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JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
ELSEWHERE:
IN THAT NEWSWEEK COVER PIECE a few years back about “Seattle Chic” (the one with Slate swami Michael Kinsley on the front), my ol’ UW Daily colleague Lynda Barry contributed a comic strip about how she’d never really fit in in this town. She was a giddy, borderline-superficial funtime gal in a place more welcoming to somber reflection.
But from the looks of her latest illustrated novel Cruddy, Barry’s quite adept indeed at the somber-reflection bit, even to the point of abject grimness and a teenage nihlism that’s not at all affected.
The basic plot: In 1971, 17-year-old Roberta Rohbeson has been grounded to her horrible family (bratty sis, hysterical mom) in a decaying rental house, after getting busted for dropping acid. She uses the time of confinement to write about her sordid past, which is even more nihilistic than her present.
Seems that six years before, Roberta had disappeared with her maniacal, violent (and possibly incestuous) father. She was found weeks later in a Nevada foster home, with no apparent memory of what had happened to her or where her father had disappeared to. But in the diary that becomes the flashback story of Cruddy, Roberta tells all about the road trip through various hells of the American west, complete with arson, smuggling, triple-crossings, many brutal murders by the father, and two equally gruesome slayings by Roberta herself (including patricide).
Two of the towns of her hellish odyssey are Seattle-inspired.
“Cruddy City,” where the 17-year-old Roberta’s “present day” (1971) story takes place, is an almost geographically exact rendition of the Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill.
More specifically, the dreary blocks around Roberta’s dreary home are modeled on the still-rundown area just west of the Rainier Avenue-Martin Luther King Way intersection; a land of sidewalk-less streets, weed-strewn yards, the Copeland Lumber yard with its spooky black-cat logo, garbage-strewn winding roads up Beacon Hill (one of which, clasic-TV fans, is named Della Street), and taunting hillside views down onto the affluent blocks closer to Lake Washington.
I became very familiar with the neighborhood in the ’80s, when I had a miserable job in typesetting and layout for the South District Journal/Capitol Hill Times chain of neighborhood weeklies. I worked on ancient Compugraphic phototypesetting machines, in a wooden shed that had weeds growing inside from cracks in the concrete floor. Barry perfectly captures the little-corner-of-despair sense of the place.
(Remember, 1971 was the depth of the Boeing recession, the economically bleakest period in Seattle since the Depression.)
In contrast to the nothingness of Cruddy City, lots of stuff’s happening in Dentsville, one of the stops on Roberta and her dad’s road trip of terror.
The geography of Dentsville is based on downtown Seattle; specifically the waterfront (including Ye Olde Curiosity Shop), the pre-Convention Center Pike Street corridor (including the recently demolished Gay Nineties restaurant-lounge), and the pre-Interstate 5 west Capitol Hill (where, in the 1965 flashback story, the no-good dad confronts a no-good relative who’s squatting in a freeway-condemned house).
Of course, realistic geography isn’t what makes a novel really work. That requires great writing, compelling characters, and an intriguing story. Cruddy has all those aspects in vast supply; plus some of Barry’s best-ever visual works (in the form of maps and sullen character portraits).
In its vision of completely justified youthful despair, Cruddy is the Great Grunge Novel (even if the flashback story takes place before most ’90s rock musicians were born).
Just, please, don’t let anybody make it into a movie. They’d never get it right. They’d undoubtedly use the horror and violence in the story to depict exciting action, not Barry’s world of desperate rootlessness.
TOMORROW: Even Hollywood insiders are foreseeing the death of mass culture.
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A MERE SIX MONTHS after the WTO riots, I predicted there’d be folks who’d spend the rest of their lives in the shadow of that singular protestorial moment, or (worse) using their participation in it (no matter how peripheral) as a badge of radical sanctimony, a way of defining their personal specialness. (I’d seen too much of that in ’60s fogeys.)
So it should come as no surprise that documents of this type are beginning to appear.
Case in point: The recent book Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond. It lists three “authors” on the front cover. One is really a photographer, Allen Sekula, whose color close-ups emphasize the more photogenic (or most visibly wounded) protestors, obscuring both the scope of the marches and the diversity of the marchers.
The text is by longtime lefter-than-thou essayist and syndicated columnist Alexander Cockburn and his colleague Jeffrey St. Clair. The main piece of text, the “Seattle Diary” chapter, is credited solely to St. Clair, and is our topic here.
And it disappoints greatly. And I’m not just talking about the many many typos.
St. Clair seems less interested in getting to the grit of global trade and its discontents, of the miraculous breadth of the anti-WTO coalition, than in (1) name-dropping all the radical personal friends he runs into at the marches (all of whom seem to be from San Francisco), and in (2) berating everyone he sees at the marches or accompanying events whom he considers insufficiently radical.
These not-good-enough types include the respected populist-progressive commentators Michael Moore, Jim Hightower, and Molly Ivins; folks who’ve made plenty of unkind words about the rule of Global Business and its political lackeys, but whom St. Clair, for reasons apparently perceptible only by the sort of people who read The Nation, considers to be less than ideologically pure.
In short: Where the WTO protests were a grand coming-together of all sorts of people who had all sorts of agendas and priorities, and who wanted to persue these agendas and priorities without a global-corporate monoculture’s repressions, St. Clair saw the protests as a big party to which only persons meeting his doctrinal standards should have been allowed.
