THE 1998 MISC. MIDSUMMER READING LIST: For the second year, we’ve a pile of old and new bound verbiage (in no particular order) to recommend as mental companions while you sit in airports, on ferry docks, in the breakfast nooks of RVs, in rain-pelted tents, and wherever else you’re spending your summer leisure hours.

The Ruins, Trace Farrell. In the ’80s I was involved in “Invisible Seattle,” a group of writers who (among other exercises) fantasized about an alternate-universe Seatown with Old World traditions and grit. This is what local author Farrell’s accomplished in her hilarous parable of working-class discipline vs. New Money hedonism; set in an Old World seaport town but based on a real Seattle supper club and on Seattle’s current caste-and-culture wars.

The Incomparable Atuk, Mordecai Richler. From the Great Canadian Novelist, a 1963 fable still relevant amid today’s Paul Simonized nobel-savage stereotypes. Atuk’s a supposedly innocent native boy from the Northwest Territories who’s brought to Toronto as part of a mining company’s publicity stunt, and who quickly falls right in with the city folk’s hustling and corruption.

Machine Beauty, David Gelernter. One of these skinny essay-books everybody’s putting out today; only this one’s in hardcover. The premise is admirable (advocating simplicity and elegance in the design of industrial products and computer software), but it’d have been better if it were longer, with more examples and illustrations.

Consilience, Edward O. Wilson. Giant essay-book by biologist Wilson, who proposes all human behavior (and indeed all knowledge) can be ultimately traced to biology and physics. He puts up a solid defense, but I still disagree. To me, the world isn’t a tree with a single trunk but a forest of interdependent influences. Life is complexity; deal with it.

The Taste of a Man, Slavenka Drakulic. For “erotic horror” fans, a novel of psychosexual madness by the Croatian author of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Not much laughing here; just a heroine who takes the female sex-metaphors of absorption and consumption to their logical extreme.

Self Help, Lonnie Moore. Short stories by the author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams, reworking women’s-magazine clichés into a far less “motivational” but more realistic worldview.

Coyote v. Acme, Ian Frazier. Light yet biting li’l funny stories like the old-old New Yorker used to run. The cast includes a cartoon lawyer, a Satanist college president, Bob Hope, Stalin, Mary Tyler Moore, and “the bank with your money on its mind.”

Eastern Standard Time, Jeff Yang, Dina Gan, and Terry Hong. Asia’s economies are on the ropes but Asia’s pop cultures are going strong, as shown in this breezy coffee-table intro to everything from pachinko and sumo to Jackie Chan and Akira Kurosawa.

Sex, Stupidity, and Greed, Ian Grey. For all haters of expensive bad movies, essays and interviews depicting Hollywood as irrepairably corrupt and inane (and offering the porn biz as an example of a slightly more honest alternative).

Behind Closed Doors, Alina Reyes. An ’80s teen-romance series, 2 Sides of Love, told its stories from the girl’s point of view on one side of the book and the boy’s on the other. Reyes (author of The Butcher and Other Erotica) applies this gimmick to more explicit sex-fantasies, putting her two protagonists through separate assorted sexcapades in assorted dreamlike settings with assorted opposite- and same-sex partners before they finally come together at the middle.

Soap Opera, Alecia Swasy. Intrigued by Richard Powers’ corporate-greed novel Gain (based on Procter & Gamble, and named for one of its detergents)? This real, unauthorized P&G history (named for the broadcast genre P&G helped invent) is even stranger.

Underworld, Don DeLillo. Mega-novel spanning four decades and about many things, principally the U.S. power shift from the northeast (symbolized by NYC’s old baseball dominance) toward the inland west (symbolized by chain-owned landfills). But with the Yankees back in dynasty mode, and financiers now overwhelmingly more influential than industry (particularly resource-based western industry), DeLillo’s march-of-history premise seems like reverse nostalgia.

The Frequency of Souls, Mary Kay Zuravleff. The best short comic novel ever written about refrigerator designers with psychic powers.

AND A READER SELECTION of sorts:

Subject: Northwest Lit
Sent: 7/26/98 5:29 PM
Received: 7/26/98 5:36 PM
From: LSchnei781@aol.com
To: clark@speakeasy.org

Clark:

Your review of the above subject completely ignored the best of the lot–Ivan Doig. Here in Fort Wayne IN where more books are read per capita than in any other city in America (there just isn’t much else to do), Mr Doig’s books enjoy a wide readership, and he is considered by many of us to be in the first rank of contemporary American writers.
Lynn Schneider (LSchnei781@aol.com)

WELCOME TO A MIDSUMMER’S MISC., the pop-culture column that hereby calls for a one-year moratorium on any further motion pictures depicting the violent destruction of computer-generated replicas of New York City.

UPDATE: The Cyclops restaurant, closed last year when its building was demolished in the Belltown redevelopment mania, will be reborn later this summer as a beneficiary of that same mania. It’ll be in a part of the ex-Peneil Mission/ Operation Nightwatch building, whose new landlords wanted more potentially lucrative tenants than the perenially underfunded social-service sector could provide. Since the building’s side sports half a faded old Pepsi sign blending into half a faded Seven-Up sign (the two have long had the same local bottler, which was once based in that building), it’d only be appropriate if a mixture of the two took a place on the beverage menu…. In other real-estate news, the nearby Casbah Cinema’s turned its SIFF-month closure into an indefinite one. The beautiful screening room in an alley location without dedicated parking is still for sale. And the former U District Clothestime juniors’ clothing store is now a National Guard recruiting office (talk about your yin/yang dualities).

