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The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Book feature for The Stranger, 8/20/98
THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT
by Aimee Bender
(Doubleday) $21.95
The 16 stories in Bender’s first fiction collection are dark yet never morbid, funny yet never goofy. They’re constantly going just off the side of your expectations, yet their own twisted worlds function perfectly. They have just the right details in just the right places.
Bender deconstructs the Everywoman motif common among so many contemporary female authors. Bender’s women do, by more or less their own free will, things other women may find selfish, inconsiderate, or just plain icky. These heroines and antiheroines aren’t virtuous victims or scheming sirens but more-or-less ordinary folks who get caught up in (or find themselves creating) extraordinary events. Even when these women do not-too-nice things, Bender lets us fully understand why they would.
Example: The long-suffering wife in “What You Left in the Ditch,” who remains steadfastly loyal to her soldier husband until he comes home without lips. Bender doesn’t excuse the woman’s superficiality or abandonment of her beloved in his hour of need, but she lets us see how the character had been dependent upon an idealized fantasy of her faraway man, a fantasy ultimately severed from the scarred, real husband.
Another example: The mild-mannered librarian in “Quiet Please,” who learns her estranged (and possibly abusive) father has died, and who spends the rest of the day soliticing sexual favors from every adult male on the library premises–not to fulfill any of their (or her) lusts, but to engage in the act of life as atonement for the belief she’d psycically caused dad’s death by having wished him dead for years. A male reader might first imagine the thrill of encountering such a woman. A female reader might first feel mildly appalled at her actions. But by the end of Bender’s tightly-written, well-paced little tale, all readers will likely feel a tinge of pity, perhaps mixed with a sort of admiration for a character who does what she must to righten herself.
Ross Shafer Goes Inside the First Family
Record review for The Stranger, 8/6/98
Ross Shafer Goes Inside the First Family (Jerden/SoundWorks): Shafer’s becoming one of those sadly “inspirational” figures who never gives up in the face of repeated failures. The original host of KING’s Almost Live (which became a local institution after he left) continues to attempt different areas of comic entertainment, hoping for that big break. Here, he attempts to clone Vaughn Meader’s classic JFK-themed comedy LP The First Family, only with the Clintons as characters–and with the meanness and luridity required for airplay on Clinton-bashing talk-radio shows. The cast (including local voice-over vet Ken Boynton as Bill C.) tries its darnedest to bring Shafer’s mediocre scripts to life (the final big gag is Teresa Ganzel’s faux-fellatio sound FX). Even sadder: It’s produced and released by Seattle recording legend Jerry Dennon, who masterminded the Sonics and Wailers and Kingsmen back in what they call “the day.”
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.)
One Disaster Movie
and
One Disastrous Movie
Film feature for The Stranger, 6/28/98
ON THE BEACH
(dir. Stanley Kramer, 1959)
Local oldtimers remember when Stanley Kramer lived here in the ’80s and hosted KCPQ’s Sunday-night movies. He was always trying to make a statement, but usually took every commercial break to try to meander back to his original point, usually unsuccessfully. Here, though, he makes his point early and blatantly. In Aussie novelist Nevil Shute’s story, the Yanks and Russkies have fired their nukes in 1964, destroying most of civilization. Australia wasn’t hit, but the radiation clouds are on the way; so, as Ava Gardner’s character sighs, “There isn’t time. No time to love. Nothing to remember. Nothing worth remembering.” Well, actually there’s time for Gardner to fall for U.S. submarine captain Gregory Peck, for Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins to try to keep up the townspeople’s spirits somehow, for a brass band to play one last round of “Waltzing Matilda,” and for one lingering B&W shot of Melbourne’s eventually-lifeless streets. The spookiest antinuke flick of them all (including the ’80s TV ones), precisely becuase of its lack of onscreen gore.
