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Paul Constant

Paul Constant

@paulconstant.com

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is reading and writing in Seattle

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Cartoonishly Sublime, or Sublimely Cartoonish?

Local cartoonist and comedian Brett Hamil typically produces comics in two styles. First, he’s a gag strip artist: Hamil has a pair of comic strips in local media, one dealing with parenthood issues and one satirizing local politics. And second, he has published a series of clever, inventive slice-of-life comics that are typically quieter, more...

Don’t Forget How Hard It Was

Image from Joe Alterio's website. During the early days of pandemic lockdowns, I interviewed a librarian who was trying to find fiction set during the 1918 pandemic that was published shortly after the pandemic. He said that basically there was almost no contemporaneous fiction written about the Spanish flu or its impacts on society. Once...

This One’s a Charmer

The Poet Empress by Seattle area author Shen Tao is not the kind of book that I traditionally read. Fantasy, particularly fantasy involving royal families, is really not my bag. I don’t like stories about destiny and preserving bloodlines and other determinative nonsense. But the book came highly recommended by Lost the Plot mobile bookshop,...

Not Directed By Judd Apatow, Thank God

In another universe, Olivia Wilde’s latest movie, The Invite, could have been a standard Seth Rogen comedy. The premise, about a weary middle-aged married couple (Rogen and Wilde) inviting a more sexually adventurous couple (Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz) over for dinner, seems custom-made for Obama-era Apatovian nonsense. But I’m glad to live in the...

Motherfucker, You ARE the Mainstream

I was just on NPR's website for an unimportant reason and I encountered this remarkable artifact of the media in the year 2026: Screenshot Bear with me, please, because I want to describe what is in this screenshot that I grabbed: First, it says "Popular on NPR.org." Then, there's a picture of an old white...

The Urbanist In My Ear

One of my all-time favorite audiobook experiences was the fall when I was listening to Jane Jacobs's urbanist classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities while walking around Seattle. Very often, the audiobook would describe something I was looking directly at on my walk, and it began to feel like an audio tour...

Sue Me, I Liked The Bear

Rarely has a television show fallen in the public's estimation over the course of five seasons like The Bear. Like everyone else, I enjoyed the first season a lot and was blown away by the second season, which I'm pretty sure stands as one of my all-time favorite TV seasons. And like everyone else, I...

Here’s My June 2026 Playlist

When it comes to my taste in music, novelty is important. I can't listen to the same 500 classic rock songs every single day. I like to hear new sounds, track new trends, find new artists. Every month, I start a new playlist. Then, every time I hear a new song that I like, I...

Down to the Last Letter

I was at a bar with booksellers a couple of months ago when someone used me as an experiment: “Have you read The Correspondent?,” she asked me. I said I hadn’t. She asked the bookseller next to me the same question and she quickly and enthusiastically replied that she had. Our interrogator turned to her...

One Man’s Trash! Is Another Man’s Trash

I’ll admit it: I was suckered into reading Simon Pare-Poupart’s memoir about life as a garbage man, Trash!, because Dwight Garner compared the book to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I love well-written books about workers who provide services that most people don’t ever think about. But Trash! is bad. It’s a macho, cliched, annoying (but...

Furiouser and Furiouser

Seattle is lucky enough to be home to the best film critic on the topic of action movies in the business. His name is Vern and his blog is a must-visit for me every time I watch a movie. So let me tell you that if you only read one review of the martial-arts action...

The Future Doesn’t Have to Suck

The thing that drew me to M. Arusha Wehm’s novel The Department of What It (Really) Means to be Human was the promise on the dust jacket that the book was “a thoughtful, optimistic sci-fi novel set in a near-future Aotearoa New Zealand where an investigator navigates a newly post-capitalist world in their search for...