• Clever entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have a line of T-shirts and posters exhorting what I and many of my fellow writers and artists have been shrieking lo these many years to cheapskate dot-com and media execs: FREELANCE AIN’T FREE!
• Good idea in the legislature #1: Looking into the abundance of “special taxing districts” around the state, with an eye toward paring them down.
• Good idea in the legislature #2: Getting rid of a Cold War-era ordinance that authorized state government to persecute, blackball, and ban “subversive” people and groups.
• Let’s all welcome the Houston Astros to the American League West (the Mariners’ division), not this year but next year. Except they might not be called the Astros by then.
• Shepherd Fairey, that “radical chic” Obama and Andre the Giant portraitist, didn’t just steal from AP wire photos. He’s regularly “borrowed” even entire images from sincerely political artists around the world, completely uncredited and uncompensated.
• SeattlePI.com is even more short-staffed than before, but it’s still got some good stuff. Like Vanessa Ho and Joe Dyer’s excellent feature on homeless people sleeping under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, who are being kicked out of there by the state. As Anatole France wrote back in 1894,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.

• All right, fans of glass buildings and obscure dangerous plants, you all have one year to figure out how to save the Volunteer Park Conservatory.
• Update: That 83 year old activist Tacoma priest, who was on a hunger strike while in federal detention? He’s still detained, but off the hunger strike.
• Another of those silly surveys claims Washington DC has surpassed Seattle as the nation’s “most literate” city.
• A Republican state legislator introduced a bill to scuttle any enforcement of the feds’ prescribed remedies concerning excessive force by Seattle police, and shunt the matter over to “a bipartisan taskforce.” Where, presumably, Republican politicians would hold veto power on any policy changes.
• In other legislative news, farmers and farm workers both back a bill to slow the local spread of “E-Verify,” the federal background-check program for immigrant workers.
• The new Businessweek’s cover story discusses Amazon’s latest move into publishing its own e-books—the opening of an NYC office intended to issue bigtime books by bigtime authors. The headline (“Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business”) and the cover image (yes, a burning book, straight outta Fahrenheit 451) depict the viewpoint of an NY publishing cartel both scared to pieces and smugly defensive of their old time business-as-usual, now threatened by this dot-com upstart. And just as you’d expect, the piece quotes the industry’s Big Six conglomerate-owned mega-publishers defending their wasteful, slow traditional practices by hyping their “role as nurturers of literary culture.” As if the commercial book biz had ever been about that.

Without any further ado, the big new product announcement promised here on Tuesday.

Actually, it’s an old product.

But a new way to buy and enjoy it!

It’s The Myrtle of Venus, my short, funny novel of “Sex, Art, and Real Estate.”

It’s now out in ultra handy e-book form, for the insanely low price of merely $2.99.

Yes, that link goes to the “Kindle Store.” But you don’t need a genuine Kindle machine to read it. They’ve got free apps for Macs, PCs, iPads, and lots of mobile platforms.

Why should all of this site’s loyal friends and true download it?

Because it’s alternately sexy, hilarious, and poignant.

Because it takes you back to those heady days of the real estate bubble.

Because it’s a rollicking tale of eleven lively characters who combine, clash, and re-combine.

The action all occurs amid the dying days of an artists’ studio cooperative. The artists’ new landlady, the World’s Blandest Woman, wants them out. But the artists have a plan. They’ll seduce her into becoming one of them.

But their best laid plans don’t get her laid the way they plan.

What happens next is as wild as it is unpredictable.

To find out, you’ll just have to get the thing and read it already.

revel body, via geekwire.com

• Seattle’s really got some high-tech hardware geniuses. Among them: the folks who’ve taken the same principles behind the Sonicare toothbrush and applied them to create advanced 21st century vibrators! (Really.)
• We’ve previously mentioned the strong presence of women’s erotica among Amazon’s e-book sales. Now come charges that some of the self-published smut books are stolen from stories posted for free viewing on erotica websites. (These allegations are against the small-time publishers, not Amazon.)
• Crazy Wall St. idea of the week (thus far): A local corporate-buyout analyst showed up on CNBC and said Microsoft should buy Barnes & Noble.
• Here’s one way to make money off of the walking renaissance. Make a big venture-funded software thing to help folks find homes to buy in walkable neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ pal Geov Parrish believes the state budget mega-crisis might, just might mind you, lead to talk, or even actual action, toward reforming Washington’s mighty regressive tax system—by far the principal failing of a local “progressive” politic that never dares challenge big business.
• On a related matter, state House Speaker Frank Chopp is floating the idea of Wash. State running its own bank, just like North Dakota. Or something as close to a bank as the state constitution now permits.
• The Mariners lose one really good pitcher, gain one maybe decent-hitting position player. What could possibly go wrong?
• Who knew the original Ladies’ Home Journal was so prescient? A 1911 list of “What Might Happen in the Next Hundred Years” predicts “telephones around the world,” airplanes used as “aerial war-ships,” automobiles “cheaper than horses,” “trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour,” grand opera “telephoned to private homes,” photographs “telegraphed to any distance,” “cameras electrically connected with screens at opposite ends of circuits,” ready-to-eat meals in stores, genetically modified foods, and even global warming. Writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr. did get a few things wrong, such as “hot and cold air from spigots,” the deliberate extinction of mosquitos, and the removal of C, Q, and X from the alphabet. Watkins also didn’t predict that his magazine would still be in business today, after many of its compatriots went to the great newsstand in the sky.
• Clever videomakers in Montana have released a thoroughly obliterating parody of a particularly dumb “rebel lifestyle” pickup truck commercial.
• And a great big thank you for those who attended the Seattle Invitationals Sat. nite, at which I performed what I hope was a respectful, straightforward rendition of the Presley classic “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care).” Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, I’d wanted to perform the best song from It Happened at the World’s Fair. But the live band didn’t know it. So here it is for all of you, in the original rendition.

