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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…is peripherally involved in the latest fabricated memoir scandal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But let’s keep talking about it.

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

…and you know where this is going to lead. I want to read or hear something, anything, about Norman Mailer the writer.

Not Norman Mailer the celebrity. Not Norman Mailer the drunken macho blowhard. Not Norman Mailer the political “radical” with Neanderthal attitudes about women. Not Norman Mailer the antiwar activist who was quick to elevate cocktail-party disagreements into calls for fistfights. I’ve read more than enough about all those Norman Mailers.

My experiences with Mailer’s writing have been mixed to poor. I cringed at his Marilyn Monroe tribute book. Tough Guys Don’t Dance was a slop of a book that became a bigger slop of a movie.

Then there was the 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which I first read sometime in 1982 or 1983. Yes, it accurately predicted the Sixties culture wars. But it was also a piece of self-promoting nonsense. But then again, I already believed, apparently unlike Mailer, that black culture had purposes other than giving white hipsters something to copy, and that women had purposes other than facilitating male orgasms.

So: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recommend something Mailer wrote that justifies his hype. I’m afraid you’ll have to do it via email again; I’ve still not figured out how to turn comment threads on.

Did Raymond Carver really write Raymond Carver’s short stories? Or should they more properly be considered editor Gordon Lish’s prose based on Carver’s storylines? Carver’s widow would like us all to see his real stuff, un-Lish-ized.

• The exodus of established stars from the decaying music industry continues, with Madonna signing a concert management company, not a record company, to distribute her next few CDs. Other artists, including space-heater heir Trent Reznor, are going further and selling direct to fans.
• That quintessential “legacy media” company, NBC, is buying up Oxygen (one of the last big non-conglomerate-owned cable channels) and vacating its historic studios in Beautiful Downtown Burbank. Under California laws intended to preserve media-biz jobs, the network has to offer the lot to a buyer that’ll keep it operating.The Tonight Show will move to the Universal Pictures lot, which NBC also now owns; the NBC News bureau, the KNBC-TV local news, and Access Hollywood will move to a new building nearby. The other network show still made on the Burbank lot, Days of Our Lives, is rumored to be ending in ’09.

  But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.

• Get ready for more Letterman “Network Time Killer” segments: The movie and TV industries are bracing for the first writers’ strike since 1988. The difference this time: The networks and cable channels might let a strike go on for a while, running a bunch of cheap reality shows instead of scripted fare.
• Our pal Sherman Alexie is in the running for a National Book Award. It’s for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a “young adult” novel about a Spokane Reservation teen who finds himself an outsider everywhere he goes.It’s also got fabulous illustrations by another of our ol’ pals, the one-n’-only Ellen Forney. It couldn’t have happened to two nicer folks.
• Looking for an industry even more moribund than recorded music? Try mass-market beer. Miller has already merged with South African Breweries; Coors has merged with Molson. Now both seek to merge their respective U.S. operations.The deal would turn the once competitive domestic swill market into a duopoly between “MillerCoors” and Anheuser-Busch. (The Pabst brands are now owned by a marketing company that contracts out its production to Miller.)

  I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.

  Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”

• As the world gets hotter, it also gets humid-er.
• Ann Coulter inanity of the day: Now sez she wishes all Jews to “perfect” themselves, by becoming Christians.
• Office whoopee? Go right ahead, say many companies. Just don’t try to cover up the aroma by burning microwave popcorn in the break room.
• While other commentators wax nostalgic about the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, P-I business columnist Bill Virgin gushes undeserved laurels on the semicentennial of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (that other favorite novel of male virgins everywhere).Let’s compare n’ contrast, shall we?

  Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.

  But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.

  Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.

  Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.

  Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.

  But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.

  (P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)

…just how “progressive” a left-of-center web site can be if said site is turning a profit but not paying its writers.

On one level, David Lynch’s brief memoir/manifesto Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is, like most of Lynch’s body of work, bewildering.

On another level, like most of Lynch’s body of work, it makes perfect sense by its own individualistic sense of logic.

The bewildering part is when Lynch frequently segues into endorsement spots for Transcendental Meditation. He’s practiced it for almost as long as he’s practiced filmmaking, and now has his own “David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.”

I’m sure Lynch has sincerely benefitted from his TM practice. It’s a minor shame he takes the movement’s PR lines at face value. For some reason I’d expected more healthy skepticism from him. But instead he waxes enthusiastic about the “unified field” and a thousand meditators in one town miraculously reducing the crime rate.

I’m sure Lynch’s daily meditation habit helps to ground his mind, refresh his creative juices, and enable him to withstand the massive stresses that face any Hollywood player.