OVERREACTION DEPT.: The supposed “gang riot” last Saturday at the Fun Forest was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, really just either an argument or an exhibition of horseplay by a handful of rowdy teens; climaxing either with a few gunshots into the air or (more likely) firecrackers. The ensuing scramble among sweaty, crowded kids set cops scrambling into crisis mode and herding all opposite-race youths off of the grounds. Live TV reporters got all hussied-up about a Sudden Threat to Public Safety, while the kids passing by just giggled or mugged it up to the cameras–this was a big Dionysian revel that had merely gotten a bit out of hand, not the huge angry mob depicted. More telling was the scene the following late afternoon, in which teams of cops with plastic face masks and billy clubs shooed any and all groups of three or more young Af-Ams not just off the Center property but out of the larger vicinity. It’s not just the Sidran gang and the anti-affirmative-action cadre who fear blacks, particularly young blacks. The fear is ingrained in the popular image of a clean, ordered city where everybody’s soft-spoken and unassuming. Lots of real Af-Ams are just like that, of course; but lots of whites still think (consciously or sub-) that Black + Young = Gangsta. (White teens can get rowdy too, but tend not to inspire such wholesale crackdowns.) Elsewhere last weekend…

DAYS-O-FUTURE PASSED: The Mariners’ Turn Ahead the Clock Night promotion, with uniforms and stadium signage supposedly harkening forward to 2027, finally let the Nintendo people put their graphic stamp on the team they co-own, at least for a one-game gimmick. The oversize, maroon-and-black, not-tucked-in jerseys with the huge, tilted logos and the “Xtreme-sports” style lettering, accessorized with metallic-colored batting helmets and racing-stripe pants legs, harkened back to an early-’90s computer-game interpretation of cyberpunk’s retro-modernism. Of course, it was all completely antithetical to the modern-retroism of the new Mariner stadium; so no regular Ms’ uniforms will probably ever look like that. (‘Twas also fun to ponder the fake out-of-town scoreboard listings for Venus and Mercury. If you think the thin air in Denver affects the game…)

DESIGNS FOR LIVING: A bookseller of my acquaintance recently tipped me off to one of the nonsexual passages (yes, there are several) in the Kama Sutra: a list of “the sixty-four arts and sciences to be studied” by a learned man or woman. They include some universals (“singing,” “dancing,” “tattooing”), some obscure-around-these-parts cultural practices (“binding of turbans and chaplets”), and some practical matters of life in ancient India (“storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns, and reservoirs”). Anyhow, it’s inspired me to compile 64 arts and disciplines (from the practical to the spiritual to the just plain fun) a modern person should know. As always, I’d like your suggestions, to clark@speakeasy.org. Results will appear in this space in three weeks.

(Here’s a link to the original Kama Sutra list)

(Next week: The 1998 Misc. Summer Reading List.)

The Ruin of Many a Poor Boy

Original online book feature, 7/6/98

The Ruins

by Trace Farrell

NYU Press

In the ’80s I was involved with a writers’ collective called Invisible Seattle (inspired partly by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and partly by the French Oulipo writers’ group). Through group writing experiments, an early computer bulletin board system, and public performance events, we imagined alternate universes where the Queen City of the Northwest had different properties, populations, and institutions. Sometimes, we posited a Seattle with a Latin Quarter; sometimes, a Seattle with open-air butcher stands and lovemaking in the streets; sometimes, a Seattle with mysterious spies investigating a case of people disappearing into thin air at the whim of a creature known only as “The Author.”

Trace Farrell might never have known of the Invisible Seattle group, but her novella The Ruins lies completely within the spirit of the group’s doings. Her concept: Take a real, oh-so-darn eccentric private Seattle supper club (name unchanged) and imagine if it wasn’t the creation of its founders’ fantasies as much as an organic part of its community. To make this clearer: Farrell took the real Ruins (with its ambience of fake Euro-decadence) and made up a fictional city to put it in.

This city, called merely “Q__” and situated in an unnamed European country, substitutes old-world outrageousness and earthiness for Seattle’s cold “niceness,” but surrealistically represents a lot about our real city’s increasing bifurcation of the new rich vs. the old poor, hip vs. square, bombast vs. thrift.

“Our hero, Tom” is the old Seattle–hardworking, unassuming, disciplined, sincere, repressed as hell. He’s a down-on-his-luck shoe-shine-stand operator who shows up at the Ruins in search of more gainful employment, and (being the first even half-sane person to ever enter the building) gets immediately hired as its maitre d’.

The other characters represent various aspects of the new Seattle. The owner’s a gregarious, loud, gladhanding big-idea man who can’t be bothered with such boring trivialities as health inspectors and rent payments. The employees are knockabouts, actors, and airheads who know everything about maintaining a festive Bacchanalian spirit but nothing about running a restaurant. The regular customers (most notably a voluptuous dowager lounge singer) are New Money hedonists and hustlers whose lives of worry-free abundance couldn’t be further from Tom’s pitiful existence and what New Agers would call his “poverty consciousness.” Tom is repeatedly hounded, harrassed, and made the butt of cruel jokes by all the others–who, through it all, insist they love him and need his continued presence to keep the Ruins from total operational collapse.

On one level, Tom is a classic archetypal patsy–an Elmer trapped in a world of scwewy wabbits, a hapless Hardy in a roomful of Laurels. On another level, Tom’s a stand-in (or stunt double) for The Forgotten Man, the hard-working schmoe exploited as “Joe Sixpack” by politicians, labeled a “fascist redneck” by self-styled radicals and hipsters, and treated as a blight in need of removal by urban redevelopers. His misadventures in The Ruins are sometimes hilarious, but don’t laugh too hard. His fate could soon become yours.

(PS: For those who’ve asked me to state more clearly if I liked a book, I liked this one. Farrell’s a deft humorist. Her fantastical concoctions, and her descriptions of them, are outrageous without ever crossing the line into safe parody. She’s sympathetic toward her antihero even while she puts him through humiliation after humiliation. And she writes up a more amazing meal than any nonfiction food writer you’ve ever read.)

Tipton Bio Never Drags

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/25/98

Suits Me:

The Double Life of Billy Tipton

Diane Wood Middlebrook

(Houghton Mifflin) $25

You know the basic story. Billy Tipton, a nostalgic pop-jazz pianist and fixture of Spokane society for over three decades, died in 1989 and was revealed by doctors to have been a woman all along. Now here’s the long version.

Who was Billy Tipton really? At several points, Middlebrook (a onetime Spokanian herself) accepts the argument that Billy (born Dorothy Tipton in 1914) was a closeted lesbian who only dressed as a man to make it in the jazz business and/or because nobody in her world would accept A Strong Woman. Yet the details of Tipton’s life, which Middlebrook clearly spent much time and effort collecting, suggest otherwise. Instead of heading to NY or LA or Vegas, where lesbians and jazzy women would get as much acceptance as they would anywhere in those less enlightened decades, Tipton stayed in the Midwest and later the inland Northwest, where the potential career rewards were smaller but where the competition was also smaller. (Tipton only recorded two LPs, both of retro trad-jazz standards released in the ’50s on supermarket budget labels; his work, as described by Middlebrook, seems to have settled quickly into covers and, later, Lawrence Welkish nostalgia.)

