if I could raise a couple hundred bucks for a good cause I’d be happy. We’re well beyond a couple hundred bucks now, thanks to you!

And it’s never too late to make a pledge. Books & Bakes runs through Labor Day and every book I read between now and then can earn $1, $5, or $10 to support Cake4Kids. Visit my Books & Bakes website at seanbuggrealtor.com and sign on today!

That’s not the way I work. Sure, things are terrible right now, worse than they’ve been in decades. I’m angrier than I’ve been since I was shouting “Act Up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!” (And I was pretty fucking angry then.) But I don’t believe in giving up or succumbing to doomer instincts.

Except then I saw today’s news that the Supreme Court had legitimized state laws attacking transgender people playing sports, which will certainly be used to even further drive the absolute hatred and bigotry Trump and Republicans have frothingly fomented over the past decade. This guarantees things will get worse before they get better.

Add to that a skin-of-the-teeth decision affirming birthright citizenship — it’s being reported as a 6-3 vote, which is bad enough, but actually only five of the justices affirmed its constitutionality (Kavanaugh found it to be merely legislative, which of course would be easily repealable). This is, of course, a bunch of racist and ahistorical nonsense and, again, things will get worse before they get better. Republican activists will continue to concoct bogus “originalist” legal theories to keep chipping away at what had been settled law since the Civil War.

Oh, and they opened yet another flow of dark money to allow billionaires even more access and control of the levers of government, because those guys have been doing such a fucking bang-up job over the past two years.

In a rare moment of reading the room, I don’t think today is the day to go on an angry-yet-optimistic rant on the perils of despair. This is a day when it’s okay to embrace both anger and sadness, to experience the hopelessness that comes with a radical government bound and determined to attack anyone who does not conform to their narrow and bigoted idea of what it means to be an American. I don’t have the right to tell people who are directly affected by all this to immediately suck it up and take to the ramparts.

So, feel it. Let it sink in. Take some time, a day or two or three. Maybe the whole damn July 4 weekend, since celebrating the idea of America seems odd when the people running America hate that idea so deeply.

In a few days, we’ll circle back. It hurts now and it’s going to keep hurting for the foreseeable future. But we will turn this back and make things right, if not for ourselves now then for the people who come after us.

Until then, take care of yourself and the people you care for. We all need that.

This month I’m previewing some of the books I’ll be reading for the Books & Bakes read-a-thon to benefit Cake4Kids. Grab yourself a copy so you can read along and join in the discussion this summer.

I left home for a Virginia college at 17 and never looked back. Since those distant days, I’ve only lived in Virginia and Washington, D.C., where I’ve spent decades building my own life and family.

But if you ask me where I’m from, I’m going to say Kentucky.

It’s an odd thing, holding on to a home state identity when I left before I became a legal adult. I technically can’t even say that I was “born and raised” in Kentucky — thanks to the draft and the Vietnam war, I was actually born on Camp Pendleton Marine Base outside of San Diego. But my earliest memory is in Kentucky as a toddler: standing in the kitchen of our yellow-brick house while my mom held my still-infant little sister.

And I still have all the sense memories of home. Playing in the creek behind the house. Walking through the fields to Granny and Grandpa’s. “Helping” on my uncle’s farm. Playing Little League on the Fredonia ball field. Staring up at a night sky free of light pollution and dreaming of bigger things.

No matter how long I’m away, Western Kentucky will always be a part of me. I’m specifying the part of the state because Western Kentucky is a different beast than the other, more famous parts: Eastern Kentucky, with its coal-fired Appalachian history, and Bluegrass Kentucky in the center, with its white-fenced bluegrass pastures and expensive horses. Eastern and Bluegrass have their holds on American culture, for better and worse — Loretta Lynn singing from the mountains, coal-miner strikes, the halls of state government, and the Kentucky Derby showing that even country can get fancy.

Western Kentucky, though, not so much. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot there to work with. The most prominent author I know to have done so is Bobbie Ann Mason, whose 1985 novel In Country made a sizable debut and was adapted into a film by Norman Jewison (starring Bruce Willis) that tackled the post-Vietnam war years and PTSD.

That’s all a very long way of saying I don’t see much of my Kentucky home and experience reflected in the books I read. Which is why I’m happy I’ll change that a bit during Books & Bakes with T. J. Martinson’s Blood River Witch, a just-published murder-mystery/thriller that delves into the rural Kentucky area that shaped me as a kid. From the jacket:

I came across Blood River Witch via TikTok, of all places, when the algorithm served me Martinson’s series on literary feuds, Literary Diss Tracks. He’s an assistant professor of literature at Murray State University, down the road and across the Land Between the Lakes from my hometown and where my mom got a degree while I was in middle school. When I heard Martinson — who’s from Illinois — talk about his desire to write about the Western Kentucky area he’s adopted, how could I not sign up?

During my background research for this column I also found that in 2019 Martinson was “pre-emptively fired” from his then-new position teaching at Olivet Nazarene University because his novel, The Reign of the Kingfisher, had a lesbian character and someone complained to the administration. “[Inclusion] is, in my opinion, an ethical imperative that all writers must acknowledge and embrace. I personally wish for everyone to feel welcomed into my stories, especially those who are consistently disenfranchised and whose voices are often erased,” Martinson said at the time. Guess now I’ll be reading two books by him.

