PBS ASKS, is there a Pacific Northwest accent? (Found by Slumberland.)

…upon our recent piece on Seattle writing, Ryan Boudinot has submitted “A Primer: How to Write a Great Northwest Novel.”

THE PNW isn’t just the most unemployed part of the nation, it’s now also the hungriest.

…the real start of autumn in the GreatNW. Before long, there’ll be as little as eight and a half hours of daylight—and even when there is daylight, there won’t be much of it.

I luuvv what other folks think of as Seasonal Affective Disorder season. The air is crisp. The light is diffuse. An overriding blanket of gray hovers over everything like a half-comforting, half-smothering blanket. It’s the closest you can come in the Lower 48 to Alaska’s wintertime “midday moon.”

It’s time to break out the sweaters, scarves, boots, and long coats.

Time to spend long nights and short mornings cuddling for warmth, or to spend short afternoons and long evenings in cozy gathering places in search of a co-cuddler.

Time for cocoa, mochas, hot buttered rums, and red wine.

Time for thick oatmeal, toasted foccacia sandwiches, stew, chili, lasagne, teriyaki bowls, and roasted veggies.

Time for bright interior colors and dimmer switches turned up to 11.

Time for video-viewing marathons, group dinners, and house parties.

Time for basketball, ice skating, bowling, skiing, and pool. Time for home beer-brewing, bookshelf-building, book-writing, and political organizing.

Time to reconnect with what makes each of us truly human.

…our online of top Northwest power pop past and present, has been assigned a new URL by our server provider. This means those of you who’ve bookmarked it in WinAmp, iTunes, or other MP3-playing software will need to paste in the new address, http://www.live365.com/play/73998.

I’D BEEN TRYING FOR SOME TIME to write a fictional character who would be the perfect embodiment of the mythical “Northwest Lifestyle” as anointed by the local media and advertisers.

You know, the people portrayed by models in Nordstrom catalogs and condominium brochures. All grinning with a freshed-faced, fetishistic blandness. Always of child-bearing adult age, but seldom seen in the presence of children. Always white (or at least pretending to be).

A lover (but not too ardently) of mellow music, fancy restaurants, fine wines, outdoor recreation, winter vacations in Hawaii, upscale shopping, coffee jokes, gardening, and vaguely “outdoorsy” but still office-acceptable fashions.

A possessor of wealth, but never excessively ostentatious about displaying it.

A figure almost totally devoid of ethnicity, ideology, religious belief, strong emotins, or personality.

I couldn’t get inside this character’s soul; just what someone like that would think or feel. Then it hit me: This character isn’t the epitome of Northwest Lifestyle nothingness; she’s simply trying extremely hard to live up to the ideal. She’s trying to be someone she’s not, as a way to hide what she hates and/or fears about her real self.

Then it hit me: Perhaps the “Northwest Lifestyle” personality doesn’t really exist, at least as promoted.

I felt SUCH a sense of relief at the thought!

Maybe nobody really is as plain, soulless, appearance-perfect, and self-satisfied as the images. And if any real-life people (as opposed to models’ assigned personas) appear to fit the “Lifestyle,” they could themselves be faking it out of fear, dread, peer pressure, or some combo of the above.

So my challenge to you is: If you, or anyone you know, really does live the featureless, passionless “happiness” that is the Northwest Lifestyle, let me know. Bonus prizes will be yours if you’re willing to share your Lifestyle with our readers, and if you can explain, in detail, why you think the above rant is full of Zoo Doo.

NEXT: Turning this little business into a mighty media empire.

ELSEWHERE:

• Abandoned images left behind in America’s photo booths….
• “What’s Your Pokename?”…

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.

A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.

A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.

As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.

Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.

(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)

So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.

The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.

Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.

A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.

(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)

But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.

The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.

TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?

ELSEWHERE:

• A tribute to the roadside art of Chicago….

TODAY WE DISCUSS two of the topics we’ve been obsessing with of late: “deviant” Northwest fiction and the now-allegedly-fabulous 1980s.

The editors of the recent anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions claimed they were doing something wildly outre by compiling tales based on strong plots, well-defined characters, and urban settings; instead of adhering to a nature-travelogue vision of “Northwest writing” emphasizing birds and sunsets and massively de-emphasizing humans. (What the Northwest Edge folks really did, natch, was to reassert some universal rules of good storytelling, in the guise of breaking other, less workable or appropriate, rules.)

