What I'm Reading Right Now
NOCO 2024: STORIES FROM THE NOCO (NORTH COLUMBIA CITY) WRITERS GROUP
NOCO is a neighborhood that my ol’ pal Elaine named because that’s how she rolls. Hey, it’s better than having a real estate developer name a neighborhood, as so often happens. I’m looking at you, Hillman City!
This is the second book from the NOCO Writers Worshop. Their first effort, NoCo Writers in Quarantine: Stories from the North Columbia City Writers' Workshop, 2020, was created during the pandemic.
NOCO 2024 is published by Clark Humphrey’s MISC MEDIA. I subscribe to his daily email newsletter of the same name which is a recap of Seattle news stories with links. Clark was the editor of the newspaper Elaine and I established, the Belltown Messenger. Clark has a story in NOCO 2024, along with Elaine, Daphne Bellflower, Ren Felman, Dalmatia Fleming, Tom Gaffney, Joanne Klein and Tom Sunderland.
Eleine’s story, A Professional Courtesy, is a hard-boiled tale about a prostitute caught up in various predatory systems. Good gritty stuff.
I consume trash rock star autobiographies as part of an ongoing project and alcoholic junkie Duff McKagan’s How to Be a Man: (and other illusions) really is the worst of the genre. This second (best-selling!) book is all about what a great husband and father he is. Good writing needs to be honest. If your ghost writers and editors can’t make you look honest what’s the point?
Re-read Tom Hansen’s American Junkie. This is honest writing. Very gruesome. Tom died recently. The cover blurb for American Junkie is from Mark Lanegan who survived a Duff McKagan level of booze and smack. Lanegan — an anti-vaxxer — also died recently of … guess what?
Steve Moriarty’s Mia Zapata and The Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution is a great rock biography - a rare thing. I know Steve, and over the years I could see that Mia’s murder was something he might not ever get over. And yet here it is - his recovery exposed for all to see in the form of a very well written book. I had low expectations here but was pleasantly surprised - Steve can write. In a brilliant editorial decision, this heartfelt story about Mia and the band ends before her death. I know that, looking back, Steve is bitter about the media’s exploitation of Mia’s case, and that when the killer was caught years later it opened a wound. This is his revenge.
Aw shucks after all the painful Seattle rock star books I was ready to settle in with a feel-good story about Jimmy Stewart and Hank Fonda - Scott Eyman’s Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart (A Biography of Two Hollywood Legends). I found this on Kindle Unlimited - where Amazon Prime members can choose from an assortment of free eBooks, knowing that Amazon is tracking you as you read and monetizing the data you generate while doing so.
Jimmy Stewart, despite being a conservative republican, was an incredible man who was one of the best actors of his era. He was also a pilot and war hero who bombed Germany* during World War 2. He lost his step son in Vietnam.
*Firebombing cities full of civilians is bad, but Stewart showed great courage by piloting those bombers. The survival rate for any given mission was not great.
Like Stewart, Henry Fonda was also one of the great American actors and also a war hero. He wasn’t as reactionary as his friend Jimmy and even eventually softened up about his son acting in hippie drug culture movies and his daughter protesting the Vietnam war. A well written book that students of film history will love.
—Alex
New! I’m spicing up this website by branching out from writing about food to opining about whatever I feel like.
Thanks for the LOVE. We have been writing together as a group since 2012 and this dedication to the art of fiction is just PURE D FUN. Plus we get to impress our friends with our ERUDITION "the quality of having or showing great knowledge or learning; scholarship."