St. Clair, I’m afraid, is a ’60s-style radical who Doesn’t Get It about the way-new left. It’s not about bringing back the allegedly-good-old-days of self-aggrandizing counterculture hustlers and sectarian schisms. It’s about working together with people who don’t necessarily belong to the same subcultural “tribe,” but who share a dream for a more just, more democratic, and more healthy world.
For a more thoroughly researched, more serious account of the events on and surrounding Nov. 30, 1999 in Seattle, pick up Janet Thomas’s The Battle in Seattle. Thomas (who’s actually lived in the Seattle area) takes the issues behind global trade and corporate power seriously and soberly. Instead of St. Clair’s oversimplified us-vs.-them dichotomies, Thomas finds patterns of power and influence, and people from all continents and walks-O-life who’ve been finding ways to work together to change those patterns even after the last tear-gas canisters were discharged on Capitol Hill.
She even includes dozens of addresses and websites in the back for those of you who’d like to get in on the hard work of building a better society, not just protesting against the one we’ve got.
TOMORROW: How to publish an arts magazine in the Post-Funding Era.
Favorite Videos and Worst Job
by guest columnist Ryan
(ED.’S NOTE: One of the email lists I’m on had a topic thread last month, in which members posted the books they’d least likely let anyone borrow. Thanks to the well-known factor of topic drift, that led to people listing their favorite videos. Ryan [last name redacted at his request] went a step further and added an additional topic-drift step, as printed by permission below.)
Delivered-To: clark@speakeasy.org
Reply-To: [email address redacted]
From: “Ryan” [email address redacted]
To: wallace-l@waste.org
Subject: RE: wallace-l: Top Videos/Degrading Job
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 10:03:11 -0500
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Importance: Normal
Sender: owner-wallace-l@waste.org
TOP VIDEOS:
Apocalypse Now
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Dazed and Confused
The Usual Suspects
Kids
The Harder They Come
…and anything by Stanley Kubrick (esp. 2001)
MOST DEGRADING JOB:
Feel free to disregard this, but I must vent.
I worked for a company called DSMax. They call themselves an advertising and marketing firm. They are lying. I could probably write a book about what was horrible about this job, but here’s a handy list instead.
1. 4:45 a.m. Wake up, shower, put on mandatory shirt and tie.
2. 5:45 a.m.-7 a.m. Commute 1.25 hours to DSMax branch office in Norristown, PA.
3. 7 a.m.-9 a.m. Engage in motivational cheering sessions and spirit-building exercises with fellow “representatives.” (“Where we going?” “To the top!” “WHERE WE GOING?” “TO THE TOP!” “When?” “Now!” “When?” “Now!” “WHEN WHEN WHEN?” “NOW NOW NOW!!!” And other humiliations too numerous and depraved to list. Let me just say there was “hand jive” involved.) Listen in quiet horror as co-workers enthusiastically discuss pro wrestling/soap operas/fanatical, cultish commitment to DSMax/plans for all the money they’ll make once they get promoted to branch manager. Take note of surprising number of co-workers who’ve quit since you started. Envy them.
4. 9 a.m. Commute back to Philadelphia in order to walk door-to-door in the run-down ghetto business districts of West Philly. In December. Peddling long-distance phone service to local small business owners (i.e. hair salons, corner stores, dive bars (people drinking straight vodka at 10 a.m.), garages, endless parade of delis and other shithole restaurants, etc.) Do this until 5 p.m. Return to “office” (really just one large rumpus room) during rush hour.
4a. Locate potential client (e.g., sucker). Check soul at door. “Pitch.” Trudge, defeated, out door OR (rarely) attempt have customer sign multiple contracts and make multiple phone calls to complete sale. Trudge
forlornly out door when customer informs you that he/she “don’t have time for this shit.”
5. 6 p.m. Return to office. Ring small bell, large bell, or gong, according to your sales performance for the day. Calculate commission. Choke back tears at realization that commission will not pay rent and there is NO BASE PAY. Gather round for another session of cheering and practice pitching (just follow your five steps and your eight steps!–DSMax’s keys to success, in addition to trite little coffee mug aphorisms and the sort of pithy acronyms that Judge Judy would find clever: KISS–“Keep It Simple Stupid”). Fend off barrage of entreaties by over-zealous co-workers to attend post-work DSMax get-togethers at nearby Applebee’s.
6. 8 p.m. Return home. Microwave taste-free/nutrition-free food because you are too tired, beaten to cook. Complain to sig. other.
7. 9 p.m. Pass out on couch in front of mindless television.
8. 1 a.m. Wake up on couch. Get up and go to actual bed. Cry self back to sleep.
9. Repeat steps 1-8.
I lasted five weeks. I probably made a total of $1,500.
A part of me died that I will never get back.
TOMORROW: Unionizing a dot-com, an impossible dream?
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
SCOTT MCCLOUD first emerged on the independent-comics scene in the ’80s with Zot!, one of the most intelligent and character-driven (and, for the time, least violent) superhero series around.
But he found his real calling in discussing comics, and making comics that discussed comics.
He’s now followed his ’93 bestseller Understanding Comics with a bigger, even more ambitious work, Reinventing Comics.
McCloud’s first volume was an introductory explanation of the art form, and an argument about why it should be considered an art form instead of the kiddie pap many Americans have treated it as.
His new one also has two tasks, divided into two sections.
