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 that I have failed to attend to lately. My bad! I’ll try to do better. Anyhow, as the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons around here. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

But the button that’s coming up? Succumb to temptation! It’s safe as houses. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter, which is free.1

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Ready for the Rush

The reason I’ve allowed DPTB to lie fallow is that I’m way out in a little canoe in the big ocean of a new novel and, between that and a couple of other ongoing projects, and the wild swings of this year’s edition of the Red Sox, my reflective capacities have been pretty tapped out. I’ve wanted to check in, though, and one of my favorites, Jeff Tweedy, recently stacked a stack about Rush that I absolutely loved and wanted to bump, so that gave me an excuse.

First, a quick aside on Wilco and Tweedy and all his assorted projects, in case I haven’t touched on them before: I saw the band play at the Guinness Fleadh Festival, oh, twenty-five or so years ago now, and I’ve been on board ever since. They played “I Must Be High” and a bunch of the Being There LP, and it was totally thrilling. I actually played my original copy of the AM CD until it expired, which is hard to do with a CD. There’s an urgency encoded in all his writing and in all his performances. It’s his special magic. You can feel him reaching for you in that rocky, singularly haunting voice.

In his post, Tweedy talks about coming around on Rush, and he puts it in terms that I appreciate enormously:

“[It] feels good to figure out why something was so popular and people loved it so much and continue to love it so much.”

Then, he delivers a revelatory cover (behind the paywall) of “Tom Sawyer,” and, gosh, I need to give Rush another turn at the plate. What a jam.

As an explanation for this resistance to the band, Tweedy talks in the piece about how the guys who picked on him as a young person wore Rush T-shirts. For me, I’ve long shied away from them because the emphasis on the music’s elaborateness turned me off and made it seem like it was bit of an academic project. Nothing academic about Tweedy’s “Tom Sawyer” cover.

I suddenly suspected that I was cheating myself of something that was really fun, but I’m not going to stay cheated. After I finish up this post, I’m going to throw on Moving Pictures, settle in, and get a load of what I’ve been missing.

The idea that Tweedy expresses is one that I’ve often found rewarding. Because you didn’t like something once, or because some people who suck like it, doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there. It may not have been the right time; the suckiness of a given enthusiast does not generally belong to whatever it is they are enthusiastic about. Sometimes you have to visit with a song or a book or what-have-you a second time to get the appeal.

I read David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as a graduate student and it was a grind. A few years later, I had a blast soaking in Infinite Jest, finished that, and circled around to Brief Interviews again, and the sailing was smooth. I used to immediately turn the radio dial when the Grateful Dead came on. I’d heard a few songs and had cast them away as tinny and dumb. Somehow a copy of Dick’s Picks Volume 8 fell into my hands and I thought, “Oh, what the hell, I’ll listen to this goofy shit,” and it clicked: the Dead are so fucking fun.

For ages, I steadfastly refused to eat guacamole, was convinced I didn’t like it. A fool! I was a fool! If a head-high mound of guacamole materialized in front of me this instant, I would gobble my way straight through it, like Dig Dug.

The counterpoint is that our sentence here on earth is finite and you can’t endlessly devote yourself to solving the appeal of merlot or pickleball or Updike2 or whatever it is that confounds you. I do get that, I do, and there’s certainly a balance to be struck between never challenging a prior impression and driving yourself nuts with something that you really, really don’t get. It is possible to simply not like a thing. That is allowed. (It’s a whole other post, but this is important to keep in mind in relation to your own work, and bears endless repeating: people are allowed to not like your creations, just as loudly as they would like.)

The point is to be open-minded as much, and as often, as you can manage, because, if you do, that missing puzzle piece might snap into place, and it’s pretty cool. Hats off to Jeff Tweedy for the reminder and the mind-blowing “Tom Sawyer.”

The Latest

• I was over the moon to be nominated in the novelette category of the Shirley Jackson Awards for “Letter Slot.” Thank you, Shirley Jackson Awards! I did not win — congratulations to Vanessa Santos, who did, for “Emily,” from Make a Home of Me, which I can’t wait to read — but it was hugely flattering to be on a list with such a terrific group of writers, and I appreciated it very much. Check out all the winners and nominees at the SJA website.

• I visited the Eastford Public Library in April and had a wonderful chat with the wonderful Jody Blanchet. If you are in the general area, do follow them on Instagram, because they have great programs.

• Eastford is the home of the Frog Rock. It was closed when I was there, but I was able to see it from a distance and it is majestic.

I committed myself to getting in better shape and I’ve been going to the gym at least a couple of times a week. I feel better, I’ve been sleeping better, I haven’t hurt myself yet. I do regret taking off twenty years from a dedicated exercise regimen, but in my defense, I was mad at myself about it the whole time. Meanwhile, my gym shows insane competitions on all of its television screens around the clock and it’s compelling. There’s one where wrestlers try to stuff each other into stacks of tires!

• I don’t know what to say about the Red Sox. They lost a bunch of key players, it was agony to watch them, and then, in desperation, they adopted a bold strategy of basically never losing. It’s been fabulous, but confusing.

• I went with my pal Charles Soule to take the measure of our local ball club, the Hudson Valley Renegades, seeing them play the Jersey Shore Blueclaws, and it was a treat. Jersey Shore got the Renegades in extras, 2-1. Griffin Burkholder of the Claws threw an absolute dart to nail the would-be tying runner at the plate to end the game. I root for the Renegades despite their Yankees affiliation, so on the one hand, argh, but on the other, wow, awesome, awesome play. The Phillies have a good one in Burkholder.

• I insisted that Charles pose with the plastic statues of the Renegades’ mascots. He was thrilled.

The Psychic Benefits

My friend Elizabeth Nelson of the Paranoid Style is going on tour with Lara Walker of Wussy this fall, but that didn’t stop me from interrupting rehearsals to ask her a question on behalf of the Psychic Benefits, PS’s Official Fan Club.

PB: The Paranoid Style has been kidnapped by Hall & Oates cultists and taken to a remote location. The lead cultist hands you a guitar, Elizabeth, and demands that you sing a Hall & Oates song for their leader, a figure in gossamer white robes who rests languidly on a throne made of CDs, drinking red wine from a bejeweled goblet. If you do not please the leader, the strongest cultist will pinch one of PS guitarist Timothy Bracy’s tender earlobes between their meaty thumb and forefinger. What song do you play to save Timothy?

Elizabeth: I think the best H&O song to delight them with is “Your Kiss Is On My List” because I really love that song and I think they’d appreciate my respect for lists. I could talk about all sorts of lists, like Christgau’s Dean’s List, or Santa’s naughty or nice list, or what a great resource Craigslist is, or at least was; I have no idea what people use it for these days, procuring contraband I assume? But I found a cat sitter through there once, or maybe it was a violin teacher. Then, we could segue into ranking H&O’s top ten, which would take hours, giving me enough time to figure out that neat little pre-chorus in the song, which I’ve always loved and find so invigorating every time that I hear it. I’d tell them all about that and give them the respect they deserve for such excellent song craft. Maybe they could tell me how Oates came up with that part, which would serve as a nice distraction. By the end, we’d all be singing along because there’s all of those awesome harmonies and backing vocals. They’d need Tim to not be screaming in pain because they’d need all hands on deck. Anyway, that’s just one idea. “Maneater” could be fun, too.

Recommendations

• I devoured Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams. It’s an impossible novel to summarize, so I’m not even going to try, but if you enjoy polyphonic storytelling, you can’t do better. Novels that contain several radically different voices often suffer a little bit because one or the other of the voices is more engaging. Not in this case. Every POV shift grabs ahold of you immediately and is equally addictive.

• The new William Matheny LP, Material Witness, is primo roots rock. A fantastic recording. The easiest reference point is probably Tom Petty, but if you like great music, you’ll like it.

• Song of the summer, you ask? Sure thing. Got it right here. “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)” by Julia Jacklin.

Jerry

Before I bounce out of here, I just want to recognize my excellent pal Jerry Rocha, who passed away a few weeks ago. He was a beautiful soul. This remembrance of him is perfect, just like Jerry.

As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and a modest amount of chatting sometimes occurs. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m intermittently active at best.

If you’d like to purchase a signed copy of one of my books, Oblong Books has a selection and they are always happy to mail them.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Luckily, the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

Polo Grounds First Bagger, Three Letters

First of all, my apologies for the long gap between newsletters. I’ve been hard at work. Besides, the cat keeps bringing me her stick with the ribbon attached and that’s cut into my newslettering time.

A few nights ago, however, something I read in Joe Posnanski’s (delightful) The Baseball 100 sent me on a journey that seemed too important not to share. It started with Posnanski’s Mel Ott chapter.

While most of you probably know Mel Ott because of the federal law that requires he be used as an answer in half of all crossword puzzles, he was also a heck of a ballplayer. Ott delighted New York fans for 21 years, from 1926 to 1947, and pounded a still remarkable 511 homers along the way. Posnanski takes a fascinating deep dive into the statistics to show how Master Melvin radically altered his approach away from the Polo Grounds, hitting for doubles instead of homers. (Here’s Mel taking his batting practice licks in 1934. That’s a big hitch!)

But what really sent me spinning was a question that braced me out of the blue, a question that many others have doubtless asked themselves: did hecklers ever call Mel Ott “Mel Snot”?

I checked my tableside dictionary — The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary — and learned that snot derives from the Old English gesnot and corresponds with the Middle Dutch word, snotte, which is just fun to look at. I also picked up an excellent new definition of snot: “the snuff or burnt wick of a candle.”

Meanwhile, the online Merriam-Webster specifically dates snot to the 15th century! So, we are dealing with a word that has been in use for a long, long time, since way before Mel Ott took the field for the New York Giants in 1926.

Which means that, yes, it is possible that hecklers called him Mel Snot. Remember, too, that the Giants played in the same division as the Phillies, where the fans are all actual lunatics. In Philly, calling him Mel Snot would be going easy on him.

I moved over to The New York Times and gleefully searched their database for the word snot. I’m surely not the first to do this, but I might be the first over the age of 13 to do it. How many hits do you suppose I got? 1,5121! That’s a lot of snot!

The oldest entry, printed October 16, 1852, titillated. SEDUCER SNOT. How badly was the Seducer snotted, and by whom? Unfortunately, the article hadn’t been transcribed.

Nine years later in 1861, a declaration by traitor Jefferson Davis seemed to provide another new definition of snot. “Contracts have also been made at that city with two different establishments for the casting of ordnance, cannon, snot and shell,” boasted the famous and disgusting racist. While I dug around for information about this usage without luck, it initially seemed fair to assume that the snot he was crowing about was some kind of ammunition.

Wait, though…

I wondered, was it possible the Times just had some long-running issue with transcribers typing snot when they intended to type shot? After all, the H and the N are close enough on the keyboard to borrow a little flour from one another. That would explain why my attempts to find a definition that included ammunition had been a bust, and help us better understand what happened to the Seducer of 1852.

Most of the next few snots seemed military-related, and an eye-catching dispatch from March 29, 1902, confirmed my suspicion.

In the transcribed article itself, Banny Stevack, 23, is reported to have been captured by IRS agents at a carpentry shop at 123rd St. that seemed to be operating as an illegal distillery. Banny — and what else was the man supposed to do but become a bootlegger with that name? — attempted to flee and was halted in his tracks by “two shots close to his head from Col. Thompson’s revolver.” 1) I hate Col. Thompson’s police work here. Don’t fire at unarmed suspects. 2) Shots makes a lot more sense than snots.

Then, I discovered that it was possible to click through to a close-up PDF scan of the original newsprint and see the actual headline and article:

There you have it. The headline word was Shots not Snots.

I circled back to the Seducer article and checked out the close-up of the PDF there. Here’s the actual story in its entirety, and it’s a doozy:

Yesterday, a woman, named Ann Wheeler, formerly of Cleveland, where her friends reside, shot a young man named LACE in the street, with a pistol. LACE, who is a married man, had seduced her, and reported the fact in the saloons of the city.

Let me repeat: it’s bad to shoot people — even that asshole LACE.

Whoever transcribed The New York Times of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a typo issue with the word shot that periodically blew up in their faces. No criticism here. The print on these old papers is teeny tiny, and I bet the transcribers weren’t exactly being paid big bucks.2

Farther along, the Times’s snot files did unveil a more convincing definition of the word in a July 6, 1913, article about crabbing. Here, a snot is “[a crab] that has just entered the shedding stage.” I once again struggled to unearth this definition anywhere else. However, the scan is clear and that’s definitely snot in the newspaper column. It rings incredibly true as a piece of fishing vernacular, doesn’t it?