I used “his” above for a reason. Despite Middlebrook’s psychoanalyses, her tale is clearly one of someone who saw himself as a man born with the wrong equipment, who wanted to be known exclusively as a man. There were plenty of strong women in Tipton’s dust-bowl Oklahoma upbringing; but their strength was in holding households and careers together, not in the letting-loose demimonde of jazz. By the ’40s, when female instrumentalists had started to emerge in jazz and pop (and young men not in the armed forces were often derided as unpatriotic), Tipton never took the opportunity to end his offstage “act.” Even when dying of untreated ulcers, Tipton refused the medical attention that might have revealed his secret.

No, the Tipton story isn’t a tale of tragedy but of triumph. Tipton wasn’t a jazz great and probably knew he’d never be one, but he died a success at becoming something, and someone, he wanted against all odds to become–and without benefit of surgeries, shots, or hormone pills.

Fun things in the book: The elegant design, the cover, the shadow-clef frontspiece logo, the descriptions of ’50s Spokane, some of Tipton’s creakily “naughty” onstage jokes about women and gays, the descriptions of Tipton’s cross-dressing details (strap-ons, chest-binding, elevator shoes, claims that sanitary pads were great for sopping up car-oil leaks).

•

The Crisis of Criticism

Edited by Maurice Berger

(New Press paperback) $17.95

Yes, there are readers who actually take arts reviews seriously. At least other reviewers do. When New Yorker writer Arlene Croce complained about the concept of “victim art” she accused a Bill T. Jones AIDS dance work of abetting (without Croce actually seeing the show), several members of the NYC-centric art-crit and lit-crit spheres fell into a tizzy.

This brief book compiles Croce’s un-review with eight other critics’ responses and ruminations on the value of criticism in today’s everybody’s-a-critic era. Granted, a lot of these pro critics and authors (especially bell hooks) are just sticking long words onto a desire for a world in which people such as themselves get more respect. But others argue, with varying degrees of success, for a new or reasserted role for their profession.

Some of the better pieces don’t address Croce’s beef at all, but instead explore other criticism-related matters. Particularly notable is Richard Martin’s “Addressing the Dress,” arguing for more serious and less hype-laden fashion journalism. With so much art, entertainment, etc. being churned out by the intellectual-property industries and their highbrow counterparts, the best of these essayists assert the importance of trying to make sense of it all, to sift the aesthetic diamonds from the aesthetic zirconia.

MISC. would rather be most anywhere than San Diego’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this Sunday, with bands at each mile-mark and a big oldies concert at the finish. An AP story hypes it: “Here’s your new inspiration for running a marathon: Pat Benetar and Huey Lewis are waiting for you at the end.” Now if they were at the start, that’d get me inspired to run as far away as I could.

ON THE RECORD: Some copies of the Airwalk Snowboard Generation CD box set bear a big sticker reading “Made In England.” Can you can think of a worse country to try to go snowboarding in?

INSURANCE RUNS: Those ESPN SportsCenter punsters have lotsa fun with corporate-arena names. Vancouver’s GM Place, they call “The Garage.” Washington, DC’s MCI Arena: “The Phone Booth.” Phoenix’s BankOne Ballpark: “The BOB.” But what could be made from “Safeco Field” (paid-for moniker to the new Mariner stadium)? “The Claims Office” doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. ‘Tho you could call the stadium’s scoreboard “The Actuarial Table.” Two games in a day could be a “Double Indemnity Header.” Home and visitors’ dugouts: “Assets” and “Liabilities.” TicketMaster surcharages: “Co-Payments.” Speaking of corporate largesse…

WINDOW PAINS: We’ll keep coming back to the Microsoft legal flap over the next months. But for now, consider the notion advanced by some MS supporters (including Fortune writer Stewart Alsop) that a software monopoly’s a good thing. The company’s address, “One Microsoft Way,” expresses the dream of Gates and his allies in associated industries to impose a structured, top-down order involving not just a single operating system and Internet browser but a single global culture controlled by a handful of corporations.

They claim it’s for a higher purpose of “standardization,” a unified technology for a unified planet. It’s an old rationalization of monopolists. AT&T used to use the slogan “One Policy, One System.” Rockefeller invoked similar images with the name “Standard Oil.”

Yet at this same time, the Net is abetting advocates of a different set of ideals–decentralized computing, cross-platform and open-architecture software, D.I.Y. entertainment and art. Not to mention thousands of religious sub-sects, sex fetishes, political factions, fan clubs, fashion trends, etc. The MS case won’t alone decide the fate of this diversity-vs.-control clash, but could become a turning point in it. Speaking of unity in cacophany…

SUB GOES THE CULTURE: Something called the Council on Civil Society (named for a phrase that’s served as an excuse for stifling cultural diversity around these parts) put out a treatise claiming “Americans must find a way to agree on public moral philosophy if democracy is going to survive.” Its report (Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths) claims, “If independent moral truth does not exist, all that is left is power.” An AP story about the group cited Madonna choosing single momhood as evidence of such social decay.

At best, it sounds like Dr. Laura’s radio rants demanding a return to impossibly rigid social and sexual conformities. At worst, it’s like the hypocritical pieties of “Family” demagogues who’ve been degenerating moral and religious discussion into a naked power game, selling churchgoers’ votes to politicians who really only care about Sacred Business. Yet any successful demagougery has an appeal to honest desires (for stability, assurance, identity, etc.) at its heart. It’s a complicated, complex populace. Cultures and subcultures will continue to branch off and blossom. Attempts to impose one official religion, diet, dress code, sex-orientation, etc. are dangerous follies at best.