In the first half, he bemoans the sorry state of the comics scene in North America as both an art form and a business. Daily strips are following the newspapers they appear in on a slow road toward oblivion or at least irrelevance in many people’s lives. Comic book stores, and the publishers and creators supplying them, took a financial shellacking in the mid-’90s when the speculator market collapsed. The so-called “mainstream” comic book publishers still concentrate too tightly on selling one genre (superheroes) to one niche audience of white male fanboys, neglecting the diversity of subjects, styles, and creators that could attract a wider clientele.
(Although, he acknowledges, some strides have been made in creator’s rights; and indie publishing has slightly increased the breadth of both content and diversity of contributors.)
In the second half, McCloud looks to possible solutions to comics’ artistic and business dilemmas. Guess what? They all have to do with the medium on which you’re reading this.
NASDAQ speculators and venture-capital funds may have written off the Net as a content medium, but McCloud insists its only problems are simply bugs to be worked out; mainly involving most users’ slow modem speeds and still-developing display technologies.
McCloud remains a mostly-unwavering advocate of the Internet (or what it can evolve into) as a force for decentralization, disintermediation, and creative breakthroughs.
The thing is: If and when all these revolutions come into being, will the result be anything approaching comics (or “sequential art”) as we know it?
If you define “comics” as printed documents comprising hand-drawn still images in linear sequence (sometimes with written narration and/or dialogue), maybe not.
If you define comics according to McCloud’s definition, maybe.
By the time Web comics really take off, they could become something closer to today’s Flash animations or the narrative elements of CD-ROM games than to silent still images in frames.
A new art form, perhaps; or at least a new blend of existing forms (comics, animation, film/video).
But it still wouldn’t mean the preservation of the existing comics form; many of the strengths of which lie in the disciplines of its limitations (no motion, no sound).
TOMORROW: A guest columnist remembers the worst job he ever had.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE UPDATE: Just as the excitement of a Presidential non-election finally wound down, the Seattle scab newspapers returned to their previous levels of bulk and dullness. Indeed, with their no-name staffs they’re even duller than before. Meanwhile, the Seattle Union Record has quickly blossomed into quite the spunky li’l alterna-rag. I still want it to go permanent and daily.
Generation S&M, Part 2
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began musing about the ’90s revival of bondage fetishism in pop culture, and some of its possible sources. Her conclusion: A generation had come of age after growing up with Catwoman and Emma Peel.)
MY GENERATION was the first generation raised in front of the television.
Suddenly there were shows geared just towards us. Our moms bought us the new TV dinners, then set us in front of the tube while they went to their ESP development class.
And it wasn’t just The Partridge Family and Leave It to Beaver reruns we ate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. We’re talking some pretty heavy sexual-revolution morsels from the ’60s. Things even too risque for today’s TV.
I’m talking Catwoman, in full dominitrix gear, playfully torturing Batman. Sure, she was evil, but she was sort of doing Batman a favor by punishing him. I was five and I understood that.
Then there was I Dream of Jeannie, a scantily clad Barbara Eden dressed like a Turkish concubine who called a guy “Master.” (Impossible on today’s television.)
On Bewitched, Samantha was cheesily nice, but did you ever catch her evil twin sister Serena, the dominitrix? Between changing Darren into various livestock, she always had something vicious to say to her sister and just about anyone else around.
Emma Peel, in tight leather, karate-chopped men and always had the upper hand on Steed.
These were the women who raised me while my mom was at work. Me and my friends couldn’t swear by oath because it was against our religion, so we would say, “Do you swear to Catwoman?” If you lied on that one, we all knew you would go straight to hell.
In the ’70s, suddenly schools couldn’t make us cut our hair, pray or even insist we pledge allegiance to the flag. Just when we wanted Catwoman for a teacher, gone was the enticing restraint of the ’50s. All that work from the women’s libbers paid off, too; they couldn’t stop us from joining the army, cutting our hair, wearing pants and completely desexing ourselves.
We could do anything we wanted, and boy were we bored.
Our parents were all divorced and “finding themselves,” repeating Stuart Smalley-type self-affirmation mantras in the bathroom mirror, or smoking a joint; so they were too busy to give us any discipline.
In rebellion, my classmates starting getting born-again all over the place, finding the rigid moral confines of the fundamentalist church comforting.
In comparison, punk rock and S&M were sane alternatives. Not only did S&M give us something to bounce off of for once, but it made sex illicit, exciting, unnatural, and deviant. We could finally get that disapproving look from our society that we had waited for all those years.
The end of S&M as we know it: Now, of course, it is not so risque to be a dominitrix. it’s no longer considered deviant. In fact they even have advocacy groups and support groups.
In the ’80s, as a sociology student, I watched a “sexual deviancy” film. There was the prostitute, the nymphomaniac, the transsexual etc., and of course, the dominatrix. She was pitifully tame. Nowadays they would have to take her out of the film.
And the ’70s have come back into style–not only clothes-wise, but suddenly the 20-year-olds stopped wearing makeup and everyone thinks they have ESP or are a witch. N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys are singing some really sugary-sweet stuff that is as barfable as Barry Manilow. Madonna traded in her tight leather corsets for that flowy polyester look.
Sex looks boring again; or at least I wouldn’t find it enticing to do the dirty with the anorexic, bell-bottom-wearing, self-loving, and self-affirming teenyboppers out there. I mean, do Ricky Martin and Matt Damon really look at all dangerous?
I guess I will just have to wait 20 years or so to have any fun.
Or maybe I’ll just ignore that S&M is no longer chic.
