So Long, 2023
Dear All,
This is the latest episode of Don’t Press That Button, a newsletter about books and music and movies and cats and baseball and whatnot. As the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons around here. That said, Between the Buttons by the Rolling Stones? You should press the button that plays that album. While I prefer the US edition, which has “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday,” I wouldn’t hesitate to play the UK edition, either.
The button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. It doesn’t play Between the Buttons, but there’s no reason you can’t put the album on and then quickly press the subscription button, and pretend that subscribing to DPTB caused the Stones to jam out. I think that’d be cool.
Anyway, if you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.
Dispatch from New Mexico
I may have mentioned it before, but I am not much of a traveler. While I often enjoy visiting far-flung locales once I arrive, I find getting out the door to be a struggle, and when I do depart it’s with the grim certainty that I’m leaving home just in order to end up at a hotel with strep throat, a gastrointestinal bug, or both.
However, earlier in the month, I summoned the wherewithal to escape my neuroses long enough to get to the airport and fly to New Mexico, which is a wonderful place. There’s so much sky, and those huge distances, they fill you up. You feel this compulsion to start walking straight ahead and give yourself over to them.
At the airport in Albuquerque, there’s a viewing deck with great chairs where you can relax and soak it in. If you’ve never fantasized about doing a tour of duty at a remote planetary outpost in the distant reaches of the galaxy, well, sitting in this spot will get you started. Of course, as soon as you get caught up in the romance of interstellar exploration, you may have to contend — if you’re me — with pondering the threat of coming down with the flu in space…
The Latest
It was a big thrill to get the news that Waterstones had included The Curator in its roundup of the Best Books of 2023. Thanks to everyone at Waterstones and to everyone at my UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton.
I’ve been remiss about reporting on the translations of The Curator. Spanish (Penguin Random House), Italian (Sperling & Kupfer), Russian (AST), and Czech (Dobrovsky) language versions are all forthcoming. I don’t have any order links yet, but I will include them in future newsletters as I do.
Copies of the Gauntlet Press edition of The Curator featuring an afterword by Joe Lansdale and an alternate ending just landed on my doorstep! I adore this edition. Gauntlet still has a few copies left if you’d like to snag one.
As always, Oblong Books has signed copies of my books if that’s of interest.1
It was an honor to write an introduction for the gorgeous MidWorld Press edition of Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye. The way that Bayard channels Poe is a true marvel, and beyond that, the mystery that the story tracks is absolutely devilish.
The Self Help production schedule has been a little slower than we originally anticipated, so we are now eyeing a May rollout. I can report that issue #2 is nearly locked and looks beautiful.
The Psychic Benefits
The holidays are the Paranoid Style’s favorite season! They recently gave us the gift of the second single off their upcoming LP, The Interrogator. It’s called, “Print the Legend,” and it’s a doozy.
We sent the following two-part question into P-Style Headquarters:
The holidays are for giving and, obviously, Paranoid Style records and merch make ideal gifts. But what do you suggest for the person who has all the Paranoid Style records, including the Romanian-only release, The Maybe Someone Did Fart, But Like All Things, It’ll Fade Eventually Sessions? Also, what’s the best music or music-related gift you’ve ever received for the holidays?
Here’s what they said:
Good question. I always say for the holidays that the important thing to keep in mind is your watchwords. For me, the Christmas season boils down to two things: temerity and excellence. If you've got one, your stocking is halfway stuffed. If you have both it's bulging like a princess heifer. That's what you want — the bulge. I'd say for this person, do they REALLY have enough Paranoid Style to go around? In this time of imminent crisis? If so, good. I applaud you. But do keep your cupboards stocked. Now, as for the greatest music related gift I've ever received. It has to be this vintage Live Aid shirt, direct from the big event in Philadelphia back in 1985. Of course I was not at the event itself. I was in elementary school on Long Island — how would you have expected me to get there? That's completely unreasonable. That's what makes having the shirt all the more special. Sometimes, when I want to spice things up during one of the Paranoid Style's rare public appearances, I kick off the show by saying the exact words that Joan Baez used to start Live Aid: “Children of the '80s, this is your Woodstock!'“ Sometimes I change it to: “Children of the '80s, this is your Altamont!” Both work.
Recommendations
My favorite 2023 reading experience was actually a listening experience. Matt Godfrey’s audiobook narration of Lee Durkee’s memoir of his search for an ad vivum portrait of the Bard, Stalking Shakespeare, is splendid, capturing both the wry humor and the underlying melancholy in the author’s prose. What I responded to so strongly in Stalking Shakespeare is the way it demonstrates the way that a fascination — in Lee Durkee’s case, with Edwardian portraiture — can become a fixation, the center of a whole life, the roundabout that all our personal traffic passes along. You certainly won’t go wrong with taking the book on in the old-fashioned way, but Godfrey’s reading is so good it frequently made me want to drive around the block an extra time or two to keep listening.
John Warner’s Biblioracle is an excellent Substack about books, and his most recent newsletter considering what we should want from the books that get taught in schools is particularly smart.
Taking a cue from the Biblioracle newsletter, I recall being assigned Great Expectations as a high school freshman and thinking, man, this is going to be an epic drag. Of course, once I started, I couldn’t put it down.
I couldn’t agree more with Warner when he writes that “[A]ny framing of reading as some kind of process of moral or character formation, or the actions of a superiorly evolved person with great suspicion, even scorn.” I believe that books can make a huge difference in our lives, but I don’t read them with that expectation, and I don’t write them with that intention in mind. I read and I write because those are activities that I enjoy. Great Expectations is, however, one of those novels that did more than just entertain me. Specifically, it created a connection with a society that belonged to another time; the immediacy of the humanity stunned me. The characters were so far away, but I recognized them in the same way I recognized the characters in books set in my own familiar world. It made my universe bigger, and me smaller. Suffice to say, Great Expectations2 is recommended.
As DPTB bids farewell for the year, I need to say thank you again to all the writer friends who gave their time to help me present The Curator at bookstores, to all the people who attended the events, and to the bookstores. I also want to say thank you, of course, to all of you for reading this newsletter.
In case you ever have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I’m over on Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there.
All Best,
Owen
If you’ve already bought one of my books as a gift for someone, or you were planning to pick one up at your local bookstore to give, and you’d like a signed book sticker, let me know and I will send you one. Please note: this offer is only open for the next week, while supplies last, and within the United States.