So what would my idea of a standard of conduct be? Maybe something like this: There’s more to life than just “lifestyles.” There’s more to well-being than just money. There’s more to healthy communities than just commerce. There’s more to spirituality than just obedience (whether it’s evangelical obedience or neopagan obedience). We’ve gotta respect our land, ourselves, and one another–even those others who eat different food or wear different clothes than ourselves. Individuals can be good and/or bad, smart and/or dumb, but not whole races (or genders or generations). We’re all the same species, but in ever-bifurcating varieties. Live with it.

Online Extras

This Rage-To-Order thang’s, natch, bigger and, well, less unified than my typical oversimplified approach implies. A lot of different people are wishing for a world reorganized along a unified sociocultural premise; the problem is each of them wants his or her own premise to be the one everybody else has to follow.

Big business, thru its hired thinkers and think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Discovery Institute, Global Business Network, and co.) seek a globe sublimated under a single economic system; with national governments ceding soverignity over trade, labor, and environmental policy to the managements of multinational companies.

The culture component of global business would like nothing better than a whole world watching the same Hollywood movies, listening to the same US/UK corporate-rock bands, and purchasing the same branded consumer goods.

In an opposite corner of the ring (but playing by the same rules), you’ve got your Religious Rightists like Pat Robertson who demand that even if all Americans can’t be persuaded to convert to Christian fundamentalism, they oughta be forced to submit to fundamentalist dictates in re sex, family structures, gender roles, labor-management relations, art, music, etc. etc.

The fundamentalists’ sometime allies, the “canon” obsessives like Wm. Bennett, believe all Americans should be taught to speak the same language (even the same dialect), and all students should all be made to read the same short list of (mostly US/UK) literary classics, instilling a uniform set of “virtues.”

Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, claims we could arrive at a unified system of knowledge, uniting the sciences and the arts and the humanities, if we only put the principal laws of biology at our philosophical center.

Wilson intends this conception of reassurance as an alternative to “chaos theory” and to the complexities of postmodern critical theory. But it could as easily be made against dictatorial pseudo-unities such as that proposed by the fundamentalists. Indeed, he spends quite a few pages acknowledging how the secular-humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers (his heroes in the quest for unity) helped pave the ideological way for the false new orders of Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, et al. Similarly, biological metaphors were misused in the “social Darwinism” theories propagated by Ford and Rockefeller to justify their mistreatment of workers and crushing of competition.

Then there’s Terence McKenna’s biological excuse for bohemian elitism, proclaiming his followers to represent the next evolutional stage of the human species (as if acid-dropping and square-bashing could bring about beneficial genetic mutations.)

A more promising recipe for unity’s in an obscure book I found at a garage sale, The Next Development in Man by UK physicist L.L. Whyte. Written in England during the WWII air raids, Whyte’s book (out of print and rather difficult to wade through) starts with the assumption, understandable at the time, that the European philosophical tradition had reached its dead end. We’d continue to suffer under dictators and wars and bigotry and inequality so long as people were dissociated–i.e., treated science as separate and apart from art, body from spirit, id from ego, man from woman, people from nature, rulers from workers, hipsters from squares, and so on. (Sounds like something I wrote previously, that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds, and those who don’t.) Whyte’s answer to the oppressive aspects of Soviet communism: A re-definition of capitalist economics as not a war of good vs. evil but as a system of privileges, with innocent beneficiaries as well as innocent victims. His idea of unity: We’re all in this life together, and it’s in all of our overall best interests to make it a more just, more peaceful life, one more in tune with the needs of our bodies, minds, and souls. He sees this as an ongoing effort: There’s no past or future Golden Age in his worldview, only a continual “process.” Unity isn’t a static, uniform state of being, but a recognition of interconnectedness of all stuff in all its diverse, changing ways.

Gates of Hell?

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/18/98

Barbarians Led By Bill Gates

by Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller

Henry Holt ($23)

Most reviews of this book talk about how co-author Jennifer Edstrom’s mom is Microsoft’s long-serving PR boss, and how this less-than-flattering portrait of the software giant must be hurting familial relations. A better focus would be on its other co-author, ex-MS programmer Marlin Eller. Barbarians can be seen as the literary equivalent of modern-day Microsoft software. It’s fairly comprehensible, and more or less gets the job done; but it’s clunky in places, with extra features abruptly tacked onto old “legacy code.”

The introduction notes this was originally to have been a straightforward memoir of Eller’s 12 years in the Redmond salt mines. The authors don’t say why the book didn’t end up that way, but the publisher clearly wanted something more applicable to recent news surrounding the company–antitrust suits, allegations of monopolistic and coercive practices. So, Eller and Edstrom re-coded the product (revised the book) to meet the new specs. The shipping version (final draft) emphasizes Eller’s toils on projects directly relevant to current MS controversies, such as early versions of Windows. Chapters about Eller’s years on projects far from MS’s operating-systems heart, like handwriting-recognition software and pay-per-view TV boxes, now emphasize object lessons about MS’s hyper-aggressive culture, its less-than-polite leadership (including Mr. Bill, depicted as an asocial geek on the world’s biggest power trip), and its drive to engulf and devour competitive technologies. Especially technologies which just might maybe nibble a bite or two away at MS’s precious OS monopoly.

MS haters will find their opinions conveniently confirmed. MS loyalists might at least grudgingly appreciate sympathetic portrayals of code warriors striving to finish impossible tasks, within inconceivable deadlines, under unliveable stress, for often-substantial material rewards. In other words, it’s designed to appeal to the largest potential user base.

Other Bill boox:

• Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry–And Made Himself the Richest Man in America, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews (1994)
• Hard Drive, by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (1993)
• Overdrive, James Wallace’s Hard Drive sequel focusing on the days of Windows 95 and the first Netscape showdown (1996)
• The Secret Diary of Bill Gates, by ‘Bill G.’ (a parody consisting of pseudonymous newsgroup messages; 1998)

Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll:

Book review for The Stranger, 5/7/98

The mostly-British anthology Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll: Stories to End the Century (Serpent’s Tail trade paperback; edited by Sarah LeFanu) purports to chronicle the return to the “traditional values” of social repression following the end of the purported ’60s-’70s Bacchinale. Actually, it’s more like a reassertion of one particular traditional value of U.K. fiction: the pre-’60s kitchen sink drama, Angry Young Man version. That was a genre particularly suited for the England of grey skies and grim industrial towns and lingering postwar depression, a place where things new and invigorating just didn’t occur. The protagonists of most of these stories don’t find satori or mind-expansion from their earthy pursuits. At best, they achieve a little solace or escape from their everyday tedium.The sex is mostly of the “alternative” variety, and mostly in conformance with current “alternative” propriety. Professional dominatrixes; gay men searching for mates while on ecstasy; future lesbians engaged in girlhood role-playing; a married woman whose husband supplies her with another man as her birthday present; a honeymooning intellectual couple sitting at cafés while discussing the philosophical implications of fucking.