smith tower construction, from seattle municipal archive

• The 1914-built Smith Tower is up for sale in a foreclosure auction. It comes four years after a condo-conversion scheme for Seattle’s first skyscraper was born, and three years after the scheme died. Let’s hope someone shows up who can bring the classy place back to glory.
• Could it be? Could it be? Could there really be snow in Seattle next week? I hope I hope I hope….
• One of those silly magazine surveys ranked Seattle as America’s fifth “gayest” city. Number one: Salt Lake City!
• Update: When we wrote last week about a scheme to bring the National Hockey League to Seattle, we noted a state legislator with a plan to help fund a new arena. The state rep’s name is Mike Hope (R-Lake Stevens). His plan: Have visiting teams pay a licensing fee to play there. No local taxpayer funds involved.
• David Goldstein again righteously picks apart the Seattle Times editorial board for its near-right-wing hypocrisies.
• The headline says it all: “New York Times Crossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin”.“
• Fun with reactionaries: “Rick Santorum Quotes as New Yorker Cartoons.” (Well, actually as new captions to pre-existing New Yorker cartoons.)
• You don’t have to be a gamer to get valuable schooling in non-linear narrative design from the original Legend of Zelda.

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:

• Doug Nufer (above) telling a tall tale of a circus freak, who had been the knife thrower “before the accident.”
• Judith Roche repeating a “blessing” she’d given to a new waste treatment plant, praising the cycle of life as the cleaned up biosolids get trucked to the Palouse to fertilize the wheat fields (really!).
• Nico Vassilakis howling raw phonemes.
• Christine Wertheim enacting an orgasmic childbirth(!), then with equal passion mourning the murder victims from Mexico’s drug wars.

iloveyoubluesky.blogspot.com

• How-the-mighty-have-fallen dept.: Last year folks mourned the end of Kodachrome slide film. Now, Eastman Kodak itself may declare bankruptcy. The only thing that could delay that move: a fire sale of Kodak’s patents, its only remaining valuable assets.
• The Wash. State Supreme Court ruled the state Legislature is failing in its constitutionally assigned task to fully fund K-12 education. But the court didn’t prescribe any specific action to remedy this. I’m hoping this means the days of brutal, all-cuts state budgets are finally over.
• Speaking of which, some legislative Democrats have another state income tax proposal going, as part of an overall tax reform package. We’ll see how far this one goes.
• The movie biz had a lousy ’11, but music sales (led by commercial downloads) were up 6.9 percent. Non-major-label releases, however, were stuck at about 12 percent of total sales.
• The folks who created the “phone book art space” Gallery 206 tried to give it away to the Seattle Art Museum. They said no, expectedly.
• Not as gruesome as you might have thought: The guy who tried to drive alone in the HOV-only freeway lanes by having a dressed-up skeleton in the passenger’s seat? It was just a plastic skeleton.
• Yesterday when we said Boeing Wichita’s demise was Seattle’s gain? Nope, not really. Blame the obsession by corporate hotshots with outsourcing everything, even if it costs more in the long run.
• Update: That smashingly good sounding “Electronic Literature” exhibit in town, tying in with the Modern Language Association convention at the Convention Center? If you live here, forget about seeing it. It’s only for ticketed convention goers, despite what its web page says.
• R.I.P. Robert Jenkins, a figure in the Seattle music scene for more than three decades. I knew him in the ’80s, playing guitar for Audio Leter, Officer Down, and the New Art Orchestra, among many other combos. Lori Goldston’s obit says Jenkins…

…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:

• the company’s central mailroom,
• its photo studio (where tall blonde models would occasionally assemble),
• a large conference room (sometimes rented out to the guys from the Pepsi plant across the street),
• office-equipment storage, and
• the workshop where they custom-make the legendary Amazon “door desks.”