Snot trickles in and out of the paper of record. It disappears entirely, for instance, from 1903 to 1908, 1914—1915, and 1925—1928. Was the crabbing usage the only seemingly intentional one? And what about Mel Ott?

I clicked a little more and…

I won’t leave you in suspense. There is no mention in this wonderful article about anybody calling Mel Ott “Mel Snot.” Instead, snot shows up again as a typo, this time for spot. The sentence is “Now the moment a spot of dust3 or grass stain appears on white leather surface the umpire throws it out.” The article itself is a grump special about how baseball fans these days — in 1929, that is — “yell for less finesse and more slugging” — and Ott features as the season’s current leader in homers. Not only is the point of view one you could find today, it’s one I hold myself! Enough with the homers, let’s throw it around and slide and stuff.

It then struck me that most of the articles4 were eerily familiar: the shooting, the scumbag boasting about his war machines, the dangerous arrest. That depressed me, frankly.

Anyway, etymology is fun. History is interesting. And whatever they said about him, Mel Ott blew his nose on the naysayers, those utter snottes, and now lives among the immortals in Cooperstown.

The Latest

• As I mentioned above, I’ve been hard at work writing new things in order to fill up this part of the newsletter down the line. I do have a couple of introductions, a couple of stories, and Self Help: Lie Another Day already in the pipeline. Nothing on those today, alas.

• What I can tell you is that the German paperback of The Curator, aka Die Kuratorin, is now available. As you can see, the good folks at Buchheim Verlag have outdone themselves again!

Recommendations

• I was not lying when I proclaimed that the Paranoid Style’s Known Associates was their best album yet. No less an authority than NPR agrees with me, and you can listen for yourself on the streaming medium of your choice, though Bandcamp is best.

• Watch the excellent thriller Dead of Winter on HBO Max, starring Emma Thompson and featuring a scene-stealing turn from Judy Greer.

  

• Read this outstanding, moving essay by Amanda Peet at the New Yorker.

• Subscribe to my dear friend Jerry Rocha’s Substack. Jerry is one of the world’s funniest, nicest people, and he has a story to tell.

• Attend a No Kings protest this Saturday. While you’re at it, make sure your voter registration is up to date.

As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and a modest amount of chatting sometimes occurs. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m not super active. If you’d like to purchase a signed copy of one of my books, Oblong Books has a selection and they are always happy to mail them.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Luckily, the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

The Late Great Todd Snider

Before I get into the programming I had planned for this edition of the newsletter, I want to take note of the passing of the irreplaceable Todd Snider. If you’ve been around a bit, you may recall that I wrote about one of his many (many, many) incredible songs in a previous issue, and he’s been a favorite of mine for a long time. A lot of people have already published essential, thoughtful pieces about Snider and his art, and I expect there will be more to come, as there should be. I’ll just add that these last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about this passage from “Money, Compliments, Publicity (Song Number Ten)”:

I went to see this therapist,

she said just do the best you can do.

Do the best you can do.

I was hoping for something more specific.

It’s a harrowing ride, this life — any life. On the one hand, the people we love are everything to us. On the other, we are impossibly, eternally apart from them. That is the condition. And, looking down the line, it’s not one that’s going to get better! This is a bummer to consider. There’s no instruction manual to fix the way of it. All you can do is work your ass off to be good to your family and friends, be as generous as possible to people even if you don’t understand them, fill your days with as much joy as you can find, and try to keep your brain away from the sucking whirlpool at the bottom of the big sink. All you can do is the best you can do.

Thank you, Todd.

Here’s a beautiful song Rhett Miller and Ben Greenman wrote about him.

Burning Questions: Holiday Special

There are many questions that people never ask me that I’ve been waiting to answer for them. More, in fact, than we can get to today in this limited space, but as the holidays approach, I thought I might cover a few seasonal issues.

Is it OK to listen to holiday music before Thanksgiving?

Yes, and more than that, you can listen to holiday music in the hottest days of July if you so desire. Maybe that makes you a freak. So what? Fuck it, be a freak. Freak out. I do.

The best holiday music is some of the best music. It would be a shame if you only ever listened to “Fairy Tale of New York” by the Pogues, “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love, “Red Suit On” by Josh Rouse, “I Want an Alien for Christmas” by Fountains of Wayne, “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight)” by the Ramones, “I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up for Christmas” by Aimee Mann, “Christmas Is Coming” by the Old 97’s, or It’s a Holiday Soul Party1 by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings in the gap between Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas.

Should I discuss politics at Thanksgiving with my family members?

Everything I have read on the subject has led me to believe that any beneficial conversation about politics depends on first giving the person you are talking with the space to explain where they are coming from, acknowledging what they are feeling, and then countering with your own ideas and beliefs in a calm, sincere way. If you believe that the person you want to talk politics with is a little bit open, and you possess enough patience to let them express ideas that you don’t agree with, it could be quite a positive thing. I say go for it.

What is your stance on year-end lists?

I’m personally not too keen on ranked lists of books, movies, albums, etc. I used to be. Different works of art have such different ambitions, though, I’ve come to find it extremely hard to settle on my own criteria. It makes more sense to me to write “Of the books I read this year, [X] was my favorite, and I also had a hell of a time with [Y] and [Z].” That said, if the format2 helps someone open the door to spread the word about stuff that they love, why not? I certainly appreciate any time my own work appears on a positive list.

What’s your go-to holiday gift?

You know what I’m going to say: Books. Specifically, the one that never fails is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. It’s an undeniable classic, underappreciated, and a total rip, just wildly funny.

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker3 is another one I’d suggest. It has so much to say about how we live in 2025, I really feel that it’s essential reading for, well, everyone. Becker does an outstanding job of making complex science approachable. It’s disturbing but clarifying.

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

It’s my firm belief that no one in the world cares about this determination. It’s like the fucking thing about fighting a hundred ducks or whatever that is. Great movie, though. I want this Die Hard puzzle in the worst way, but it’s sold out.

Isn’t caroling sort of scary?

Yes! A large group of grinning people carrying lit candles materialize from the frosty night onto your lawn singing “Jingle Bells.” Take a step back and you realize that’s about a quarter-inch away from a classic vampire seduction move.

The Latest

• I snuck away from my novel for a couple weeks and knocked out a long short story, a piece that’s quite a departure from anything else I’ve ever tried. I feel good about it. This might be a subject that bears a longer treatment, but it’s a first-person story and I don’t usually go that route these days. For a first-person voice to motivate me it needs to be determined — I really need to hear from them. The Catcher in the Rye is a quintessential example of a first-person voice that has an absolutely vital ring to it4. (Think of Holden talking about phonies, etc.) Anyway, I really went for it with the voice in the new story. I don’t know what’s in store for it, but when I do, I’ll let you know.

• Expect some Self Help: Lie Another Day news in 2026. The final issue is being drawn as I type these words. Jerry Hauser and his friends are coming back, I promise. It’s just taking us a little time to get all the ducks in a row.

Recommendations

• It’s getting colder, there’s less aid than ever, and there are a lot of hungry folks. If you can give, it’s a wonderful thing to do.

• If you’re a baseball fan of a certain age, the 1988 Topps Podcast is a treat.

As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and a modest amount of chatting sometimes occurs. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m not super active. If you’d like to purchase a signed copy of one of my books, Oblong Books has a selection and they are always happy to mail them5.

I expect that this is 2025’s last newletter. Thank you for subscribing, and here’s hoping that 2026 is an improvement.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Luckily, the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

Always Bring a Book

One of the few immutable laws of nature is this: If you don’t bring a book, you will find yourself wanting a book. The solution is, obviously, to always bring a book.

I have a cherished memory of going to see Iron Eagle 2 at the Hoyt Cinemas in Bangor. To judge by the release date, I must have been 11 or 12, so you’ll excuse me if the single moment that I (maybe?) vaguely remember — feel free to let me know if this is an accurate recollection or my imagination — is a part where someone, perhaps but not definitely the character played by Lou Gossett Jr gets pissed and whips out their sidearm and shoots a basketball flat. I have no idea if I liked the film.1 What made a more lasting impression, however, was something that my mother did. She was the one who had brought me to the movie, God bless her.

I can’t say exactly say when this happened during the running time, but at some point, my mother elicited a sad moan. I glanced over, worried that she was sick. Indeed she was: Her immune system was losing its battle against Iron Eagle 2’s narrative, characterizations, and dialogue.

Nevertheless, my mother did not panic or be a dick and insist we leave — because she had a book! She yanked that book from her purse and, bending low, began to read it by the illumination of the aisle running lights. If you’ve ever been to a movie theater, you are aware that the running lights are not made for reading. My bad ass mother did not give a shit.2 While she was not going to deprive her child of Iron Eagle 2, she was also not going to suffer Iron Eagle 2, and she did not have to, because she had brought a book. This was excellent planning on her part.

Accidents happen. You may end up waiting by the side of the road, or at a gas station, or at a hospital waiting room. You may be stuck with your kid watching Iron Eagle 2. The person you were meeting may be hung up in traffic. Your flight might be delayed. You could end up sitting for a while. The line at the pharmacy, or at the DMV, or at the voting station may be long and slow. There could be a problem with the train on the track that’s ahead of yours. I could go on. If you always carry a book, these things are easily contended with.

Of course, nearly everyone has a phone, and many people use their phones to read books. I get that and I’m not judging you for watching a movie or listening to tunes or playing a video game where you stack small fruits to transform them into bigger fruits. Those are quality activities. Also, your phone is nice and light. When I was a young person in New York City, I used to stuff my shoulder bag with two books for a five-stop subway trip, and it was tough on the back.

What a paper book has going for it, of course, is that it can’t really do anything else. If circumstances have brought your day to a halt, I’d submit that there’s something to be said for going with it. Whatever you are doing on your phone — even reading this newsletter — there is a blinking light just beyond the partition in your mind that never lets you forget, “Stuff is happening! People are doing things! Time is fleeting!” All you have to do is close one app and open another. You know this, lots of people have said it.

But also: What if your phone runs out of battery life? What if you need to preserve the battery life? What if you’re trapped for days? What if you are trapped with other people and those people brought books and a rudimentary form of commerce breaks out where people swap books with one another, but you have no book to swap?

You’re only safe if you bring a physical book.

The Latest

• I barreled through a first draft that had some challenging (and inspiring) limitations, and I like how it came out. Now I’m going to brood on it a little.

• I also wrote an introduction for an upcoming release from Gauntlet Books. I don’t want to scoop them, but this is where advance orders for that book will soon appear. It’s a fun one. (You’ll also see that they still have a few copies of their limited edition of The Curator, if that’s of interest.)

• My big brother’s new novel, King Sorrow, descends on bookstores everywhere on October 21. It’s glorious and you should go meet him on tour and get him to sign a copy for you.

• The injury-riddled Red Sox are causing me some consternation. I believe the best years are ahead for the club’s young core (Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, Wilyer Abreu, Brayan Bello, etc.), but I’d like them to just go ahead and make the playoffs in 2025 anyway. As I write this, they are a game up on the Tigers for the second of three wild card spots.

• Aside on the baseball playoff wild cards: I wish Major League Baseball would give some thought to how tiresome it is to explain how shit like this works to people who don’t follow the game on a regular basis. If we’re doing it this way, doesn’t it make more sense to dump divisions entirely and say, “The top six teams in each league get in, and the top two teams get byes?” Football should do this also. Discard the divisions and just give us two nice lists of teams, one for each league. Sometimes a game has rules that take some explaining and a little frustration and there’s no getting around that if you want to get to the fun. I embrace that, especially in the context of board games. Needless complexity in big sports competitions, though, should be avoided, shouldn’t it? That’s why, for instance, the pitch clock (throw within 15 seconds) and the shift limit (two infielders on each side of second base) are good rules, and the zombie runner (the last guy who got out in the 9th gets to go to second base in the 10th even though he already hit the previous inning) is a bad rule.

• Your pal who hates traveling went to Denver and had an awesome time. Among other things, I caught a game at Coors, and it’s a stunner of a venue. Every modern ballpark I’ve visited has had its merits, but this one is neck-and-neck with Oracle for the top spot. If you happen to go, the pro move is to pop into the very cool National Ballpark Museum beforehand and check out the artifacts. I loved to see this seat from Sick’s Stadium where the Pilots too briefly toiled.

  

• I saw a dude in an alley in Denver casually firing the biggest joint I’ve ever seen in my life. It looked like one of the torches that Indiana Jones uses to explore underground chambers.

• As it happens, my flights to and from Denver went by in a flash because I had a funny, engrossing novel to read, Big Sky by Kate Atkinson3.