Similarly, the drugs are mostly used to escape the darkness of one’s life (Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Woman Is Born to Bleed”) or to build an artificial sense of self-confident fuckability (the aforementioned ecstasy users in Philip Hensher’s “The Chartist”). The main exception: Laurie Colwin’s “The Achieve, or the Mastery of the Thing,” in which a student bride in the nascent hippie years turns her professor bridegroom onto the then-novel joys of spending one’s entire life too stoned to feel pain.

Not much rock ‘n’ roll is in here, and that’s OK since there’s so little good writing about that world that isn’t really about the sex and drugs. Certainly the main rock story here, Cherry Wilder’s “Friends in Berlin,” has little novel to offer about bandmates getting on one another’s nerves while on tour. Again, nostalgia for the days of potential rebellion provide the highlight–Christopher Hope’s “Gone,” about a ’50s white boy learning to love rock music in apartheid South Africa.

The notion of intense pleasures as dulling narcotics reaches its ultimate point in Michael Carson’s “Postcards of the Hanging,” imagining a near-future in which humans are implanted with 24-hour radio receivers in their bodies, letting the outside world fade away while listening constantly to the top pop hits (with commercials). Like much modern-day sci-fi, it’s based on the schtick of taking a present-day trend (Walkmen and boom boxes) and simply imagining it will become more-O-the-same in the future. In this day of “chaos theory” and “quantum thinking,” many science and pop-science writers no longer believe trends necessarily “progress” in one direction forever. Too bad so many science fiction writers haven’t discovered this notion yet. But then again, maybe chaos-influenced fiction would constitute stories to begin the next century, not stories to end this one.

Writers at Microsoft:

WPA or Pharoah?

Book feature for The Stranger, 5/7/98

Artists, the old saying goes, subsidize art with their lives. Unable to make a living from their life’s passion, they spend their daylight hours pretending to be other, less noble creatures, from strippers to lawyers. These days, untold hundreds of writers, painters, musicians, et al. have infiltrated the 8,000-plus Redmond workforce of Microsoft.

“I had an office mate once,” says painter Pam Mandel. “We joked how Micosoft was like the WPA [Works Progress Administration, FDR’s make-work program for artists during the Depression]. This place has put more artists and writers to work than any place we knew. It’s the biggest employer of creative people I’ve ever seen.”

THE WORK

Two years ago, it seemed half the writers in Seattle were working on proposed “shows” for the Microsoft Network. Now, most of MSN’s entertainment or culture-oriented sites are, or will soon be, gone. (One survivor, the political-analysis netzine Slate, has moved to a paid-access format.) Instead, MS is pushing into websites that can generate direct profits by selling stuff like cars, plane tickets, and financial services.

But that shift still leaves lotsa work for word-wranglers. Besides the remaining MS websites, the company has reference CD-ROMs, software manuals and help files, training guides, Microsoft Press books, PR materials, and in-house documents to be written, edited, and constantly revised. And it has work requiring good communication skills, in such areas as graphics, “interface design,” marketing, and telephone help lines.

Tech writers are part of most MS software-development projects nearly from the start. “The products are so complicated,” poet and essayist Emily Warn says, “they need people who can communicate about them. More and more ,the manuals have gotten simpler and they’ve tried to make the products more intuitive. Yet if you’re only a programmer, you don’t have the ability to think like a user using the product.”

Warn notes the differences between this and traditional literary day jobs on college campuses. “I’ve a lot of writers in academia asking me how they can get jobs at Microsoft. Academia seems so petty and removed for me–all the office politics and ideological sects.”

THE ADVANTAGES

“I know I have a BFA,” says Mandel. “I couldn’t make anywhere near this kind of money teaching or working in a gallery.” Currently working as a technical writer, Mandel previously wrote picture captions for MS’s Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia. “It was the first time I’d ever been paid for my art-history education.”

Warn says she feels “almost apologetic because I like working at Microsoft. There are a lot of creative, smart, chaotic people. It’s a very interesting place to work. In my group alone [maintaining the Internet Explorer website], here are at least five working poets, three working fiction writers, and several highly qualified journalists. My boss is an ex-Maoist fiction writer.”

Eileen Duncan recently wrote in the online literary zine Salmon Bay Review, “I don’t always admit in public that I’m a writer. I’ve had several people ask, `Why would you do anything that doesn’t earn you money when you already have a job?’ At Microsoft, however, people react with kindness and interest to my admission. They even approve of it.”

Second-generation Seattle writer Sean Bentley works in a “user assistance group,” surrounded by “folks who at least read, if not write. This is a happy break from selling wastebaskets to restauranteurs who hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about most of the time if it didn’t have to do with Rubbermaid. Bartending was similarly soul-sucking, and I was lucky to escape being knifed, which is something I rarely have to worry about at MS.”

THE DRAWBACKS

Ken Smith co-edits Salmon Bay Review when he’s not at Microsoft. He finds the transition between left- and right-brain work “sometimes tough. When you sit down to write code, it’s absolutely literal. Sometimes the logic doesn’t make sense and it works anyway. Sometimes it’s hard to make the mental shift.

Smith says the sometimes-long hours and the Seattle-Redmond commutes don’t affect him, at least not directly. “I do have the time to do the things I want to, but sometimes my brain is a little more fatigued when I come home than it used to be.”

THE IMPLICATIONS

Microsoft is an aggressive corporate player with an ambitious agenda, to leverage its operating-system dominance into new aspects of the computer business (and many businesses only half-related to computers).