The ’80s nostalgia fetish, meanwhile, speaks to more than just the longing to recapture one’s younger days. At least around here, it recalls a time when everything wasn’t about making money and feeling pressured to make even more. A time when the dominant local paradigm wasn’t wealth but mellowness; when all you had to do to be a paradigm-subverter was to assert your right to a passionate life of any kind.

Which brings us to The Cornelius Arms, a trade-paperback suite of fifteen interconnected stories by ex-local guy Peter Donahue (now teaching lit in the Carolinas) and put out by still-local dude Von G. Binuia’s Missing Spoke Press.

Set at some indeterminate point between 1983 and 1990, Donahue’s tales revolve around the denizens of a decaying Belltown apartment building. The building’s obviously based on the real Cornelius Apartments at 3rd and Blanchard, a place I’d frequently visited at the time. (It’s still standing, now providing student housing for the Art Institute of Seattle.) Donahue’s descriptions of the building (a once-stoic place, reduced to near-unlivability by a spendthrift slumlord) are accurate, as is the running plotline of tenant activism against the slumlord.

The stories are dotted with other (mostly now-gone) real places (the Tugs gay disco, the Unique Cafe, a renamed version of the Magazine City store, and the still-extant Virginia Inn). A couple of real-life Seattleites also get cameo appearances (housing activist John Foxx, the late Virginia Inn bartender Homer Spence).

Donahue’s resident characters are well-written and well-defined. They comprise a fine cross-section of Belltown life in the pre-dot-com days. There are retired pensioners, druggies, a young recovering alcoholic, a gay party dude who’s already lost one lover to AIDS, a Korean immigrant, some racist skinheads, a female young executive with a confusing sex life, a former WWII refugee, some lonely middle-aged men, a Native American woman struggling to better her condition in life, a young man at the crossroads of his life, and an old man who’s proclaimed himself President of the World.

All are treated as sympathetically and as humanly as possible (even the skinheads, whose philosophy of violence is eventually revealed as just a sad attempt by these lost boys to forge a substitute family).

By the book’s end, the Cornelius Arms building has fallen into the hands of redevelopers, who’ve rebuilt it with gaudier fixtures and tinier, costlier apartment units. The residents have scattered.

It’s not the loss of a “community” that the reader may mourn; most of the residents never really met one another except at tenant-activist meetings.

It’s the loss of a place, a shadow-space of sorts where society’s marginalized (by choice or by force or by a combo of the two) might live in squalor, but at least can live in relative peace and with relative dignity.

TOMORROW: Why I’ve never been to Burning Man.

ELSEWHERE:

• Learning to appreciate the roadside attractions of Canada! (found by Arts Journal)….

NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)

I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.

The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.

Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).

In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–

• Artistic and literary figures (Lynda Barry, Jacob Lawrence, cartoonist John Callahan, essayist Stewart Holbrook, whodunit-ist J.A. Jance).
• Business and political leaders (the Nordstroms, software moguls, progressive populists, big-business Democrats, Wobblies, and John (Reds) Reed).
• Food and drink favorites (Rainier and Oly beers, the Galloping and Frugal Gourmets, Dick’s Drive-Ins, Fisher Scones).
• Media (J.P. Patches, Wunda Wunda, some of the CBC’s blandest Vancouver-based dramas, The X-Files, Northern Exposure, Keith Jackson, Ahmad Rashad).
• Music (The old Seattle jazz underground, the Wailers/Sonics garage bands, and a certain latter-day music explosion or three).
• Attractions, Places, and Events (the 24-Hour Church of Elvis, the Java Jive, the Kalakala, Ivan the gorilla, Ramtha).
• Sports and Recreation (all the big pro and college teams, a few long-gone outfits like our North American Soccer League teams, legendary (Rosalynn Sumners) and infamous (Tonya Harding) stars).

…and lots, lots more.

The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:

• You get Nordstrom and the late Frederick & Nelson, but not the Bon Marche.
• You get Ivar’s and Brown & Haley (“Makes ‘Em Daily”), but not the great roadside attraction that was Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere, WA.
• You get Vancouver music greats DOA and 54-40, but not Skinny Puppy or even k.d. lang. (Its Seattle music listings are equally uncomprehensive, but there are other places you can go to read about that.)
• Portland comic-book publisher Dark Horse gets a listing, but Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books (and the locally-based portion of its stable of artists) isn’t.

But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.

TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….

IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!

ELSEWHERE:

• Can the nearly all-female-written-and-edited, yet still feminist-vilified, romance novel industry return to its formerly winning ways?…
• Analyzing the great comic-book implosion (found by Arts Journal)….