RENALDO AND CLARA
(dir. Bob Dylan, 1978)
After Dylan mumbled through his role in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), the Voice of a Generation apparently thought he could act–and even direct! So when he made a filmed record of his 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, he padded it out to five hours with fictionalized backstage antics, incoherent pontifications, and sub-dinner-theater acting. Dylan plays the “ambiguous” Renaldo (as described by the All-Movie Guide). His then-wife Sara plays Clara. Ronnie Hawkins and Ronee Blakely play Bob and Sara Dylan. Joan Baez plays The Woman In White. Bob Neuwirth plays The Masked Tortilla. Sam Shepard (his on-screen debut) and Harry Dean Stanton attempt to add professionalism. Dylan and Shepard share the writing credit/blame. After its box-office failure, Dylan issued a two-hour cut of just the music (including Arlo Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, and an out-of-place Roberta Flack). Neither version’s easy to find.
Pere Ubu’s Lost Landscapes:
On the Road Again
Music feature for The Stranger, 6/25/98
For those who came in late, including over-21ers who weren’t born when Pere Ubu first formed, some things to know:
They’re not punk, nor are they `new wave.’ They were originally part of a tiny proto-scene in Cleveland during those Doobie/ Ronstadt dark ages of the early ’70s. The band’s founders, David Thomas and the late Peter Laughner, believed rock should mean something other than stadiums and cocaine. But they also didn’t settle for the AM-pop revivalism of the Ramones and Blondie.
Freed from career considerations (even “alternative” career considerations), Pere Ubu could produce perfect gems of energetic rock ‘n’ roll (the ’76 45Â “Final Solution”), totally-listenable experiments in joyous dissonance (the ’80 track “Not Happy”), and LPs of noisesome rambles that never degenerated into self-important noodling (The Modern Dance); all kept together by Thomas’s high yet forceful voice. They knew the rules of rock-song construction, and precisely where and when to break them.
They haven’t been continuously together these 23 years; yet this tour isn’t a formal “reunion.” Eleven people played in various versions of the original Pere Ubu from 1975 to 1982. When Thomas officially went solo, he continued to record and tour with some of his erstwhile bandmates. Four of those old Ubu musicians were in the band’s 1987 re-formation; Thomas and original guitarist Tom Herman remain in the five-piece group now touring.
Today Thomas makes both “David Thomas” records and “Pere Ubu” records. The essential distinction: The Thomas solo records go into whichever musical directions Thomas chooses to pursue; the Ubu records build on the band’s guitar/ synth/ vocal heritage. Players for both groups are signed to one-album contracts (Thomas calls them “project-years”).
They’re an indie band, but not religiously so. They started with self-released 45s at a time when nobody was doing that. They’ve bounced around various major, major-distributed, and full-indie labels on two continents ever since. Currently, the old stuff’s being reissued on Geffen (including the box-set retrospective Datapanik in the Year Zero); their two newest albums (plus old and new Thomas solo affairs) are on Portland’s Tim/Kerr Records and U.K. indie Cooking Vinyl.
They have the technology. Instrumentation on the new Ubu CDÂ Pennsylvania includes several organs, digital and analog synthesizers, tack piano (sounds like a grade schooler’s toy piano, only in tune), theremin, and computer-generated voices, along with the expected guitars and percussions (often used in unexpected ways). But as Thomas insists in the album’s press kit, “We aren’t experimental…. We know what we’re doing. We don’t need to experiment.”
The new album isn’t quite like the last one. The ’95 Ubu release, Raygun Suitcase, edged toward the rock half of the band’s art/ rock equation. Pennsylvania strays closer to the art half.
Pennsylvania can be interpreted as a meditation on a lost American landscape (or being lost on said landscape), as observed from repeated tour-van treks separated by long stints away. (While the band’s still officially based in Cleveland, Thomas now spends most of his non-touring days in England, where his biggest audience has always been.) It should be listened to from start to end, preferably on a car stereo while on a lonely stretch of Interstate in the wee hours. Track after long track of the most hypnotic driving music since Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (with Thomas growling or drawling instead of his more familiar chirping) are interrupted at the 42-minute mark by a pair of quirk-pop arousal tunes, followed by one uptempo rocker (“Wheelhouse”), representing the band finally arriving and playing its gig. Then, three minutes of silence; then, 15 minutes of bonus tracks put you on the road again with avant-jazz-like variations on the album’s prior instrumental themes.
