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.

AUTHOR-CRITIC NEAL GABLER has a different way to describe what some other critics call ironical PoMo entertainments. He calls ’em “simulated entertainment.”

I KNOW UPDATES HAVE BEEN SPARSE this past week. But the print MISC is out now, so we’ll be adding more stuff soon (including pix taken in the past few weeks, and some recent print MISC texts).

…an unexpected tribute to the True North from the once-promising novelist Douglas Coupland. (His comments about the “Canadian character” toward the end are, unremarkably, a lot like what I’ve been saying about the Seattle character.)

…to one of the true greats at the still-new art of web writing, Rodney O. Lain, who passed away over the weekend.

Lain, who at various times wrote for nearly every Macintosh-centric website, quickly established himself as an outspoken, well-written, detector of pomposity and dissecter of corporate hype. In perhaps his most memorable piece, he audaciously compared his status as a black man in a white world to his status as a Mac man in a Windows world.

AS WE APPROACH the 10th anniversary of the filmed-in-Seattle semiclassic Singles, Forbes magazine has placed Seattle right in the smack-dab mediocre middle of its listing of “America’s Best Cities for Singles.”

As you might expect from the magazine’s other priorities, its index included “cost of living” and “economic growth” among its criteria–areas in which the Nor’West is admittedly doing piss-poor these days. But SeaTown also ranked less than stellarly in the more subjectively-defined areas of “culture” and “nightlife,” areas in which I firmly believe we’re more than fully competitive with other cities in our population “weight class.”

But then we come to the most potentially damning part of the piece: “Seattle ‘solo artists’ say the town is still a bit tougher than other places when it comes to dating, as denizens tend to be more reserved than folks in sunnier spots…” As one who’s proud to call himself one of those reserved denizens, I think it a badge of honor that I don’t stoop to screaming dorky pickup lines at women; and I enjoy that my taste in the single ladies tends more toward smarties and less toward silicone.

Yes, Nor’Westers might be a little harder to get to know. But, like so many other advanced disciplines of life, we’re darned well worth it.

OPPONENTS OF MODERN ART have a new pet accusation. Instead of calling it obscene, at least one critic is now saying it’s bad for your mental health.

PRINT MISC WRITER Doug Anderson writes:

“Back from Paris. The usuals are still in place: The food was great, the plumbing old, the light pretty, the buildings grand. The French were–contrary to most I had heard–courteous. Exceptions were a couple dicey encounters with Arab French who–I suppose–took us for Israel=supporting Americanos (we are, but they didn’t bother to find out where we stood before they unloaded their full boorishness on us).

“Touring Louis XIV’s Versailles Palace, my friend and I noticed a painting (circa 1720) of a black servant fluffing the giant sleeves of a princess. I think it’s a bit late in the day for Le Pen to be railing against ‘colored’ immigration. A Metro riding poll shows Paris to be about 60 percent black and Arab.”

More of Anderson’s writings (on other topics) can be found at his site Klang.

TODAY, we start trying to keep an earlier promise by postiing selected articles from past issues of the print MISC. With any hope, it’ll wet your whistle enough to want to subscribe.

In today’s batch, we start with Matt Briggs’s The Age of Uniforms, a memoir of one woman’s work life as seen via clothes.

Then, Matthew Stadler offers a Letter From Astoria, chronicling one of America’s strangest and saddest towns.

We’re also making it easier to find past weblog items from 2002 by listing some of the better (or at least longer) ones by name on an index page.

…new conservative-bashing book Stupid White Men at a big chain bookstore? If you have, let me know. As previously mentioned in this space, HarperCollins (Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house) tried to pull out of its contract to publish the book unless Moore toned down his barbs against George W. After Moore publicized the fracas, HarperCollins backed down and issued the book as scheduled. But you can’t find it (at least in my town) in the chains that heavily depend on promo bucks from the likes of HarperCollins. I’ve heard of record labels burying releases by bands they no longer care to promote; could this be a book-biz equivalent?

Letter From Astoria

from the Winter 2002 print MISC
by Matthew Stadler

ASTORIA, OREGON is a city of 10,000, covering most of a hilly peninsula where the Youngs River meets the Columbia and the two empty into the Pacific. The weather is severe, astonishing, and the city itself is very old, first settled in 1811.

It is a city, not a town. Taxicabs navigate the narrow grid of downtown streets, shadowed by a tall art-deco hotel, office blocks, and brick apartment buildings. There are alleyways, canneries along the waterfront, secret tunnels under ground–all the stuff of literature, which Astoria has in fact become. It was a novel (Washington Irving’s eponymous international best-seller of 1836) 15 years before Seattle was even a single roofless cabin.

I moved here last year, to a huge, derelict house I bought for about two-thirds what my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle had cost.

THE UNIONTOWN Steam Bath, just below the porn shop, opened in 1928 and is still in business. I go there on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays and Saturdays too. On Saturday there’s a beer party in the “men’s public sauna”–a cooler full of Hamm’s, plus foam collars for the beers so the steam doesn’t warm them.

The talk is animated and coarse, sometimes clever: A call to bomb Berkeley for its rumored stance against the American war in Afghanistan is shouted down by bikers who point out that neighboring Oakland is world headquarters for the Hell’s Angels. Partisans take sides. New clearcutting on state forest land is both attacked and applauded. Bush is differentiated from Cheney, Cheney from Ashcroft, and each is allotted subtly calibrated degrees of contempt or admiration.

This steam bath is the kind of civil society I recall from Holland, the last place I lived where people conducted public discourse in the nude. Like Holland, Astoria enjoys a robust libertarianism that seems driven primarily by the capitalist instinct for free exchange, unhindered by morals.