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:

• Thrillers.
• Whodunits.
• Regency romances.
• Sword n’ sorcery.
• Space operas.
• Twilight knockoffs.
• Bridge to Terabithia knockoffs. (In the knockoffs, the fantasy worlds the kids travel to are real.)
• Inspirational lessons.
• Celebrity tell-alls.
• Cookbooks and diet guides.
• Political sermons of all stripes. (Yes, my fellow lefties, right-wingnuts do read books. They read wingnut books.)
• And, oh yeah, “serious literature,” or whatever that’s called these days.

•

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.

• Christopher Hitchens was an erudite and outspoken essayist/commentator on world affairs, peace/war, justice, and religion and all he felt was wrong with it (which was just about everything). But, like several of his ’60s radical-intellectual forebearers, he became seduced by the siren song of right-wing righteousness; specifically, the Bushies’ meme that there was one big “Islamofascist” conspiracy to overthrow Western society, and that the war in Iraq was a valiant counter-crusade rather than an imperial power-grab. But then, his chain-smoking and chain-drinking already proved there were limits to his wisdom.
• Vaclav Havel was one radical-intellectual who never changed his ways, even when it was might inconvenient not to do so. The herein-linked BBC obit lauds him as having brought “free markets” to what was still Czechoslovakia, following the collapse of the Soviet empire. But that wasn’t even among Havel’s chief priorities. He was foremost a thinker and writer. He began by writing satirical plays, which were promptly banned once Soviet forces crushed the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Arrested several times, he never gave up striving for freedom, democracy, and independent culture. When the Slovaks split off into their own nation, Havel oversaw an amicable civic divorce. May we all remember his life’s motto: “Truth and love will prevail over lies and hatred.”
• Kim Jong-Il, with his tinhorn self aggrandizement and his obsession for military ultra-precision in all public spectacles, was regularly depicted as a living joke—at least among those who didn’t have to live under North Korea’s abject poverty and repression. The best hope for the failed state he left behind is that his heirs sell it to the south, in exchange for a cushy Kim family compound in some equatorial land.

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:

• KPLU revisits out that ol’ regional quandary, do Nor’westerners have an accent or not? And if there is a Northwest accent, how should it be defined?
• Umberto Eco sez, “People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.” I’d trust what he says. I like Eco. Even if he’s no longer playing with the Bunnymen.
• Barry Ritholtz insists it wasn’t the poor people getting mortgages that caused the housing bust, no matter what the right-wing-media blowhards now bluster. It was a collapse of private corporate policies that were doomed to fail in the long term; policies instituted here and globally.
• Naomi Wolf claimed online last week that the crackdowns on Occupy encampments in cities around the nation had help and coordination from the Feds. This accusation turns out to be an unsubstantiated rumor. The brutality of those individual crackdowns, though, is all too sadly real.
• William M. Chase at The American Scholar says there was a golden age for college English departments in this country. It lasted for less than 30 years, about as long as the golden age of radio. It’s been over for almost 40 years, with no reincarnation in sight. Chase claims only one thing could bring back student and administration interest in lit studies. That’s if appreciation of great literature is hyped as a worthy pursuit in and of itself; not as a route to a cushy faculty career, nor as a mere sidebar to ethnic/gender studies.
• Meanwhile, the NY Times ponders whether a college degree, as a purely careerist strategy, is worth the cost anymore.
• Katie Roiphe finds lessons in how to live from a man who decided not to live any longer, the maximalist author David Foster Wallace (he’s also one of my own all-time faves).
• Turns out folks other metro areas have had the same idea that Seattle’s viaduct-replacement-tunnel opponents had—the idea that cities need fewer freeways, not more.

Horror author and Seattle music-scene legend Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is out of the hospital and back home, tired but apparently on the mend.

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.

Before Thomas Frank became a renowned author of geekily-researched anti-conservative sermon books, he co-ran a tart, biting, yet beautifully designed journal of essays called The Baffler.

It was based in Chicago for most of its existence. Its original focus was the intersecting worlds of corporate culture (including corporate “counterculture”), entertainment, and marketing. (It’s where Steve Albini’s 1994 screed against the music industry’s treatment of bands, “Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked,” first appeared.) As Frank’s concerns steered toward the political, so did The Baffler‘s.

Its one consistent aspect was its irregular schedule. Though it was sometimes advertised as a “quarterly,” only 18 issues appeared from 1988 to 2009.

This will now change.

The title was bought in May by essayist/historian John Summers. Last week, Summers announced he’s attained backing from the MIT Press. MIT and Summers promise to put out three Bafflers a year for the next five years.

This is good news, because we need its uncompromising voice more than ever.