I almost never write about my private life here. But in the weeks since my recent, involuntary, five-day Internet fast, I’ve returned to certain habits and behaviors into which I’d gradually fallen over the months of my current unemployment.

I’ve been letting my mind, my most precious possession, remain stuck in first gear all day.

I’ve spent hours upon hours sitting before this machine, reading and looking at other people’s creativity, day after day, week after week. Not writing much; finishing even less. Getting a quota of job applications out, but not doing nearly enough of the ol’ in-person schmooze-networking.

I’ve got about a dozen and a half book ideas; few even close to completion. I’ve had all the time in the world, but instead have been watching scores of DVDs and reading self-help books about positive mental attitudes that don’t seem to ever really work.

I don’t know what to do about this condition.

But part of it must surely involve changing the circumstances of my daily existence.

I’ve got to spend less time online. Maybe even drop my home connection from DSL to dialup.

And I’m never going to become a “Kill Your Television” puritanical hippie (moderation in everything—including moderation). But I do need to spend lesss time with other people’s stories (even well-made art film stories) and more time devising my own.

For you the loyal MISCmedia reader, all this may mean fewer updates. Or it may mean more and longer updates, but concerning topics closer to the so-called “real” world than to the media-mediated worlds that have been this column’s main topic lo these past 16 years. Or it may mean more fiction pieces or long, serialized research projects.

Of course, if I just somehow attained a lucrative day job that kept me out of the house and out of my own head several hours a day, that also might help my condition.

AS YOU MIGHT KNOW, we at MISC aren’t reallly big poetry fans. But we’ve just been turned on to a poet we can truly appreciate.

Scottish epic versifier William McGonagall (1825?-1902), whose vast output can be read at the above link, is described on the linked site as “a man without talent who thought he was a great poet and tragedian and only needed an opportunity to prove it.”

His stuff isn’t all that bad really; well maybe largely bad, but not as completely insuffrable as a lot of present-day poesy. For one thing, his poems had stories and at least one-dimensional characters, rather than being limited in scope to the poet’s own viewpoints. A lot of them are about turgid events (shipwrecks, battles, tornadoes, domestic melodramas), instead of the smug flower-gazing of nature poets or the self-aggrandizement of slam poets. His execution of these plots and his verbal stylings might seem less than imaginative by the standards of the classicists, but he remains his own man, with his own inimitable manner.

And his stuff all rhymes too.

…MARGARET ATWOOD has written an open letter to America:

“If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They’ll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They’ll think you’ve abandoned the rule of law. They’ll think you’ve fouled your own nest.The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn’t dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country’s hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.”

…things to say about this current mess, I’ve gone back to a couple of the past century’s most famous social thinkers. So have some other present-day commentators.

I’m about a third of the way through a dog-eared used paperback copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. The pop-critic’s best known “serious” book popularized the catch phrases “the medium is the message” and “global village.” But it also presented a detailed, reasonably coherent worldview, built around the human senses and how various generations of media effect/extend/attack/desensitize/alter them. He claimed it was the phonetic alphabet, more than roads or weapons or force of will, that brought about the Roman Empire, and by extension the later western powers’ conquests around the world. My the mid-20th century (the book came out in ’64; he was working on it as early as ’59), the “cool medium” of TV (as defined by the degree of the audience’s attention and involvement) was overtaking such “hot media” as radio and movies. This, McLuhan claimed, was starting to change North American society’s whole perceptions and attitudes.

A recent symposium in NYC discussed how these and other McLuhan theories could be used to try to make sense of the current nonsense.

Certainly, the war is the ultimate example of what later PoMo media theorists called “The Spectacle.” It’s both a real war with real death and a media event made with an eye toward home-front PR. TV has become a “hotter” medium since McLuhan’s time (more detailed, less aloof), and live war coverage is “hotter” still. Sleaze-talk radio, the Bushies’ favorite medium, is ultra “hot” by McLuhan’s definition: It not only gives a dumbed-down, one-sided worldview, it orders its listeners precisely how to respond—with anti-intellectual, passive-aggressive obedience.

