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Here’s one way to get a large audience for a literary reading. Invite so many readers that they, and their individual dates and/or entourages, will fill the room by themselves.
That’s what happened at Town Hall last Saturday night with “60 Readers.”
The event’s organizers scheduled it to tie in with the Modern Language Association’s convention in town that week. But the reading was not officially connected with the MLA. This meant the general public could get in.
Town Hall’s 300-capacity lower room was nearly filled for the free event. Readers were limited to three minutes max. The whole thing came in on time, at just under three hours.
The readers picked included both locals and MLA attendees. They ranged from the wild and the experimental down to that squarest of all literary sub-genres ever created, ’70s style nature poetry.
They read in alphabetical order. They opened with Greg Bem, whose “piece” was a listing of all the readers’ names.
As it happened, most of my favorite bits came in hour three:
iloveyoubluesky.blogspot.com
…had an otherworldly timbral and expressive range with both guitar and voice, ranging from beautifully sweet to guttural monster-from-Hell.
The Modern Language Association, those ol’ guardians of the university English department as the supposed nexus of all thought and creativity in America, are meeting in town this week.
Besides the members-only conferences and seminars on surviving campus budget cuts and why doesn’t America appreciate the greatness of English profs, there are a couple of major peripheral events open to the general public.
On Saturday (1/7/12), Town Hall hosts mini-readings (three minutes max) by “60 Writers,” including “upstart, altertative” scribes. Some are local; some are in town for the conference. It’s free and starts at 7:30.
And Washington State University’s Creative Media and Digital Culture Program is organizing a display of “Electronic Literature.” Its curators describe the exhibit as featuring:
…over 160 works by artists who create literary works involving various forms and combinations of digital media, such as video, animation, sound, virtual environments, and multimedia installations, for desktop computers, mobile devices, and live performance.
The works in the exhibit were all “born digital.” That is, they were designed to be experienced as digital media spectacles, not merely adapted from straight-text products.
The exhibit is open Thurs.-Sat. (1/5-7/12) in the Wash. State Convention Center Room 609. There’s also a free tie-in reading event, 8 p.m. Friday (1/6/12) at Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave. on Capitol Hill.
(UPDATE: Even though the Electronic Literature exhibit’s web page says it’s free, it’s really only open to ticketed MLA convention goers. Locals can attend the Hugo House reading, however.)
It’s only appropriate that all this is happening this year in Seattle, ground zero for the big transition from dead-tree lit product to the brave new digi-future.
Be there or be pulp.
My full time (with overtime some weeks) contract position with Amazon.com is now ended. A gig that was originally set to have lasted 7.5 weeks instead got stretched to 13, so I’m more than grateful.
I was not stationed at the massive new Amazon campus at south Lake Union. Rather, I was in the company’s highly obscure back office in back of the Rainier Valley Lowe’s.
(For local old timers or baseball nerds, my desk was where the left field bleachers had been at the old Sick’s Seattle Stadium, home of the old Rainiers and Pilots.)
I was in an office area previously occupied by Amazon’s accounts payable department, for which we occasionally got phone calls, to which we had no forwarding info.
The building also houses:
I got to eat lunch at the fine fast-food outlets of the Rainier Valley; as well as two local indie treasures, The Original Philly’s and Remo Borracchini’s bakery-deli.
I worked as part of a team that varied between 12 and 32 people; at least two-thirds female. Some were otherwise stay-home moms. Some were recent college grads. Some were middle-age cranks like myself. All were damn smart and able to think their way through sometimes obtuse situations.
•
What we did all this time is a bit harder to explain.
On the Wednesday of our first week at the task, Amazon announced a line of new Kindle e-book machines.
At the same time, it announced a new, exclusive feature in its e-book files, “Xray.”
Reviewers have called Xray “an index on steroids.” It’s a hyperlinked list of a book’s references to people (real and fictional), places, ideas, topics, etc. It gives Amazon something other sellers of the same e-book titles don’t have.
