April 12, 2008

If Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo had managed to safely hitchhike from Milan to Lebanon dressed as a bride as part of her conceptual art thing (the Brides on Tour project) thereby demonstrating that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people, this success which would have been novel, would have broken with any kind of expected narrative. If I were to describe to you her project -- two woman in their early thirties dressing up as a brides and hitchhiking across the Baltic states, through Greece, Turkey, and into the Middle East -- you would most likely say, "What are they thinking, they'll be raped and killed and their naked corpse thrown into the wilderness." You'd think she was either naive or had a death wish. Her success in braving this cliche and breaking the expected narrative would not be marked by an event. It would be marked by a lack of an event -- the lack of death -- and it wouldn't have generated any kind of international press coverage. In short, as a conceptual stunt success would have been failure.

Instead someone identified as MK picked up Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo at a gas station outside of Gebze and performed the obligatory roll dictated in the situation. He raped and killed Marineo, removed her wedding dress, and tossed her naked body into the woods. He also took her cell phone and used it to make calls, even if he did switch the SIM. He needed to be caught, I suppose to satisfy the story. Art against barbarism.

And so this it is the cliche and the expected narrative that is newsworthy. The story confirms the trope of the barbaric Middle East against the civilized West. In some ways it is worse than this though because Marineo working as a conceptual artist makes even her impulse to bridge this gap and work to dissolve this trope seem not only naive but dangerously delusional, and this gap I think undermines the entire impulse behind her project. She demonstrated that she not only could she not trust the locals but that she should be very, very afraid of them.

The project was doomed to failure from the beginning.

January 10, 2008

In 1995, my wife and I registered for our first internet service account. We shared the e-mail address that came with the account. Our only point of reference for an address was our postbox. We shared our mail box. We also shared our phone number, and answering machine, the only other point of reference. There was a certain amount of security in that we had only a single point of contact so we could send ourselves e-mail with the confidence that the other person would see it. We could keep on each other's virtual lives. Even the phrase virtual live seemed high flown, theoretical even, thirteen years ago.

Within the year we had both moved our own Web-based e-mail accounts because the addresses would outlast our internet service providers. The old address had the name of the ISP, Earthlink, in it. The old address required a client to access. The old address was my wife's initials and last name and seemed cryptic and in it's lack of relation seemed to provide a collective secrete handle.

Several incidents though drove us to a separate addresses. My wife participated in online bulletin boards, and I would read her correspondence and then someone started to pick a fight with her and so I responded as her. When we ordered presents for one another from Amazon the mail was sent to the collective address. So we moved to separate accounts.

In the meanwhile, though our virtual identities became older and more sophisticated. I had a web site named Seed Cake because of a zine I had published. This alias was useful to me because online an alias name was flexible. I could be anything I wanted using an amorphous handle.

Although I kept up a Web based e-mail, my working address hopped from ISP to ISP. My level of virtualization remained fairly conventional. I never pretended to be a thirteen-year old girl, for instance. Online though this was possible, and even if I didn't try to pass myself as a thirteen-year old girl, the structure of being online with made up names, with photos I'd scanned and maybe doctored a bit in photoshop, with references to web sites I could easily create myself created the sense that my identity was fiction. It was rooted in traditional things such as where I was from or the social class of my parents, and where I went to high-school. I began to keep a blog in the early 2000s but never really adopted the steady stream of self-reflection and scaz that made for a compelling blog. Nor have I been able to keep at it on a daily basis or focus on a single topic, both things that seem to make for successful blogs.

Although there is the possibility of passing yourself off under sometime somewhat fictional personae online, after thirteen years of being online, I can see that there many conservative mechanisms to keep identity in check. Reputation and gossip permeate the web. My usage of online stores, old forum posts, and even my endless search engine behavior leaves a pattern in the web that captures my virtual actions and in many ways this is the essence of my character, at least in Aristotelian terms: character is action. I might say, then, that online identity is shopping, search engine patterns, and old forum and blog posts. Real world networks also have their online echo contestant tying Even the most lightly trafficked blog is discoverable via Google by anyone if you use real names, as I've discovered for my own lightly trafficked blog when I wrote about my experience at WordStock in 2005. And so the Web has these two competing ways of being virtual. On one hand, a person can pretend to be anything, on the other hand, they still cannot escape themselves because they a trail of actions: mistakes, comments, blog, posts, and purchases.

Of course, there remains and probably will always remain a huge gulf between real world networks and virtual networks. Many people I've known over the years have left no detectable trace online. Conversely, people who I might have known hardly at all have huge, vibrant virtual presence.

During this time as I've found myself split into these two modes of being, one in the real world and the other virtual, my wife has had also split. There is her physical presence in our marriage with her undeniable real world physicality such as giving birth to a child, and then there is the shadowy, constructed life of her virtual presence. In the real world, she responds to her real name. She will even respond to, hey you, by throwing something at my head. In the virtual world, she responds to a number of contextual handles. One name belongs to a number of webforums. Another name she came up hastily while exploring an online music community, lecouturier, not realizing the drag gender chaos in using the masculine French article with the feminine lecouturier. When she had realized these things she had left a virtual record and was stuck with the handle.

One of my surprises of my being a father has been the central presence my wife's physicality is to our tiny, nuclear family. I imagine that this is a given to people in traditional mindsets and so they cannot conceive of a family without a female body being central to the family. We could easily have a lovely family if my wife was a man, but as a woman, me as a heterosexual man and my daughter each require our pound of physicality from my wife. I require close physical proximity, like a cat. My daughter breast-fed for three years. For much of this time, she kept within an arms reach of my wife. My daughter depended on her to go to sleep. When she felt tired, she would lie down next to my wife and suck her thumb and twirl her hair with one hand while she listened to my wife breath.