That would be SO Catwoman of me!
TOMORROW: A blowhard gets his comeuppance and refuses to admit it.
IN OTHER NEWS: The three U.S. news magazines often share the same cover-story topic, but rarely have Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report all used the exact same cover image, with two of the three using the same banner headline.
LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to the progressive movement; all while cyber-Libertarians and other big-money defenders use the language of “business revolution” to define the moneyed elites as today’s real populists and the critics of corporate rule as meddling reactionaries futilely fighting the inevitable triumph of the market plutocracy.
Meanwhile, a few lefty commentators, including Thomas Frank and Michael Moore, have peppered their critiques of the new corporate order with nostalgic references to the old corporate order, in which big industrial empires forged compromises with strong unions, workers got a predictable living wage with health and retirement benefits, and close-knit communities formed lasting bonds and took care of their members.
That’s a rather rosy depiction of the old America. Too rosy, as even Frank and Moore would admit.
It embodied the seeming end of history after WWII, the arrival of the American Century. Heavy industry was supposedly here to stay, as were the associated principles of permanence (or stuckness).
Industrial unionism rose as a counterforce to heavy industry, demanding that workers and their families get their fair shake from the setup.
The premise of AFL-CIO style unionism, especially in the Red-scare ’50s when the unions purged all lefty radicalism from their ideology, was that (1) big manufacturing companies with big permanent factory installations were the source of all wealth, and (2) the best way for individuals to make it under such a system was to group together to demand strong wages and job security.
It was a reactive ideology, one that acknowledged the centrality of the company.
But now the setup of big business is changing. The tactics for getting workers and their families a fair shake from it have to change too.
One possible, partial answer: Brand pressure.
Most every company (even Microsoft!) depends on good PR, on a healthy public image. Coffeehouse chains are discovering the image value of having organic beans and beans made under “fair trade” working conditions. Automakers, oil companies, and timber companies have long touted “green” business practices (or at least practices that can be passed off as “green” in fancy ads).
Eventually, shoe and garment companies will rediscover that the goodwill factor of making their stuff in North America, under decent wages and conditions, can be worth more than any sweatshop-borne cost savings.
Or, such a goodwill factor could be worth that much, if the anti-sweatshop activists keep working to make it so.
Another possible, partial answer: Re-redefining some of those “New Economy” buzzwords.
So the Wired Libertarians and the post-Gingrich Republicans and the Clinton Democrats and the business-motivation authors say people have to stop relying on big institutions and start fending for themselves?
OK, we will.
We’ll network (organize).
We’ll stop expecting to be taken care of by bureaucracies (corporations).
We’ll become more self-reliant (seize the means of production; albeit nonviolently).
We’ll dare to challenge the authority of old, tired institutions (the Fortune 500 and their media advocates).
TOMORROW: A guest columnist tries to not get arrested in the Son of WTO march.
YESTERDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to a progressive movement that had been stuck in self-defeatism for years and years.
Activists, authors, and even some political candidates are taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy from those who’d define “revolution” strictly to mean “revolutions in business.”
And it’s about time, as Baffler editor Tom Frank notes in his new book One Market Under God.
Frank details, in 360 brisk pages, a decade or more’s worth of blathering agitprop about the “business revolution,” how it’s supposedly good for everybody. He contrasts this with pithy asides about how the market-as-everything ideology has helped ruin journalism, academia, downtowns, rust-belt communities, third-world conditions, etc.; how it’s brought downsizings and layoffs and sweatshops, all in the name of the inevitable, unerrant tide of globalization and privatization.
If there’s a complaint to be made about Frank’s work, it’s that he spends too much time sneering at his subjects and too little time explaining why we should share his ire. Long passages in One Market Under God read too much like the work of lefty “media analyst” Norman Solomon, who’s notorious for shouting that the news media aren’t telling us what’s really going on, but who seldom gets around to telling us what he thinks the real story is.
I want to hear from Frank what he directly believes democracy and liberation are, instead of keeping this ideas in the shadows, delineated only in the context of his criticisms of corporate culture.
Besides, one of Frank’s central theses-that corporate idealogues are using Orwellesque “newspeak” techniques to redefine the language of liberation so that any real challenge to the plutocracy of Global Business is literally unthinkable-is thankfully yet to be proven successful. If anything, the proponents of real empowerment are getting more vocal in exposing the contradictory bombast of the “New Economy” hypesters.
(Why, the latest Utne Reader even has a piece on “Five Signs of the Coming Revolution.” And the notoriously centrist Utne isn’t talking about a mere reorganization within the corporate ruling class, but an on-all-fronts challenge by those of us who believe business isn’t the end-all and be-all of everything (even if we disagree on almost everything else).
Still, there’s much to admire about Frank’s latest weighty tome.
He’s got a lot to say, and even more to hilariously quote, about the truly dumb ideas and convoluted doublespeak being bandied about by op-ed pundits, techno-Libertarians, and Republican think-tankers to justify the new corporate order.
Just as long as you remember that the old corporate order wasn’t all that hot either.
MEANWHILE: The WTO-protest anniversary began according to script. Hundreds of “get-tough” cops waited impatiently for some anarchist ass to kick. A few thousand old hippies and neo-radicals gathered in four locations to speak out about the usual boho-lefty topics (Mumia, Peltier, pot, veganism, animal rights, and just a little bit about global trade issues).