So, Blood River Witch is officially part of my Books & Bakes read-a-thon benefiting Cake4Kids. Remember, for every book I read, supporters will pledge $1, $5, or $10 to help bring more smiles to at-risk and underserved children on their birthdays. If you make a pledge, you’ll also get a free six-month, paid-tier subscription to The Back Half, so you can join in the chat about all the books I’ll be reading between July 1 and Labor Day.

Reading is awesome on its own but it’s even better when you have someone to share it with. You can grab your copy of Blood River Witch via Amazon, or you can support your local independent bookstore in person or by ordering at Bookshop.org.

To find out more about Books & Bakes and to make your pledge, visit seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. You can follow T. J. Martinson on TikTok, @tjmartinsonwritesbooks.

This month I’m previewing some of the books I’ll be reading for the Books & Bakes read-a-thon to benefit Cake4Kids. Grab yourself a copy so you can read along and join in the discussion this summer.

Back in my editor days, I would occasionally gift books to younger writers I worked with, reflecting things that I saw in their work and (I hope) encouraging new explorations on their part.

One day I handed a copy of Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms to one of my critics. With a small derisive sniff, he handed it back. On the bright side, that did reduce by one the number of people I would be giving books to in the future.

For those unfamiliar, Pratchett is the late and legendary author of the Discworld books, a series of fantasy novels set on the titular Discworld — a flat world that flies through the universe atop four elephants standing on a giant space turtle. A master of absurdist satire, Pratchett blends nearly every genre trope into a rich stew of linguistically nimble and deeply humanist fables that reflect our own fractured reality.

Take this quote from Men at Arms, which over the years has become a staple of studies and think pieces on poverty:

The Atlantic recently published a piece lamenting Pratchett’s lack of prominence in literature writ large — he’s a legend in fantasy circles but does seem scarce when the topic turns to “mainstream” masters — with the unfortunate hot take that expensive movie adaptations would bring him to the masses. I disagree, in large part because so much of what makes Pratchett special is wordplay, puns, and wry observation that is hard to see translating to screens without massive amounts of voiceover narration. In which case, it would be more efficient to listen to an audiobook.

I prefer the more traditional way of promoting an under-read author, recommending them to everyone I possibly can. So, I’ve chosen Wyrd Sisters as one of my Books & Bakes reads. This was one of the first Discworld novels I read and one that made me into a lifelong fan. Wyrd Sisters is part of the sub-series of Discworld focusing on three witches led by one of his greatest characters, Granny Weatherwax. It’s been a long time since I’ve visited with her and I’m eager to dive back in.

Remember, don’t sniff at genre. No one likes a snob and you’ll miss out on some truly great work.

Leaving behind the storied fields of English humor, I’ll be returning to the States for a classic American literary tradition: the immigrant’s memoir. Given the lamentable state of our country at the moment, now would be the time to do so.

I first read Viet Thanh Nguyen when his debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize. Given that I married into a Vietnamese family, I’ve always kept an eye out for authors who can teach me more about that experience and who I can share with my nieces and nephews — I always want them to have at least some writing in their lives that comes from authors with shared background and experience.

And Nguyen, whose family came to the U.S. as Vietnamese refugees, is the guy to do it with his memoir, A Man of Two Faces. He has been an astute commentator on our current national nightmare in the New York Times and other outlets. Sharp, funny, and exceptionally dapper — a quality not related to literary talent but I still enjoy seeing it, given that I myself am exceptionally un-dapper — he’s well primed to examine America from the inside and out. I’m really looking forward to this one.

I have not set an order for the books I’ll be reading, though these two will likely be in July. I’d love it if you joined me in reading so we can chat about it here at The Back Half. If you’re weaning yourself from the Bezos bullshit, go to Bookshop.org where you can both buy the book and support your local independent bookstore.

The Books & Bakes read-a-thon starts on July 1 and runs through Labor Day. You can make your pledge at seanbuggrealtor.com. All your pledges will go directly to Cake4Kids and help them bring birthday smiles to underserved and at-risk children.

Then there’s the whole quagmire of asking how these writers of the past influenced our tech leaders of the present, particularly those of my generation who ostentatiously tout those influences in the names of their companies, products, and corpo-speak mission statements.

In this January 1982 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories I stumbled on a doozy of wishful techno thinking that definitely reaches forward to today: “Futures Fantastic: Toward Human Immortality.”

To cop a phrase from Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.

This is basically a round-up of the state of research on aging in the early 1980s by writer J. Ray Dettling, with the goal of promoting funding for more research. Fair enough, enthusiastic support for science and research is one of the more laudable aspects of science fiction as a genre (unless it’s Jerry Pournelle and his ilk advocating for space lasers and targeted nuke strikes). But reading it only gave me deja vu and an immense sense of loss.

First, there’s the proliferation of anti-aging buzzwords that remain with us to this day: antioxidants, free radicals, periodic fasting, and (of course) cryogenics. The idea at the time was that antioxidants and related research would extend human life expectancy — read that as “American” life expectancy — by 20 years by the year 2000.

U.S. life expectancy was 74.5 in 1982. By 2000 it had shot up to…76.9! And today it’s gone up all the way to 79.4.1

“A recent Rand Corporation Study concluded that by the year 2020 (only 40 years hence),” Dettling says, “we will have added 50 years to the human lifespan.”

The lesson here, which I don’t believe we’ve learned, is to stop paying so much attention to Rand Corporation studies. Also, the economic and cultural chaos that would be unleashed by nearly doubling the human lifespan in that short of a period would be, well, a good hook for a science fiction story. Not to mention the realization that we should be both cautious in what we wish for and discerning in our acceptance of long-term predictions.