Some writers at Microsoft declined to be quoted about the company’s role in the world, a topic its PR division doesn’t like other employees discussing with the press. Poet and former Microsoft contract employee Arthur Tulee was willing to discuss it in historical-metaphor form:

“I was one of many slave scribes (excuse me, temporary contingent staff) for the Pharoah Bill…. I wrote, drew, and spellchecked on many of the various publications and manuals on how to build the Sphinx, obelisks, Cleopatra’s barge, etc. I studied straw production, quarries, Nile barge traffic, slave lifespans (excuse me, temporary contingent staffing contract periods), and purchasing quality fake beards at less than cost for Pharoah Bill and his thousands of permanent blue-badge lieutenants, some of whom were too young to grow beards.

“All my blue-badge lieutenants were educated, all-wise and compassionate. Some of them started out also as scribes, so no wonder. They worked us beyond human endurance, and promised us one view off the pyramid summit at the end of our project. There is no greater thrill than looking down upon thousands of slaves (excuse me, temporaries) sweating, groaning and straining for one purpose, one cause, one vantage point. We accomplished many stacks of hieroglyphs, some on short schedules, and only a few had slipped on the production calendar. On our backs stand giants.”

THE SHOCK OF THE NUDE: As mentioned previously in The Stranger, Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady coffee-table-book photos won’t have their own Seattle Art Museum show (across from the peep-show emporium where Langley took her pix) after all. She’d been invited by one SAM official, then disinvited by highers-up (who’ve offered her a slot in a group exhibition next year instead). The official line: The show would’ve been in a hallway, where kids on group tours might be exposed to the sight of beautiful women’s physiques. (Langley’d already agreed to leave sexually-suggestive shots out of the show.) Yet Langley and her supporters noted (in this paper and elsewhere) that other nudes (M/F) have been on open display at SAM. I saw plenty of under-agers enjoy the drawn nudes at SAM’s Cone Collection exhibit last year, including several young art students copying the drawings into sketchbooks. But art’s gatekeepers have always preferred their nude images to be safely removed from the here-and-now. I believe as late as Monet’s time, painters were expected to set nekkid people only in historic (ancient Greece), foreign (Mideast harems), or mythical (Biblical sinners) settings. But a modern-day gal willfully showin’ off her bod sans shame? Alors! Speaking of sex-fear…

I WAS READING the 1965 intro to The Olympia Reader, wherein editor-publisher Maurice Girodias complained about French censorship in the de Gaulle era, when the radio told me about a Federal Way city council hearing wherein speakers claimed a planned Castle Superstores sex-toy shop would directly lead to wild-eyed rapists rushing the streets after any woman or child in sight (as if anybody in Federal Way walked anywhere!). As I previously wrote, Castle’s just a big-box consolidation of the indie and small-chain stores where nice straights (and nice closeted gays) buy silk undies, condoms, vibes, videos, and other tools for enabling their decent, wholesome sex lives. A criminal will think like a criminal with or without such stimuli. Indeed, a clean, well-lit, mainstream sex shop might help convince someone with borderline-criminal thoughts that sex isn’t necessarily the stuff of oppressive compulsions but is as natural (and potentially as dull) as any aspect of existence. Speaking of sex-role stigmas…

LESS OF A MAN’S WORLD?: The Seattle Times recently reprinted a Washington Post article (originally one of a five-part Post series on gender relations) claiming increased social stigmas against males, especially boys. It claimed boys were more likely to be ostracized for asocial behavior or “learning disabilities,” and more likely to later become perpetrators (and victims) of violence (to themselves or others). Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld wrote, “Boys are the universal scapegoats, the clumsy clods with smelly feet… feeling the tightening noose of limited expectations, societal scorn and inadequate role models” amid a lack of positive sex-role imagery (girls can now become most anything, but boys are still expected to be dumb jocks). Other reports, meanwhile, talk of lowered sperm counts and fewer boy babies in the major western nations, even of chemical-therapy estrogen finding its way (via sewage-sludge fertilizer) into the food supply. Whatever happened to the ’80s radfem cliché of “testosterone poisoning”? Speaking of a gradually more femdom world…

SPLITTING: Bikini Kill’s members have called it quits their way, after seven years of making music their way–avoiding major labelss, package tours, MTV, even movie soundtracks. It’s not that the band’s career was going nowhere. They achieved just about all they could achieve within their self-prescribed boundaries. And now they’re moving on to new creative endeavors, without major-label debts, contractual-obligation albums, or acrimonious “farewell tours.” While I disagreed with the anti-sexist sexism in some of their words, I always admired the strength of their convictions. When they called for “Revolution Girl-Style Now,” they meant more than simply wishing to stick some female bodies onto the same ol’ seats of power, or some military overthrow with subsequent reign of terror. It was about rethinking the whole premises of social engagement, including the way “rebel” music’s produced and distributed.

Virtual Unrealities:

Book feature for The Stranger, 4/23/98

I could go on for the length of a trilogy about what’s wrong with most recent science fiction writing. Instead, I’ll recommend Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (Vintage trade paperback) as a near-perfect example of how it should be done. Alfred Bester was a veteran of the ’30s NYC lowbrow-writing circuit, where he ground out tales for pulp magazines, radio, and comic books. Gradually he got opportunities to ply his solid storytelling skills to more ambitious topics. While earning a living writing nonfiction magazine articles in the ’50s, he produced the novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, plus occasional short stories, most of them collected here.

Each of these 17 stories has a different fantastical premise, ranging from “hard science” speculation to flights of impossibility and varying degrees in between. But it’s Bester’s writing that makes these premises work.

The book’s centerpiece tale is “Fondly Fahrenheit,” Bester’s futurization of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men premise. In it, a man is doomed to travel the galaxies accompanied only by a psychotic, and possibly homicidal, android. The man and the machine, we slowly learn, have developed a complex mental symbiosis, which Bester subtly reveals by switching his first-person narration between the two, sometimes in mid-sentence.

In that and the other stories, Bester always uses the premise not for its own whaddya-think-of-that? sake but to hook the reader into caring about his (mostly male, mostly melancholy) characters. In “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” a young man learns the secret to time travel and attempts to change history, only to find himself literally disappearing from consensus reality as his own time-track becomes derailed. In “The Pi Man,” a mathematical super-genius rides his mental compulsions into unimaginable wealth, only to live in forced isolation from the imperfect minds of everyone else.