I’ve previously referred to demagogue radio as a 24-hour version of the “Two-Minutes Hate” scene in George Orwell’s 1984. Lots of folk have noticed the increasing parallels between Orwell’s world and ours. Among them: A new satirical student group, Students for an Orwellian Society. (Slogan: “Because 2003 is 19 years too late.”)

Certainly we’ve got a milieu of economic catastrophe for all but the members of the “inner party,” a regime that loves war, loathes sex, vilifies rational thought, and thrives on fear. The regime wants total knowledge and control of every citizen’s thoughts, words, and deeds. It preaches eternal self-sacrifice for the masses but reserves untold priviliges for itself. Its media minions disseminate nonstop war “coverage,” deliberate detailed lies, exhortations toward “patriotic” fervor, and demonizations against all perceived opponents.

But today’s Republican INGSOC doesn’t yet have the total power its agenda ultimately requires. It might never attain that total power. In the Internet age, information and communication may be unstoppably diffuse, despite the monopolistic efforts of Fox and Clear Channel. Neotribalism, multiculturalism, and the media’s own push toward fractured demographics mean there’s no undifferentiated mass of “proles” to be easily controlled.

But a gang that can’t get total power can still inflict a lot of damage trying to get it.

…sez we shouldn’t consttantly rail against Bush’s language blunders. For one thing, we can still “criticize the U.S. President based on his bad policies. It ain’t like there’s a shortage of those.” For another, “Language bullying — or prescriptivism, as it’s more
politely called — is conservative in the worst sense. It advances a stuffy
and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by
supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common
usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain
wrong and cranky.”

DAVID BRODER breaks from the Washington Post‘s recent deluge of Dubya-worship to dare to question a new Federal budget that sacrifices almost everything from education to children’s health, all for the sake of the gazillionaires’ sacred tax cuts….

WHILE SUSAN FALUDI ponders whether we’re seeing the death of certain American mythologies, such as those of morality and justice.

…the passing last week of Maurice Blanchot, 95, a hi-brow French novelist and critic. I don’t include much writing-about-writing on this site, but here’s something Blanchot once wrote in that vein:

“Writing is a fearful spiritual weapon that negates the naive existence of what it names and must therefore do the same to itself. Literature runs the danger of denying its own desire for presence, although it cannot become anything else, philosophy for example. Hence writing is a self-disturbed activity: it knows itself to be, at once, trivial and apocalyptic, vain yet of the greatest consciousness-altering potential….”It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a writer sitting at their table and forming letters on a piece of paper.”

I’ve been recruited into speaking this Thursday at the Tacoma Public Library’s main branch (1102 Tacoma Avenue South; 7 pm).

They’re running one of those “everybody in town reads the same book” promos, based this time on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The panel I’ll be at will discuss Bradbury’s premise of a future dystopia where audiovisual media are drugs and books are outlawed.

This nightmare image has been very popular among highbrow technophobes, particuarly by Neil Postman. In his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman essentially argued that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of TV-addicted idiots; that new info technologies were always inherently reactionary and anti-thought; and that The Word was good for you and The Image was bad for you.

I’ve written about Postman in the past: I disagreed with his premises then and still do.

The Simpsons and The Sopranos are, I argue, more intelligent than the books of Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Secondary and tertiary cable channels provide more highbrow arts and culture than PBS ever did. The Internet has helped to democratize the written word (and helped get the current peace movement jump-started).

And kids’ attention spans seem to be getting longer these days. I’ve written before how every Harry Potter book is at least 100 pages longer than the previous one; and about those PC adventure games where you have to methodically explore and experiment for weeks or months before discovering the solution.

Postman, and most of his leftist pop-culture-haters, apparently believe there had been a pre-TV golden age when everybody was a Serious Reader, every newspaper was a junior New York Times, and every magazine was a junior Atlantic Monthly.