• The Paranoid Style have popped off with a monster new single called “Tearing the Ticket.” Those drums! It’s going down! Speaking of the Paranoid Style…

The Psychic Benefits

For those of you who are new around here, the Psychic Benefits is the official fan club of the Paranoid Style, a fantastic rock and roll outfit from Durham, NC, headed by my friend Beth. When she’s not busy cooking up riffs, writing liner notes, or running long distances, we like to rope her in to talk a little shit.

DPTB: Wow, “Tearing the Ticket,” the lead track on the new record, Known Associates, makes me want to run through a mall as fast as I can, slide down the escalator, burst out into the moonlit night, and keep going until I can leap into the quarry. Good job. Why did you choose it as the first single? What’s the thinking process about first singles in general?

EN: Great question. Regrettably, the established methodology used by Bar-None Records for choosing a first single is proprietary. We won’t be able to provide you with that paperwork, even under heavy legal weight. “Tearing the Ticket” was first because it wasn’t going to wait. A stirred-up bull in a paddock. Everything inflamed. I think you know what I mean, from the bull’s perspective.

DPTB: Of course. I have one more thing if you don’t mind. It’s been nagging at me for a while. You and P-Style guitarist Timothy Bracy are avid runners. Do you talk to each other while you run? Do most rock and roll bands run?

EN: We talk, but not on the record. Nothing you could publish or tell anybody about. We also listen to tunes, podcasts, the hissing of autumn lawns and search the skyline for the predicate. I do think some bands jog, but none of them would best us in a four-ball 10k. Maybe Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis. Love that band.

Recommendations

It turns out that the Trump Administration is demonstrating some misgivings about the 1st Amendment. Most recently, the FCC Chairman’s not-so-subtle hint regarding late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show — “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” — was gross and scary. As you know by now, Kimmel was pulled from the air, but happily he is back. That said, we need to be vigilant about government attempts to use their authority as leverage to discourage broadcasters’ from platforming dissenting voices.

Whatever your party affiliation, you understand that the 1st Amendment is the bedrock of our society. The best way to protect it then, is to pay attention to who is supporting it, and who is not, and vote against the latter folks.

Therefore:

• It’s never a bad time to check your voter registration.

• Why not sign up for election reminders, too?

• Learn more about free-speech fights by spending some time reading around at Pen America, at FIRE, at the ACLU, or at the American Library Association.

As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and a modest amount of chatting sometimes occurs4. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m not super active. If you’d like to purchase a signed copy of one of my books, Oblong Books has a selection and they are always happy to mail them.

Thank you for subscribing.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Luckily, the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.

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My gateway to the music of Bob Dylan was 1989’s classic Oh Mercy LP. I don’t know if I had any clue who Bob Dylan was at the time, although I have a strong memory of singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at an elementary school concert. My dad brought the record home — probably a CD, actually — and played it constantly. The songs really got my attention. Nothing else I’d heard was remotely like it. [The Man in the Long Black Coat] “had a face like a mask.” “Ring them bells with an iron hand.” Death went up the steps of the nearest bank. While Dylan’s voice wasn’t beautiful in and of itself, it did beautifully match the music and the stories he told — the romance and the sly strangeness and the darkness. The way he mixed up the medicine made the world open up to me in a new way.

I was off to the races. I was the most Bob Dylan-loving 12 year-old you’ve ever met1, and his work has been a mainstay across the decades since.

In fact, Dylan is so important to me that I generally keep a lid on it. That’s especially been the case with regard to my writing on the Internet. To be human is inevitably to be tiresome now and then, but when I get going on Bob, I’m certain I can be very fucking tiresome.2 Only fellow obsessives deserve to suffer my deep read of “A Simple Twist of Fate.”

But here in the depths of middle age, I continue to adore his music, to be fascinated by it, to reexamine it, and to let it carry me off to dream in his personal kingdom of hustlers and queens and bums and country girls.3 I expect that will remain the case for as long as I live.

Which brings me to the rare pleasure of hearing him in concert at Jones Beach on August 1 as part of the 10th annual Outlaw Festival. I went with my friends Beth and Tim, otherwise known as the Paranoid Style.

You know that song where Bob mentions that he’s been in trouble since he set his suitcase down? He could have been talking about them. What a beautiful pair! Believe it or not, while we keep our lines of communication open at all times, I hadn’t actually hung with them in person in a decade-plus. Way, way too long. I won’t let that much time pass again. Take it from me: the people you love, you can’t just see them at Bob Dylan concerts.

Anyway, we had so much fun.

Here are the details:

We arrived as Lucinda Williams was getting into the meat of her set. She was in splendid voice. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is one of my favorite LPs, a masterpiece that can’t be worn out. She closed on a worthy cover of “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World.” I wanted her to play “I Lost It,” but you don’t always get what you want.

Wilco followed up. For me, Jeff Tweedy and company are right up there with Bob. While I’ll delve more deeply into that another time, I’ll just mention that Tweedy’s recent post at Starship Casual talks about what remarkable individualists Dylan, Lucinda, and Willie all are, and that strikes me as exactly right. The particular artistry that they each model is in the mainstream because they dragged the mainstream over to their artistry; other musicians sound like them, but they never sound like other musicians. (Tweedy falls into the same category, by the way.) For Wilco’s set, we got excellent selections from across their discography (“Handshake Drugs,” “Evicted,” “Jesus, Etc.”, even “Box Full of Letters”!) and a roaring take on “U.S. Blues” that I hope they consider releasing for wider consumption.

Columbia Recording Artist Bob Dylan graced the stage next, and it was exactly what you want from Bob. Awesome, obscure covers? Check (“Axe and the Wind”). Scalding hot blues? Yes, always (“Early Roman Kings,” “Love Sick”). Revelatory rearrangements of classics? Of course (“All Along the Watchtower”). A Shatner-esque spoken word version of a favorite song seemingly designed to make less seasoned fans wonder if he has gone insane? Indeed (“‘Til I Fell in Love with You”). Stunners you haven’t thought about in ages? Bob had that, as well (“Under the Red Sky”). All in all, a spectacular performance.

And then, Willie Nelson and his band — special note here for Waylon Payne, who was a splendid sidekick throughout — sent us home. Willie is 92. 92! His singing, his playing, his presence, I don’t know how to make sense of it, of how it’s possible. He made me laugh and he made me cry. I can’t select a highlight for him. It was all highlights.

The Latest

• A terrific time was had at Terrificon! It was a blast to hang out and chat with so many nice people. Thanks to everyone who came out.

• As promised, we conducted the Self Help raffle on July 1. The randomizer wheel spun and its arrow fell on Shady J! We enjoyed corresponding with him and he was kind enough to send us this picture with his assorted winnings.

Thank you again to everyone who played the game. When we announce solicitations for Self Help: Lie Another Day we’ll do another raffle for a different character portrait by Marianna Ignazzi, so start planning your aliases. More soon.

• Finally, I finished collaborating on a new story with my friend Rio Youers. If you don’t know him, Rio’s a fabulous writer who you ought to read. We had a ton of fun doing it and, you know, I think it’s a damn good yarn! It’s for a 2026 anthology, so more on that down the line.

Recommendations

Eat this mustard. As soon as I learned that Brewers great Gorman Thomas had created his own mustard,4 I knew I needed some, and my expectations were fulfilled. This stuff is freakishly delicious. Your condiment family will not be complete until you get some.

Read Bob Fingerman’s Printopia. This graphic novel is a funny and humane love letter to zines and weirdos. It’s also a showstopping display of Fingerman’s range as an artist.

Listen to the first single off Rhett Miller’s A Lifetime of Riding by Night right now! I was lucky enough to hear a preview, and let me tell you, it’s a doozy.

As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and some chatting has taken place. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m not super active. Thank you for subscribing.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Luckily, the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.

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A few thoughts on readings

I recently participated in an email interview that tweaked a memory. I’ve already forgotten the exact wording, but there was a question along the lines of, “What was your most memorable bookstore reading experience?”

My answer for this is one that some of you may have heard me mention before. When I was touring for Double Feature1, I did a reading in Portland, Maine. Now, I usually have two or three passages from any given book that I read — well, I used to, more on that in a sec — but for Double Feature I really favored a particular passage that was, well, for adults. It’s a pretty ridiculous phone sex scene and it was good for a few laughs and, more broadly, demonstrated the tone and mood of the novel as a whole.

Before beginning, I always prefaced my reading by saying something like, “What I am going to read is for adults. It’s a sex scene. If that makes you uncomfortable, I am incredibly sorry, but the novel is honestly pretty filthy throughout, and it wouldn’t be fair to pretend otherwise.” At this particular reading, I observed a woman standing near the front. I don’t know why she caught my eye, but I picked up an anxious vibe, and I had a premonition that she was not going to love what I read. But there was nothing I could do. I had to go ahead.

I started reading and, well, right around the time Sam, the main character of my novel, begins to use some super bubbly shampoo as a masturbation aid, she dashed from the store like she was being chased. I glanced up at the sound of her steps and locked eyes with F. Lee Bailey, the legendary defense attorney, who was standing close beside the door she had just pushed through.

F. Lee grinned wolfishly at me.

It seemed like he was enjoying the reading, so that was good, but was he even real? Had I suffered a stroke? I somehow carried on, finished, answered some questions, and discovered afterward that, yes, that was F. Lee Bailey, and he was corporeal. I exchanged a few words with him that I can’t recall at all, and that was that. The mystery of how he slipped into the bookstore like the fucking Shadow without me noticing in the first place remains.

I’ve never gotten around to developing much of an opinion about F. Lee Bailey — things keep coming up — but upon reflecting on the experience, what seems important is that I did not crack in the middle of the reading. My sanity held.

These days, readings seem to be rarer. I toured as much for The Curator as I did for Double Feature, and I only read from it maybe two or three times. My general sense is that bookstores have come to feel that the preferable scenario is one where the writer with the new book is paired with an interlocutor who potentially draws in a few extra attendees, and you just have a nice chat about your novel and writing fiction in general. While I’m neither here nor there on this because I like both formats, readings can be an incredible treat, and if you are a writer, you still may be asked to give one some time.

With that in mind, here is…

My Unsolicited Advice for Giving Readings

1. Practice. I believe that the key reason I passed The F. Lee Bailey Test was because I had read that passage from Double Feature so many times that I could just about recite it from memory.

2. Edit your chosen passage with an eye toward clarity. There may be references to earlier narrative events, for instance. You need to either cut those or add in an explanatory sentence or two.

3. Keep your reading to fifteen minutes or less. Even fifteen minutes is pushing it. I once miscalculated on a reading and went long. It is a deeply embarrassing memory. I have also sat for a handful of readings that stretched on into the hour range and, unless the reading takes place in a theater with comfortable seats and is fully mesmerizing, it starts to feel like you’ve been taken hostage.

4. Choose a passage to read that requires a minimum of set up. The scene I read from Double Feature, for example, sets up the nature of the romantic relationship between the two characters, moves into their sexual interaction over the phone, and closes out abruptly in a way that demonstrates a lot of why (spoiler alert) they aren’t actually a great match. There’s not much, if anything, that’s hanging off the edges of the piece that might confuse listeners. It’s about seven pages long in the hardcover, and probably a bit less with various cuts I made for performance.

5. If possible, read something that’s a little comedic. If you invite the audience to laugh a bit, they will almost certainly take the invitation.

6. You may stumble over a word, or lose your place, or get asked a question that you need to consider for a second or two. Don’t freak out. People don’t go to readings very often. In fact, it’s not unlikely that some members of the audience have never been to one before. They may not know what to expect, but they definitely don’t want you to fail. They came because they like your writing, or are at least intrigued by your writing, and they are rooting for you.

7. Dress is a super personal thing. It makes me a tad anxious. I’m not confident in my looks, or my fashion sense. I just try to be presentable and comfortable. Someone might take a photo of you and put it on the Internet, so factor that in. I usually opt for a dress shirt, or a sweater, sometimes a sport coat. Whenever I wear a sport coat, I am reminded of the classic Mick Jagger song “Evening Gown” — so beautifully covered here by Alejandro Escovedo — that has the line where he confesses to wearing his sports clothes way too loud, and I feel Mick-like, and therefore boosted. Whatever makes you feel in charge to wear — wear that.

   

8. During Q&As certain questions come up a lot. This will be the case whether you did a reading or just had a chat with an interviewer. Here’s a few I receive frequently that you might consider in advance: “What was the inspiration for the book?” “What is your writing process?” “Who do you imagine in the roles of the major characters in a movie adaptation?” “Is there someone who gives you feedback on your rough drafts?” “How did you get your agent?” “How much did your book change during the editing process?” “How did you know the book was done?”

