…in her new anti-corporate-scheming book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, makes the provocative allegation that (as paraphrased by a Salon.com reviewer) “IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart.”

To Ms. Shell, it doesn’t matter which social caste a company courts. As long as it imports kilotons of future-landfill consumerist stuff from low-wage countries, she doesn’t like it.

Her consistency is a welcome change from the classism of many anti-corporate leftists, whose disdain for any particular corporation seems to increase with that corporation’s connection to “the wrong kind of white people.” Thus, we’re all supposed to loathe Wal-Mart (purveyors of cheap disposables to stereotyped white trash), but be at least ambivalent about Taret (purveyors of near-identical cheap disposables to hip social climbers).

…a brief, handy list of “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature .” Essentially, they’re all reasons why serious lit is just about to die off.

My question: Has serious lit ever not been just about to die off?

For its first 50 or so pages of his novel Happinessâ„¢, Canadian satirist Will Ferguson provides a quaint send-up of office politics and the book industry (historically, literature’s second most boring subject, after writers themselves).

But the humor picks up once the main story gets underway. This is really a book about a book, the ultimate self-help book, a meandering 1,000-page series of life lessons entitled What I Learned on the Mountain and credited to a pseudonymous guru calling himself “Rajee Tupak Soiree.” Our hero, downtrodden book editor Edwin de Valu, gets the typewritten manuscript in the slush pile at the middling publisher where he gruelingly toils. After some initial misadventures, Edwin has the text published with no changes.

Without the blanding-out process of the industry’s professional prose-polishers, What I Learned on the Mountain gets unleashed full-strength upon an unsuspecting world. Within days (the book biz’s notoriously slow operational pace is highly compressed in Ferguson’s fictional world), it’s the #1 best seller of all time.

And it really works!

Soiree’s turgid prose turns out to have a hypnotic effect, subconsiously leading most of its readers into a new way of thinking. (Ferguson doesn’t attempt to show us how this works; he only directly quotes from What I Learned on the Mountain in very brief snippets.)

The result: Pretty much the end of civilization as we know it.

Millions of North Americans suddenly convert to inner peace and contentment. The alcohol, tobacco, drug, fashion, and baldness-remedy industries collapse. So does the book industry, except for spinoffs and ripoffs of What I Learned on the Mountain. Vast swaths of the U.S. work force just up and quit their posts to embark on vision quests or to join Tupak Soiree’s Colorado ashram/harem. This heaven, like David Byrne’s is a place where nothing ever happens.

Edwin de Valu sees everything he’d known (including his wife and his ex-lover) disappear around him, and feels responsible for it. This milquetoast salaryman reinvents himself as an action hero (or antihero), determined to strike his revenge on Tupak Soiree and all he represents. In the process, he learns the real lesson of life—it’s meant to be a struggle. Happiness, real happiness, is a journey, not a destination.

And (spoiler alert) Edwin also finds out that Tupak Soiree is a total fraud. What I Learned on the Mountain, the book that conquered humanity’s cynicism and greed, was a cynical attempt to make money.

I found Ferguson’s ending to be a real cop-out. I wanted to read about the ultimate battle for humanity’s soul, between evil-disguised-as-good (Tupak and his blissed-out hordes) and good-disguised-as-evil (the now angry, gun-toting Edwin).

That story remains to be written.

So does the heart of Ferguson’s conceit, a sufficiently-long example of Tupak’s seductive prose stylings.

But these failings may simply mean Ferguson’s conceptual reach exceeds his stylistic grasp.

In other words, he’s also still striving.

(Sidebar 1: The novel’s original Canadian title in 2001 was Generica, referring to the uniform state of bliss people adopt upon exposure to Tupak Soiree’s teachings.)

(Sidebar 2: Could there actually be a style of writing that, like monks’ chants or recent attempts in “binaural-beat” electronic music, rewire the human mind? The story possibilities, oh the story possibilities…)

(Sidebar 3: What would US/Canadian society really look like after a mass conversion away from anxiety/depression/addiction and toward inner peace? We’d still have to feed and shelter ourselves, and we’d still have tribal/social/political differences. More story possibilities…)

…at the top of this article about the self-publishing book boom is a startling statistic. Between self- and corporately-published titles, one book was published last year for every 500 Americans. Not one copy sold, but one whole work created. And this doesn’t count works issued solely online or as ebooks.