Not so. Escapism has always been with us. We are a species that craves stories, pleasure, beauty, and diversion. Bradbury himself is an entertainer. (In the early ’50s he sold stories to EC Comics, whose Tales from the Crypt and other titles were denounced in the U.S. Congress as corrupters of innocent youth.)

And no, The Word isn’t in decline. We’re more dependent upon words than ever. Rather than dying, the book biz seems to be weathering the current fiscal storm better than the TV networks, and a lot better than the movie theater chains and the cable TV operators.

And those words aren’t always progressive or enlightening. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Jewish hoax that’s become recently popular among Islamic fundamentalists, is a book. The Bell Curve, a pile of pseudo-scientific gibberish intended as an excuse for anti-black racism, is a book.

Entertainment can give a context for ideas and propose a way of seeing the world. Few people knew this more fully than Francois Truffaut, who directed the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was a lifelong student and admirer of great films. He wrote elequently about how the perfect scene, or even the perfect single image, could immediately express whole ranges of thoughts and feelings.

The question should really be what contexts and worldviews emanate from the entertainments we’re being given. That’s what I hope to ask in Tacoma this Thursday. Hope you can attend.

(SURE NUFF, the print MISC is delayed still, this time not of our making. Some outlets should get it by Friday.)

Regular readers of this space know we love bullet lists, outlines, and the other trappings of precision humor. Some persons, however, still apparently believe “real writing” hasta be obtuse & obfuscatin’. Even daily-paper writers, who must state their premises clearly, occasionally fall under this delusion.

That’s the best reasoning I could figure for a recent Chicago Tribune gripe-piece ragging about PowerPoint presentations. Writer Julia Keller claims they’re ruining the art of argumentative discussion, by turning every topic into a rigid sequence of oversimplified “talking points” and preventing impromptu exchanges among speakers and audiences.

In real life, those sins are only committed when the presenters are either:

• unsure of themselves in public,
• unsure of themselves with a particular audience (say, bosses or customers), or
• intellectually lazy.

The article includes several facetious examples of famous speeches reduced to easily-digestible PowerPoint lists. (Here’s another, visualized in presentation-slide format.) Go ahead and have a quick laugh, but then take another look. These gag translations actually reveal the soundness of the original authors’ arguments and the clarity of their thinking. Far from destroying the magic of the original speeches, these latter-day outlines could be useful tools for teaching modern-day folks how to think, write, and speak with similar clarity.

Keller also seems to claim outline-based presentations are incapable of expressing complex ideas. Bunk. Any good Hegelian knows any expressive or instructive statement flows from a sequence of hypotheses, antitheses, and syntheses. Details follow from sound structures, as much as any soundly-constructed building starts with a solid foundation and a sturdy frame.

Here’s a particularly beautifully written example: A 1930 manual published by RCA, intended to teach movie-theater projectionists how to properly exhibit those newfangled talking pictures.

The 211-page document travels a vast path from the laboratory basics of sound and electricity, to the procedures of operating the crude ealry theater sound equipment, to advanced lessons in maintenance and troubleshooting. But it remains thoroughly readable and comprehensible, because its clear copywriting arises from a clear structure. All “technical writing” worthy of the name exhibits these traits—and so do the most effective philosophical, argumentative, persuasive, and political writings.

When properly used, tools such as PowerPoint can help an author or presenter create clear structures. Some of the people these tools are helping are people who weren’t previously familiar with these principles, or with the general basics of writing and public speaking. PowerPoint is helping these rank amateurs become at least semi-adept amateurs. Some of their resulting works will feature less-than-Shakespearean elequence. But they can, with a modicum of creative discipline, effectively say what the speaker-presenter wants to say.

So don’t be another tech-bashing fogey, like so many culture-critics and newspaper essayists unfortunately are. If you don’t need software assistance to help organize your thoughts, you don’t have to knock those who do.

