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

Here’s a sample lesson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Disneyland’s Tomorrowland-of-yesterday for The Atlantic and asks whatever happened to the human imagination.

That’s close to something I’ve been asking for a long time: Whatever happened to the future?

The two are highly intertwined, as O’Rourke’s essay implies. Without a working imagination, an individual or a society can’t foresee a compelling vision of tomorrow, let alone implement it.

This situation goes far beyond mere theme-park attractions, beyond the unending post-apocalyptic cliches in novels and movies.

You could see this utopia-deficiency among those liberals and radicals who spent the 27 years prior to this past year conveniently moping that everything was going to hell and nothing could really be done about it so why bother.

You could see it among those conservatives and business hustlers who spent the same years propagating a social zeitgeist of I-got-mine-screw-you.

And it ties in with a current project of mine.

I’m in the process of writing a futuristic story, in the form of a graphic-novel script. It’s a simple story, but it’s set in a complex world. Its setting is a future America that’s neither utopia nor dystopia, in which machines have progressed and the environment’s been “saved” and many other things have happened, but in which individual humans are just as fallible and their social structures just as imperfect as ever (albeit “different” in many intriguing ways).

When I’ve told people about it, I’ve had to repeatedly explain to them that my particular story’s “back story” includes no apocalyptic event between our “now” and the characters’ “now.” No nuclear wars, no eco-catastrophes, no corporate-military coups, no alien invasions, no mass genetic mutations.

It’s as if we’d lost the very ability to imagine an Earth on which things just happen, at their own various paces, with various results, with which people learn to live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…a lot lately, letting interesting-sounding links take me any which where. While browsing the “Stores” page listings, I ran across something called “I Love ‘Boobs.'” Within the “Wall” (comments thread) was a lovely, loving ode to women’s self confidence. (Hint: It might have scrolled off of this particular page by the time you click on it. Keep going back through the thread.)

I like the idea that a woman telling other women how smart, daring, and beautiful they are can coexist, with seemingly no contradiction whatsoever, in an online discussion dedicated to the most superficial expression of admiration toward the female physique.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

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

…refer y’all to any Wall St. Journal opinion essays. But here’s one I like. It’s all about a serious modern poet’s love for Warner Bros. Cartoons. Really.

Greta Christina intelligently discusses a topic about which I’ve occasionally and incoherently ranted—non-thinking and anti-thinking in “alternative” culture.

Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.

“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.

I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.

Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.

Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.

Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.

Some British gent claims “Shakespeare’s Plays Were Written by a Jewish Woman.” I’ll leave it to you to imagine Hamlet’s soliloquy recited by Fran Drescher, or Juliet’s balcony speech emoted by Sarah Silverman.

…is peripherally involved in the latest fabricated memoir scandal.

That’s Marie Phillips, author of the novel Gods Behaving Badly, when she writes about wanting to be “a pop novelist”: “Maybe I can be like Ray Davies or Peter Blake. They’re no lesser because they aren’t Mozart or Michelangelo. They are doing something else.”

…in I don’t know how long, my work is the subject of serious criticism. My erstwhile Stranger colleague Charles Mudede has written a nuanced, lucid review of Seattle’s Belltown.

Essentially, Mudede seems to like the book for what it is, but wishes it had more. That, I’ve learned, is a common response to Arcadia Publishing’s slim photo-history tomes. Arcadia’s formula of many pictures and few words has proven very commercially successful, here and around the country. But many aspects of any place’s story will necessarily get left out by this broad-strokes approach. Some readers would like more oral-history material. Some would like more human-interest anecdotes. Some would like longer passages about specific people and places of interest to them.

Mudede specifically wishes Seattle’s Belltown included more emotional, human history. He’d have liked more of “a sense of horror or sadness or wonder at the great and rapid sequence of events that shaped Belltown.”

And he’d like the book to have a stronger sense of advocacy. After all, he notes, the neighborhood’s an “explosive battleground of competing land use and architectural ideas, of private and cultural capital, and a variety of class issues. Even in a book as small as this, one wants the writer to take a stronger position on these pressing matters, presenting not only conclusions but also solutions.”

These are all good things to yearn for, and not just in books.

It’s a level of discourse beyond Arcadia’s format. (They are trying to move units through Costco and Walgreen’s.)

But it’s certainly something I can work harder at in my other forums, including the Belltown Messenger and this site.

Have I got answers to the ongoing disappearance of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, artist spaces, and the Crocodile? No, at least not any good ones, at least not tonight.

But let’s keep talking about it.

…in today’s SeaTimes for Dr. Vernon Skeels, who passed on last month at age 89. I’ve had the privilege of knowing Skeels and his family since 1982. He was one of the genuine ones, a gentle soul with a bright wit and a manner of quiet elegance. He’ll be missed.