BACK IN THE ’80S, I used to complain about what passed for “regional” literature here in the PacNW, as officially defined by a certain clique. Quaint little nature poems depicting still-life scenes devoid of human presence; humorless prose about rugged living-off-the-land types.

Back in the ’90s, I noted the apparent passing of nature-lit, and also recounted some of the diverse writings that have come from here that weren’t like that.

Now, a few of these other strains have finally gotten their recognition as a “genre” of sorts, thanks to the new trade-paperback anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions, edited by Lidia Yuknavitch and L. N. Pearson and published under their Portland-based Two Girls imprint.

It’s a fast-paced, well-rounded revue of stories and experimental prose-works, with a few photo-narrative pieces (mostly by Richard Kract and L.N. Pearson) mixed in for relief.

Among the highlights:

• Chuck (FIght Club) Palahniuk’s “Survivor,” in which a clueless rich couple is totally dependent upon their impoverished house servant to instruct them in proper deportment at bigtime dinner parties.
• Paula Coomer’s “Almost Plum,” a light and sincere love triangle among drag-queen cowgirls in Spokane.
• Steven Shaviro’s three terse essays on UFO abductions, transsexual-vampire fiction, and Italian horror movies.
• Allison Owens’s “Waiting,” a brisk little tale abruptly juxtaposing tragedy and childhood “innocence.”
• Lance Olsen’s “Strategies in the Overexposure of a Well-Lit Space,” a surrealistic nightmare of complete TV immersion gone utterly weird.
• Our pal Doug Nufer’s “Restraining Order,” a cleverly laid-out dark-comic vignette about your basic Co-Worker from Heck.
• Meagan Atiyeh’s “What It Lacks,” a disciplined, taut short-short of exquisitely-described loneliness (“Raising a glass of water for a pill the maid had brought, she is aware of her own restlessness, a vague and cloudy nature full of sediment, full of doubt, full of phrases and notes to be made in pocketbooks”).

Virtually none of the pieces revel in the old nature-poet Northwest of herons and seals and sunsets on the beach. And some of them simply reflect a global bohemian zeitgeist.

But the best of them depict a Northwest state of mind. It’s a hard thing to encapsulate, but it comprises hefty doses of droll skepticism, dry humor, and a BS detector set to eleven.

MONDAY: Political conventions–I say let’s keep ’em.

ELSEWHERE:

• Acclaimed-in-some-circles author Douglas Coupland wonders what would happen if “breakfast-cereal mascots ran for public office (found by Metascene)….

ST. PETER TO GENE RAYBURN: “If I’d known you were coming I’d have prepared your (blank).”

YESTERDAY, we reported about Kentucky developers’ plans to build a 100-acre “Great Northwest” theme park south of Tacoma. They claim it will “highlight the ‘rugged outdoors’ elements of the Northwest, as well as its history.”

Today, we continue our imagined trek through what we think an NW-themed tourist attraction ought to be.

Having already witnessed Seasonal-affective-disorderland, Clearcutland, and Sprawlland, you move on (very, very slowly) in your SUV-replica tram car on the Ex-Country Road Traffic Jam Ride, on your way to your next destination–

• Gatesland. After the long Traffic Jam Ride, the kids will rush for the chance to stretch their legs and run through the Office Cubicle Maze.

  The grownups, meanwhile, will be corralled into a cavernous meeting room to hear the Animatronic Bill robot (surrounded, as always, by a dozen animatronic yes-men) either (1) praise his legacy of innovation, or (2) map strategies for “embracing” other companies’ ideas and running said companies out of business.

  A short corridor leads into the next meeting room, also known as–

• Processland. You’re now watching a two-part dramatized farce. A panel of animatronic city bureaucrats sit with the stoicism of London palace guards while animatronic activists rant on and on (via electronically speeded-up voices) about assorted social ills. Suddenly, two human actors (playing the only characters in the piece the producers choose to depict as human) rush on stage, demanding hefty municipal subsidies for a new upscale-caviar store. At once, the bureaucrat robots spring to “life,” shuffle some papers, and promptly approve the proposal on a voice vote.

  The victorious upscale couple invites everyone in the audience to come celebrate this important victory for the city’s future, and leads everyone off toward–

• Condoland. Nosh at the Gourmet Hummus Snack Bar. Partake of the finest no-host beverages. Eavesdrop on upscale costume characters chattering about what a crime it is for government to dare interfere with business, and why citizens who don’t support caviar-store subsidies are lacking the will to greatness.