I’m not being Malthusian there, even though this piece once again raises the Malthusian argument that everyone loved — unchecked economic growth would create population growth that would overwhelm agricultural capacity — that turned out to be bunk because economically secure women don’t feel the need to birth six to a dozen babies apiece. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying, it’s fine.) But if you’re tired of Boomers and Gen Xers now, imagine if you wouldn’t be rid of them until 2085 or so.

Anyway, a five year increase isn’t nothing, depending on the quality of those additional years. But given the hostility to science and expertise currently running the nation, alongside a cult-like worship of quackism led by RFK Jr., we’re not gonna be getting that kind of extension in this century. Personally, I think we’ll be lucky if we manage to stay at 79.4 for the next couple of decades, since even that was a rebound from the depths of Covid when life expectancy dipped back to 76.3.

When you gut public health, destroy the nation’s capacity for research, and stop using the vaccines that played a huge role in the life expectancy leap from 1950 (68.1 years) onward, good things aren’t going to happen.

One last gem: “[A] surgical technique called parabiosis was performed in which aged organisms were connected to young organisms like siamese twins. Thus the blood of the young subject could mix with the blood of the older subject. The aged organisms showed immediate signs of rejuvenation and greatly outlived the animals in the control group.”

So that’s where Peter Thiel got his gay vampire plan from.

The Stories

Full honesty, this is not a good issue for short SF stories. Mostly meh with the new stuff and the “Amazing Hall of Fame” re-print, “A Way of Thinking” by Theodore Sturgeon, is just boring in a way that I didn’t expect from a Sturgeon story.

One that stands out in a bad way is Steven Ray Daugherty’s “Comnet 2 Enters the 21st Century,” a Network riff (or ripoff, take your pick) about a future TV network’s rapacious low-brow programming that whacks you over the head with the unrelenting and ubiquitous homophobia that may ultimately drive me off this project: “Alex slides out of his chair, his knees buckling as they collide with the back of Little Tom, who is kneeling under the desk in order to service his boss. (No kidding, it’s a jungle out there.)” That’s followed up with a bunch of proto-MAGA bullshit about the “Federal Bureau of Minority Opinion” and the “Gay Rights Advisory Commission.”

So, let’s just move on to easily the high point of the issue, George R. R. Martin’s “Unsound Variations,” a story about chess that I expected to hate — I really do not care for chess, a game that is wildly overused as a metaphor and framework — but ended up liking very much.

That’s because Martin is a great writer and the chess theme here works well as a larger theme for aging and life choices. A rich, Elon Musk-type calls his college chess buddies together for a cloistered weekend, revealing he has used a time-travel technique to systematically ruin each of their lives as revenge for humiliating him in an undergrad chess tournament. All of that leads to a meditation on aging and life choices, both those we make and those that are made for us:

“Once the game begins, the possibilities narrow and narrow and narrow, the other variations fade, and you’re left with what you’ve got — a position half of your own making, and half chance, as embodied by that stranger across the board. … The might-have-beens are gone.”

I’m not sure I could describe life post-50 more succinctly than that.

It’s easy for people to hate on Martin these days because of their frustration with his incomplete greatest work. But people need to remember he’s long been a prolific part of the science-fiction and fantasy world and we would be worse off without him. Unlike many of the stories I’ve been writing about in Flashback, this one is pretty easy to pick up — it’s part of his Dreamsongs: Volume II short story collection. Give it a go.

Books & Bakes Read-a-Thon

And that’s a wrap on Amazing January 1982. I do have some other things in the pipeline that should be fun but don’t forget about “Books & Bakes,” my summer read-a-thon benefiting Cake4Kids. I’m a volunteer baker for Cake4Kids, which provides birthday cakes to at-risk and underserved kids in our community. It’s a wonderful organization and I’m excited to have this new way to share and support its mission.

There will definitely be some sci-fi and fantasy included over the course of July and August, so you won’t want to miss out. Next week I’ll be posting some previews of the books I’ll be reading (and writing about) on The Back Half.

To learn more about “Books & Bakes” and Cake4Kids, as well as make a pledge, check out my other website: seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. Let’s have a great summer reading!

I quickly started reading well above my age and grade level, a fortunate by-product of growing up in a home with lots of books. By sixth grade, I had already delved into Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King. In middle school I was a lending library for my friends, providing them all the horror and sci-fi books their parents didn’t want them reading.

It’s no surprise, then, that I grew up to be a writer — that was my dream goal. And reading has been with me at every stage of my life, making me a better writer and a better person. My book collection dwarfs what I grew up with, due to my inability to enter a bookstore without buying five or six books just because they look interesting. I’m often actively reading three to four books at a time — a history here, a horror novel there, a piece of classic literature I’ve finally gotten around to — yet my “to be read” pile (actually, piles) continues to grow because so many new things sound so interesting.

While reading was with me from the start, my cooking obsession came later. In the early ‘90s, during my first days in D.C. learning to live on my own, my mother gave me a copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. I began dabbling with basic recipes, sometimes successfully, sometimes very much not. But over the years, with a lot of reading and a lot practice, I got good at it. I even taught myself to cook traditional Vietnamese food to impress my in-laws.

But the first thing I loved to cook was super basic: baking bread. As an angsty young man, it was entertaining to make something that required punching. Over the years I got better with practice and now I can say with some pride that I haven’t bought a loaf of sandwich bread in more than decade — I bake my own every week or so.