By midafternoon, they’d gathered in the little Westlake park and the two adjacent blocks of street. They had a great time intimidating the cops, grinning before the TV cameras, dancing and partying. (There was even a return appearance by the duct-tape-pastied women from last year’s protests.)
But by evening, enough of the crowd had withered away for the forces of order to feel assertive. The remaining, outnumbered, bohos were hounded and chased up Fourth Avenue (safely outside the Xmas retail zone). By Fourth and Blanchard, right in front of Sit & Spin, another phalanx of cops gathered on the other end of the block, preventing the remaining protesters from obeying the bullhorned orders to disperse. Paddy-wagon buses were moved in, nonviolent mass arrests were made. It played out like a touring-show version of the original–the same actions played out by a smaller cast on a smaller stage with more practiced choreography and far less spontenaity.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The Seattle Scab Times and Scab P-I have grown in their second strike-bound weeks to 18 pages of non-ad space, up from 15 at the strike’s start. As they gain bulk but not their experienced staffers, they’re becoming even duller than their pre-strike versions.
The Seattle Union Record, however, is getting slicker and livelier. It’s now out three times a week, at regular free-newspaper dropoff sites. (And it was much more sympathetic to WTO and WTO-anniversary protesters than the big papers ever were.)
MONDAY: The possibly-misplaced nostalgia for industrial unionism.
Book Review Confidential
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE BOOK REVIEWS?
I used to think the whole point of this racket was to force publishers to pay attention to my own books. Editorial screeners, however, have little clout or they simply resent query letters that lead with a whiff of a tit-for-tat proposal for them to accept me as a potential supplier of literary merchandise in exchange for my support of their products.
The reviewer gig does offer some perks, like free samples; and it’s usually more lucrative to write about books than to write the damn things, even when you factor in all of the time it takes to read them.
Apart from industrial considerations such as personal career advancement, there’s an altruistic side to book reviewing. This ranges from the fairly innocent (I love books, therefore I write about them to spread my enthusiasm to others) to the reasonably corrupt (I love books that really matter–not the crap the NY Times thinks is important–so I aim to reward fiction that advances the art of fiction). And then, some people just like to criticize things (I love to write about what I hate).
Although most book reviews are written by freelancers for little or no money, newspapers and magazines often have staffers whose job is to review books. Beyond that, there are plenty of commercial opportunities for freelancers, even if you don’t specialize in quickies of under 200 pages for cash cows who pay more than $200 for a short review. By indulging in some tricks of the trade (reading a few pages and then cobbling together your review from quotes in the press pack), anyone can turn a buck on the book beat.
After all, the stylebook standards of reviews are child’s play. Basically, you dress up a plot summary with some toney opinionating (just go easy on the poststructuralist lingo), dangle a reservation or two, and close with a pick or a pan.
While some dream of being critics, nobody sets out to become a book reviewer. Primarily, reviewers are writers, editors, or professors who have or have had other lit projects more ambitious than review work.
Not that this means the reviews are slipshod knock-offs. The pros I know consider (reread, if necessary) an author’s previous books as well as similar books by others, seldom review books by friends or enemies, and skip rather than slam books by unknown writers.
Editors have some influence over quality, but nothing drives reviewers as effectively as the fear of hanging their asses out in public. You can toil in painstaking obscurity, cranking out reliable and incisive reviews, but if you compare Frankenstein to Gertrude Stein, you’re bound to be immortalized in a blurb.
Although experienced reviewers are better at covering their asses than beginners are, even the best ones can unwittingly look like fools. Some play the reference game. To put something in critical context, they nick so many literary luminaries that reading their reviews is like watching an arcade superstar play pinball. Others succumb to the towline effect (or its inverse, the backlash effect), where the value of the book is directly (or, inversely) proportional to the effort it took them to read and review it. Often the towline effect has a cart-pulling-the-horse dynamic (see the NY Review of Books): If the review is five times longer than it needs to be, the book must be important.
Reviewers new to the game may threaten to get personal, as they star-fuck their favorites and lay waste to their foes. This gets old fast, but generally, I think it’s good for a reviewer to have a personal stake in the book under review. Who better than an entomologist to review a book about entomology, even if she just wrote a book on the same topic?
Book review assignments may deserve another article or none at all: The topic is either too mysterious or too obvious. Everybody knows that a tiny percentage of published books get reviewed, that big names and bestsellers and commercial houses hog the ink, that tons of worthy books go undiscovered. Many suspect that reviewers despise the proliferation of books, even while the reviewers themselves feed the literary lottery pot with their own hopes to overcome the astronomical odds and win fame.
Few realize, however, that nobody determines what books get reviewed as much as the reviewers do (more through whim and inertia than through any flex of power), and that the most formidable obstacle an author wanting to be reviewed can face is the neglect or incompetence of his own publisher.
And why do people read book reviews?
So they don’t have to read books.
(Doug Nufer is an editor of and contributor to American Book Review. His book reviews have appeared in the Nation, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and currently appear in the Stranger and Rain Taxi. He hated to write book reports in school.)
TOMORROW: What might really be behind the recent frey over movie content.
TWO OR THREE SHORT THINGS TODAY, starting with a defense of a perennial, and perennially maligned, American institution.
YES, I LIKE NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS. The rest of the time, TV and radio commercials are all bright ‘n’ bouncy, overstuffed with that incessant mandatory happiness that’s pervaded American life from employee-motivation courses to theme-park architecture and even many evangelical churches. But during election season, suddenly the tenor of spots changes.