Bester’s stories have a lot teach to today’s would-be fantasists, who’ve been learning too many of the wrong lessons from the golden age of adventure fiction. What was great about the old pulp and early-paperback stories, the comic strips and movie serials, wasn’t the formulaic boy-adventure plots or the one-dimensional characters, but the skill masters like Bester learned from the sheer volume of work they produced, the way they beckoned readers into their worlds, and the vividness with which they used unearthly plot elements to express all-too-universal yearnings and conflicts.

From the periphery of Europe to the heart of America:

The Color Gray

Book feature for The Stranger, 4-16-98

On the surface, The Factory of Facts (Pantheon) is the simple memoir of Luc Sante’s search for his roots, as a child brought to the U.S. northeast in the ’50s by parents emigrating from a depressed small factory town in still-war-scarred Belgium. But Sante wants more than to scratch any mere surface. If you’ve ever lived someplace on the periphery of the bigtime cultural action but not really in the middle of it (hint: you’re in such a place now), Sante’s got some parallels for you to ponder.

Sante (a book reviewer for the New York Review of Books and Microsoft’s Slate) sees himself as an outsider everywhere, neither fully American nor European. What’s more, he sees Belgium as an outsider among nations–something patched together during the breakup and formation of assorted Euro empires over the centuries, situated on an all-too-convenient invasion route to and from France, an amalgam of French and Dutch (and, in his own Wallonia region, German) influences. A place that gave the world (via French publishers and other middlemen) the occasional detective author (Georges Simenon), actor (Jean-Claude Van Damme), or cartoonist (Hergé), but which lives under the largely unbreached notion that the real sociocultural action is elsewhere. A country where Francophone newspapers still encourage readers to erase “colorful native idiomatic expressions”, in favor of pure, Paris-approved French. A country whose “hallmarks are ambivalence, invisibility, secretiveness, self-doubt, passivity, irony, and derision.”

Naturally, this made for little inspiration to an immigrant boy, an arriviesté in the nation that led the world in the export of dreams and ambitions. “Willfully, accidentally, organically, negligently, crudely, systematically, inevitably I got rid of a section of myself, a part that was once majority and shrank to accessory. I went from being the little Belgian boy, polite and diffident and possessed of a charming accent, to a loutish American adolescent. This was nothing special: I drank, I smoke, I stole, I swore, I stopped going to church…. My mother was convinced that Belgian children did not do such things, her view of Belgium becoming more idealized with every year she spent away from it. My view of Belgium became correspondingly more hostile, because it represented authority and also because I was certain its taint was what made me timid and awkward and unpopular and unattractive and solitary. I began a project to reinvent myself, acknowledge no bonds or ties or background, pass myself off as entirely self-made.”

A French culture minister might say the young Luc was buying into American cultural imperialism, abandoning his own heritage for the commercialized temptations learned from James Dean movies. Sante’s explanation is more melancholy: “We lost connection to a thing larger than ourselves, and as a family failed to make any significant new connection in exchange, so that we were left aground on a sandbar barely big enough for our feet. I lost friends and relatives and stories and familiar comforts and a sense of continuity between home and outside and any sense that I was normal…. Continuing to believe that I had just made myself up out of whole cloth was self-flattering but hollow.”

So the grownup Luc returns to Belgium as time and money allow. He seeks to re-connect with the extended family he left behind–not just his blood relatives, but the still-depressed industrial economy of Wallonia, its heritage of radical labor organizing (and authoritarian repression of same), its dying regional language, its once-thriving indiginous music and theater communities, its declining Catholic ideology of personal suppression (what Sante calls “the Sacred Fear”), its remaining un-globalized way of life. “What makes a country, apart from tangled history? Baked goods. Churches. Weather. The habit of discretion. Fried potatoes. Shrubbery. The color gray. The elaborate mandarin ritual that attends commercial transactions, or even just stepping into a shop. Compactness, miniaturization. Cleanliness. The cross of modesty and prudery called pudeur in French. Brickwork. Class consciousness. Women of all ages suffering in skirts and stockings in the dead of winter. Reserve, aloofness, judgment. Varnished wood. Silent children, well-bred dogs, unassertive houseplants. The fear of God, the god of fear. Wallpaper. Comic strips….”

Sante ultimately reconciles himself to his roots by re-defining himself again. He now views himself as a sort of literary industrial worker, toiling in an intangible factory constructing intangible products of value, as his forebearers had built tangible products in tangible factories. He (and we) may now be part of an “information economy,” but he (and we) still exist as the result of all which has come before us, something we forget at our own peril.

Searching for the NW In NW Lit:

We Are Here! (Aren’t We?)

Feature article by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 4/9/98

From a very early age I was instilled with the (probably unintended but unmistakable) message that real art, and by extension real life, were things that only happened in places far away from my rural Washington existence. The stories read to us in class, and later assigned for us to read, all happened in Harlem or Korea or mythical fairylands or mythical Anytowns–until we got to read Beverly Cleary. Her kids had real attitudes. Her grownups had real tics and quirks. And they lived in a real place (Portland) I’d really been to. Ever since, I’ve sought out the stories of my own place, the affirmations that, like Dr. Seuss’s Whos, “We Are Here.”

Eventually, I found some stories that tried to reveal the people and attitudes of the place. And I found other seekers.

Last December, I was involved in an exchange of emails on the topic of Northwest literature. The original question, posed by Raven Chronicles editor Matt Briggs: “Is there any ‘Northwest’ in Northwest Lit’?”

Some of the respondents said there wasn’t any–that Caucasian-dominant society here’s still too new, and too subservient to the national/ global society of airports and strip malls and stadiums. I disagreed. I felt there were indeed distinguishing characteristics in stuff from here, at least the better stuff from here.

Defining the Literary Northwest: Let’s define “here” as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, maybe Alaska, and just maybe Montana; excluding the sociopolitically different worlds of western Canada and northern California.

If that’s the literary Northwest, then Northwest literature could conceivably include anything set in this place, or written by someone who resides or once resided in this place. But that could conceivably include everything from Thomas Pynchon’s V. (partly written while he was a Boeing technical writer) to tales where people leave Seattle early on and never return (certain Jack London stories,Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs).