During the pandemic, like so many others, I focused on baking. But not on sourdough. I wanted to bake cakes. I’d been baking cakes for years but one thing I’d never tried: actual cake decoration. So with videos and books and much trial and error, I taught myself how to use piping tips, how to make frostings and icings, how to shape chocolate into ornamentation, and so many other skills.

Ultimately, I was baking too much for a two-person home to consume and my neighbors had begged me to stop giving them cake and donuts so often. Fair enough. But then I came across Cake4Kids as I was searching new techniques online.

Cake4Kids is a non-profit that provides underserved and at-risk youth with custom birthday and celebration cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. In chapters across the country, home bakers create beautiful cakes to give young people who may feel forgotten in the system something special just for them. I signed up immediately and quickly found myself baking a soccer-themed cake, followed by Fortnite. Bakers don’t meet the kids directly but we hear back from the organizations who coordinate these gifts. Each one I’ve baked has given me an immense feeling of joy.

This spring, Cake4Kids provided its 100,000th cake. It’s a big effort to run a non-profit that provides for kids — training, coordination, education, fundraising, it all adds up. So, while I’ve been supporting the kids through baking, I want to support the organization through reading.

How does that work?

One of my favorite activities as a kid was the read-a-thon, a school-organized fundraiser where we asked friends and family to pledge a certain amount per book we would read over the course of a couple weeks. Voracious little bookworm that I was, I raised far more money doing this than I ever did selling candy bars or candles.

What I’m doing this summer is an individual, grown-up read-a-thon. I’m asking friends, family, subscribers, and clients to pledge a dollar amount for each book I read from July 1 through Labor Day. That’s ten weeks of me working through my to-be-read pile (or using it as an excuse to buy more books). At two books a week, someone who pledges $1 per book would donate $20 to Cake4Kids.

Make Your "Books & Bakes" Pledge Here!

Every Friday, I’ll publish a round-up here at The Back Half of mini-reviews and recommendations of what I’ve read. They’ll be mostly positive because one of the perks of being a grown-up is not having to read bad books. I’ll be reading across a range of topics and genres: my beloved sci-fi and horror, as well as some fantasy, history, and literary fiction (plus, I hope, a couple surprises).

And the more I read, the more support Cake4Kids receives.

I’ll also let you know what books I have on deck so you can read along and share your thoughts here.

It’s a simple plan, combining two things I love — reading and baking — to support an organization whose mission I’m committed to.

An important part of Books & Bakes is the support I’m receiving from the Bediz Group at RLAH, which I joined this spring. One of my goals in making that switch to a new real estate brokerage was finding new ways to give back to the community and I’m delighted that David Bediz and the whole team have helped me make this a reality so quickly.

The Rules of the Read-a-Thon

If I’m asking you to pledge $1 or $5 or $10 per book that I read, then I need to have some guidelines so you know how your support is going to work. Here are the five simple rules for how I’ll approach Books & Bakes.

1. No “short” or “easy” books.

I will be avoiding short books that could be called novellas or are under 200 pages. I’m not going to run up the score by reading things I can easily finish in an afternoon. I love graphic novels but they’ll have to wait until the fall.

2. No behemoth novels.

This is not my time to dive into Joyce’s Ulysses or take yet another run at War and Peace. A “read-a-thon” implies reading a lot of books, not just a lot of one book.

3. Non-Fiction is included.

I’ll sprinkle in some non-fiction, partly for spice and partly because they can be super interesting.

4. Let’s read together!

Every Friday, I’ll publish a Books and Bakes review of the books I’ve read at The Back Half. As a Books & Bakes supporter, you’ll receive a free six-month, paid-tier subscription to The Back Half. I’ll also include a book every week that I’m currently reading so you can read along.

5. You can cap out if my volume is too high.

Whether you’re pledging $1, $5, or $10 (or more) per book, you can set a cap on your total pledge. So, if I hit a four-book-a-week pace — unlikely, but we’ll see — you won’t find yourself stuck with a final tally that strikes fear in your heart. This should be fun, not stressful! That said, any amount you can pledge will be doing great work for Cake4Kids.

How to Support Books & Bakes

This part is super simple: Visit seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes — just fill out the pledge form and you’re ready to go! Remember, it’s your choice how much you want to pledge and if you want to set a maximum amount. Anything you can contribute will make a difference for at-risk and underserved youth.

Each supporter will receive a free six-month, paid-tier subscription to The Back Half, complete with all the benefits that come with that. That means you’ll get access to the full archive, an e-book edition of my book Boy Does World, and no paywalls on any posts.

Also, I hope you’ll join me in some chats here at The Back Half about the books I’ll be reading — the more people reading, the better!

And there’s always something that sounds interesting. That’s the beauty of books.

Unfortunately, I’ve been finding interesting things then not getting around to reading them for decades at this point. I could easily go for a few years only reading books I’ve bought but haven’t started (or finished). The thought to do so occasionally crosses my mind, especially when staring at all the volumes I have yet to find shelf space for that confront me every morning.

Naturally, I respond to this thought by deciding to re-read something I finished and shelved a long time ago. And not just anything at the moment. I’ve finally given in to a nearly overwhelming urge I’ve had for the past few months to once again pick up Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, the first volume in his famed Wheel of Time series.

Yep, in the face of all my unread novels and histories, I’ve chosen to jump back into a mammoth fourteen-book fantasy series where each novel runs 800-plus pages. As they say, That boy ain’t right.