The company’s crack coders created a software algorithm to generate the Xray files. But it had trouble parsing the infinite possibilities of what is and isn’t a person’s name (it regularly believed “Jesus H. Christ” and “Jack Daniel’s” to be characters in a story), and what is and isn’t a relevant phrase (publishers’ addresses don’t really belong in an index).
So every Xray file needed human tweaking.
That’s what we did, on the “Xray Quality Assurance Team.”
We used specially-programmed data tools to delete and add names and phrases in the Xray files. (To explain the process any further would risk violating my non-disclosure agreement.)
Our goal was to have 6,500 titles ready by the time the new Kindle models came out or shortly thereafter. By this past midweek, we’d exceeded 8,000. I worked, in whole or in part, on almost 1,500 of those.
Since “books” are a widely diverse lot, each Xray editing job was different.
Some titles (self-help guides or tech instructionals) contained lots of phrases but few to no names. Others (short stories sold as stand-alone products) had names but no significant phrases.
Some had compact casts of characters and limited place names. Others, such as epic historical tomes, contained literal “casts of thousands.”
The absolute toughest e-books to figure out were the umpteen-volume fantasy sagas, such as The Wheel of Time and the Game of Thrones sequels. They’ve got hundreds of made-up people names, plus hundreds of equally made-up names for places, tribes, deities, swords, etc.
But no matter how tricky any particular job was, our goal was accuracy above speed.
We picked the titles to work on from a database of Amazon’s most popular e-books, both “paid” and “free.” The latter include sample chapters of forthcoming books as well as public-domain classics. (I helped edit the Xray for The Idiot, and sure felt like one afterwards.)
I’ve long ranted in this space and elsewhere that, despite four decades’ worth of pseudo-intellectual hype about “The Death of The Book,” the written word remains a vital medium, commercially as well as in other aspects.
My thirteen weeks with Xray helped to confirm this belief.
The job also gave me an insight into what’s selling in the e-book sphere.
You’ve got all your regular NY Times and USA Today bestsellers, present and past.
You’ve got your expected genre items:
And there’s one genre that I, and the rest of the Xray Quality team, were surprised to find so prevalent among the top selling e-books.
Sometimes, it’s euphemistically billed as “erotic romance.”
What is is, is women’s smut.
You might already know that your regular formula romance novels, the Harlequins and the Silhouettes and such, include explicit sex scenes these days. (Only “Christian” romances don’t.)
But lately—and specifically in the e-book realm, where no one else can see what you’re reading—stories primarily or totally about sex, written for and by women (or at least under women’s pseudonyms), have become a major cottage industry.
I’d say they made up a good 5 percent of the database of Kindle bestsellers, at least.
They range in length from full size novels to short-short stories.
Some are self-published. Others come under the logos of established romance imprints, or their subsidiary lines. Still others are issued by professional, e-book-only companies. The latter have authors’ guidelines as strictly detailed as those of print romance publishers.
And formulaic they are.
For one thing, the traditional romance happy ending is a must. No matter how wild the sexual adventures, the heroines have to end up in committed relationships by the end.
The prose styling is also strictly regulated. No Anias Nin poetic flourishes; just simple declarative sentences and an established vocabulary of descriptions. Breasts are never fondled or groped but always “cupped.”
The plots are equally formulaic.
Several of them star mousy, modern-day women who travel back in time and into the arms of shirtless Scottish Highlanders.
In other formula plots, the male lust objects are equally studly—young corporate tycoons, Navy SEALs, cowboys, police detectives, firefighters, zombie hunters.
Or they’re vampires. Or shape-shifters of assorted types. There are werewolves, were-leopards, were-foxes, were-rats, and were-ravens.
And, quite often, the heroine has simultaneous sex with two, three, or four men. Sometimes these men are brothers. Other times they have sex with one another as well as with the heroine. But they always end up in permanent polyandrous households.