9. It’s not wildly uncommon for someone to ask a deeply strange and/or jarring question. For instance, a gentleman who came to one of my readings was intent on extracting my thoughts on the issue of Area 51.2 On the one hand, it might feel off-putting to be pressed on a matter that’s outside your expertise; on the other, most people don’t mean any harm, and if you are nice about it — “Gosh, I haven’t thought about that!” — usually you can quickly move on.

10. I’ve read for crowds as small as four. I would read to a crowd of one. If a single person is interested in hearing you read, that is awesome, and you should take pride in it. Read them your story.

The latest

• I had the honor of reviewing a very strong and very dark new novel by a giant of letters, Joyce Carol Oates3.

• In our last newsletter we unleashed the first ever DPTB raffle, and the response has been outstanding. Thank you to everyone who jumped in. We feel loved and inspired to write more stories about tricky criminals and insane people with pet panthers. The raffle is not over yet, though!

If you’re new here, a quick recap:

We invited everyone who has bought the Self Help graphic novel, or all five issues, or taken the graphic novel out from the library to email our special raffle email address for a chance to win the following: 1) A superb inked portrait by artist Marianna Ignazzi of two of our favorite characters from the series, Michelle and Amelia 2) A signed Owen King book 3) A signed Jesse Kellerman4 book 4) Probably other stuff!

If you want in, you still have time, but not too much time, so don’t hesitate. The drawing will take place on 7/1/25.

Pertinent details are as follows:

1. You are eligible if you bought issues 1-5 of Self Help or the graphic novel, or if you borrowed the issues or the graphic novel from the library and read it that way, and live in the United States. Paper or digital, either is legitimate. Honor system.

2. Our friends and family are not eligible.

3. Email hellodayren at gmail dot com and say that you want in.

4. Give us a handle to put in the spinner wheel. If your name is Bob Jorgenson this could be “Bob J,” but it would be a lot more fun and in keeping with our comic about grifting if you come up with a fun alias — i.e., “Super Chill Ove,” “Danny Smooth,” “The Seeing Eye,” etc.

5. We will not use your email for anything other than this raffle, ever.

6. We will randomly select the winner on 7/1/25 and that person will get all the stuff.

7. If we screw up somehow, we will try to make amends, but you can’t be angry at us.

8. You agree to send us a picture of you and the artwork, or your cat and the artwork, or, if necessary, a friend’s cat and the artwork, so that we can show everyone who enters that we weren’t scamming.

• You can now enjoy a Self Help playlist! I feel good about it, but suggestions are always welcome if you feel like it’s missing something. Jen, official DPTB copy editor and Keeper of the Tunes, has kindly posted it on Spotify here.

• I am excited to be attending Terrificon at Monhegan Sun August 8-10. It’s going to be cool! What a lineup: Charles Soule, Kevin Eastman, Louise Simonson, John Romita Jr., and many, many others. More details on that as it approaches, but please come say hello if you’re there.

• For the Psychic Benefits, I hit the Paranoid Style with an unusually important question and they need more time to craft an answer. It’s a doozy! Please stand by for that in the next newsletter.

Recommendations

This has been a rather extensive post by DPTB standards, so I’ll keep this one brief.

See Ballerina! It’s a worthy addition to the John Wick canon. Crazy, violent, funny, inventive.

Read The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City by Kevin Baker! When it comes to baseball books, this one just shot to the head of the class to take a place beside The Glory of Their Times. The baseball part is incredibly fun and informative, but the way that Baker uses the sport to tell roughly a hundred years of New York City history is simply superb.

Listen to this titanic tune by Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band.

As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and some chatting has taken place. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m not super active. Thank you for subscribing.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Rest assured the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.

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The Raffle

Hey! We’re doing a raffle! We meant to do it when the Self Help graphic novel1 came out, but we were too slow and disorganized. Details momentarily.

First, though, let’s get this right out of the way: entering a free raffle is definitely akin to pressing a button. I recognize that. However, free is the keyword. Granted, if a thing is free, it often sucks. That’s fundamental. Free pens from the doctor’s office are a classic example. This newsletter is free, and I think I can safely acknowledge that not every edition has been exactly top notch. Free advice? No, thanks. ChatGPT doesn’t cost anything (aside from your mortal soul) and it’s total dogshit.

But if it’s free and it’s good? Wow, hard not to like that. Remember the Jedi glasses from Burger King? Our lust for them was insatiable.

We had three of the four, for sure. The Han Solo one was particularly memorable and, in fact, I believe that my parents still have it in their drinking glass cabinet. Since it’s made of real glass, this seems impossible, and yet I’m positive that it has somehow survived. We ran it through the dishwasher, so it’s faded, but it’s still alive, still glorious. Was it painted with some radioactive material that will eventually kill me? Don’t care! I loved drinking from it and musing on science fiction adventures.

Wait. Were they actually free?

I just watched an original ad for them and it seems like they maybe charged something in addition to the price of your Coke, which kind of goes against what I had in mind when I started writing about them… shit!

… You know what, though, just imagine if they were truly thrown in free with your Coke? Pretty good, right?

That brings me back to the raffle. We are raffling an absolutely gorgeous original by the incomparable Marianna Ignazzi, showing Michelle and Amelia from Self Help.

But that’s not all! We are also throwing in 1) A signed Jesse Kellerman novel, 2) A signed Owen King novel, 3) Probably other stuff.

Here are the rules and the details:

1. You are eligible if you bought issues 1-5 of Self Help, or bought the graphic novel, or borrowed the issues or the graphic novel from the library and read it that way, and live in the United States. Paper or digital, either is legitimate. Honor system.2

2. Caveat: our friends and family are not eligible.

3. For clarity: our enemies are eligible.

4. Email hellodayren at gmail dot com and say that you want in.

5. Give us a handle to put in the spinner wheel. If your name is Bob Jorgenson this could be “Bob J,” but it would be a lot more fun and in keeping with our comic about grifting if you come up with a fun alias — i.e., “Dakota Sandy,” “Doc,” “Thunderbird,” etc.

6. We will not use your email for anything other than this raffle, ever.

7. We will randomly select the winner on 7/1/25 and you will get all the stuff.

8. If we screw up somehow, we will try to make amends, but you can’t be angry at us.

9. You agree to send us a picture of you and the artwork, or your cat and the artwork, or, if necessary, a friend’s cat and the artwork, so that we can show everyone who enters that we weren’t scamming.

OK, I’m pretty sure that’s everything. If you haven’t already checked out Self Help, we’d be thrilled if you did, and then jumped into the raffle. If you already have done so, we are incredibly grateful! You are ready to raffle, so shoot us an email.

The Latest

• I’m thrilled about the response to “Letter Slot.” Thank you to everyone who has read it.

• As excited as I am about the debut of Marcelo Mayer, the Red Sox are bumming me out. Something about this club is not clicking. If nothing else, they need to call this dude up immediately.

• The Pope’s baseball card is amazing. First ever card with Latin on it?

• I have heard the rough cut of the new Paranoid Style album, Known Associates, and it destroys. Their best yet. More on this to come.

• Work on Self Help: Lie Another Day continues apace. Issues 1 and 2 are fully inked and colored.

• Work on my other, yet-to-be-announced projects grinds ever forward.

Recommendations

• Sinners is tremendous entertainment. Don’t miss the chance to see it on the big screen. I can’t wait to watch it again.

• What do I think about the new Hamilton Leithauser LP, This Side of the Island? I love it.

• Self Help editor Chris Ryall wrote a wonderful appreciation for the late Peter David, who was a lovely guy, and one of my all-time favorite comic book writers.

As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and some chatting has taken place. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m not super active. Thank you for subscribing.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Rest assured the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

I Left the House — Again!

2025 has been a bit much, to be honest, which is why I utterly failed to inform you all about my plans to attend the Leipzig Book Fair on March 28 and 29 to promote the publication of Buchheim Verlag’s gorgeous German-language edition of The Curator, Die Kuratorin. This failure does not register too, too highly on my List of Failures, thankfully — #3211 — and luckily the word must have gotten out, because it was my pleasure to meet and sign for quite a few readers at the Fair, and I had a terrific time. Everyone was so friendly, and so forgiving of my lack of German, it was just a beautiful experience altogether.

The trip had a number of highlights, chief among them being an invitation to read from the book at the Gohlis Palace2 on my last night in town. Look at that picture down below. I mean, can you believe that?

My German publisher, Olaf Buchheim, who is among the kindest human beings I’ve ever met, went all out, arranging for a cellist and pianist to play interludes between the passages, and setting up a screen at the back of the stage that ran the text in German as I read in English. It was a blast. I was joined by the illustrator of the edition, my friend Francois Vaillancourt, and we had a great Q&A afterward.

Before that, most of my time was spent at the Book Fair meeting and greeting and signing, and wandering around in a happy, albeit somewhat jet-lagged haze. A Comic Con connected to the Fair occurred simultaneously, and many, many people came wearing fantastic costumes, which added to the festival vibe.

A few notes of interest:

• I bought a tea at the fair and was given a tiny, red plastic token along with my beverage. This confused me. It did not seem like currency, but I worried about coming off as a dick if I said anything. Olaf explained to me that you bring the coin back with your cup to get some more change. I did bring back my cup, as it happens, but not the red plastic token, which came home to the U.S.A. with me. Learn from my mistake!

• The Monument to the Battle of the Nations has to be seen in person to be believed. You want steps, the monument has you covered. If you want a view that can’t be beat, the monument has that for you as well, although if you are like me — i.e. super uncomfortable with low walls at great heights — you will want to hang back a tad. I was told that the gigantic soldiers that circle the cap of the structure were part of the inspiration for statues in The Lord of the Rings, and that checks out.

• Everything you have heard about German food is true. It is delicious.

• European airports have much to teach us. I spent some quality time in both the Berlin and Amsterdam airports and they stand out for their abundance of decent seating, light, space, and startlingly pleasant restrooms. I think that American airports are underrated in general, but these two were the best I’ve ever visited.

The Latest

• While I wasn’t promoting my visit to the Book Fair, I also managed to not promote my new story, “Letter Slot,” which will be available on April 15 as a part of Amazon’s The Shivers Collection.

  

  Here’s the pitch:

  “A helping hand, a fateful cost. In this ominous short story from New York Times bestselling author Owen King, the cost of living keeps rising—and it collects payment from the soul.

  Sensing his mother’s failing health, a struggling teenager pours out his worries in a letter and drops it through the mail slot of an abandoned show house. He’s surprised when a response arrives, promising good fortune for the price of just one name: someone he hates. He’d give anything for his mother. But the true cost may be more than he’s willing to pay.”

  I’m quite happy about how this one came out, and I hope you’ll check it out. More than that, I’m especially delighted that it’s appearing alongside my big brother’s wicked yarn, “Jackknife,” not to mention Catriona Ward's “Night and Day in Misery,” Stephen Graham Jones's “The Indigo Room,” and Grady Hendrix's “The Blanks.”

• Finally, in Self Help news, Jesse and I were lucky enough to be invited to appear on the Turn the Page Podcast, and we had a great talk.

The Psychic Benefits

If you’re new here, you need to know that one recurring feature of DPTB is the Psychic Benefits, the official fan club of the Paranoid Style, which it so happens is also the official pub rock band of DPTB. In light of chatter that we’ve heard in certain corners of the Internet about a new album, I recently wrote to Paranoid Style frontwoman Elizabeth Nelson, to get some answers.

DPTB: Let’s cut to the chase. Is there any truth to the rumors that you’ve been in the studio recording fresh tracks? What can you reveal?

PS: I won’t bullshit a bullshitter. I know better. We’ve been grinding away on the new album Known Associates. It’s a brutal record for brutal times, but I hope the humanity comes through on tracks like “Tearing The Ticket” and “Dead Fucking Last.” The mood has been understandably grim, but the tracks are upbeat, sometimes even celebratory. They say sometimes nothing happens for years, and other times years happen in a week. That’s the kind of time we live in now — hanging in the balance of the reality of man. It’s the best record I’ve ever written and I look forward to sharing it with what’s left of us after the flood.

DPTB: Fuck yeah!

Recommendations

• If you’re looking for a film to watch tonight, you could do much worse than The Menu. Ralph Fiennes’ performance is — no surprise — priceless.

• S.W. Lauden’s outstanding “Remember the Lightning” Substack has been providing me with a steady stream of power pop tunes. If that’s your jam, it’s your jam.

• Baseball! We’ve recommended it before, and we’ll recommend it again. It’s good! Now watch this tasty highlight.