We get Our Man depicted in bright, cheery color, hugging the wife and kids. The Other Guy, meanwhile, gets portrayed in stern black-and-white still mug shots that get shrunk and darted across the screen; while buzzwords get electronically stamped on his face like canceled postage.
And judging from this year’s slander spots, the received ideas behind the buzzwords are ossifying into a formulaic ritual, of little relation to either the candidates or the voters. Republican consultants still expect the populace to get scared out of our wits by the mere mention of “bureaucrats,” “big government,” and especially “liberal,” as if the Reaganisms of 20 years ago were still a novelty instead of a bore. And the corporate Democrats can’t seem to think of anything to smear Republicans with besides the spectre of an anti-choice Supreme Court.
(There’s plenty of other legit complaints to be made against the Repo Men, of course; but the corporate Demos don’t want to bring up issues on which they could themselves be called to account.)
So if smear ads have become a rite engaged in strictly for its own sake, why haven’t other advertisers hopped on the trend? I’m still hoping to hear something like: “Pepsi says they’ve got the most refreshing soft drink. But take a look at the facts….”
‘SWING’ KIDS: Here’s a recommendation for a book you can’t get, at least not very easily.
Canadian author Billie Livingston was in town a month or two back, accompanying a friend of hers who’d gone to participate in a joint reading at the Elliott Bay Book Co. While here, Livingston consigned a few copies of her new novel Going Down Swinging, thus far published only in Canada.
It’s a gorgeous, poignant little tale about a severely alcoholic mom whose second husband and teenage daughter have both abandoned her. Her only solace, besides bottles and pills and lines, is the seven-year-old second daughter she struggles to keep custody of and who loves her dearly, despite mom’s frequent blackouts and occasional hooking. It’s a tale of real family values and survival, mainly set in Vancouver’s threatened-with-gentrification east end.
You should try to get it, at Elliott Bay or thru a Canadian online bookseller such as Chapters.
UPDATE: Thanks for your emailed comments about our forthcoming experiment with fictional alter-ego characters in the online column. The first episode to include some of them will appear in the next week or two, and will be duly identified as fictional, maybe.
UN-SPOOKED: Halloween 2000 turned out about as expected, at least at the events attended by myself and our intrepid team.
There were the usual assortments of robots, furry critters (rabbits, cats, dogs, et al.), politicians, celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Elvis), lumberjacks, devils, ’70s disco dudes, loinclothed adventure heroes, bare-butted samba belles, firefighters, detectives, politicians, superheroes, and at least one woman dressed as a kitschy lamp (gold body paint, gold grass skirt and bra, a shade on her head).
Not seen, at least by our team were any of the characters that would’ve been really scary here and now:
A WTO riot cop.
OTHER WORDS (from Aldous Huxley): “I can sympathize with people’s pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”
TOMORROW: The Clash, Motown, and three generations’ notions of musical empowerment.
Haunted Ground, Part 2
by Guest Columnist Donna Barr
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started to explain how her adopted home of Bremerton, the town across Puget Sound from Seattle, just might be the most surreal town on the planet. Today, she continues.)
A FEW STRAINS of “pedigree” pets–especially Siamese cats, Pekingese and Pomeranian dogs, and pit bulls–are used in a Ponzi-scheme breeding system, to make a little cash.
A “Bremerton purebred”–one of several unoffical local strains, unrecognized by the regulation kennel clubs–a female, is bought, impregnanted, and then her kittens or puppies sold. No attention is paid to inbreeding; an uncle may be bred to a niece, with a hand-job to help ’em along, so long as saleable young are produced.
If they don’t sell, they’re dumped into a Humane Society and Animal Control system already overloaded by the transient naval population, and its habit of leaving its pets behind when it is transferred. The local naval commanders don’t do anything about the problem. Females who aren’t profitable are put down.
Pit bull fighting is common–it’s nothing to see a big uncut male missing an eye, or with a gash that runs half the width of his neck. And I don’t know any vet, even in Bremerton, who sews up wounds with dental floss.
The pit bull puppy-mill in the place across the alley didn’t get broken up until we had an attack. The big stud-dog tore after a little dog that was being walked down the alley, and when the little dog’s owner tried to save him, he got the stud-dog’s teeth in his ribs. The little dog was usually walked by a twelve-year-old boy whose throat was about rib-high. The dog was destroyed and the mill run out by the landlord.
Drug dealers aren’t much of a problem, not even the gangs that come in with the Navy ships. The block-watches are pretty easygoing. So long as a drug dealer doesn’t set up a crack house, or let the kids cut the crack on the front table with the door open, if the dealer doesn’t bring in customers all night, with cars coming and going and running up on the sidewalk, people will leave them alone. And no drive-bys. The block-watches know they’re not targeted, but the problem with druggies is they can’t shoot–and whenever a bullet goes loose, all the kids in the neighborhoods become bullet magnets.
So if the dealers will just go down to the Callow Safeway, where a nice big concrete-pit parking lot has built to contain the bullets, then nobody will bother them. If they show up on the street, the old Detroit trick–the sign that says “Drug Parking, Fifteen Minute Limit”–will make them leave. Or you can sit on their cars and drink beer. They hate that. What is it with drug dealers that makes them think they don’t have a neon-green sign on their forehead that says “Get your smack here”?
Bremerton is only an hour from Seattle, and only an hour from the Olympic Penninsula, so you can go do the city or go camping without a lot of driving.