Funnily enough, I was not a fantasy boy growing up. I read The Hobbit quite young but bounced hard off of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which to this day I have not read. I made a couple half-hearted attempts at other books, such as Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane and Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, and bounced off them just as hard. The tropes — dragons and princesses and chosen one quest stories — didn’t appeal to me. Science fiction and horror were my jam and very little could shake me out of those.

I believe what changed my mind can be summed up in two words: Final Fantasy.

Starting with Final Fantasy 7 on my original PlayStation and continuing through the entire series, I got myself hooked on those same tropes. It helped that FF7 dressed those tropes up in sci-fi drag but even the less tech-centered, more high-fantasy installments that followed had me hooked. Turns out that having a passion for role-playing games translates into a sudden onset of appreciation for fantasy literature.

In the years since, I have torn through many high-profile fantasy series, including a staggering number of Terry Brooks’s Shannara series. I’m particularly fond of Tad Williams, whose Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy manages to take all those tropes and weave something that feels classic in its homages, yet modern in its telling. And of course I’ve read Game of Thrones, which I won’t be going to back to re-read unless I’m certain it will finally be finished.

I may be nuts but I’m not that nuts.

Wheel of Time is actually complete, even though Jordan died in 2007 with the final three books unfinished. Brandon Sanderson, another weirdly prolific fantasy writer I enjoy, stepped in to wrap up the series based on Jordan’s notes and outlines (with the blessing of Jordan’s wife/editor). So I won’t get literary blue balls re-tackling the series.

I’m already well into the second book, The Great Hunt. I’ll be writing more about this series as I once again make my way through it. Jordan’s fantasy world owes as much to Dune as it does Tolkien, with incredibly complex and convoluted world building and political intrigue. I’m specifically reading it through a gender-focused lens this time, which is appropriate for a series where the world’s magic power is explicitly split into male and female halves, with the male half tainted by evil and women wielding immense magical (and political) power.

Jordan has taken some hits for his supposed gender essentialism and I recall some spanking stuff around halfway through that doesn’t help his case. But I don’t remember it being quite so cut and dried — he works through many, many permutations of how such a world might grow and falter, some absolutely horrifying. Perhaps my memory is being influenced by Amazon’s Wheel of Time television series that took some interesting swings at the source material and then promptly got cancelled when it got really good.

Jeff Bezos needed to focus his resources on destroying the Washington Post, instead.

I’ll be revisiting the books here in batches as a longer term project for 2026 (and likely 2027). It will take a while because I have another reading project that I’ll be announcing here on Memorial Day that means I’ll need to suppress my urge to re-read giant-ass novels for the next few months. So many books, so little time.

And stay tuned for what’s coming. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Finding My Way Back to Paper

Two years ago I wrote a review here of my then-latest technology acquisition: the Kindle Scribe, a combination e-ink tablet for note taking and writing, as well as an oversized e-book reader. A few months later, I wrote a follow-up, noting how deeply the Scribe had become integrated into my daily work and personal life:

“One last thing that I’ve found myself using far more than expected is notations in Kindle books. … I’ve always taken my notes on paper (or sometimes a laptop) as I read, which creates a disconnect between the text and my thoughts. The Scribe solution is a pop-up box for notes, which is tied to a specific location in the text rather than a location on a page. This works super well for me, especially because I can access them easily through my Kindle app on my laptop for when I’m ready to convert those notes into my own writing projects.”

All these months later, the Scribe is still a major part of my daily life. Sheets of yellow paper and Post-It notes remain banished from my desktop. I take it everywhere, so I’m always ready to take notes on a meeting, scribble down otherwise fleeting ideas, or dip into one of the many (many) ebooks I’ve collected over the years.

Well, scratch that last one. I’ve reverted to old-fashioned books on paper in a major way and in large part because of my Scribe.

I have not adopted some anti-ebook attitude. I think ebooks are great and I still grab a few here and there — since my Scribe is always with me that means I always have something to read that’s not my damn phone.

What actually happened was I started taking too many notes.

Jotting notes inside the text seemed super useful at first, especially for books I planned to write about here at the Back Half. But I quickly started hitting some road blocks, primarily that space was limited to fairly short notes. And as time went on, I found the Kindle app on my laptop to be less and less capable of managing my notes, as well as my highlighted passages, which made using it frustrating rather than illuminating when trying to reference them.

I realized I was having a much easier time when reading physical books, despite my initial concerns about a “disconnect” between my thoughts and the page. Taking my notes on the Scribe, where I could scribble out a few hundred words of thoughts and questions with no problem then export them to my Mac, began to free me up. Given my near-genetic-level aversion to writing in books, this was still a big deal for me and my process.

I want to be clear here: I’m not some collectible-focused dilettante who obsesses over maintaining every book I own in mint condition. Books are made to be read and the act of reading is going to inflict some wear and occasionally tear on them. Still, I am a stickler that they should be handled as gently as possible. Every time I see a person reading a paperback with the front cover bent all the way around to the back a piece of my heart dies. If I see you marking your place in a book by folding down the corner you can be certain I am judging you. Use a business card like a caring person does.

You can imagine how I feel when I see some rando posting on #booktok with a video of their pages underlined and highlighted into full-spread rainbows, plus scribbles in the margins, plus Post-It arrows. It sends shivers up my spine. How does anyone make any sense of performative annotations, anyway?

Now here I am, full circle, yet again expanding my already bursting personal library with new hardbacks and trade paperbacks (pour one out for my beloved and defunct mass-market paperbacks). Though I am making far more use of my local library to keep my expenditures somewhat reasonable, I’m not completely crazed.