  In the corner of your eye, you spot a pair of nose-ringed beverage servers walking down a hidden passageway. You follow them down what seem like 10 flights’ worth of stairs to–

• Boholand. You can see the faint remnants of a painted-over “Grungeland” sign at the entrance; next to the sign announcing the area’s new name.

  You can also see people you’ve run into earlier today. Previously, they were ride operators, tour ushers, and snack-counter servers. Now, they’re dressed in art smocks, Beatnik-chick black sweaters, ballet tights, leather G-strings, BSA-logo biker jackets, or drag gowns. They invite you to share their Triscuit-based hors d’oeuvres and wine-in-a-box, while they explain to you how everything in Boholand used to completely suck, but now it all completely sucks in totally different ways.

  As your eyes adjust to the dim lights, you can see signs posted around the black-painted room. The signs announce that various corners have been condemned for an expanded Condoland. Eventually, you also see a sign that promises “Only Way Out.” It turns out to be a short cut back to Seasonal-affective-disorderland.

  It’s not that you can’t leave the park, but that you’re not supposed to ever want to.

TOMORROW: Imagining life after Microsoft.

ELSEWHERE:

• This story gets it a bit wrong. The culture-monopoly issue isn’t really the U.S. vs. the rest of the world, it’s Hollywood and Madison Avenue vs. the rest of the world, including the rest of the U.S….
• “The more you play with them, the more they learn.” (found by Grouse)….

JUST A FEW MORE WTO COMMENTS:

• The city has returned to “normal.” That means, instead of the eerie yet somehow empowering sense of calm that pervaded over downtown during the two days after the Wednesday night cop riot, there was the more familiar, more materialistic chaos of Xmas shoppers looking at and getting stuff. In a way, mighty disappointing; in another way, to be expected, now that both the out-of-town protesters and the out-of-town WTO delegates they were protesting against are gone.
• Could the multinational, multi-cause coalition we saw in Seattle last? It actually could, I think. I saw a sticker on a male protester’s jacket: “Owls Don’t Kill Jobs. Greed Kills Both.” Loggers and mill workers aren’t really helped by accellerated clearcutting of forests; it just means their jobs and communities are destroyed a little later, a lot more permanently.
• Was it just a few weeks ago when I wrote that the end-O-history, total-rule-by-global-business guys were on an apparently unstoppable roll? After WTO, that seems at least a little less likely.
• I know at least one person who quit working for Microsoft three days into the protests. She says after a taste of real empowerment, she couldn’t stand the ruthlessly pro-corporate attitudes anymore.
• It felt great (at least as one who wasn’t gassed or arrested) to have participated in such a big, seemingly-triumphant gatherings.

  But, as I’ve always said, feeling good about yourself isn’t enough.

  My past complaints about the Lifestyle Left were only partly about the subcultural isolationism and delusions-O-superiority endemic among too many hempheads, vegans, het-male-bashers, Earth-Firsters, Animal-Liberationists, etc. etc. They were also about the hippie-derived notion that “being political” has to be fun or thrilling or self-aggrandizing.

  Real political work, like most any real work, is mostly grind-work, and often is (or at the time seems to be) unsuccessful. Not only can’t hedonism change the world; but any zeitgeist centered around personal pleasure is all too easily taken over by corporate hipsters.

• I’m still adding items to a long list-O-WTO-links.

NOW, OUR PROMISED TOPIC FOR TODAY:

A couple weeks ago, bigshot developers from Kentucky announced plans to raze 100 acres south of Tacoma (near Fort Lewis and McChord AFB), where some low-income housing, a trailer park, and a middle school now stand.

In place of all that, they want to put up a “Great Northwest” theme park.

Early accounts said the “proposed family-oriented park would include thrill rides. It would aim to highlight the ‘rugged outdoors’ elements of the Northwest, as well as its history.”

It’s a satirical opportunity just too damn good to pass up. And since Almost Live ain’t around to handle it, I’m gonna have to.

Here’s what I believe any truly authentic NW-themed tourist attraction oughta have:

• Seasonal-affective-disorderland. Start your visit here at “The Depressingest Place On Earth,” where a special overhead dome keeps the “sky” unrelentingly grey and dim for a few midday moments; completely dark all the rest of the time. Soothe your quiet desperation at such merchants and attractions as the Jolt Cola soda fountain, the tanning-bed thrill ride, the Magic Prozac Dispenser, the Imgmar Bergman screening room, and the Cry-In-Your-Beer Garden.