• It appears that we are in for a very tough time and, the simple, difficult fact is that the only way out is through. In the meantime, we’re going to have to support each other. I know it’s hard to know where to start, but you might consider signing up to support the American Library Association. Our libraries are one of our nation’s most remarkable resources, and the librarians that share their expertise with us are another. The current administration doesn’t it see that way, though, which is why it’s important to stay updated on what our libraries are contending with so that you can share that information with your friends, or take it to meetings in your community, or include it in letters you write to your local newspaper. A grateful memory: my kindly elementary school librarian scrounging up one Three Investigators mystery after another for me.

  

That’s all I have for the moment and, fair warning, it might be a bit longer than usual before the next newsletter — deadlines!

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 also have a chat here on Substack, and some chatting has taken place. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there, although I’m not super active. Thank you for subscribing. Watch out for those buttons.

All Best,

Owen

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 quite cautious about buttons around here. We want to understand what the button does before we smack that thing.

But the button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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Two Days, Two Stellar Events

Last week I was scheduled to celebrate the release of the Self Help graphic novel with a couple of events, so I packed up my vehicle, checked twice to see I had three books to read — two current, and an extra in case I got stranded in an emergency room or something — and that I had all my medications and my toothbrush and toothpaste and that none of the cats had squirted into the garage while I wasn’t paying attention. With those formalities dispatched, I was then able to climb into the driver’s seat, give myself over to the station on Apple Music that promised to play songs like the songs Dan Reeder1 plays, and set out for Columbia, PA.

Leaving the house: it’s usually great once you do it, but in the attempt, man, my OCD lights up like the console of a spaceship!

Thank goodness I did, though, because I had a fabulous time. The first event, at Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni’s Vortex Books & Comics in Columbia last Saturday, was everything I hoped, just an amazingly cool time. This is a store that’s worth making the trip to visit. They have the good stuff. Awesome comics like this, they will sell to you:

Alongside the wonderful and mischievous Clay McLeod Chapman, who was there with his new novel Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, I signed Self Help graphic novels and a bunch of my other books for a couple of hours straight. I think I can speak for Clay when I tell you that we were beyond thrilled by the turnout. Thank you so much to everyone who came and chatted with us.

Thank you most of all to Vortex. It turns out that when you have a good thing going the word gets around — and Brian and Mary clearly have a fucking great thing going.

My next stop was Four Color Fantasies in Westchester, Virginia, where I signed all afternoon on Sunday, and where the high bar set by Vortex was not lowered so much as an inch. Massive thanks to everyone who stopped in and bought a Self Help or one of my others, and of course, I’m eternally grateful to the whole gang at the store, especially since they don’t usually open on Sundays. This is another shop that is absolutely worth taking an extra hour out of the way to visit. They have all the comics and most of the games.

And that was it! With my labors completed, I scooted homeward and was asleep in my bed by about 1am.

The Latest

• Self Help received a beautiful review from Publishers Weekly: “True to its pulp playbook, the script mixes gritty and outlandish elements into a satisfying potboiler… Fans of crime comics ought to snap this up.”

• Jesse and I sat down over Zoom and wrote the last six or seven pages of the final issue of Self Help: Lie Another Day together. This one has been a wild ride, and there’s no one I’d rather have taken it with. We laughed a lot writing this story, and took some fairly adventurous chances with the narrative, but I was surprised by what an emotional wallop the end packed. No spoilers, but suffice to say, we put Jerry and his family through a lot!

• If you’ve been enjoying the comic, or have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. And, hey, if you dug it, loan it to a friend — Help ’em out! (Get it? Little joke there.)

• No Psychic Benefits this issue, but we will absolutely be checking in with them next time. You see, there are rumors that the Paranoid Style have been in the studio. As we know, these sort of rumors aren’t always true, and even if they are true, they may have just gone to the studio because the soda machine there has R.C. Cola, or because they were lost and needed directions. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the Paranoid Style has been recording. But they may have been recording. We will get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, Beth sat down for a chat with the legendary Chuck Prophet.

Recommendations

• I’m halfway through Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies, and it is hard, hard material about Boston in the seventies and the endemic racism that poisoned so many lives there. Lehane handles it all with a relentlessly clear eye.

• Erik from Four Color Fantasies told me to read Patrick Horvath’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, and I was wise to follow his instructions. BTTWNS is about an adorable serial killer bear and — well, what else do I have to say?

That’s all I have for the moment. Thanks for subscribing.

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 also have a chat here on Substack, and some chatting has taken place. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there, although I’m not super active.

All Best,

Owen

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 quite cautious about buttons around here. We want to understand what the button does before we smack that thing.

But the button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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Self Helpings: The Graphic Noveling

The Self Help graphic novel has actually already leaked into a few comic stores — which is absolutely fine, the release date moved around a bit — but it’s landing in most stores in mere days, on 2/25.

It’s a fantastic edition, if I do say so myself. Among other things, it’s glorious to have Ian Chalgren’s designs all together in one place and just be able to relish all the care that he and our editor, Chris Ryall, put into paying tribute to movie posters (such as Saul Bass’s Vertigo) and book covers (like the ones for Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series) that are in the noir tradition that we’re very consciously working inside with the comic.

This is where I confess that I am truly of two minds about the best way to read a comic book, issue by issue vs. graphic novel. On the one hand, I enjoy the ritual of getting each issue of a series at a comic store. I also like to honor the structure that a series forces on to a creative team: each issue is a link in a larger chain, but it’s (or generally should be) it’s own individual circle, too. If I read each issue as it comes out, I attend a little more to the craft of those individual circles.

When I read a series issue by issue, however, I do have a tendency to sometimes lose track of the finer plot points of a series during the interim between each new comic.1 If you’re reading through a graphic novel you can flip backward a few pages and make sure you have a complete handle on the small details. In the issue-by-issue scenario, you need to dig out those previous issues from your comic box and, you know, that’s easier than shoveling the snow from the driveway, but the graphic novel makes it easier still.

Anyway, if you’ve been waiting to read Self Help as a graphic novel, the wait is over, and we sure hope you enjoy it. Jesse and I believe that the sequel, Self Help: Lie Another Day, coming later in the spring or early summer, is even stronger, and it’d be great to have you along for the ride. Join us!

A reminder: I’m going to be signing copies at Vortex Books & Comics in Columbia, PA on March 1 from 1 to 3pm, and then at Four Color Fantasies in Winchester, VA on March 2 from 1 to 5pm. You can also get signed copies from my pals at Oblong Books, or regular copies wherever you like to get your comics or your books. It’s even available digitally.

The Latest

• For the time being, I’m sworn to secrecy, but there are Self Help-related happenings on another front, and they’re exceedingly cool.

• I finished the editing process on a short story I’m very excited to share. I can’t talk about that yet, either. Soon!

• I also have a new novel slowly clicking into place. It’s tricky, though. Wouldn’t be prudent to say any more than that at this time.

• Jesus Christ. This is beginning to sound like I’m under cover. I remember the late great Graham Joyce once writing something on Facebook about how he was ready to kill the next person who wrote that they had the biggest, bestest news ever but couldn’t say anything yet.2 I’m not doing it justice, but you get the idea. It made me laugh so hard. Graham was a real wit, as well as a genius. I only knew him a little, but I loved the guy. Sure wish he was still with us.

• I went tramping in the snowy woods the other day. This is an underrated activity. I have a terrible phobia of ticks and poison ivy, so I’m not huge for walking in the woods during the other seasons, but if you’re dressed for it, the winter woods are too good. I like following the animal tracks here and there, pretending I have the faintest clue what made them.3 The best part, though, is when you get far enough away from things that you can be still and listen to the sound of all that wet weight piled up on the branches and rocks and ground, creaking and cracking, and totally forget yourself.

• I had a great, hilarious conversation about Anthony Trollope with my friend Nate. Nate is a professor specializing in Victorian literature and one of my dearest, oldest friends. We shared a railroad apartment on the Upper Westside with a few thousand cockroaches after college, so our bond is forged of strong stuff.

  

  I had been reading Trollope’s Barchester Towers, trying to understand the confusing political perspective that seemed definitely favorable toward a conservative establishment and yet very aware of the weaknesses of that conservative establishment. (Forgive the generality: the particulars are more interesting than it sounds, but they are, well, particular.) So, I called Nate up and happened to catch him while he was at his most vulnerable — driving home through D.C. traffic — and asked if we could discuss the matter. Although he was initially shaken — Trollope? In this economy? — Nate quickly rallied to the task, and explained the weird politics behind a novel that he last read about twenty years ago, navigating city traffic at the same time. How amazing is that? Is there anything better than stretching out a book with a friend?

Recommendations

• You might treat yourself to Graham Joyce’s deeply unsettling, deeply humane novel The Silent Land. A perfect winter book.

• It may not have sounded like it, but Trollope is good fun, too. The Warden, which precedes Barchester Towers, is my suggestion.

• My big brother’s new novel, King Sorrow, is now available for order! Folks, I have read this beautiful beast, and it is the full five courses. You do not want to miss it.

That’s all I have for the moment. Thanks for subscribing.

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 also have a chat here on Substack, and some chatting has taken place. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there, although I’m not super active.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Also, buttons can carry germs. Have you read about the norovirus? Oh, boy, I do not want anything to do with that. It is on the loose. I have a real dread of anything that makes me sick to my stomach. Many years ago on my birthday, back when we lived in the city, I was teaching a class uptown, and then afterward, I took the train home and didn’t feel quite right. Kelly made me a beautiful jambalaya and delicious carrot cake, and sometime around midnight, I remade their acquaintance. I have never eaten those foods again.

Did I have a norovirus? Did I get it from a button? Did I press a germy button and forget to wash my hands? Don’t know, can’t rule it out.

The button below is germ-free. All it does is subscribe you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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You May Be Surprised

I bet most of you are familiar with Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. I’ve read three of them and I think they’re extremely cool, and much more artful than they get credit for being. Reacher kicks huge, hilarious amounts of ass, and it’s a joy to read about it. I also find it delightful and very funny that the villains in the novels can’t see that they are messing with the Ultimate Dude, and surrender is the only option. That said, the access Child gives to the point of view of his villains lets readers understand what it is they want even if (in the entries I’ve read, anyhow) their desires aren’t incredibly complicated. They may be essentially nuts or essentially venal, but they operate in a way that makes total sense inside the world of the novels.

Here’s the thing: all the action in the novels occurs in an alternate universe where Jack Reacher cannot lose.1 I knew this going in, and in the abstract, it didn’t sound like something that would appeal to me at all. For one thing, it seems to rule out any suspense; he’s going to save the day. What’s the fun of a story that’s essentially fixed for the hero, a man whose only true weakness is that there are probably some carnival rides that he’s too swole to ride on? A lot, as it turns out, but you have to submit to the project. Child commits so wonderfully and so urgently to the whole premise, he’s able to knock away my resistance to the rigged aspect.

We all bring intensely subjective standards to the stories we read or watch. We all know people who have ruled out entire genres, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you can’t buy into secret underground cities populated by vampires, you can’t buy into secret underground cities populated by vampires. I know someone who just can’t watch any movie featuring Michael Douglas; she sees Michael Douglas and it all just seems like bullshit to her.2 I generally don’t care for novels or films that are devoid of any humor. (Again, this strikes me as a totally subjective standard — an absolutely smile-free book can be artistically successful and I don’t begrudge another person for liking it.)

Every once in a while, though, you disregard your preconditions and end up giving a try to something that you are convinced isn’t for you and, it turns out, is for you. The Reacher books were like that for me, and I recently had a similar experience with the film Midsommar.

***MIDSOMMAR SPOILER ALERT***

I had held off on seeing the film because I took one glance at Florence Pugh’s expression of hopeless anguish on the poster for Midsommar, and the message I was received was that this was a story about a character who is crushingly doomed.

Now, it’s fine with me if the characters in a story come to bad endings. It can even be telegraphed. I mean, the title The Tragedy of Macbeth isn’t exactly hiding the bad news. But I want the story to give the characters a choice. Macbeth doesn’t have to kill anybody, right? He lets his greed get the better of him. If it feels like they have no chance to survive, no choice to make, for me, the narrative circuit is closed in a way that makes it difficult to invest in the characterizations. The sense that their sacrifice is inevitable pushes me away. That’s another of my story hang-ups.