…I spent a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to liberate writing from the shackles of Serious Lit, the smug treacle of post-hippie nature poetry, the convoluted code of academia, and the stiff cliche-worship of “genre” bestsellerdom.

Now, in the PowerPoint era, the lesson’s simple: “Write like a rock star.”

My big Guiding Light essay will show up here Friday. But for now, some other televisual content. It’s my Vanishing Seattle plug segment on KING-TV’s Evening Magazine.

We’ve previously noted the similarities between the Bushies’ arrogant hubris and the “create your own reality” corporate-motivation side of New Age philosophy. Now, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the even more obvious connection between this “law of attraction”/”visualization” ideology and the recent Wall Street misadventure:

“The tomes in airport bookstores’ business sections warn against ‘negativity’ and advise the reader to be at all times upbeat, optimistic, brimming with confidence. It’s a message companies relentlessly reinforced—treating their white-collar employees to manic motivational speakers and revival-like motivational events, while sending the top guys off to exotic locales to get pumped by the likes of Tony Robbins and other success gurus. Those who failed to get with the program would be subjected to personal ‘coaching’ or shown the door….”No one was psychologically prepared for hard times when they hit, because, according to the tenets of positive thinking, even to think of trouble is to bring it on.”

I’ve also noted that the Obamans’ “hope” mantra is vastly different from positive thinking’s yin-without-yang, comedy-without-tragedy worldview. Hope says the pains of life do exist, but they don’t have to persist.

However, I dread Wednesday morning, when the P-I withdrawal symptoms begin. Thankfully, I’ve stockpiled three volumes of Emmett Watson’s out-of-print memoirs. They may hold me for a little while.

I’m thinking of becoming a freelance book packager, leveraging the lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Here’s a sample lesson:

Book publicity is a two-headed monster. Or rather, it wants you to become a two-headed monster. Your first head’s supposed to quietly conform to hidebound notions of tweed-suited authenticity and NPR-mellow good taste. Your second head’s supposed to go all manic and aggressively hustle after every sale like Billy Mays hawking OxyClean in a late-night commercial.

…the forthcoming posthumous/unfinished third novel by my main man David Foster Wallace touches upon a theme with which I’d recently been obsessed.

The novel is about people who find their mindfulness by taking on ultra-routine jobs at the Internal Revenue Service.

As D.T. Max quotes in The New Yorker, Wallace’s idea was that “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

I haven’t been pursuing employment at the IRS. But I have had a sequence of temp gigs for the county that involved equally rote tasks, performed accurately and performed all day. I found a great peace in simply going somewhere, doing something, and doing it well.

It may well be that my current search for renumerative employment could lead me back into the stress-filled realm of hustling for individual bottom-feeder freelance gigs.

But I’d enjoyed the clerical equivalent of chopping wood and carrying water. I could really do it some more.

Just saw the documentary Obscene, a profile of longtime Grove Press/Evergreen Review publisher Barney Rosset. Rosset specialized in hibrow and “daring” lit for the GI Bill generation of college kids and for their ’60s successors.

He also specialized in anti-censorship court battles. He successively succeeded in legalizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Now in his 80s and still feisty, he’s full of colorful stories about his life and times.

But the most shocking image in the movie involves a right-wing smear campaign against Evergreen Review in 1972.

The magazine, in its last years, had become part lit journal and part “artistic” skin mag. One issue contained an essay by WA’s own Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The appearance of Douglas’s words within the same staples as erotic art photos was enough to give then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford an excuse to call for Douglas’s impeachment.

We see a press junket event with Ford and two other Repubs. Jerry holds up the magazine, lingering on each page of the nudes, demanding that we all be outraged.

Two years later, Ford would become the beneficiary of another impeachment drive, and would propagate the self-image of a conciliatory Mr. Nice who just wanted to bring everybody together.

It’s good to learn this other side of Ford, as just another right-wing sleazemonger.

I’ve known Thomas Frank’s work since his cultural-commentary zine The Baffler and his first book The Conquest of Cool. As the Clinton era and the tech bubble gave way to Bush’s Reign of Error, Frank’s focus morphed from “hip” youth-marketing shticks to the early-oughts’ financial speculation mania, to the deepest darkest heart of conservative malevolence. This is the setting of his latest treatise, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

Frank’s premise in a nutshell: Many of your worst conspiracy theories about the right-wing sleaze machine are true, and he’s got the voluminous research to prove it. Legislation is sold to lobbyists for big money at golf courses and expensive restaurants. This lobbying industry’s made DC’s Virginia suburbs one of America’s wealthiest enclaves.