  The fog machines shut off just long enough to reveal the desolate landscape of your next stop–

• Clearcutland. Panoramic murals enhance the experience of being entirely surrounded by stumps and blown-away topsoil. Take the Abandoned Sawmill Ride, but keep your arms inside the tram car–especially when turning past Circular Saw Corner. See the hourly fights in the Lonesome Pine Tavern (the sign above the bar reads: “It’s called the Lonesome Pine because it’s not poplar”), as the hippie backpackers blame the unemployed loggers for having killed 90 percent of the forest and the loggers blame the hippies for not letting them finish the job.

  But see it all soon; each week, 50 square feet of Clearcutland is given over to the expansion of–

• Sprawlland. Enter the showplace of material excess that is the Cabin Castle–a giant, meandering compound all done-up in “rustic” tones and overlooking the last remaining forested area of Clearcutland.

  Step lively during the walking tour; while the castle’s perky mistress (looking sharp in her Coldwater Creek apres-ski outfit) demonstrates each of its amazing luxury features (the indoor hot-spring surrounded by holographic rain-forest images; the sauna rebuilt from an authentic native sweat lodge; the bedposts made from real Inuit totem poles)–all while lecturing you about the importance of Simple Living.

TOMORROW: The park tour continues at, naturally, Gatesland.

(Suggest your own surefire tourist-attractors at our gregarious MISCtalk discussion boards.)

ELSEWHERE:

• French writer Georges Perec could write entire books without the letter “E;” nowadays, folks in the Net biz can’t seem to write a single word that doesn’t start with it. (Found by Memepool)….

MOST EVERYBODY LOVES ODD STUFF. Strange events. The unknown. The wacky, the wild, the bizarre.

Even stiff-upper-lip Brits.

Especially those Brits who read and write for the quarter-century-old journal The Fortean Times (named for pioneer odd-stuff researcher Charles Fort, and now published by the same folks behind the bad-bloke magazine Bizarre and the bad-boy satirical comic Viz).

One of the mag’s chief researchers,Mike Dash, has now come out with Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Surrounding Unknown. It’s been out in the U.K. for a few months now; the U.S. edition might be available this week or within a few weeks.

The book’s a long, leisurely intro to all sorts of odd and quasi-supernatural stuff around the world, past and present. Think of it as a quaint stroll through just about everything that seems to happen or to have happened, and which can’t be firmly, rationally explained.

What you get: UFO sightings and alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Yetis. Ghosts and poltergeists. Crop circles. Miraculous relics, stigmata, and Mary sightings. Stonehenge and mystery spots. Ley lines and energy centers. Dear-death and out-of-body experiences. Seances and spirit guides. Mediums and ESP. The face of Jesus in tacos and Arabic script in vegetables. Fairies, gnomes, goblins, and wildmen. British authors who claimed to really be Tibetan wise men. Carlos Castaneda and Uri Geller. Time travelers and clairvoyants.

And of particular interest to our local readers: Bigfoot! The famous 1947 “Flying Saucer” sighting near Mt. Rainier! The Olympia “Satanic cult” scare, eventually blamed on false-memory syndrome. Ogopogo, British Columbia’s own mythical lake monster. Reports of a similar beast in our own Lake Washington in 1987, found to really be an 11-foot sturgeon. The mirage-like “Silent City” visions in Alaska.

But plenty of books, movies (documentary, fictional, and in between), zines, comix, and TV specials and series have explored some or all of these topics. What sets Borderlands apart is Dash’s personable-yet-levelheaded tone (he’s a Cambridge Ph.D.) and his attitude of informed, open-minded skepticism. He’s ready to call a fraud a fraud (Castaneda). He’s all for scientific and material evidence behind strange occurrances, when and where such evidence might be found. And he’s open to both rational and supernatural explanations for this stuff.

But, ultimately, the phenomena he chooses to include in this book are phenomena which remain unsolved, unproven, unconfirmed. Something that has become known and proven, such as hypnosis, is something that’s now within the rational realm. The “borders” of knowledge referred to in the title keep moving back, but the borders’ length, and the size of the area beyond them, may remain as large as ever.

TOMORROW: Celebrating one year exclusively online.

ELSEWHERE:

• The most hi-larious Y2K scaremongering spoof site yet….
• How to create your very own surrealist poems….
• These fairy tales are a little more than “fractured”….
• Making fun of English-as-a-Second-Language writing, one of the old-reliable laff-riot premises (found by Dandot )….

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)

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.”