I finally watched Midsommar on a whim, though. I knew I was taking a lot from a poster and some previews and some general chatter, and felt like I should give it a chance. If you haven’t seen the film, the story, briefly, is that a group of young Americans travel to a remote Swedish commune that turns out to be a murder cult. After the first ten or fifteen minutes, I never thought it was possible for Pugh’s character Dani to come out all right in the end. Dani has been traumatized and orphaned by family tragedy, and she is desperate for love and support. However, her boyfriend, Christian, and his friends are self-involved dipshits. As the situation at the commune grows increasingly dangerous, it’s beyond belief that any of them possess either the will or the capacity to help her, and they don’t. Meanwhile, Dani is already making a heroic effort to hold it together, and that’s before two commune members ritualistically bash their brains out on some rocks and people start vanishing. She can’t stop the madness by herself, and she doesn’t. In the end, although Dani outlives her companions and is awarded an honored position in the commune, our last glimpse of her, wearing a lunatic smile, is grim.3

So, I was basically right: Dani is, indeed, doomed. The story never suggests any off-ramp, anything that she could do except not take the journey in the first place, and she really had to take the journey because Christian is her sole remaining bulwark. It was exactly what I don’t usually like.

And you know what? I loved it! The writer/director Ari Aster is a brilliant visual artist who frames and stages his scenes beautifully, and who makes the most of the perversely bucolic background. Pugh’s performance as Dani is heartbreaking; she’s so real, there’s no way to maintain a distance from the character. All the supporting characters, ill-fated dipshits or not, are vividly portrayed and interesting. Finally, the whole wild scenario is stunningly imagined. You will fear Sweden! I couldn’t deny it.

Here’s to taking more reading and watching risks in 2025.

The Latest

• I have two events scheduled for the release of the Self Help graphic novel, one on March 1 at Vortex Books & Comics in Columbia, PA, and the other on March 2 at Four Color Fantasies in Winchester, VA. At each store, we’re going to be raffling a package of the single issue B covers along with a script page signed by both Jesse and me. If you’re in the vicinity of either store, I’d love to sign a comic or a book for you.

  

• If you’re not close by and want something signed, I suspect that both stores would be willing to work out a mail order for you if you rang them up. My friends at Oblong Books can also help you out with that.

• While the graphic novel collects issues 1—5 of Self Help, the story is only halfway home. After stealing the identity of self-help guru Darren Hart, con artist Jerry Hauser has thus far proved to be light on his feet, but his problems are manifest. How is he going to pay off Darren Hart’s debt to a killer Finnish gangster? What can he do to keep from being murdered by the white supremacist gang that he ratted on? Where will he dispose of the pool man’s severed foot? And what the heck is going on in that cabin? The sequel series Self Help: Lie Another Day runs for another five issues and will answer all these questions! The great Antonio Fuso is the artist on the new sequence, assisted by colorist Emilio Lecce, and we are deep into production on that. Catch up with the graphic novel and look for it in the late spring. Here’s a sneak preview from issue 6.

• I was flattered to receive a mention for my contribution to The Drive-In: Multiplex, “Behind Screen 9,” on Ellen Datlow’s list of the Best Horror of the Year Recommended Stories. Thanks again to Chris Golden and Brian Keene for inviting me to participate, and to Joe Lansdale for creating the world of The Drive-In in the first place.

The Psychic Benefits

It’s been far too long since I chatted with my friends at the Paranoid Style. Let’s get into it!

Dear Paranoid Style,

You’ve spent your share of time on “The Road.” It’s your calling and you have to do it, but thinking back to the germy buttons mentioned above, I wonder, is keeping healthy a concern when you are traveling from one juke joint to another?

PS: Oh yes. I too have a great fear of any dread illness, particularly of the GI variety — I came down with what I can only assume was food poisoning a couple of years ago and let's just say that I think I finally understand what Joni Mitchell was talking about when she was talking about looking at love from both sides, but instead of love, I mean food, although food is a love language according to the bags of Fancy Feast we purchase for the fuzzbots.

Recommendations

Los Angeles is one of the best places. If you can, please support any of the many worthwhile charities that are supporting victims of the wildfires or the LAFD.

That’s all I have for the moment. Thanks for subscribing.

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 Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there.

All Best,

Owen

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. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.

Claw machines come to mind. I find claw machines very, very tempting. Have you ever won anything from a claw machine? I have! I’ve won some perfectly wonderful shit from claw machines. I’d go so far as to say that we are living in a Golden Age of Claw Machines. Some people don’t know that. But with claw machines, if the stuffed animals are packed too tight, or — more commonly — if the claw has a weak grip, it’s hopeless and you can’t win and that sucks. So, you need to take a close look at the whole apparatus. Is the claw machine going to play fair?

Same goes for buttons. We want to understand what the button does before we smack that thing.

We play fair here: the button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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Some Baseball Reading

I won’t pretend that current events don’t have me a little down in the mouth. Maybe you feel the same way?

My first instinct at moments like these is to fall back onto baseball, but we find ourselves in the nightmare canyon between the end of one season and the beginning of another. Probably the thing I love most about baseball is the way that, during the season, it organizes my life. Game time is a horizon point; even if I’m not planning to watch, I’m certainly going to want to check in on the score. You can always look forward to baseball.

Luckily, there are still books about baseball! They can’t sort out my existence for me, but they entertain me and help keep me occupied while I wait for the season to come around again. Here’s a (noncomprehensive) list of some good nonfiction ones1. If you have a baseball fan in your life, the answer to your holiday shopping dilemma might well be here:

• Power Ball by Rob Neyer — I believe I recommended my friend Rob’s book in a previous episode of DPTB, but I’m not afraid to give it a curtain call. It’s a witty, searching chronicle of a single regular season game in 2017, and if you follow the game closely, you’ll find it especially interesting in relation to the rule changes that were introduced in 2023 and 2024. I suspect that this book was passed around the MLB Commissioner’s office.

• Hall of Name by D.B. Firstman — You will marvel and cackle at D.B. Firstman’s investigation of baseball names. There is so much delight in these pages.

• Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year by Jimmy Breslin — Here’s a taste:

“The bartender put in a couple of fistfuls of ice chunks into a big, thick mixing glass and then proceeded to make a Tom Collins that had so much gin in it that the other people at the bar started to laugh. He served the drink to the Babe just as it was made, right in the mixing glass.

Ruth said something about how heavens to Betsy hot he was, and then he picked up the glass and opened his mouth, and there went everything. In one shot he swallowed the drink, the orange slice and the rest of the garbage, and the ice chunks too. He stopped for nothing. There is not a single man I have ever seen in a saloon who does not bring his teeth together a little bit and stop those ice chunks from going in. A man has to have a pipe the size of a trombone to take ice in one shot.”

• Foul Balls by Alison Gordon — Alison Gordon was a groundbreaking beat reporter for the Blue Jays in the late seventies and eighties, and — you might be sensing a theme here — her memoir of the time is as funny as they come. I can’t stand that this book is out of print, and I have to believe that will change in the not-too-distant future. It’s too important. In the meantime, it’s worth the trouble of digging up a copy, I promise.

• The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball and the Art of Pitching by Ron Darling — This book has a nifty structure, stepping from particular innings (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc) at particular moments throughout Darling’s career. It shows him discovering and mastering his craft, then at the height of his powers, and finally, beautifully, faltering at the tail end of his career in the 9th.

• The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James — No list of baseball texts is complete without a Bill James book. Open it up to any page and get lost.

• The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It by Lawrence S. Ritter — My absolute favorite book about baseball, and a terrific document of American life in the early twentieth century. The stories the players tell about their lives are as fascinating as their recollections of the sport in its dead-ball era.

The Latest

• My friends at Oblong Books are now taking preorders for signed copies2 of the Self Help graphic novel that collects the first five issues. With Self Help: Lie Another Day, the concluding arc of the series — also five issues long — arriving at comic stores around the same time, here’s your opportunity to catch up with Jerry Hauser and his great big mess. Important note: these will be signed just by me. My co-writer Jesse Kellerman and all the other members of the team are unfortunately too far away.

• My local store, October Country, has a few signed copies of the single issues if you’d like to get in touch about having one shipped to you. Again, these are just signed by me.

• There will always be digital copies of the comic.

• Will there be any in-person appearances? I hope so! We are working on that. Please stay tuned. Jesse and I are scheming to put at least one or two together. Suggestions for comic stores and/or conventions to visit are certainly welcome!

2024 DPTBers Awards: The “Gold Buttons”

I was just about to send this newsletter out when it occurred to me that I’m legally obligated to make a 2024 best-of list. Fine! Let’s inaugurate the DPTBers — the “Gold Buttons” — the newsletter’s official award. We have three honorees:

Best Kitten: Marmur

This was not a close competition.

Best Book: James by Percival Everett

It’s as stunning as you’ve heard.

Best Song: “Archbishop Harold Holmes” by Jack White

Listen and tell seven friends!

All right, all right, all right! That’s all I have today, and probably for the remainder of the year. Thanks for subscribing.

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 Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there.

Until 2025,

Owen

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion. If you want to check it out, all you have to do is tap the button below, and you’ll be able to join the chat, and that’s it. It’s been thoroughly vetted, believe me. This is one button you can trust.

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The Election

I try to keep it positive around here. However, with regards to the upcoming election I feel compelled to go on the record, and, fair warning, it’s not a sunny situation. Last time I wrote on this subject,1 one loyal subscriber wrote in to suggest I go fuck myself, which, you know, thanks, but trust me on this one, ace: I need no invitation.

I get that politics and political conversations are frequently unpleasant and wearying.2 If you don’t want to read my thoughts on the matter, feel free to bounce out here, or skip down to the next section. I’ll also add that I’m speaking for myself, and myself alone.

Our country desperately needs to avoid a second Trump administration.

Former President Trump is, of course, a despicable asshole. He has disparaged people with disabilities, he has disparaged our veterans, he doesn’t pay his bills, he is a racist, and he is a pig. None of this can be reasonably disputed.

I am aware that a segment of his supporters view his human failings as a perverse credit to his candidacy. Their thinking seems to follow from an opposition to what they see as stifling political correctness. I don’t want to chase this point of view down the rabbit hole too far, but isn’t the sum of it a concern that if liberals get too much power they will eventually outlaw being a prick? I am incredibly confident that is not going to happen. Look, I treasure my right to sometimes be a prick. Trump is not the avatar you want for this important issue. He’s a lot more than a prick. He’s a full-time monster who has never done anything for anyone but himself.

Also, and most importantly, his policies are very, very bad, and he did a dreadful job in office: His Supreme Court Justices overturned Roe v. Wade and now women are dying; his tax cuts for the wealthy only helped the wealthy; he played politics with the pandemic; he didn’t do anything about climate change;3 he is absolutely opposed to stopping the endless stream of guns that have brought about our country’s epidemic of mass shootings; he’s anti-labor; he attempted to extort Ukraine; he is inexplicably acquiescent in his dealings with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin; and he instigated a mob to attack the capital to try to stop the certification of the 2020 election.4 Those are just some of the highlights!

It was recently reported that former President Trump resisted giving aid to Californians in a disaster zone until aides convinced him that it was a Republican area. Think about that: He simply doesn’t regard Americans who don’t support him as Americans. Furthermore, consider that we’re so awash in Trump’s ghastly behavior that reporting like that hardly makes a dent.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz represent an entirely mainstream alternative.

They are just fine. If they have a Democratic Congress, they have promised to discard the filibuster and codify Roe v. Wade. They will keep our economy on its upward swing and won’t cut taxes for billionaires. They will appoint judges who don’t adhere to this grotesque hoax that the Constitution endows every American with the right to own a machine gun. They will stand with unions. They will pursue policies to mitigate climate change. They will abide by election results.

They are not perfect, but they are serious leaders who will sincerely attempt to deal with the problems that our country faces. Trump, at best, punts everything down the road. At worst, he burns everything down.

Please vote, and please vote for Harris/Walz, and please do it early if you can. Encourage your friends and family to do the same. It really matters. If you’re not sure about the where/when/how, head on over to Vote.org.

Thanks for hearing me out.

The Latest

• Self Help issue #5, arriving in comic stores on October 23, concludes the first half of our story. But we’re absolutely not done with Jerry, Cassandra, and Michelle yet!A second series, Self Help: Lie Another Day, will run for five more issues and bring the story to its finish. My local store usually has some signed copies if you want to contact them about getting one shipped to you, or you can grab it at your nearest comic vendor. If you prefer to read your comics digitally, we’ve got you covered there, too.

  

  

• The plan is for Self Help: Lie Another Day issue #1 to publish in tandem with the release of the graphic novel that collects Self Help issues 1-5. The graphic novel is scheduled for publication on 2/25/25, but it might arrive a week or two later.