Besides, the PC-based “slide” lecture is another great addition to our collection of late-20th-early-21st-century literary forms. (Some others: FAQ lists, video-game hint sheets, e-mail investment scam solicitations, filmmaking storyboards, self-help quizzes, affirmation tapes, and shopping-channel spiels.) All of these vocabularies and more are just waiting for some clever writers to relaunch as more or less serious storytelling techniques.

Bellevue Square is trying to evict FAO Schwarz. But the troubled toyseller isn’t backing down, and is making legal challenges.

It probably won’t end there. Where might it end?

I can see it now. The GI Joes and the Toy Story Bucket O’ Soldiers surround the store, vowing to repel any invasion. Some of the Cabbage Patch Kids start learning triage. Plamobil people start planting small explosives around the 14-foot bear sculpture, ready to turn it into an instant barricade. Some of the Barbies offer themselves as human shields in front of the soldiers. Other Barbies rebel against the whole scene, and go off into a prayer circle somewhere near the educational toys. Bert and Ernie are reprogramming the foot-powered giant keyboard into an early warning alarm. Pokémon villains Team Rocket are attaching incidiary devices to the radio-control model cars, ready to roll right up to the mall manager’s desk upon the receipt of the go-ahead signal (Tickle Me Elmo’s giggle). An expeditionary force of Sailor Moon dolls secretly maps out a counter-attack plan. They will lead a vanguard of Dragon Ball Z and Power Rangers characters in taking more mall territory. They will pelt the mall cops (and any stray shoppers) with Monopoly houses and Jelly Bellys, but only as a diversionary tactic. While mall management is looking the other way, Jay Jay the Jet Plane will fly off toward the Muzak control room, to deploy the toys’ ultimate weapon. The unbearable strains of the “Welcome to Our World of Toys” song will play continuously, at full blast, until an unconditional surrender is attained.

NEWS ITEM #2: Mainstream news media, both national and local, have suddenly discovered young anarchists, some 26 years after the first circle-A teens and three years after WTO. Whether the papers are trying to brand all antiwar protestors as extremists, or whether they really want to shed light on the philosophy of no-government, the issue’s a little more pertinent now than it was pre-George Dubious.

At the time of the WTO protests, many of us perceived a “withering away of the state” underway, giving way to effective rule by a stateless corporate elite. Some WTO opponents vocally wished for a resurgence of governmental paternalism, countering the often inhumane moves of Big Money.

But nowadays, governments and their bosses have reasserted their presence, in unkind ways. The White House occupant has embarked on a macro strategy of sleaze and graft, of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, of imposing or trying to impose a vast spectrum of police-state brutalities. I’m starting to wonder if, should the GOP goon squad win in 2004, whether there will even be a presidential election in 2008.

So: It’s again quite relevant to ask whether the type of megastate that can do this much harm on such a grand scale deserves to exist. The biggest argument in defense of Big Government these days might be that it’s the only thing that could stop terrorism and protect North American residents from hostilities by other governments.

Nine-eleven’s perpetrators were non-governmental but still quite authoritarian. They weren’t after “regime change” here, but did encourage hardline elements within the Muslim world to try and form harsh governments in their own homelands. Our government’s might has so far failed to catch or punish this non-governmental force, and is now instead being massively redeployed against another perceived enemy which had little or nothing to do with the 2001 terror attacks, but which, by being a government with real estate and a real army, is more convenient to deploy forces against.

Back home, the argument against big government could easily be made by invoking Iraq and North Korea as the horrific result of governmental leaders who’ve grasped the kind of extreme strong-arm power our own government now wishes to impose upon us. Even the right wing’s rugged-individualist factions (such as the black-helicopter conspiratists and the “Remember Waco” bunch) are starting to grumble at Bush’s creeping Big Brotherisms. And with most Democrats still shunning their party’s past insistence that governmental power can do good things for people, it’s easier than ever to imagine no (or at least a lot less) government as the only viable alternative to bad government.