Getting out of town once in a while is important. You can drive out to the reservation and buy really great fireworks, at places like Ill Eagle and Pyro Mama’s. M-100s and nearly professional-level rockets, the kind that wake up all the dogs in the neighborhood and make Bremerton look like a war-zone, with all the blue smoke floating through the trees. My husband and I always get the impression that the locals sell ’em with the attitude of “Go ahead, you dumb white folks–blow your hands off.” Which we think is pretty funny, after what the U.S. government got away with up here, burning down Old Man house for one.
Once the U.S. officials tried to stop the white folks that were coming off the reservation with fireworks, and they ran into the reservation chiefs and their back-ups, who told them to get the hell away from their customers.
Everybody thought that was pretty funny.
All the plastic car fish-logos are here: Blank Christian, Darwin, Survival, Alien, ‘n Chips, and Gefilte.
Bumper sticker: The Christian Right is Neither.
The black drag queen dresses fine, but he seems to have a hard time finding quality shoes.
TOMORROW: A Halloween roundup, among other short items.
Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 2)
by Guest Columnist Sean Hurley
YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started explaining why he’d first considered moving out of central Seattle; first to Rainier Beach and then to Kenmore. Today, more of this.)
AT THIS SAME TIME, rents were on the ascent at an ear-popping rate. Downtown had begun its conversion to the mold-formed Large American City it has since become, sidewalks cleared of humanity’s unsightly flotsom and jetsom by city hall so that the important people–the shoppers–could feel completely comfortable bringing their wads of freshly minted greenbacks down Pine and Pike, hurling their dollars into franchise clothing and home accessory boutiques by the armload, clogging the arteries of their bodies with another overpriced dinner out and the arteries of the city with yet another overpriced rolling status flag.
The heart of a city, its true essence, cannot, I believe, be found in its polarities. When we look at our environment through the skewing lenses of rage or lust, righteousness or nihilism, that environment becomes no more than a reflection of us. This sort of solopsism is both pathetic and dangerous.
And for me, it was easily remedied: We simply moved.
If I could no longer take a measure of my city’s soulfulness because I could no longer see its subtleties, clearly the thing to do was to get another vantage. This we did.
It worked. South Seattle wasn’t even on maps of town. Finding our way to the furthest reaches of upper Rainier Beach for the first time was thoroughly discombobulating; and for a week after the move I felt a sense of displacement that bordered on the existential.
It was much more of an ordeal to, say, walk to the store than I had experienced for perhaps fifteen years. And I became much more reliant on my automobile than I had ever hoped to be, a reliance I still admit to with great shame.
To be unhappy where you are in the world, geographically or otherwise, often results in a gradual abstraction, a reduction of that world to the very polarities by which it can no longer be truly lived in; the unhappy reality is consumed by a fantasy of other, better, more fulfilling, and satisfying worlds. By contrast, to be comfortable and at peace with the area in which you live, physically or otherwise, is to have made some distinction between the real and the illusory.
In a sense, to have moved outside of that dense urban area to the peripheral neighborhoods and eventually to an even more suburban address, I quickly gained a sincere appreciation for the amenities of both. A simple change of environment, and not only did the new place look good, the old place looked pretty good, as well.
I was born in Seattle, and, while I grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, I have lived in this city since my late adolescence. I’ve always thought that people tended by degrees to live principally in the future or the past, mentally speaking, with a rare few who could be legitimately said to live in the present, in the moment. I myself definitely have my mind on what lies ahead, perhaps sometimes to the point of escapism.
It is perhaps for this reason that I only rarely have any wistfulness for Seattle as I have known it. I find that sort of nostalgia more haunting than comforting. Many of my friends, fellow artists, have left here in the hope that they might find something approaching fame or fortune.
I like to think that what they really got was a bigger world. Although my family and I will not always live in the suburbs, not always live in America even, it seems to me that a suburb can widen the world as well as any other dream.
MONDAY: Why old fake architecture’s better than new fake architecture.
Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 1)
WHEN I TELL PEOPLE where my family and I live, which is in Kenmore, I’ll often get a chuckle or smirk, and some reference to the general grimness of suburban life.
It’s no coincidence that this reaction is more typical to people still living in Seattle’s denser neighborhoods. For all the snideness that urban hipsters have traditionally had for the idea of suburbs, it took a move there for me to understand that, while they are clearly disasterous from an environmental and aesthetic perspective, nothing is all bad.
It took a move there for me to like Seattle again.
If there is an exodus of urban hipster types from the heart of Seattle into the ‘burbs, it begs the question of whether Seattle in fact has a heart at all; it goes without saying that it has no brain, another topic altogether.
If it is true that the creative types that have historically formed the core of Seattle’s artier neighborhoods are being driven out, a fact only an idiot would refute, then perhaps it indicates a few things beyond a flush economy and the cookie cutter tastes that such an economy can manifest. For some, perhaps you really do need to get away from something to appreciate it.
We moved out of the downtown area for some really simple reasons. I had been growing steadily wearier of the area we had been for over four years, one block away from Harborview, the constant wail of sirens rattling the windows of our basement apartment which, while spacious (if oddly laid out—it had earlier in the century been the building maids’ quarters) was perpetually dim.
The other residents of the neighborhood, a term I use very loosely here, were largely poor, ethnic-minority, coping with the inner city realities they lived with in a variety of manners.