• Jesse and I definitely plan to do more events for that, so please stay tuned. Also, I don’t have any specifics yet, but — hint, hint — if you’re interested in attending an event for the graphic novel in PA, you might consider following the Vortex Books Substack.

• Oblong Books has a fresh stack of signed copies of Sleeping Beauties if you want to spoil a friend for Halloween.

• Official DPTB copy-editor Jen was in town for far too short a time. We were able to squeeze in a good game of Wingspan, though, and she took to it like a wood duck to water. Have you tried it? An absolute classic. Every game cabinet needs it.

  

Recommendations

• Just to reiterate: I recommend you vote. It’s terrific!

• I love writing letters on this Life “Bank” Paper. I’m pretty catholic about pens, but I especially like using Pilot V5s on these sheets.

• Zadie Smith’s The Fraud is the latest novel in her impeccable, searching catalog. The 19th-century milieu was right up my alley, and there’s a great conundrum in the middle of it that has a lot to say about our modern politics. It’s probably not the novel I’d recommend if you’ve never read her — that would be White Teeth — but if you have read her and have been on the fence on this one, you should jump right over.

• The new Plastic Man series, Plastic Man No More, written by Christopher Cantwell and drawn by Alex Lins, is wild, gooey fun.

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 Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along there.

All Best,

Owen

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. We want to understand what the button does before we smack that thing.

But the button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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Another Set of Eyes

Although I’ve taught creative writing for years, I’m usually a bit reticent about sharing writing advice on the Internet. For one thing, if you want creative writing advice, there’s quite a lot of it out there! More than that, for me, unless the advice is very concrete, it’s hard to apply at this distance — which is to say, without a manuscript between us, or without at least having had a one-on-one discussion about what you’re thinking and what I’m thinking.

I happened, however, to recently hear a live performance by the great, great songwriter Todd Snider that included some exceptionally valuable insight into how he wrote his song “Highland Street Incident,” which is based on his own incredibly scary experience of being mugged by two men outside of a bar in Nashville. Before performing the song, Snider describes trying to write about what happened from his own perspective and not getting anywhere. Then, he says this (and please pardon any small errors in my transcription):

“At one point I wondered, what they were thinking, because what I was thinking didn’t rhyme, and it was time to give up on it. And so as soon as I started thinking What happened in their night… How did these two guys come to the decision to go down and stand behind Ryan’s and get the next guy, you know?, and once I started thinking about it like that it came out quick.”

His process here is worth considering. When the song refused to come together the way Snider imagined it, he unlocked the story he wanted to tell by reversing the perspective. Now, I need to add that in Snider’s specific case, on top of rethinking the angle of his approach, he also committed a remarkable act of empathy by embodying the people who attacked him — obviously, that kind of undertaking is intensely personal, and I’m in no way suggesting that your writing requires you to make that kind of choice.

What I am suggesting is simply this: If you are stuck in your writing, you might ask yourself, “Is the right character/point of view telling this narrative?” You may find, like Todd Snider did, that there’s another way into the same story by putting on another pair of eyes.

Finally, let’s just relish the complex characterization that he gets across in short order:

I don’t even know how long I’ve been awake anymore,

but I know what we’re out of and you do, too.

[…]

We sold everything we stole and everything we had.

It’s not that bad, though, it’s not that bad.

The voice of the story is exhausted, addicted, broke, and, despite all evidence to the contrary, insisting that everything is going to be okey dokey anyway. That’s a razor-sharp portrait of desperation in one verse. This person does bad things, but the pathos we feel for them is undeniable. One verse!

I love Todd Snider’s music. He’s a national treasure. The Devil You Know is my favorite of his albums, but I couldn’t do without The Excitement Plan, Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables, or Crank It, We’re Doomed, either.

The Latest

• Self Help #4 is out on September 25! That’s tomorrow! Get a physical copy or download it for your device. Jerry barely survived his first attempt at playing Darren Hart, but with Cassandra’s help he’s been studying up, and in this issue, he tries again. Be careful, Jerry!

  

  

• Let me get ahead of the cliffhanger complaints right now: Issue 5, arriving in October, only concludes the first half of our story. I will share details about the second series of Self Help very soon. There’s also a collected edition of the first series headed to stores in early 2025, and we’ll be talking about that as well.

Recommendations

• I’ve recommended checking your voter registration before, and I’ll probably do it again! Go right over here to make sure you’re ready to vote.

• The USPS recently released stamps honoring the Hammer, Hank Aaron, and Dungeons & Dragons1. If you’re writing letters — an activity I recommend — those are the stamps you want to use.

  

• Forgot to recommend it when I read it a few months ago, but better late than never: Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution is a beautiful Sherlock Holmes novella. A perfect Sunday afternoon read.

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

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. We want to understand what the button does before we smack that thing.

But the button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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Space Toys!

This is quite a belated newsletter — sorry about that!

Late July and August got away from me. Among other things, I went to see the Red Sox and they walked off the Mariners. It was awesome. Rafi blasted one off the wall, the winning run scampered home, the Standells played “Dirty Water,” everyone jumped up and down, and Wally the Green Monster stormed the field and waved his flag. Good times never seemed so good!

I was also very busy with some exciting Self Help-related work that I can’t share just yet, but please stay tuned on that.

I started physical therapy on my thumb. I am beginning to believe that my hand jive days may not be over after all…

What else? I lost my reading glasses. I’m going to find them, though.

Oh, and I’ve been tumbling some rocks. Almost done with that: The instructions called for four cycles. I’m not deep into geology as a general matter, but who doesn’t like a nice rock?

Really, I just can’t resist a long project. Come to think of it, for me, that’s actually maybe the best part of writing a book — you get to sit right in that thing for a good old time. I bet some of you are writing books, or stories, or scripts, or comics. You have to finish eventually, but I hope you’re relishing the process.

But, the bottom line is that I’ve been remiss with this DPTB, and I feel guilty. Maybe I can make it up to you by sharing this glorious page of ads I found in a random comic book from the mid-eighties? Look closely!

A few thoughts: 1) Mail order brass knuckles: hello, Planet 1985. 2) The mystery of the Mental Survival Kit is a real teaser. What’s in there? I want to mentally survive! 3) Space toys - ONLY.

The Latest

• Self Help #3 landed in comic shops, and Self Help #4 is soon to follow in its footsteps! I signed some copies of #3 at my excellent local store, October Country, so go visit or let them know if you want to snag one. You can find the issue at Midtown Comics, too (not signed), or at your nearest store.

• Self Help continues to be available digitally, as well. Has anyone read it that way? If so, drop me a line and let me know how it looks!

• My Self Help co-conspirator, Jesse Kellerman, has a new novel out, The Lost Coast, which is the latest in the outstanding Clay Edison series.

• I signed a whole bunch of copies of the Sleeping Beauties: Deluxe Remastered Edition graphic novel for my friends at Oblong Books. Alison Sampson and Rio Youers’s adaptation has never looked more beautiful. Those are available here.

The Psychic Benefits

Let’s dial up our friends at the Paranoid Style!

Dear Paranoid Style, I bought a bright pink T-shirt, and I really like it, but I want it to be a faded pink, which I feel like is a great shade for me, so I’m wearing it as often as possible. What do you think of my strategy?

Ah, the "war of attrition" approach. Absolutely solid strategy — one that has been employed by many a tactician for centuries. Has the added advantage of solidifying your brand, which is really the most important thing when trying to survive late capitalism. "Oh, you know Owen," they'll say. "He's the guy who's always wearing a pink shirt." It may take some time, but you WILL see results and get to the shade you desire. Don't try any shortcuts, such as bleaching or acid washing. These are pure hoaxes designed by the powerful big T-shirt lobby. If you start to doubt yourself, just remember the wisdom of Heraclitus: You can never wear the same T-shirt twice.

Bonus: Any thoughts on Pink Floyd? I love “Wish You Were Here,” naturally, but I’ve never known where to begin.

I don't know anything about Pink Floyd, but what fascinates me about "Wish You Were Here" — to digress a little bit — is that for the past 50 years Van Morrison has been absolutely outraged at essentially every performer not named Van Morrison for "stealing" his sound and vision. The complete anomaly is that "WYWH" is almost a direct carbon copy of Van's "Almost Independence Day," which was released a few years previous. In this instance, Van seems to be not only not upset, but mysteriously approving and has been known to duet on stage with Roger Waters on the popular Pink Floyd tune "Comfortably Numb." This is one of rock 'n' roll's great enigmas, because the plagiarism couldn't be more obvious. Perhaps Van and Roger have a lot to discuss, politics-wise? Tough to say more without consulting my lawyers first.

As far as where to begin, I'd advise checking out any number of the laser Floyd shows that are invariably running at all of your local planetariums — that's always a good place to start anything, truly. But I'd recommend stopping before you get to "The Wall." No one needs that.

Recommendations

• I am reading Gretel and the Great War by Adam Erlich Sachs, and it is a splendid, tricky novel in stories that repeatedly pushes through humor into horror. All of you Pale Fire enthusiasts should definitely check it out.

• I can never get enough of the Dearest substack. How great is Tom Petty’s Mustang?

• For that matter, how great is Tom Petty? Consider him continually recommended.

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

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. We want to understand what the button does before we smack that thing.

But the button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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The Hot 100

The New York Times recently published a poll of 503 readers, writers, and critics on the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. My ballot looked like this1:

While I stand by those choices 100%, and boundlessly admire and love each book, and there are few things that bring me more pleasure than to sing the praises of amazing writing, I actually could have made a second list of ten books, and possibly even a third, that I felt just as strongly about. Truly great works of literature are just, well, great. They have an extraordinary way of drawing emotion from you, or lifting you out of yourself, or making you tense up, or inducing you to see some part of your life anew. My very favorite books do all those things, but from there, comparing their respective values, I tend to get stumped.

Do I actually regard Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as superior to, say, David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster? No! They’re both masterpieces that have enriched my existence — and they’re incredibly different! If you forced me to choose to live without one or the other, I don’t know how I could. Wolf Hall felt particularly urgent to me as I was making my ballot. You can’t do better.

On another day, however, I might have swapped Lobster (or Percival Everett’s James, or Karen Russell’s Orange World and Other Stories, or Mary Beard’s SPQR, or Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, or Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night, or George Saunders’s Pastoralia, or Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, etc.) in for it, or in for any of the other nine that I did pick. What I mean is, for me, there’s a lot of bests out there.

We Need to Talk

Issue 2 of Self Help, “We Need to Talk,” arrives in comic stores on 7/24. There’s an enormous amount of trouble in store for Jerry Hauser, I promise you that!

Thank you so much to everyone who got in touch about issue 1. Thank you for giving our wild crime story a chance. We are overjoyed at the positive reception.

We’re also hugely grateful to the good folks at Dr. Comics and Mr. Games and at October Country, who helped us celebrate the release of issue 1. I plan to keep popping in to the latter to sign, and I’m guessing that Jesse will keep visiting the former to do the same, so if you’d like autographed copies going forward, I bet both stores would try to help you out depending on where you are. You can also keep up with the story digitally if that’s your preference.

The Latest

• My friends at Oblong Books are offering advance orders on the Sleeping Beauties: Deluxe Remastered Edition graphic novel, adapted by Rio Youers and Alison Sampson. If you’d like me to sign one for you, here’s where to go!

• Speaking of my friend Rio Youers: He has a brand new novel out called The Bang-Bang Sisters, and it looks awesome.

• Elizabeth Nelson — lead singer of the Paranoid Style, the reason we started the Psychic Benefits, steely-eyed Nationals fan and defender of golf — has expanded her empire in the coolest way possible: She wrote the liner notes for the new box set from Columbia Recording Artist Bob Dylan, The 1974 Live Recordings.

• My thumb is still healing. I’m in a hard cast now, and it’s awkward and annoying, and it looks like I’m giving everyone a thumbs-up. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, though.

• The Red Sox have been terrific fun to this point. All-Star Game MVP Jarren Duran has absolutely devoured the base paths. Tanner Houck has had wonderful, evil powers on the hill. If the playoffs started today they’d be in. I have zero complaints. Go Sox!

• John Warner’s and Lincoln Michel’s considerations of the NY Times Best Books list are well worth reading.

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

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. We want to understand what the button does before we smack that thing.

But the button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. That’s it. And it’s free! If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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Ouch!

I had thumb surgery last week to take care of the chronic pain that I had been dealing with for the last few years. Now I have some fresh new pain, and an uncomfortable bulky cast, and the occasional feeling like ants are running up and down my wrist. But I’m glad I did it, and the long-term prognosis is good.