So for convenience’s sake, let’s classify the four faces, or sub-types, of Northwest lit, and the values and weaknesses of each.

Stuff written here but without “local” content. John Saul’s chillers, Robert Ferrigno’s thrillers, and August Wilson’s African American survival plays bear little or no relationship to their creators’ domiciles. Yet some of these manage to exploit a certain Northwest spirit. Stacey Levine’s Dra- and My Horse occur in surreal fantasy realms (the former in an all-indoor city); but Dra-‘s “drab and dreary world of utter dread” and My Horse‘s “painful psycho-logic” (as described on the cover blurbs) correspond internally to a sense of low-key resignation found in some more “realistic” works from here.

Locally-set genre novels. mysteries and romances with fill-in-the-blanks ‘local color’ (insert name of popular local nightspot here).

I haven’t the space nor the expertise to discuss romances, that last bastion of un-ironic genre fiction (and the only mass-fiction genre predicated on love instead of aggression). But the better whodunit-doers, here and elsewhere, go beyond place names to invoke the spirit of a region in the ways their characters commit and/ or solve crimes. Earl Emerson and K.K. Beck’s crime-solvers have a particularly Seattle kind of world-weariness; the crimes they investigate often invoke particularly local versions of ambition and desperation.

Land Lit. In college I was introduced to a whole “Northwest school” of writers and poets. Only their message, upon initial contact, seemed to be “We Are Not Here.” The poems usually consisted of minutely-detailed nature tableaux, devoid of human life save for the omniscient gaze of their narrators. The fiction viewed this countryside as verbal Cinemascope settings for noble women and stout-hearted men felling trees and fly fishing and behaving not at all like the all-too-human Norwesters I knew. None of those people, of course, lived in any city bigger than Port Townsend.

I now understand a little more about the formula’s pre-Beat-era origins. Concurrent with the Asian-inspired “Northwest School” painters and the spiritual-empowerment aspects of the Mountaineers movement, the first couple generations of nature poets (David Wagoner, Barry Lopez, Lake City kid Gary Snyder) sought a re-connection to the cyclical continuum of life. Even the “urban” writings of Richard Hugo are full of references to birds, streams, and native plants.

But the approach had its limitations, especially in the hands of ’70s-’80s imitators. What began as a quest for Zen tranquility eventually devolved into cloying sanctimony. Its nadir came in the ’80s with the NPR essays of Andrew Ward, who gushed reverently about the plants and birds surrounding his island “cabin” while acting like a landed-gentry snob toward his human neighbors.

Poet-editor Phoebe Bosche notes, “For a lot of folks/writers who have settled here, ‘urban’ (a word that needs to be in quotes) has a nasty connotation, versus the perceived ideal sense of how life should be lived. Urban = technology. These are the writers who don’t like the sound of a crow, many who are of the Poetry Northwest [magazine] school.”

Bosche also disagrees with my disparagement of nature writing: “To just dismiss ‘nature poetry/ writing’ is blind to the overriding presence of our surroundings here. There is the presence of nature in all the urban writing being created here. It is different than the open possibilities that infuse writing from southern California, my home. The cynicism here is also different from east-coast or L.A. cynicism. It is rooted in a denser feeling of our relationship with our surroundings, in the character of this city.”

The real thing. The rarest and dearest, the works that attempt to convey how people here behave, think, and relate. I’m not merely talking about highbrow-appeal, or even what appeals to me. (The annoyingly “lite” Tom Robbins certainly expresses the aesthetic of a certain ‘shroom-munchin’ caste of NW residents.) But I prefer works expressing the moods Robbins’s escapism is escaping from.

Timothy Egan called it “Northwest Noir.” Briggs calls it “the slippery sense of place and identity in the Pacific Northwest… a strange dislocation that sometimes expresses itself in deformed characters, like Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; a reduction of realty into a heavily weighted and controlled narrative, like Raymond Carver’s short stories; or in the complete absence of family history and a sort of constant self-invention as in Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, or stories about isolated and small communities as in Peter Bacho.” To that roster I’d add Gus Van Sant’s philosophical down-and-outers, the Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff’s rambunctious yet worryful teens, Rebecca Brown’s obsessively intricate life scenes, Jesse Bernstein’s defiant celebrations of despair as a life force, Willie Smith’s dark fantasies, and the sublime desolation of Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Point.

“There is a common, nervous energy (like overcompensating for the overcast winter) to a lot of the writing that I think strikes me as particularly PNW,” Briggs adds. “This spirit I’m talking about is like your weird uncle,” Briggs adds. “Your characters are generally losers. They’re not heroic; they’re just odd.”

Even the humor in NW lit, and there’s a lot of it, is off-center (Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, Gregory Hischack’s beautiful zine Farm Pulp), self-deprecating (Spud Goodman’s TV skits, Scott McCaughey’s song lyrics), or concerned with the dichotomy between crudity and beauty (cartoonist Jim Woodring, Oregon historian Stewart Holbrook).

Which brings us to the here and now. At live readings, the nature poets have largely been succeeded by slam poets. The younger would-be literary writers I meet want to be Anais Nin or Charles Bukowski. The economics of publishing virtually dictate that a work with “alternative” appeal reach out to a national or global subculture, while a work with local or regional appeal must hew to a mainstream zeitgeist. And the local mainstream zeitgeist has been thoroughly gentrified beyond David Brewster’s wettest dreams. With all the material riches to be grabbed here now, detective writers can imagine higher-stakes crimes and romance heroines can enjoy more luxurious adventures.

But what place is there for the quirky, the depressive, the unparodic noir, in a social landscape dominated by hypercapitalistic monomania? Marty Kruse, small-press buyer at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, says he’s “really disappointed with the output from the Pacific Northwest (of late)…. There was a great deal more enthusiasm when we all had less to lose.”

But if the best NW lit’s about people who’ve left behind, or been left behind by, family and society, then there’ll be plenty of material to come about people who’ve been left behind by the boom. As Briggs points out, “This has been an industrial town and a seat for the labor movement and there are all of these people who were here before the 1980s (and even those who were there before them, all the way back to the original Salish tribes) milling around, working strange jobs, and who aren’t exactly jumping on the Boeing/ Microsoft bandwagon, largely because they can’t.”