The self-published smut stories often have more traditionally “smutty” formulae. Amazon won’t deal in sex stories involving underage characters or blood relatives (except for the aforementioned groups of brothers sharing the same woman). But there are plenty of just-over-18 tarts seducing stepdads and stepbrothers.
E-books don’t really have covers, only promotional images on their respective Web pages. For many low-budget e-book-only smut titles, these images are amateurishly Photoshopped from licensed stock photos, or from unlicensed “found” online pictures. The effect is, of course, extra cheesy goodness!
An anonymous member of our team (not me, I swear) collected some of these images, along with blurbs and excerpts from the cheesiest of these smut stories, and put them on a blog called Wet & Wilde.
This, my friends, is what massive technological investments by companies here and overseas have led up to.
And even if most of it doesn’t arouse me, I’m glad it’s out there.
This weekend, three major figures from world affairs left us.
If you tried to access this site on Tuesday, you would have found an ugly, undesigned mess.
That’s because my site (and email) server company disconnected me for nonpayment, without previously bothering to tell me in any way, shape, or form that a payment was due.
The texts on the site remained up, but the WordPress-based formatting and most of the images were locked away. It took about three hours to get everything back and properly configured again.
In other news, my current contract job might finally end Friday. More regular postings should follow.
But for now, a few random linx:
I’m still on the highly time-consuming contract job I’ve been at for a while. This Monday starts week 11 of what was to have been a 7.5-week gig. But it looks like it’s finally on the closing stretch. I’ll have a full report when it’s done.
Meanwhile, I’ve continued to collect wacky n’ weird links fer y’all. They include the following:
a teenage pugmire as 'count pugsley'
Before he gained national cult fame as “the world’s greatest living Lovecraftian writer,” Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire already had several other claims to fame.
He’d played the costumed mad scientist “Count Pugsly” at the Jones Fantastic Museum in Seattle Center.
He’d published Punk Lust, a literate and intimately personal zine chronicling his life as a queer Mormon, doing restaurant work to support his obsessions with punk rock, horror fiction, and Barbra Streisand.
He’d been a constant figure on the local music scene, sometimes appearing at events in goth-white face paint with ruby red lipstick.
Finally, in recent years Pugmire’s horror fiction has risen in stature, from a few short stories in scattered anthologies to full-length, limited edition books.
He hasn’t been very visible lately. He was stuck at home, taking care of a dying mother.
Now he’s the patient. He’s reportedly now in a Seattle hospital, dealing with a worsening heart condition.
Several days ago he wrote a blog post announcing his retirement from writing. In it, he described his condition as follows:
I have been extremely ill for over a month, and it doesn’t seem like I’m gonna get better any time soon. Tonight has been one of the worst nights. I think my ailments are a combination of heart disease and lingering bronchitis. One of my ailments is coranary arterial spasms, which happens usually when I recline in bed and try to sleep–they jerk my body and produce a little yelp, making sleep impossible so that I am a zombie moft of ye time.
I know no more about Pugmire’s condition at this time. Will Hart, at the horror blog CthuluWho1, is keeping track.
gadgetsin.com
As power in the book biz moves increasingly from Manhattan to here, the Manhattan news media treat it as a crisis, or at least as a matter of controversy.
Hence, the Sunday NY Times op-ed package posing the musical question, “Will Amazon Kill Off Book Publishers?”
What rot.
Worse, it’s predictable rot.
I’ve ranted on and on here, since years before the e-book became a marketable commodity, about the traditional book industry’s stodginess, parochialism, and criminal inefficiency.
I’ve also ranted about the particular cultural conservatism (bordering on the reactionary) that’s long held sway within the big-L Literary subculture. (That scene is not the same thing as the book industry, even though it thinks it ought to be).