But what would replace big government? Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson has fantasied about a future where business takes over everything government used to do, even the police and the roads. Modern anarchists themselves usually invoke collectivist neo-agrarian Utopias where everybody would (supposedly willingly) all be neopagan vegan bicyclists wearing all-hemp wardrobes (a prospect just as monoculturally scary as anything the Evangelicals can propose).

I, as longtime readers can surmise, have other wishes. I happen to like DVD players, rock bands, and cheese-flavored snacks, and want to preserve the technological infrastructure that makes them all possible. But less facetiously, I believe humanity’s too diverse and unpredictable for any preplanned Utopian scheme to ever work. We need a society that’s flexible enough and diffuse enough to allow countless ethnic/religious/gender/subcultural/etc. sub-nations to all pursue their own definitions of happiness. Government can help or hinder this, as can business.

I don’t have the answers, at least not yet. But I’m researching them, for a possible book-length essay/manifesto. Any suggestions on your part would be most welcome.

PASSAGE (George Orwell, quoted by Sam Smith at prorev.com:)

“Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.”

…the Carl Sagan of his time?

…a long, scathing anti-Bush essay to the UK paper The Observer. It’s not online (which means the American masses on whose behalf he speaks won’t get to read it). But a short summary of it sez he calls for a big investigation (by whom?) into whether the administration knew about 9/11 in advance and chose to do nothing, because it would further the Bush gang’s anti-freedom domestic agenda. The summary also includes the following quotation:

“We still don’t know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.”

(Of course, it should be noted the “popularly elected President” in Vidal’s quotation is his own distant cousin.)

…or as I call it, “The World-O-Words LiteRama,” set up shop last weekend at one of Sand Point’s ex-naval air hangars (not, as I’d previously said here, the same hangar used for the Friends of the Library book sales).

News accounts said attendance was back up from last year’s event at the bland-modern Stadium Exhibition Center, and quoted several attendees as preferring the “funky old” atmosphere of the huge drafty structure originally built to house symbols of military power. Some of these quoted attendees said Bookfest belongs somewhere other than a standard sales-show hall, since books, after all, weren’t just another business.

Books, of course, have been treated for some time as just another business, by the intellectual-property oligopolists who run that business. And also by ambitious entrepreneurs selling specific info to niche markets; such as Heather & Co., the publisher of Eat Without Fear: Help for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

The relative remoteness of the Sand Point site, which doesn’t have direct bus service from downtown Seattle, did as much as the building’s “funkiness” to help the event’s goers believe themselves to be so darned special in that PBS-precious middlebrow way. Even the weather played its part, providing perfect tweed-sweater temperatures and waterfront grayout sightlines.

Book-biz realities, as I’ve monotonously said every year around Bookfest time, are a little different. There’s no separate subculture of book readers, just as there’s no separate subculture of CD listeners. There are now as many mega bookstores in Seattle as there are mega record stores.

There are subcultures (or niches) within the larger book biz. “Serious” literature is but one of those niches. What I like about Bookfest is the way it crowds so many of these niches into one room–the cookbook people, the travelogue people, the coffee-table-book people, the children’s-chapter-book people, the antiquarian-book people, the nature-poetry people, the self-help people, the mystery people, the sci-fi people, and at least some aspects of the serious-lit people.

(Still underrepresented at Bookfest: Comics, zines, romances, erotica, translated lit, and PoMo/experimental lit.)

And oh yeah–there’s another, locally quite popular, genre of “writing,” the tattoo. This new U-District parlor’s awning sign could easily represent not only what customers oughta seek in a tattoo parlor, but what some government/business leaders leaders seek for our local civic society.

WE’RE NOT REALLY POETRY PEOPLE HERE, but can’t help admire UW prof Richard Kenny’s versified thoughts about the “timorous Congress” acceding to war-fever.