The words are as eerie as the music, if not more so. From the opening track “Woolie Bullie” (no relation to the oldie of the same name): “Culture is a swampland of superstition, ignorance, and abuse. Geography is a language they can’t screw up. The land and what we add to it cannot lie.”
The band’s name is now just a name. It was originally taken in honor of dada playwright Alfred Jarry’s antihero. But now, Thomas says “Dada and surrealism are an historical curiosity with no relevance as a living art. Dada and surrealism is what you do when you’re 17, a thing of youth that should be put away with maturity.”
Fortunately, Pere Ubu’s music just keeps getting stronger with the years. Having dropped punk’s angry machismo long ago, Thomas finds himself still growing into his art: “Why do you think after more than 40 years that juvenile social posturing has any relevance to rock music?”
Online Extra: A brief email interview with David Thomas
1. Do you now see yourself viewing the American landscape from the point-o-view of an emigrant? How have your long stays outside the country affected how you see it when you get back?
No. They don’t.
2. Is rock n’ roll any worthwhile pursuit for people near or beyond the age of 40?
Yes.
3. I’ve known bands whose members all live in different states. How do you logistically organize a band while living on a different continent from the other members?
There’s nothing to organize that can’t be done by phone. The only difference is cost of transport.
4. What’s it like to be called an Influence by musicians who don’t sound a thing like one another (or you)?
It’s not anything.
5. Have you any advice to all the would-be indie musicians out there?
Quit.
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.
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:
Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Stories to End the Century
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:Â 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.”
Virtual Unrealities:
The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
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.”
Media Bashers:
Rebels Without an Effect
Book review for The Stranger, 12/19/97
We the Media: A Citizens’ Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy, edited by Don Hazen and Julie Winokur (The New Press)
The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank (University of Chicago Press)
Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, by Robert McChesney (Oxford)
Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, by James Ledbetter (Verso)
Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, by Stephen Duncombe (Verso)
While American leftists share few notions on how to improve society, just about all of them love the Media Analysis game. How to play: (1) Read something in the “mainstream media” (anything bigger than Mother Jones or The Nation). (2) Pretend to be shocked that the major news institutions behave, well, like major institutions. (3) Complain long and loud about how Big Media isn’t telling The Real Truth (without you, yourself, saying much about what that Real Truth might be). It’s easy, it’s fun, it doesn’t require changing anything in the real world (the game’s rules presume you can’t change the world, just critique it).
The game’s played to perfection by the creators of We the Media, a brisk anthology of short essays and cartoons covering most of the Media Analysis movement’s topics. Nearly every of its 200 pages express amazement that publishers and broadcasters act like the major corporations they are. We the Media exists only in oppositional stance; it bitches about the media loving big business and business-friendly politicians as if anybody’s still surprised at it. (Most of us grew up with local papers kissing their local business communities’ butts; there’s no reason not to expect “national” journalists to act any different.) Only briefly, mostly toward the end, do the editors get around to stating what they’d like us to be crusading for and what communications tools exist or could be created to aid such crusades.
Baffler co-editor Tom Frank holds few illusions, sincere or feigned, about corporate media ever having had ideals to have fallen from–besides the ideal of self-interest. The Conquest of Cool isn’t the grand unified philosophical statement I’ve hoped from Frank. But it does focus his main sociocultural obsession (“hipness” as a pro-corporate marketing concept) onto one specific point in time–the late ’50s and ’60s, when Madison Avenue discovered newer, flashier, homier, hippier, and sexier ways to push consumer goods. Frank believes advertisers didn’t “co-opt” the era’s “youth movement” but paralleled and even helped inspire it. He “credits” a few “rebel” ad men, who initially wanted to break out of their own industry’s stifling conformity, with instigating the whole notion of a “permanent revolution of style” (what critics called “planned obsolescence”); a notion still seen today in ads showing “rebel” teens gulping Mountain Dew and “rebel” executives running Windows 95. Frank adds a closing section about the simultaneous rise of “hipness” in the men’s fashion biz, the process that led directly into the early-’70s polyester-pimp look now curiously nostalgized.