Current example: Dennis Johnson (a respected publisher of, and advocate for, big-L Literary product), claiming in the NYT debate-in-print that
…publishing isn’t, right now, and hasn’t been, for 500 years, about developing [sales] algorithms. It’s been about art-making and culture-making and speaking truth to power.
The corner of publishing Johnson occupies might be about art n’ culture making.
But the whole of publishing is, and always has been, about the bottom line.
And in societies such as this one where there’s no royal family or state church to prop up (and censor) publishing, that bottom line means sales.
And, I will argue, that’s mostly been a good thing.
Not in spite of the ephemeral commercial dross that’s been the bulk of most commercial publishers’ product, but because of it.
The romances. The mysteries. The space operas. The treacle-y 19th century “ladies’ stories.” The pulp adventures. The lurid ’60s paperbacks. The advice and how-to guides. The travelogues. The comics. The fads. The tracts (spiritual, political, dietary). The bodice-rippers. The porn. The celebrity memoirs. And, yeah, today’s teen vampires and werewolves. They’re all where the passions of their particular times and places are preserved.
But Johnson wants to know how big-L Literary work will fare in the brave new e-world.
I say it will thrive as never before.
For the e-book business model is not, as Johnson fears, a recipe for monopoly.
It’s about less consolidation, not more.
There are three major e-book sales sites, and hundreds of minor ones.
Anybody can sell just about anything in e-book form on their own, or via one of these sites.
And they are.
Cottage industries are springing up to provide editing and design services for e-book self publishers.
And new small presses are forming to more fully curate “quality” ebooks, and to more effectively promote them.
Big-L Literature was, at best, a prestige sideline for the old-line major publishers. Smaller specialty presses, like Johnson’s, had to play by the big presses’ business rules (including devastating return policies with bookstores); rules that made Johnson’s kind of books hellishly difficult to put out at even a break-even level.
That good, and sometimes great, books of highbrow or artistic fiction came out of that business model, and came out regularly, is a testament to the perseverance of impresarios such as Johnson, and to authors’ willingness to work for the equivalent of less than minimum wage.
The e-book business model doesn’t guarantee success.
But it gives specialty works, and their makers, a fighting chance.
Mark your calendars.
I’ve got another live book event on Thursday, Oct. 13, 7:30 p.m., at The Couth Buzzard Books and Espresso Buono Cafe, 8310 Greenwood Ave. N.
And there will be another new book by me debuting at this event.
More details shortly.
(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)
My book Walking Seattle, which I told you about here some months back, is finally out.
The big coming out party is Sunday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m., at the Elliott Bay Book Co. This event will include a 30-minute mini walk around the Pike-Pike neighborhood.
When I came up with the idea of a mini-walk, the store’s staff initially asked what the theme of my mini walk would be. Would it be about the gay scene, or the hipster bar scene, or the music scene, or classic apartment buildings, or houses of worship, or old buildings put to new uses?
The answer: Yes. It will be about all of the above. And more.
The reason: Part of what makes Capitol Hill so special (and such a great place to take a walk) is all the different subcultures that coexist here.
A tourist from the Northeast this summer told me he was initially confused to find so many different groups (racial, religious, and otherwise self-identified) in just about every neighborhood in this town.
Back where he came from, people who grew up in one district of a city (or even on one street) stayed there, out of loyalty and identity. But in Seattle you’ve got gays and artists and African immigrant families and Catholics and professors and cops and working stiffs and doctors all living all over the place. People and families go wherever they get the best real-estate deal at the time, no matter where it is.
On the Hill, this juxtaposition is only more magnified.
In terms of religion alone, Pike/Pine and its immediate surroundings feature Seattle’s premier Jewish congregation, its oldest traditionally African American congregation, the region’s top Catholic university, a “welcoming” (that means they like gays) Baptist church, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and a new age spiritual center. Former classic Methodist and Christian Science buildings are now repurposed to offices and condos respectively. And yet, in the eyes of many, the Hill is today better known for what happens on Saturday night than on Sunday morning.
