…big business and its wholly-owned politicians have so thoroughly and deliberately disassembled America’s social and economic infrastructure that we’re not a “superpower” anymore. That might actually be a positive thing. Let Time founder Henry Luce’s “American Century” pass into history, along with the “We’re Number One” chants, those expensive and bloody crusades on behalf of “democracy” (i.e., oil), the trashing of everything noble and hopeful about the human species in the name of shareholder value, and the glut of special-effects-leaden sequel movies in the world’s cinemas. Let’s go back to being one country among many.

Weaving Women’s Words: Seattle Stories isn’t about weavers.

…currently touring in Ireland submits its list of “bands and their corresponding authors.” Nirvana paired up with Wm. Burroughs is appropriate, since Cobain and Burroughs collaborated on a spoken-word CD single. Public Enemy/Langston Hughes and The Doors/Jack Kerouac also seem right, even though Kerouac was more of a jazz fan. Some of the other pairings, though, seem a bit odd, such as AC/DC with Julia Child and Tori Amos with Alice Walker.

Congrats to local boy Neal Stephenson and my personal idol David Foster Wallace for making Time‘s list of the “All-Time 100 Novels.” Still undeservedly missing: Edward Bulwar-Lytton, Jackie Collins.

…ponders the limits to that big buzz-phrase concept last winter among lefty bloggers, the “Reality-Based Community.”

…in the Seattle Times by yrs. truly concerns My Life in CIA by Harry Mathews, a deft little novella that blurs the line between fact and fiction.

…when personal points of view sneak into that reader-written “online encyclopedia?” They get discussed in the section devoted to “Articles which may be biased.”

…with which I can heartily agree, the Apostrophe Protection Society!

…I can heartily endorse: Guys Read, a literacy and reading-promo program aimed at the young male mind. (Yes, males do have minds!)

…what would happen if more people started living their ilves for the purpose of selling the movie rights.

This story takes place on a Sunday afternoon at a certain decidedly non-touristy Irish pub somewhere in the greater downtown zone. (I won’t name it, because I don’t want ’em to get into any potential trouble for continuing to serve visibly intoxicated patrons.)

On a large-screen TV, the injury-plagued Sonics were somehow clobbering the San Antonio Spurs, to even up their current playoff series at two games apiece (only to fall behind again in Game Five two nights later.)

The spectacle inside the bar, in front of the screen, was even more captivating.

The first thing you’d notice, had you been there, would have been the two very young, very thin, very drunk women, whooping and hollering and flirting with everyone in sight. One wore a Mariners cap; the other wore a Red Sox cap. They’d apparently been on a girls’-day-out at Safeco Field. I say “apparently” because, while they both talked at quantity and with volume, what they said didn’t always make sense.

Among their favorite flirting targets was a tall, lanky young man seated at the bar, clad in a sweatshirt and a backwards Seattle University cap. He spoke with well-practiced Eminem-esque body language and a fake-gangsta “wigger” accent. But the musical-legend references he uttered were not in praise of hiphop royalty but the Beatles and Stones.

Over the course of our very public chat, he mentioned to me and to the drunk women that he’d been faithful to his current girlfriend fora year and a half, a commitment he hadn’t previously thought himself capable of. He also listed a series of drug possession and dealing arrests he’d undergone between the ages of 11 and 18; now, at 24, he was proud to be out of trouble and planned to stay that way.

I observed all this, mostly silently, interjecting these three with questions only at strategic intervals. I was behaving as I often do, emerging into the public sphere only to hide inside my own mind (with the aid of a book and a Sunday crossword page).

Someone seated next to me was even more withdrawn. She was making no eye contact with anyone, except when she needed another drink. She concentrated on the careful penmanship she was applying to a hardbound journal, into which she’d spent the past hour writing (as she later mentioned) about an on-the-rocks relationship.

She broke the ice with me, asking how my puzzle-solving was coming along, and sympathizing with me about that one stubborn corner. But the gangsta wannabe was more adept about opening her up. I returned from a restroom break to find him and her deep in conversation. His voice had changed, the bombastic bravado replaced by a sensitive near-whisper. He insisted to the journal writer that she could make a living as a poet, which she countered with the time-worn adage that it just couldn’t be done. He told her she shouldn’t let her soul be held hostage by any loser boyfriend.

As their conversation became more intimate, I redirected my attention toward the basketball game. About 45 minutes later, the poetess stumbled her way off of her bar stool and around me and the other patrons. She’d previously done as great a job of hiding her state of inebriation as she’d done of guarding her feelings. The white-gangsta dude did his best to keep her from falling down. I asked him to make sure she got home OK; he assured me he would.

After those two left, the thin drunk women (who’d left the bar in the company of an older man and had since come back) reasserted their command on the other bar patrons’ collective attention. They made big, loud, repetitive comments about the joys of chicken wings with Miller Lite. Somehow, I ceased caring.

…the first local case of its kind, an area man was legally chastized for remarks made on his weblog. You just gotta keep an eye on those anger-prone orchestra musicians. (Here’s the blog in question, now shorn of the disputed content.)

…of that heartbreakingly corrupt racket known as poetry contests.

…a novel that had an illustration for every page was called a “Big Little Book.” Zak Smith’s personal project to create “Illustrations for Every Page of Gravity’s Rainbow“ might be considered a Big Big Big Book.

The essays, speeches, and books by the right wing’s favorite radical feminist were at least as intolerant and diversity-hostile as those of John Paul II. But unlike JP, Dworkin wasn’t an outspoken anti-Communist, so it’s apparently OK for the mainstream media obits of her to be less than unanimously laudatory.

Other feminists, before and after Dworkin, devoted themselves to liberation, as they variously defined it. Dworkin would have none of that positivity, none of that hope. She was a purist dystopian. Just like the right-wing extremists, she craved the simplistic power of absolutism. In her vision, the entire planet was populated by only a few human character types. All Women were either pathetic victims or strident avengers. All Men were either beasts or domesticated beasts. This one-dimensional zeitgeist had its logical conclusion in the premise that women could only be freed if men were strictly suppressed.

As her many critics frequently stated, her sexism (and, let’s face it, she wasn’t anti-sexist, she was sexist) didn’t allow for the existence of non-rapist men, non-lesbian women, non-violent pornos, heterosexual couples who actually liked one another, and many assorted other wide swaths of the whole mongrel human condition. But to simply repeat these obvious flaws is to ignore the white-hot emotional power of her writings.

I recently reviewed several novels by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz. He’d survived Nazi slave-labor camps in his teens, and his tragic characters never got over the horror. Dworkin claimed to have suffered through a young life of domestic abuse, insults, and put-downs. She clearly never got over that, either by happenstance or by choice. Kertesz’s protagonists lived out their whole lives still emotionally imprisoned by their victimhood. So did Dworkin. As Regina Hackett wrote in a P-I profile of Dworkin in the ‘90s, there was no sunlight in Dworkin’s writing. She lived in a world defined strictly by fear and hate, a world she could not break out of. Until last week.