Luckily, there are no sides to be chosen here. Reading is reading and while there are aspects of physical books I’ll always love — the smell of an older book, the weight of it on your chest when you start to nap — it doesn’t mean I hate the alternatives. There was a dust-up last week on Threads, our most perplexing social media app, over whether or not listening to audiobooks counts as reading that made me understand why I don’t check Threads that often.

Go read a book, however you prefer, wherever you prefer. You can even write in it if you want. Just don’t tell me.

I just didn’t realize how much there would be.

My eyes aren’t clouded. I remember well the casual homophobia that permeated all media during the Seventies and Eighties. I knew early on what a faggot was and that I was one. Every time I ran into that word in a book or movie, it hurt a little because I secretly knew it meant me. But that part of me quickly grew calloused, which allowed me to maintain my voracious consumption of genre novels and short stories.

Going back and re-reading now I feel sorry for my younger self — and other young queer readers of the time — because the homophobia was so endemic to nearly everything. This isn’t just about genre, homophobia (and its partners in bigotry, racism and misogyny) were everywhere, even books and movies that purported to be sympathetic to homosexuality.

Perhaps sometime I’ll go on my rant about how much I loathe The Boys the in the Band.

All to say that when I decided to dip back into the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey — the film and the book — I wasn’t expecting to be smacked in the face with the anti-gay tropes of the time. Stanley Kubrick’s film has grander ambitions than interpersonal human relationships. Arthur C. Clarke was a fairly progressive humanist and quasi-closeted gay man living with his partner in Sri Lanka. There wouldn’t seem to be a lot of space for inserting random homophobia into either film or book.

One would think.

I no longer have the original version of Clarke’s novel from 1968 (so many books lost to moves and time) so I picked up the “Millennial Edition” from 1999, which includes a foreword recounting his collaboration with Kubrick. It was a unique process, with the two of them crafting the screenplay and Clarke drafting the novel, he says, “with feedback in both directions.” It’s fascinating to learn how Clarke actually rewrote sections after viewing early scenes from the movie.

He includes some moments from his journal, which is where I hit on this nugget from Oct. 17, 1964:

“Stanley has invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at ease.”

Goddammit.

Clarke — again, a gay man — included this in his 1999-written foreword so you can see that standards have still only recently and imperfectly changed for this kind of stuff. Though it is darkly amusing that Kubrick almost created C-3P0 and R2-D2 a decade before George Lucas got around to it. This moment also puts one of the ending scenes of the movie — Dave Bowman living out a lifetime in a old-world European hotel room — into a new context.

Does this change the status of these two works of art or my opinion of them? No. It’s just a reminder that homophobia in all these works that I love is like a pebble in my shoe that I’ll never get out, nagging and inescapable.

Mercifully, that pebble doesn’t show up in the actual film or novel, which are both keenly focused on human evolution, consciousness, and technology. That’s not to say that they’re devoid of social context — the relegation of women to the furthest of sidelines may be a product of the time but it is so extreme that it begins to feel like a deliberate choice.

Clarke includes this howler in the novel regarding the use of female names for the extravehicular pods onboard the spaceship Discovery: “They were usually christened with feminine names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes slightly unpredictable.”

No wonder so many women felt there was no place for them in science fiction and fantasy.

To step back and look at both separately, it’s hard not to argue that Kubrick’s film version is the superior work of art, by lightyears. It is audacious in ways Clarke’s can’t even begin to emulate. One of the most visually striking films in movie history actually opens on three minutes of a black screen and haunting orchestral score, that feels like a dare or a warning. Then there’s Kubrick’s devotion to showing the story rather than telling it, especially in the opening section where the monolith bestows the use of tools on our ancestors (and who promptly get to killing).

Kubrick’s 2001 has been analyzed to death so I’m not jumping into takes that have been done ad nauseum for decades. What actually struck me the most was how fast this supposedly ponderous movie feels. Perhaps I’ve grown more patient with age but my memories of the movie — especially the Dawn of Man — were that they were interesting but interminable. Those were false memories. Kubrick is certainly deliberate but everything on screen is communicating something, whether it’s the origins of man’s technology or the intricacies of interplanetary physics. Plus, he goes full on horror movie in the middle: the doomed astronaut’s final spacewalk is terrifying both from the vastness of space and the stalking space pod that the computer Hal commandeers.

Also, it’s quaint that a two-and-a-half hour film has an intermission embedded in the middle, a bladder-friendly accommodation we can’t get these days even during three-hour blockbusters.

The funny thing about 2001, a movie that has launched thousands of interpretations and analyses, is that if you’re confused you don’t have to be. Clarke spells it all out in the book.

Truly, Clarke’s novel is a 1968 version of a YouTube explainer video, answering every who, what, when, where, why and how you may have. Do you have questions about how the monolith changed the early humans, or what they experienced when the monolith touched them? Clark spells it out with the entranced apes:

“They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated. … Then the man-ape nearest to the slab suddenly came to life. … his body lost its trancelike rigidity and became animated as if it were a puppet controlled by invisible strings. The head turned this way and that; the mouth silently opened and closed; the hands clenched and unclenched. Then he bent down, snapped off a long stalk of grass, and attempted to tie it into a knot with clumsy fingers.”

Or, near the end of the film, when Bowman encounters the giant monolith in space and begins his final kaleidoscopic journey that inspired both acid trips and questions of What does it all mean? Well, here’s what it means:

“Call it the Star Gate.

“For three million years, it had circled Saturn, waiting for a moment of destiny that might never come. In its making, a moon had been shattered, and the debris of its creation orbited still.