A lot of Igor Keller’s Greater Seattle CD is a quaint look back at when this city’s neighborhoods could be easily typed, as they famously were on KING-TV’s old Almost Live!
Perhaps you might find a few more franchised vitamin sellers in Fremont, or a few more halal butchers near MLK and Othello.
But for the sheer variety of different groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups, there’s no place like this place anywhere near this place.
Though a lot of the time, these different “tribes” don’t live in harmony as much as in they silently tolerate one another’s presence.
To explain this, let’s look at another book.
British novelist China Mieville’s book The City and the City is a tale of two fictional eastern European city-states, “Bezsel” and “Ul Qoma.” These cities don’t merely border one another; they exist on the same real estate. The residents of each legally separate “city” are taught from birth to only interact with, or even recognize the existence of, the fellow citizens of their own “city.” If they, or ignorant tourists, try to cross over (even if it just means crossing a street), an efficient secret police force shows up and carts them away.
It’s easy to see that scenario as a metaphor for modern urban life in a lot of places, including the Hill. It’s not the oft talked about (and exaggerated) “Seattle freeze.” It’s people who consider themselves part of a “community” of shared interests more than a community of actual physical location.
The young immigrant learning a trade at Seattle Central Community College may feel little or no rapport with the aging rocker hanging out at a Pike/Pine bar. The high-tech commuter having a late dinner at a fashionable bistro may never talk to the single mom trying to hold on to her unit in an old apartment building.
Heck, even the gay men and the lesbians often live worlds apart.
It’s great to have all these different communities within the geographical community of the Hill.
But it would be greater to bring more of them together once in a while, to help form a tighter sense of us all belonging and working toward common goals.
Here’s something I haven’t seen in a while. A new print zine. Eight photocopied pages, issued at an attempted regular frequency.
Even the content within it parties like it’s 1999.
It’s called Tides of Flame: a Seattle anarchist paper. Four issues have been produced so far.
Its slogan is “joy — freedom — rebellion.”
The joy promoted here is principally the joy of busting stuff up and calling it a political act. Yep, we’re back with the flashiest (and, to me, the least important) aspect of the ol’ WTO protest, the dudes who confused destructive hedonism with revolution.
Particularly in the first issue, which starts out with a photo of a shattered and tagged window at the Broadway American Apparel store. This occurred as part of a “direct action” episode earlier this summer during gay pride week. The zine describes it as “an unpermitted dance party” staged by “uncontrollable elements within the queer and anarchist circles.”
Why did they hate American Apparel, which puts gay rights slogans in its ads? Because the company’s been “endorsing the legalization and normalization of queers…. Clearly, the attackers had no intention of being either legal or normal that night.”
The first issue also contains a well-composed ode to the contradictions of urban “alt” culture. (Even if the essay starts by referring to “the useless phallus of the Space Needle.” Anyone who looked at its curves and angles can see it’s a feminine symbol!)
Other issues defend the prolific grafitti artist Zeb and promote “fare dodging” (riding buses but refusing to pay).
But mostly they’re against things. Cops. Prisons. Bureaucrats. Banks and the economic elite (an admittedly easy target). Urban gentrification. “Cutesy street art.” Wide swaths of modern society in general.
As with most U.S. “radical” movements built on the wild-oat-sowing of young white people, the Tides of Flame zine and its makers give emphatic simple answers to questions about the outside world, but raise unaddressed questions about their own program.
Can they reach out to make coalitions beyond their own subcultural “tribe”?
Have they got any ideas for building a better world, beyond just smashing this one?
At least there’s a sign the zine’s makers are asking some of these questions among themselves.
That sign is the zine’s regular “Forgotten History” section, recounting past radical actions in the city and region, including the Seattle General Strike of 1919.
(There’s more of this recovered history at the site Radical Seattle Remembers.)
…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.