I tell friends Astoria is just like San Francisco, if San Francisco had collapsed after the gold rush. The operative word is collapse.

Astoria has been failing for longer than most of the urban Northwest has existed. It is a comfortable, even attractive, place to fail. No city has done it longer.

IT WAS FOUNDED by a New York fur trader and venture capitalist named John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world at the time (described in his obituary as a “self-invented money-making machine”). Astor financed an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia to build a city that would monopolize the nascent Pacific fur trade. It was America’s first infusion of capital into the region; the rest, as they say, is history.

I like to call the whole Northwest “Greater Astoria,” as a reminder that its operative ecology has been shaped as much by the circulation of capital as by the circulation of water, an assertion made by the detestable name “Cascadia.” “Cascadia” is this region’s last nature poem; I prefer Greater Astoria’s tale of heedless capital and urbanization.

If anything marks us, it is that capital–with all of its hunger for motion and speed–arrived here, free from the burden of institutions that in every other place had slowed its movement: Family, church, even rudimentary humanist values like decency, self-determination or respect, were, in effect, absent here as capital made its giant sucking sound and mobilized every dormant resource (from trees to fish to minerals to men) with impunity.

This unbridled behemoth also brought a rich harvest of delayed, reactionary initiatives: The defense of human rights through organized labor; utopian experiments proposing economies free of money; an abiding ecological sensibility. Greater Astoria’s marriage of great exploitation and reactionary retrenchments is simply what unhindered capital looks like.

Astor failed here (though his name stuck), fur dwindled, and fisheries, canning, and logging rose to replace it. These three collapsed and returned, variously, from the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, while inland vacationers arrived to pursue their seasonal entertainments. Then people like me began to settle, modems in hand.

MIRACULOUSLY–and uniquely among this region’s many failed emporia–Astoria today belongs to no one faction. It is a heterogenous city where no single industry nor social stratum dominates.

Stray tourists endure the stink of fish processing to watch sea lions scarf guts off the pier. Out-of-work loggers swim laps with seniors at the new city pool. An ex-Marine peddles his lefty newspaper (in its 26th year) from the used bookstore where he clerks on Saturdays. Job Corps kids from Tongue Point gather in knots by the movie theater. Idle salmon fishermen strategize over cocktails at the Feed Lot. A German software genius learns carving from a guy in Warrenton who’s now part-time at the mill. In Astoria everyone stays “afloat” because the water level has dropped so low.

Everything’s cheap here, and there’s a lot of it. I live in a towering 100-year-old house built by a riverboat captain on his retirement. I had thought I was very lucky to find it; but it turns out Astoria has hundreds of such houses (and mine is an especially run-down example). The city has never had enough money for urban renewal; so everything stays as it was, most of it in poor repair.

Victorian and craftsman houses dominate, the legacy of 19th century maritime and logging wealth, while downtown there’s a lot of art deco. (A fire wiped out downtown’s center in 1922; the next year it was rebuilt in brick and terra cotta.)

Amidst the older stuff there are surpassing examples of post-WW II design, from a ’60s four-story apartment complex (in a fabulous double-winged “V”) perched near the hill’s crest, to a neatly modulated necklace of woodsy ’70s apartments stair-stepping down the slope, to an astonishingly brutal Soviet-style apartment block straight out of Zagreb, pitched up out of the river on concrete pillars.

The result is a kind of encyclopedic mini-museum of architecture, small enough to wander in. Late at night, while most of the city sleeps and only the restless taxis drift through the empty streets, I go out to observe these treasures (most of which are, for better or worse, for sale).

OH, THERE ARE PROBLEMS. Astoria has no decent wine store. (You should start one.) Local sheriffs nearly killed a tree-sitter by driving him batty with lights and loud music, then cutting all the branches off his tree. Those Job Corps kids hang out at the movie theater because there’s no place else to go except a Christian-only youth center. Live music is generally lousy.

Fishermen can’t make a profit, no matter how big the runs get. Poverty drives a lot of lives here. In Astoria it’s all pretty visible, but at least there’s no higher station toward which to claw.

As a result, the bars are friendly. Denizens of the High Climber Room don’t turn their hickory-shirted backs to book-toting wine-drinkers like me. In Forks, WA, by contrast, I never dared ask about wine. The cocktail slinger at the Voodoo lounge takes food stamps (don’t rat on him), while in Port Townsend bars courting tourists treat local poverty as the mark of the devil (unless it’s that cultivated brand of poverty self-righteously called “voluntary simplicity”). Meanwhile, down on Astoria’s waterfront, hippies dance with fishermen at the Wet Dog.

THERE ARE BATTLES here, but what is there to win?

Astoria’s future pivots on a handful of questions: Will the community college be allowed to move onto a downtown site that could revitalize year-around pedestrian business in the city? Will environmental concerns curtail logging of old growth and other rare forests in the surrounding county? Will the planning board relax long-standing laws against larger chain stores and allow them inside the city limits? Will opposition to the deepening of the Columbia River channel succeed and make Astoria a much busier port by preventing upriver traffic? How will fishermen survive the reductions in bottom fish quotas and populations?

AFTER THE STEAM bath I drink at the Elks Lodge, sitting by the bandstand of an art-deco ballroom looking out on downtown.

Delinquents loiter by the courthouse. Taxis speed past, on their way to pick up drunks in Uniontown, where bars cluster in the shadow of the bridge. Noise from the cannery echoes up the hill, running all night to handle this year’s freakish sardine run, the biggest in 95 years. Container ships taller than downtown slip past the docks and block out the sky.

I can’t think of a better place to spend hard times.