“Now the long wait is ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax.

“Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men — or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars.”

It would be easy to dismiss this literalism as a bit of a joke when comparing it to Kubrick’s vision, which hints and alludes to these ideas. Despite all the stories of people leaving the theater perplexed about what they had just seen, 2001 the movie isn’t actually all that complicated. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen it multiple times and I am deeply familiar with the core ideas that fuel so much science fiction that it feels very obvious to me.

Still, Kubrick took their shared screenplay and created a meditation on humanity’s place and potential in the cosmos, leaving much unsaid and open to interpretation.

Clarke, on the other hand, had no interest in leaving things unsaid. Clarke was a proselytizer for science and human advancement — he saw the pursuit of space travel as a glorious goal for our species that would drive us outward into wonder as well as heal our worst tendencies. He was deeply optimistic about the use of technology to bring about more equal societies and potentially contact other civilizations that transcended their humble biological beginnings to create cultures of consciousness: beings able to not only observe the universe around them but to appreciate its beauty and wonder.

Which brings me to the other point of difference between these two versions of a story born through collaboration. Kubrick’s work is a masterpiece of film, using every tool at his disposal — editing, lighting, cinematography, visual effects — to create an enduring work that not only holds up beyond its dated world of U.S.-Soviet domination and rigid gender roles but makes profound statements on humanity and the nature of consciousness.

Clarke’s novel is, well, notable for the ideas he conveys.

I don’t mean this as an insult to Clarke who, like many of the writers of “classic” science fiction, was a competent writer rather than a literary stylist. This is “big idea” science fiction, where the premium is on the scientific concepts on display. Isaac Asimov definitely wrote in this vein, particularly his Foundation series, and you still see it today among many “hard science fiction” writers who spend pages on the technicalities of spaceship design while tossing perhaps a paragraph or two to character development.

Again, not an insult. I enjoy a lot of that hard SF focused on orbital mechanics, time dilation at near light-speed travel, and all sorts of fun science stuff. But if you’re looking for stirring prose, this is not the type of work where you’ll find it.

Also, to be fair to Clarke, he does generally consider the film and the novel two separate works despite him being the common creator of the two. And the book does differ in some significant ways, primarily making Jupiter — the climactic location of the film — a waypoint on the journey to Saturn, where the book’s climax takes place. Still, as Clarke himself notes in his foreword, “[E]ven in my own mind, book and movie tend to be confused with each other.”

That’s unavoidable given the status of the film. It’s so unavoidable, in fact, that Clarke abandoned his differentiation when he wrote the sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two, moving the action back to Jupiter. And that novel was then made into a movie sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, an overall fascinating series of events in terms of creation and collaboration. I haven’t seen or read those since the Eighties, so I may add those to my list just to compare. Hell, I could probably do an entire series on science fiction works of the time that posited distant futures dominated by U.S.-Soviet tension and/or collaboration.

Nearly everyone back then really did overestimate Russia and underestimate China.

So, when it comes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, are both the movie and the novel worth spending time with nearly sixty years later? When it comes to Kubrick’s film, unequivocally yes. While some stuff around the edges doesn’t hold up — the lack of women most prominently — the rest is astoundingly prescient and we have Clarke to thank for that just as much as Kubrick’s ability to bring the concepts to life with special effects that still look amazing.

For Clarke’s novel, I’d say that’s for completists, especially if you’re interested in following the story through his entire four-book series, continuing through 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey. It’s been a while since I read them but I recall it getting a little wild by the end. Also, despite the early trip-up I had with the mention of fag robots, overall Clarke remains a charming, if often naive, optimist about humans and technology.

Given the techno-dystopia currently being foisted on us by techbros who claim to be inspired by him, it’s worth going back to the source to see what they’re missing.

My problem was more that, if faced with a choice between saving a baby that’s hanging over a boiling cauldron and saving face for the Democratic party, well, get ready for baby stew because we all knew where Barney’s true loyalties were. That’s why he’s been devoting some of his last moments engaging in hippie-punching to the left on trans issues.

Then Bil Browning published his recollection of Barney — namely, being groped by the congressman as a young, gay political activist. When I saw that Bil had posted it to Facebook I immediately dove into the comments to confirm what I suspected would be there: a horde of my fellow Gen X gay men defending Barney’s handsiness and dismissing any concern over unwanted groping as whining over something that they believe was actually common and fun and expected back in the 1990s.

Bullshit.

Bil has followed up with his own post on this (and he was nice enough to quote me) that I think fairly makes the point that this is crazy talk. But the whole idea has really stuck in my craw now for a couple days.

This is super simple. Keep your fucking hands to yourself, especially if you’re a man in a position of power over the people around you. I’m not just saying that because I had my ass grabbed by anonymous hands so many, many times while making my way through the Sunday night crowd at JR.’s, or working my way to the bar at Tracks, or trying to force my way through that stupidly-narrow hallway between the front and back bars at Badlands.

To be clear, lest someone accuse me of hypocrisy: playing secret grab ass with strangers is a different thing than engaging in some flirty, face-to-face physicality. I did a lot of the latter and had a lot of it done to me. The thing is, those were situations where you could say no.

The fact that I rarely said no does not change the ethical calculus here. That still was true back in the 90s even if we were all acculturated to just accepting it as the way things were.

And, getting back closer to Bil’s story of Barney, it is harder to say “No” or “Stop” to someone who has power over you or influence over your desired career. I’ve spent my time around rich and powerful gay men who take more liberties than they should and, as a twink in my twenties, I let things slide because I didn’t want to rock the boat, I didn’t want to do something that would keep me from moving up whatever ladder I was focused on at the time.