Among the results: tax and regulatory breaks for the rich and connected, the outsourcing and even offshoring of many government functions, the hiring of well-connected incompetents at business-unfriendly agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Labor, official support for overseas sweatshops and oil drilling in national parks, the decimation of consumer protection and endangered species listings, etc. etc.

Frank particularly enjoys tracking all this through the career of uber-influence peddler Jack Abramoff, who seems to have been everywhere graft and sanctioned bullying have been within our time. Abramoff’s depicted as helping turn the College Republicans into a gaggle of liberal-bashing shock troops, as coordinating apartheid South Africa’s US PR drives, and of turning the post-1994 Republican Congress into a highly organized machine for legal and quasi-legal bribery.

Like Naomi Klein (whom Frank qoutes and name-drops at one point), Frank’s current work covers a few sectors of the VRWC (vast right wing conspiracy) in excruciating, mind-numbing detail, but is silent almost to the point of nihilism about what progressives might do to reverse these plutocratic trends.

This is particularly ironic considering one of Frank’s chief argument points, that Republican corruption and mismanagement increase public cynicism toward government—an opinion Republicans actively want to promote. (Frank calls this situation “Win-Win Corruption.”)

At the opening of the Obama era, this everything-sucks attitude on the part of the left has simply got to give way to more practical (and, yes, hopeful) strategems.

…today. Thanks to all of you kind readers who wrote in asking. I went to an MD today about this seasonal crud I’ve had for the past month. I came back with nothing but a flu-shotted arm. (The clinic techs know me well enough by now to give me the Bugs Bunny Band-Aids without asking.)

I’m only coughing occasionally now. At times circa Halloween, I was violently hacking to the point of momentary breathlessness.

Between that and my last, now-completed, temp gig, I’ve hardly touched my graphic novel script lately. I really need to get some more progress on it before I can announce it officially.

What I can announce are two new Vanishing Seattle products, just in time for your downscaled holiday giving plans.

First, may I suggest the Vanishing Seattle calendar? Thank you; I shall. It’s big, it’s bold, and it’s full of “future” dates and “past” pictures. Plan your ought-nine tomorrows while remembering the Jet City’s funky yesterdays.

Then, for the snail-mail correspondin’ holdouts among you, there’s also the Vanishing Seattle postcard set. You get fifteen (count ’em!) separate views of Seatown past, each on a separate cardboard rectangle and all handily combined within a carrying case of clear, rugged-yet-pliable plastic.

Both are now at finer book and gift shops and via the above online links. Why not get both today?

…this evening to the greatest American author of our generation, David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand at 46.

He’ll be remembered most for Infinite Jest, his thousand-page epic novel of PoPoMo reconstructivism and recursive complexity, about (among many other things) drugs-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-drugs, set amid a near-future North America in perhaps-inexorable political and environmental decline.

But that was only the cap of a remarkable body of works, fiction and non-, whose common thread was the hyper-rigorous parsing of a scene or a topic down to the most minute detail, the most obscure angle; all treated with a dry humor AND sincere compassion.

Wallace was no hipper-than-thou alt-cult celeb. His stories and essays, even when about his personal experiences (including past struggles with drugs and alcohol), always dealt with more universal conditions.

This Metafilter thread is one way to learn more about this.

Perhaps his most direct worldview-statement is his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon University. Towards its end, he states:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

A few of you might have noticed that the Obama campaign’s got a a really slick graphic-design department.

One of this design team’s major motifs is a solitary, serif capital “O.”

To many, that letter, presented in that context, is reminiscent of a magazine whose figurehead and co-owner is a big Obama supporter.

To others of us, it reminds of The Story of O, the classic novel and movie about bondage, discipline, submission, pain-as-pleasure, and the total surrender of one’s being to a figure of strong authority.

Damn, doesn’t that sound exactly like the ol’ Republican seduce-n’-swindle syndrome, from which Obama promises to deliver us.

Oh, and the time remaining until Election Day? Nine and a half weeks.