I’m not convinced the TM system is, by itself, any more effective than any other meditative regime. However, any human discipline can be more effectively executed with instruction and guidance, such as that provided by the TM organization’s professional trainers.

Catching the Big Fish is beautifully designed, and beautifully written. Just as in his screenplays, which seldom let dialogue get in the way of imagery, his prose is short and sweet and directly propels the narrative line.

Lynch talks only a little about his films, explaining at one point that he doesn’t want his comments to overshadow the works themselves. (This is in a piece about why he doesn’t like DVD commentary tracks.)

When he does talk about his films, it’s in the form of little vignettes. Befitting his early training as a painter, his stories in the book are all about stringing together a succesison momentary images.

He does talk about his new digital-video feature, Inland Empire, and why he’s turned permanently to shooting on video. Previously famous for painstakingly crafting the perfect shot, now Lynch is a total convert to digital video’s flexibility, its versatility, its economy, and its capability for unlimited retakes and experimentation.

And, as you might expect, he discusses the apparent contradiction between his TM-fueled drive for “bliss” and the dark, often violent content in his works:

“There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and omst films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad….It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.”

And, I LOVE what Lynch says about “world peace” as something we should work for, not dismissively joke about.

On this day, which has predictably and tragically become an annual call to fear, that’s as good a message as any:

“May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease.May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one.

Peace.”

So did that granddaddy of all most-frequently-shoplifted-by-stoners novels, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

I didn’t used to understand what all the Kerouac alterna-celebrity hype was all about. I’d read On the Road and some of his other books; but the rambling odes to young-adult wild oat sowing failed to inspire awe in me.

Sure, he’d lived an adventurous life (until he became a bloated drunken burnout). But I’ve never given a damn about a writer’s gossip life, only about his/her actual writing.

(Hence, I’m not the best person to share your worshipful odes to the lowlife legends of Kesey, Bukowski, Nin, and especially “Hunter.” Talk to me after you’ve read their works.)

Then I attended the Kerouac monologue bio-play at the old Velvet Elvis theater. Soon thereafter, I discovered Kerouac’s Playboy essay, “Origins of the Beat Generation.”

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Kerouac, I learned, was reared in Boston to Quebecois parents.

Kerouac’s beat dichotomy of hipsters vs. squares was really the great Canadian dichotomy of earthy Quebeckers vs. stuffy Ontarians!

With that revelation, I understood. Kerouac’s works were only partly romans a clef about himself and his friends. They were mostly rambling, improvised love songs to the people, places, and things he loved, to the America of hot jazz, R&B (not its teenybopper dilution as rock n’ roll), blue jeans, the long lonesome highway, drinkin’, whorin’, and all your educated-straight-white-male pleasures.

All this is a prelude to David Mills’s Guardian essay contrasting Kerouac, Wm. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.

Mills’s premise: Like certain later cultural scenes, folks who happened to be in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily make the same stuff.

The gay Ginsberg and the then-closeted gay Burroughs, Mills claims, had a lot more at stake in their personal revolts against Eisenhower/squaresville America.

Burroughs, the most formalistically-minded artiste of the three, was particularly able to hold his philosophical and aesthetic principles as the society around him churned.

But Mills believes Kerouac, the meat-and-potatoes straight guy who’d documented the adventures of his more overtly freaky friends, came to feel left behind, or even betrayed, as the Beat worldview was commercialized into hippie-dippie hedonism. All this led, at least indirectly, to his drink-sodden premature demise in 1969. Ginsberg and Burroughs, meanwhile, remained resolute and active into the 1990s.

As an old college radio new-waver, I heartily preferred Burroughs’s staccato rhythms and imaginative dystopian fantasies.

The latter-day Ginsberg? Those amateur performances of giddy song-poems lauding the allure of underage boys? Not my idea of significant art.

That leaves Kerouac. Many have superficially adored his works. I superficially dismissed it. I’ve since learned to appreciate it, and its evocation of a world that had already passed by the time On the Road came out.

Austin cartoonist Ethan Persoff is posting complete issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s pioneering (founded 1958) magazine of committed satire and radical thought.

Krassner was one of the progenitors of hippie-era ribald masculine humor (despite having been born way back in 1932). Much of the Realist material has been anthologized in book form, but to really “get” it you need to see it in its Persoff-provided original context (32-page newsprint magazines with few pictures and no ads).

One just-posted 1961 issue contains the following unsigned one-liner within its back-page filler column: “Ever wonder if some of the pious souls who talk about exporting democracy really just want to get it the hell out of this country?”