I don’t know why certain things are unsustainable. I once had an ear itch for two years and stubbornly carried on until it went away. I was absolutely fed up with this thumb, though. It was getting difficult to open jars and, worse yet, it hurt like hell to catch a baseball in the pocket of my baseball glove. Also, it was my left thumb, my second favorite thumb, so that made it an easier decision. I can still type, just not for too long, which means this is going to be a short newsletter.

I can also still sign copies of Self Help #1 and that’s exactly what I’m going to be doing at October Country in New Paltz, NY on June 26 from 3 to 5 p.m. If you can’t make it but live in the area, I’m sure they’d hold one for you if you gave them a call. If you live somewhere else and want one, contact them, and they will see what they can do about shipping you one.

It’s been exciting to have Self Help out in the world, and we appreciate everyone who has reached out to say they enjoyed it. The reviews have also been very kind. Here are a pair of lovely considerations by Chris Coplan and Zack Quaintance.

Meanwhile, my co-writer, Jesse Kellerman, put on a brilliant event in Oakland at Dr. Comics and Mr. Games, which I attended via computer screen. What a terrific store!

We’re aware that there was a bit of a snafu with the distribution, and quite a few shops won’t have the comic on hand until this week, so I just want to add my thanks to everyone who has been patiently waiting. If you don’t know if there’s a comic store near you, here’s a helpful tool.

Last of all, Self Help is available digitally if that’s how you prefer to read your comics.

Otherwise

For thumb-related reasons, I’m going to skip some of our usual features such as the Psychic Benefits, and wrap this up. However, I do want to make two quick recommendations before I sign off:

• I rewatched Michael Mann’s Manhunter. Among other things, the eighties-ness of the movie is uniquely unsettling. The synths, the clothes, the whole ambience. Because the Lector-verse has expanded so much, and there have been so many books and movies that have been influenced by Thomas Harris’s novels and their adaptations, certain aspects may seem a little worn to first-time viewers, but for me, it’s just great, and well worth checking out. And Brian Cox is terrifying!

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is an ideal one-night read. It deserves all the praise it’s received. The portrait of Ireland and, specifically, of her protagonist Bill Furlong, is indelible.

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

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.

You are doubtless familiar with the phrase “buttoned-up.” Scully is the buttoned up one in The X-Files, a show that I am honestly only passingly familiar with, but I really like Gillian Anderson. I like David Duchovny (Fox) a lot, too, don’t get me wrong. I just think Gillian Anderson is so great, and I trust her, and my general sense is that it was the buttoned-up Scully who was most responsible for their successful investigations.

Anyway, being buttoned up isn’t as fun as being not buttoned up. It has its merits, though. Look at Scully and her record of closed cases and, on balance, what do we lose when we proceed with care? Not much.

The button below simply subscribes you to this newsletter. If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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We Love It!

With Self Help landing in comic shops next month — June 19th! — I’ve been reflecting on how Jesse Kellerman and I came up with this story.

For a few weeks back in 2018, I had the incredible privilege to be a part of the writers’ room for The Stand, which is an experience I’ll always treasure. I learned a lot about writing for television, and I’m proud to have contributed to a show that I really love.

I also hadn’t lived away from New York for any length of time as an adult. That was hard! (I believe I mentioned in an earlier newsletter that travel is not my strong suit.)

The production installed me at a hotel right beside the Universal CityWalk, and my room was angled in such a way that the giant three-dimensional Stuart that stood over the theme park seemed to keep me under observation. Although I regard the minions as a benevolent force, and I don’t think Stuart ever wanted anything but the best for me, this was weird.

I had a lot of free time on the weekends, which left me feeling lonely, so I tried to keep busy. I ate lunch a couple of times at the Margaritaville restaurant at the CityWalk and took selfies of myself in my Paranoid Style t-shirt in front of the sign so that the band — hardcore Parrotheads, one and all — would know that I was thinking of them. I never saw a single other customer in Margaritaville; it was just me, the servers, and a looped concert video of Jimmy and the Coral Reefer Band playing on all the TVs. When I went downtown a stranger pointed at me and said, “I’ll fucking kill you.” My reply, “…OK,” seemed to disappoint him, and he whirled away; I was spared. There seemed to be one weed store for every human. I hiked to the Bat Cave with Daniel and learned that it was more of a tunnel than a cave. I took a walk with Tom and we randomly chatted with a beautiful movie star whose name eluded us both. Josh brought me to a ballgame at Dodger Stadium, and Verlander was not too generous with the home team.

When I was driving on the 405 one evening, amid a stream of traffic, I noticed that the hills we were passing through were on fire. We kept right on driving.

And, at some point, I thought to myself, I need to talk to someone about this place. I called Jesse.

I can’t remember the specifics of our conversation but, essentially, Jesse, a Southern California native, talked me down. He reassured me that I was not losing my mind. It was all real! The best way to process what I was absorbing — the isolating, gorgeous, plastic, scary, funny, tragic, hallucinatory burning desperation of it — was to write something about it. In fact, he thought we should collaborate, which was a dream come true for me, because there’s few cooler guys in this world than Jesse Kellerman, and he’s one hell of a writer.

How the core idea of Self Help came up, I have no clue, but it happened on that call. By the time we finished brainstorming and rang off, we knew about ride share driver Jerry Hauser and his double, the self-help guru Darren Hart, pioneer of the Hart Method.

The Latest

• As mentioned above, Self Help will be debuting on June 19th. We would love it if you’d check it out. You can find your nearest comic book store here. If you don’t have a comic store in your area, one place you can order from is Midtown Comics.

• Oblong Books just got in a bunch of copies of Sleeping Beauties: Deluxe Remastered Edition, the graphic novel adaptation by our excellent friend Rio Youers.1 If you’d like me to sign a copy for you, they will gladly make that happen.

The Psychic Benefits

It’s time to get back into it with our friends at the Paranoid Style.

I asked Elizabeth Bracy the following: I know that Columbia Recording Artist Bob Dylan is a major influence on the Paranoid Style. Have you ever considered playing one of his songs in concert? If so, which one?

Elizabeth replied, very quickly: “Honest With Me” from Love & Theft. It would also make a good franchise.

Recommendations

• Since Elizabeth mentioned it, Love & Theft is a masterpiece and “Mississippi” is his best song of the 21st-century. You should give it a spin.

• James by Percival Everett is also a masterpiece. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read Huckleberry Finn or not. You really, really should read this novel.

And that will do it!

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

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. Have you ever heard “The Hardest Button to Button” by the White Stripes? I’m sure many of you have, and I’m sure some of you suspected that I would get around to it for this newsletter.

It’s a frightening, compelling track, partly about a family welcoming a colicky baby into their home in 1981. The singer gets a “rag doll” and sticks it with pins, and that stops the crying, and apparently everything works out because in the next verse, they’re a family and doing well. I don’t think anything bad happened to the baby? I hope that’s the case….

But it’s sinister! We’re in Button Country, people!

Anyway, the song then shifts, addressing itself to someone who is the “hardest little button to button,” and it doesn’t seem intended with fondness. I don’t know what to do with any of that, but it worries me. I like the song, though.

Anyhow, that’s buttons for you. Be careful with them. Also, be nice to babies. Rock yourself out as needed.

As for the button below, it simply subscribes you to this newsletter. If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.

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The Speedy

Baseball season is upon us, and, as I write this, the Red Sox look better than expected. First of all, Tyler O’Neill is ripped and ripping. Second of all, the starting rotation/law firm of Bello, Pivetta, Crawford, Whitlock, and Houck has been excellent. One key to excellence: simply being able to get out there on the mound.

Except, what do you know, in the time between starting this newsletter and finishing it, Nick Pivetta has gone on the IL with a flexor strain. Argh!1

Health is everything in baseball, and when it comes to pitching, guys’ arms are getting injured all over the place. Spencer Strider, Atlanta’s ace and the pre-season favorite to win the National League Cy Young Award, is the most recent to go down, heading a list that includes Shane Bieber, Eury Pérez, Tejay Antone, Chris Murphy, and Jonathan Loáisiga. As future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander points out here, the fundamental thing is that modern pitchers are throwing as hard as they possibly can, and putting as much torque on the ball as they possibly can, all the time. Per Verlander: “How can you — it’s a double-edged sword — how can you tell somebody to not do that when they’re capable of throwing a hundred [miles per hour]?”

So, we want this to happen less. As a fan, you want to see the most amazing pitchers actually pitch, and more importantly, you don’t want guys getting hurt. I know ballplayers make big money (which is nothing compared to what the owners rake in), and they’re adults who can make their own decisions, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea that the rigors of the game have become such that most major league pitchers are now basically fated to suffer elbow and shoulder rebuilds.

One idea, mentioned by Verlander, is the “Double Hook,” which would tie starting pitchers to the Designated Hitter, and encourage teams to keep starters in for as long as possible, which might lead accordingly to pitchers not throwing quite as hard so as to preserve their endurance. While I like this rule and the strategic issues it raises, and suspect it will be introduced in the not too distant future, I don’t think it will do much to stem the tide of arm injuries. Pitchers will continue to throw as hard as they can, and just try to make it through the rule’s allotted five innings.

If you want to limit arm injuries, however, I have a proposal. In tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” where the storyteller refers to a fastball as a speedball2, I call it “the Speedy Rule.”

Here’s how it works:

1. For every 10 pitches thrown, a pitcher is allowed to throw one pitch over 96 miles per hour — a Speedy.

2. Suppose the pitcher throws his first pitch of the game at 97 mph and the batter swings right through it. Fine, that’s permitted. Striiiiiike! But, then, the pitcher throws his second pitch at 98 mph, puts it right down the middle, and the batter takes it. Even though the pitch was in the strike zone, that’s a violation of the rule. The batter gets a ball.

3. If the batter swings at a pitch that breaks the Speedy Rule, whatever happens happens. If it’s a foul, it’s a strike. If he swings through, it’s a strike. If he grounds out, he grounds out. If he hits a homer, he hits a homer. You get it.

4. Pitchers can bank their speedies. If all of a pitcher’s first thirty pitches are under 97 mph, they’ll have three speedies in their back pocket for an emergency situation.

That’s the gist of it. Is 97 mph the right number? Would 95 mph be better? I don’t know, but the key is that the Speedy Rule would cap the very hardest throwing to a degree. Would that make a difference for pitcher health? There’s no way to tell, obviously, and honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if it didn’t — pitchers would still be throwing very hard — but then again, it might.

Also, and I can’t stress it enough: This rule is not happening! In practice, it would be annoying to have to redirect to the scoreboard to check the speed of every pitch and to keep track of whether the Speedy is still available. It just feels too elaborate. I’m sure there are many other problems with the Speedy Rule, but it’s a thought I had, and hopefully the baseball fans among you won’t judge me too harshly for spitballing it with you.

The Latest

• I visited Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga and had a lovely talk with Charles Soule about The Curator. It’s a great, great bookstore, well worth a road trip.

• Unless something comes up, that wraps up my promotional activities on The Curator. I remain hugely proud of the novel, and I’m so grateful to everyone who attended an event, bought a copy, checked a copy out from the library, wrote a review, took the time to tell me they enjoyed it, or was encouraging in any way. Thank you.

• You can order signed copies of most of my books at Oblong Books, and they also have some at Postmark Books.

• So, next up is Self Help, my collaboration with Jesse Kellerman! Did I write in the previous newsletter that it was coming out in May? That was an error. It’s coming out in June. Which is practically May! I don’t have anything to report yet about appearances/signings, but please check back. While Jesse and I live on opposite coasts, we do have ambitions of getting together at least once, even though I’m afraid that Jesse will make me lift weights with him. With any luck, our wonderful artist Marianna Ignazzi will be able to join us.

• I have a couple of other new projects really underway now, but the road is long!

• We observed the eclipse. I liked the spooky, slightly reddish tinge that the light took on, and the way the shadows clawed their way across the grass was something else. Shades of Nosferatu. While this was going on, the shooters at the shooting range that’s somewhere near my house kept on shooting, which I will generously describe as … a choice. I suppose the argument you could make is that eclipse conditions don’t come around too often, so you want to take advantage of them and practice to make sure you’re ready to go if you ever need to shoot stuff during an eclipse, but also, like, come on, what the fuck?

Recommendations

• Do you remember my Vinegar Bend Mizell3 glove? I got it restrung by D&J Glove Repair, and it’s awesome. If you need your glove fixed, that’s the place.

• I am enthusiastic about Nicole Flattery’s short story collection, Show Them A Good Time. It’s relentlessly funny and unsettling.

OK, that’s enough for the moment. I didn’t get around to bugging Elizabeth for Psychic Benefits, but we’ll be back with that soon, and in the meantime you can still listen to the Paranoid Style.

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