But that’s not the only reason I keep coming back to those Facebook defenses of bad behavior like I’m picking at a wound.

Around 1993, I sliced my knee open on a car license plate while running around clubbing. Probably should have gone to the emergency room but Tracks was calling and I wasn’t gonna miss it. So I patched up with bandaids and promised my friends I’d go to a doctor later.

I hadn’t found a regular doctor at the time, so I chose one from an advertisement in the Washington Blade. I got a quick appointment and couple days later I was sitting pantsless on an exam table as Dr. S— stitched up my knee and gave me my tetanus booster. Then, during the “all done” portion of the visit, he fondled my genitals and gave me a kiss on the cheek, telling me I was so “beautiful.”

It happened so fast. It stuns you.

And I convinced myself that it wasn’t a big deal, I was misinterpreting what had happened, he was just being a little overly friendly. So when I came down with a case of strep throat a few months later, I went back. And I got fondled and kissed again.

That time, I stopped convincing myself.

This wasn’t the first time I’d run into inappropriate behavior in a doctor’s office. The whole reason I went to Dr. S— in the first place was because of the initial doctor I saw in D.C. on Q Street. Or, more specifically, the young physician who did my full body examination there and then pulled my home phone number from my file to call me and ask for a date. Another incident that creeped me out but I declined to do anything about.

A large part of the reason I didn’t report these guys is because, yes, at that time, we were telling ourselves that it wasn’t a big deal. Plus, my highly active sex life was no secret in D.C. and I figured it would hurt me more to report it than it would to just ignore it. Which means other guys probably had the same sexual assault experience I did because I chose not to speak up.

Too many people are still saying it wasn’t a big deal, that it was all in good fun, and everyone actually enjoyed it. As Bil notes in his piece, that’s the sound of older gay men rationalizing their own bad behavior.

I may be getting older but I’m still a fan of forthright sexual antics, of intense flirting, of slutting out to your little heart’s content. None of that is incompatible with keeping your hands to yourself until you know they’re welcome. It’s not incompatible with being respectful of people who are younger than you, who depend on you for their job, who look up to you as role model.

My generation of gay men needs to finally learn that enough is enough.

Sean Bugg first met Landyn in 2014 when they were 18 and participating in the Next Generation Leadership Foundation LGBTQ youth leadership program in Washington, D.C. A decade later, Landyn has built a thriving coaching business and become one of the leading voices on trans fitness and body image.

In this episode, Sean and Landyn talk about Landyn’s personal journey through transition and how fitness became central to their sense of self, the unique relationship trans and nonbinary people have with body image and gym culture, what healthy masculinity actually means, navigating fitness spaces as a trans person, cis passing privilege and the current political climate, and why Landyn walked away from a media career to build something more meaningful.

You can watch the full podcast on YouTube:

Trey Graham is a D.C.-based journalist who covered theater for the Washington City Paper for two decades. He received the George Jean Nathan Award for distinguished drama criticism in 2004. He currently covers theater for the Washington Post. His newsletter, “In Good Company,” is on Substack (treygraham.substack.com).

An Oral History of D.C.’s Gold Coast:

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Southern Roots and Race

02:10 Awareness of Racial Identity

07:16 Cultural Differences in Racial Perception

11:34 Confronting Personal Racism

16:30 Navigating Racial Dynamics in D.C.

23:22 Exploring Ethnic Backgrounds and Class Dynamics

26:47 Literary Influences: Flannery O’Connor’s Impact

33:59 Revelation and Self-Reflection in O’Connor’s Work

40:28 The Intersection of Religion, Class, and Race

47:25 Cultural Reflections: The South’s Complex Identity

50:48 Introduction and Context

51:06 Navigating Difficult Conversations

51:54 Closing Thoughts and Reflections

This is too bad for a number of reasons, such as not having convenient transporters, gorgeous starships, and lots of alien species who look suspiciously like us. Naturally, the most fun reasons are the unlikeliest ones — that’s the appeal of sci-fi stories.

But the real reason life isn’t like Star Trek is a downer: the show’s techno-optimism posited a happy and healthy humanity living in a better world because of human ingenuity and technology, a future that seems increasingly fragile for many and out of reach for most.

Star Trek grew out of early and Golden Age science fiction, tales of rocket ships and derring do, computers and manifest destiny among the stars. It’s long been accepted conventional wisdom that scientists who love science fiction are partial to Star Trek over Star Wars, an intellectual property that is filed under sci-fi but is actually fantasy.

I know, conventional wisdom does not equal truth, but we’re about to delve into a lot of vibes here.

There’…

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I wasn’t in D.C. yet — I was actually three hours south on Interstate 81 in Lexington, Va., studying print journalism at Washington and Lee University. Each morning at the campus bookstore, three daily papers were for sale: the Post, the New York Times, and the Washington Times. Both Times were not for me, because I wasn’t that interested in New York and I had no patience for the cult of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Plus, the Post had three full pages of comic strips. Comics were one of the ways I taught myself to read, slowly sounding out the words from the strips in newspapers at my grandparents’ house when I was four. Hell, the funny pages are probably the thing I miss most today.

Those newspapers back home in Kentucky, however, never felt like a “hometown” paper when I was a kid. Whether it was the Paducah Sun or Hopkinsville’s Kentucky New Era, they always arrived on a one-day delay so they w…

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