Our building was in fact an anomoly, its residents typically youngish, white, professional or arts-related in occupation. The area’s poverty and ethnic diversity were themselves certainly not factors in our growing itchiness to get out. Rather, the hopelessness that can accompany poverty, an almost willful ignorance and a deadeyed lethargy seemed to be infecting my own perception.
I had lived in the city since I was a teenager, and in all that time, it had never seemed so stupid and ugly as it was beginning to seem to me then.
This reached an apex when a drunken man threw a huge piece of concrete through our living room window. I was home alone when it happened, and he just stood there, swaying and muttering about his son, how his son had done it. He swiveled around and lurched off slowly, and a quick phone call to SPD had him in custody within minutes.
I had not at any point been afraid, and had been angry only momentarily, as he had walked by me half a minute after the big smash. I had called 911 and dashed upstairs out to the street, and as he ambled by, he had no idea who I was, no idea what he had just done.
He walked by stinking and wretched, and my heart was broken for me and for him.
He would never get well, and neither would the city.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
NORTHWEST BOOKFEST isn’t really the Great Affirmation of Seattle As Book-Lovers’ Capital of America that its sponsors like to claim.
It’s merely a stop on a North America-wide circuit of consumer-oriented book confabs (as opposed to industry-oriented book confabs, like the annual trade fairs in Chicago and Frankfurt). Some of these confabs are older, bigger, and/or more prestigious than Seattle’s.
But the Seattle show’s organizers can take credit for having started big six years ago and just gotten bigger since. Originally held in a rustic old pier (where the cover image of Loser had been photographed, at one of Nirvana’s last shows), it’s moved, as of last week’s 2000 edition, to Paul Allen’s Stadium Exhibition Center next to Safeco Field.
There, spread over two of the hall’s three huge rooms, what had previously been a boistrous bazaar of literary hucksterism became little more than another exercise in feelgood moderation.
The front hall was only about two-thirds filled with booths and readings stages. A couple more stages, plus some activity areas and another dozen or so sales booths, were even more thinly spread across the cavernous rear hall. The spaciousness prevented the event from generating the kind of critical mass of people, noise, and energy it needs.
Face it: Reading is (and writing especially is) a lone, quiet entertainment. Even audio books are often listened to while one’s stuck alone in a car. A festival celebrating books and reading needs to be a coming-out event, a joyous gathering where people openly share the experiences, ideas, and fantasies they keep to themselves the rest of the year.
My suggestion: Play up the “fest” part of Bookfest. If it’s going to be held in a space built for auto and boat shows, it should adopt some of the showmanship of those events.
Make it a “World of Words Lit-O-Rama.”
I can see it now:
A Vanna White lookalike letter-turning contest, with separate competitions for women, girls, and cross-dressers.
TOMORROW: Here today, gone to Kenmore.
A WHILE BACK, we discussed the idea that the most successful ideas in business were the really simple, direct ones–even the ones that were so simple they were impracticably stupid.
Since then, I’ve found wht might be the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever made–Who Moved My Cheese?
It was written by Spencer Johnson, who’s made a career out of easy-reading material for self-improvers. His most famous was The One-Minute Manager, which launched a fleet of sequels including The One-Minute Father (don’t way too many guys treat fatherhood as a one-minute experience already, or maybe a five-minute experience with Viagra?).
Anyhoo, Who Moved My Cheese? has an extremely simple lesson–change is inevitable; learn to enjoy the adventure.
It teaches this lesson with a very short, very simply-written parable. It’s a story set in a maze, involving two lab mice and two mouse-sized but human-minded “littlepeople.”
As the story opens, our four maze-runners have found a cache of cheese and decide to stop their daily running. They settle down by the cheese station and feast heartily. But as the days go by, the cheese supply keeps getting staler and smaller. One day, it’s all gone.
After some wailing and gnashing of teeth, the two mice set off in search of “New Cheese.” The Littlepeople sit around moaning and asking the titular question, until one of them (named Haw) finally gets mad enough to act.
As he heads back out into the maze, he realizes he always liked his old life of running around for cheese. He has a sequence of epiphanies about the value of change and adapting to new life conditions, and writes each on the maze walls (in the book, they’re printed as full-page slogans).
Haw finally finds the New Cheese, which the mice already are now at. The story ends with Haw hoping the other Littleperson (named “Hem”) will eventually get off his Littleass and get back into the maze.
Johnson wants us to get our heads in gear to the inevitabily of change. Accept that your job’s going to be downsized; your home’s going to be demolished for luxury condos; your current job skills are going to become worthless in four years or less; your neighborhood store’s going to be clobbered by Wal-Mart; your dot-com’s going to go phhhhft. But it’ll all be to your betterment; just as long as you get with it, give up any futile quest for stability, and become a good little manic-conformist corporate warrior.
In Johnson’s worldview it’s the Littlepeople, the ones with the thinking going on, who have all the troubles coping. It’s the mice who instinctually know what to do and set out to do it without all that time-wastin’ cognition. The mice don’t wonder why they’re stuck in a maze; they just seek out their next given-from-on-high cube of cheddar wherever, within the maze’s confines, it may be.
When Johnson asks if you’re a man or a mouse, he hopes you’ll strive to become the latter.
The book’s implied answer to the titular question is that nobody took away any cheese; the maze-runners merely exhausted their allocated supply.
But that answer begs another question, left unasked in Johnson’s tiny book: Who put the cheese, the mice, and the Littlepeople in the maze in the first place?
TOMORROW: A Pokemon guide to the Presidential candidates.