Robert McChesney helped start The Rocket (local bastion of hip marketing) 18 years ago, then went off to grad studies in Wisconsin. Oxford’s paperback reissue of his 1993 treatise on the early days of radio comes out in time to give background on the first corporate media consolidation movement, just as sweetheart deregulation bills are locking the airwaves into fewer and fewer hands than ever. His book’s heavy reading, full of scholarly detail about forgotten, Depression-era radio reform movements that never stood a chance against the RCA-CBS duopoly that controlled the so-called Golden Age of Radio.
It’s not just that business has always wanted to make big money in media. McChesney believes it’s also always tried to silence any potentially viable alternative. So does fellow scholar James Ledbetter. His Made Possible By… details the ’70s rise of public TV and radio in the U.S. and its quick subjugation, first by right-wing politicians and then by corporate “underwriters,” filling PBS schedules with U.K. drawing-room dramas and Lawrence Welk reruns. But after reading it, I got to thinking about what kind of public broadcasting we might have otherwise had. From the standpoint of getting independent and/or progressive documentaries and public affairs shows on the air, the PBS setup’s about the best one could imagine. A vertically integrated organization like the BBC not only has stricter “neutrality” rules, it’s much less open to outside producers. On the more fiscally unstable, yet more decentralized, PBS setup, anybody can propose a program, seek funding for it from inside or outside the system, and even syndicate it to individual affilliates if the PBS network feed doesn’t carry it. I agree with Ledbetter that today’s noncommercial-TV setup leaves a lot to be improved upon; unlike him, I believe it can be improved upon without the drastic restructuring he advocates.
Meanwhile, Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground tries to imagine the potentials for a different type of media universe, using as his starting point the so-called Zine Revolution with its potentials and contradictions. For Duncombe, the punk-rock, political, and personal zines symbolize the risks and frustrations of an oppositional “alternative” culture–do you stay small and irrelevant, or become part of the corporate media machine? Other books about the Zine Revolution revel in the coolness, weirdness, and wildness of DIY publishing. Duncombe instead solemnly ponders zines as artifacts of safe, middle-class “rebellion,” and wonders whether (and how) they might lead into a more serious movement for social change. It’d be a start if more Media Analysts developed Duncombe’s smarts.
The High-Tech Boys’ Club:
Now For Women Too
Book review by Clark Humphrey, 11/10/97
Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson (Broadway Books)
The Interactive Book by Celia Pearce (Macmillan Technical Publishing trade paperback)
Signal to Noise by Carla Sinclair (HarperCollins)
Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton (Times Books)
Interface Culture by Steven Johnson (HarperCollins)
Sometimes it seems a lot of people want to tell us about the future of computer-aided communications. Other times, it seems like it’s just the same few people putting out the same book. That’s because these screeds promising a decentralized, all-empowering cyberfuture are dominated by a small elitist cadre of ideologues who all hang out at the Global Business Network and other right-wing think tanks. These “digerati” all say pretty much the same things; none question their Gates-given right to not only predict but to dictate the direction of computers, the Net, etc. The first three authors in this review are women, but they’re still in the PC-biz “boys’ club.”
Esther Dyson’s a “digerati” insider of the first rank (daughter of celeb scientist Freeman Dyson, publisher of her own industry-insider newsletter). Her book’s essentially a general-audience reiteration of the digerati party line–the computerization of business is subverting all sorts of “paradigms,” you’ve gotta stay on your toes to keep up with market conditions that change overnight, don’t let pesky governments get in the way of all-kind-and-knowing companies, your kids’ll end up homeless tomorrow if their classrooms are computerless today. If you’ve already read Gates or George Gilder or Alvin Toffler or Nicholas Negroponte or any issue of Wired, you really don’t need another volume of the same.
Celia Pearce, who had almost as privileged an upbringing as Dyson (her industrial-designer dad’s worked on everything from Vegas light shows to Biosphere 2), could’ve used an editor. The Interactive Book, Pearce’s 580-page collection of essays, rambles on through her career designing group computer games for shopping malls, her love of the Internet visual-programming language VRML (whose co-designer wrote her introduction), her misadventures with the “new media” divisions of Hollywood movie studios (whom she believes will never “get it” regarding interactive media and its inherent differences from TV and movies), and how the Net and interactive media are supposedly on the verge of exploding all the old hierarchies of media, entertainment, and society in general.
Of course, behind most crusades against an old hierarchy there’s somebody who wants to build a new hierarchy with her/himself at its center. Carla Sinclair’s novel Signal to Noise doesn’t document this trait as much as help propagate it. Sinclair treats her friends and acquaintances in the Digerati as being important enough to have a roman a clef written about them. If you don’t personally knowDouglas Coupland or the Wired editors, there’s really no point in reading this long paean to their alleged hotness.
If the Digerati are the New Rock Stars folks like Sinclair claim them to be, then it’s natural to expect them to be subjected to scurrilous gossip. In Apple, Wall St. Journal writer Jim Carlton does the kind of hatchet job the digerati are always complaining about mainstream-media people for. Carlton blames office politics and executive infighting/ incompetence for Apple Computer’s fall from big profit margins in the late ’80s to multimillion-dollar losses the past year and a half. The eral story’s a lot simpler than Carlton’s account claims: When Microsoft wrested control of the PC platform away from IBM (with help from indie chipmakers who copied the IBM PC’s ROM chips for the first PC clones), MS turned PCs into low-margin commodities (similar to the old Kodak strategy of giving away the camera to sell the film). By then, Apple was already locked into an opposite business model, using the Mac’s superior operating software to sell its costlier hardware. MS’s Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) as good as the Mac OS, but it got close enough for corporate computer buyers, threatening Apple’s market niches and decimating the high markups it had become dependent upon. None of the boardroom-soap-opera battles Carlton relishes in detailing had much effect on this corporate trajectory, and none probably could have. Apple put out a lot of superior products, but built a big organization that couldn’t change as fast as it needed to. An important story, but not the tabloidy tale Carlton’s trying to sell.
Amid all the hustle-hustle of uniform paradigm-subverting, it’s refreshing to read the occasional voice of common sense. Steven Johnson, who runs the pioneering webzine Feed, is out not to make websites hotter, just better. While Johnson’s Interface Culture isn’t flashily designed itself (not a single illustration), Johnson’s screed about the principles of online design makes compelling reading. He’s out to improve online communication on a structural level, applying oft-forgotten common-sense principles to the creation and organization of text and graphics. While other cyber-pundits blather about their mover-‘n’-shaker pals, Johnson quietly shows the rest of us how to start subverting their paradigms by making our own online statements more effective.
Close to the Machine
Book review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/30/97
Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: A San Francisco essayist who’s not an insuffrable egomaniac. Instead of incessantly promoting herself as a Hipper Than Thou brand name, Ellen Ullman in Close to the Machine (City Lights Books) calmly and personably details some of the routines and subroutines of her daily existence as a freelance “software engineer and consultant.” On one level, this short memoir gives a narrative focus to the process of programming–something I haven’t really seen since a 10-year-old Microsoft Press interview book, Programmers At Work.) On another level, Ullman evokes real sympathy while describing her life as the soul-numbing reality behind the other techno-essayists’ futuristic fantasies. She sits at her keyboard all day and most of the night, except when she’s driving two hours each way on an assignment in some deep-suburban office park. She lives in a cool loft space, but spends most of her time there working alone. Aside from her family back east, her only non-work-related relationship consists of occasional convenience sex with a younger man who dreams of making it big in offshore money laundering and online porn. On the plus side, she does get to drive a fancy car and eat at fancy restaurants and solicit AIDS-benefit money from her wealthy acquaintances. But, as centuries of literature have already shown, upscaleness can’t buy happiness.