Five years ago she joined a web community, and her presence of which had been closely related to her through her e-mail address became something else. It became a real time echo and began to take on a life of its own. She related to other people online, and they interacted in the virtual space of this web community. She began to talk about people in her immediate social circle, like my coworkers, who occupied this other world and whom she had never met. There was a woman in Fremont and another in Olympia. And they all had names hardly related all to the physical world. In fact, these people who were close enough that we could visit them were really as close at hand in this other place as people in England and New Zealand and Australia.

My wife wanted me to drive her to Fremont to meet her friend Carol. Her husband was a music teacher. They lived in a narrow condo on the side of the hill. I dropped her off and told her to call me at the first sign of trouble. But really from angle I was dropping my wife on a street corner no different from other street corners in the city. My wife pointed to a house. A shadow behind some drapes dropped the drapes. A car behind me honked, and I kept on my way and when I returned hours later, my wife was on the patio with the woman, a pleasant looking stranger with her dark brown hair in a bun. I picked up my wife and she was perplexed by the physical manifestation of her friend because in physical space, in the verbal space they occupied she didn't interact as well as did in virtual space.

For a time, my wife used photos of herself that were current and came more or less directly from the digital camera. They were at first six months old. She had pictures of herself when she was working out. And then, she began to use Photoshop to "correct" them.

Around this time, there were fads in the webforum photos. Everyone used their feet for their journal icons. Everyone did them in costume.

On her music forum, my wife made friends with some graphic designers. One of these designers worked on magazine photos doing digital touch up. The art was to add hair and give her a digital nose job so that she would register visually as her herself but at the same time look like an improved image of herself. The disconnect here was that unlike real world plastic surgery, this was a digital job.

Of course, I became agitated by her digitally improved photograph. It didn't look like her, and yet it did and it pointed to the reality of her nonreal, virtual life. She was two people, just as I was two people, virtual and real, and the photo pointed the fact that this other, virtual self was a person who I didn't have a relationship with -- and nor did I really want one with this other person, and yet, and yet, it was still her.

I became aware then after this happened that were surrounded not by photographs of people but illustrations that were created from continuous tone images that mimicked photographs that themselves were machine copies of perceived reality. I wondered if celebrities came with instructions on how to reshape images so that they would be consistent.

I was at the river a couple of days ago and took off my glasses. The sun was coming down against the river, and glinting and it held tiny circles with yellow centers and bright almost white margins like tiny, glowing blocks. When I focuses on it with my glasses on they formed a pattern on the water, combining, and recombining into shapes. This was something "real", and yet it was an illusion like a mirage, something not really there. To really see the river as it was, my eyes required the mediation of my glasses. But that wasn't all. To see the literal river was impossible because the literal river as in motion, but I had no way to really know it was in motion except for my memory of objects, sticks and leaves, moving down the river. There weren't any sticks or leaves or anything from where I sat on the bank. It was a shifting field of colors and flashes. The only reason I knew it was a river was because it made the sound of a river and because I remembered what a river was, and I could imagine what would happen if I put myself in the river.

November 17, 2007

The Future of Books is digital, this seems pretty clear now. The details have yet to be worked out. From Slashdot: "With a seven-page cover story on The Future of Reading, Newsweek confirms all those rumors of Amazon's imminent introduction of an affordable ebook. Kindle, which is named to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge, has the dimensions of a paperback, weighs 10.3 oz., and uses E Ink technology on a 6-inch screen powered by a battery that gets up to 30 hours from a 2-hour charge."

I think dedicated ebook readers are a dead-end, but I also think ebooks are the clearly the future of books.

My initial thoughts about this device:

1. This is a device that is being made by a book lover. Jeff Bezos actually likes books and also understands that he might like books that other people don't like.
   
2. This is a device being made by someone who really understands the business of The Long Tail. Making money with books, like music, involves supporting a transaction-rich infrastructure where people can profitably trade/produce and buy tiny numbers of copies.
   
3. The Kindle itself (what a horrible name for a book reader. How about the Amazon "Pile of Burning Books"?) on first look doesn't exactly inspire tech lust the way an Apple or Sony product does. (The photo currently out there is from the prototype, so maybe the released version will look better.) Who knows whether the Kindle will be the platform?
   

Really, I suspect as integrated handheld products continue to get better -- for instance the much-rumored Mac tablet with a multi-touch interface -- it will be enjoyable to read a book on these devices. It is perfectly functional now to read a book on a PDA, and even enjoyable using Microsoft's Lit Reader software on a Windows Mobile Device. E-Ink itself is a fascinating idea, but standard LCD-style displays have some tricks up their sleeve. LCD screens are beginning to appear on sheets of plastic and, with polycarbon fiber, such freaky things as displays that will be able to change their shape depending on the interface are possible. The touch screen interface has experienced its first major transition, Apple's use of multitouch. Imagine, then, a screen that can change shape depending on the information it would like to display, and the audio/physical input of the user? Books, like songs, will continue to exist in the digital environment, but it is difficult for me to see them justifying a stand-alone device. The latest iPod (the iPod touch) plays music, videos, photos, and allows a user to surf. The old iPod is clearly marked now as "an iPod classic" (last year's idea.) Even a crummy paperback has a physical presence. The entire object is dedicated to one book. As soon as you open the idea to the kind of metaphors enabled by a digital device, it seems inefficient to have an entire device dedicated to a single metaphor.

November 8, 2007

Libraries nationwide are grappling with a massive increase in the number of patron's requests of media (including books, of course) held in their collections. An An article in the Seattle Times recently had several interesting facts:

• The number of holds have tripled between 1998 and 2006.
  
  The Seattle Public Library is having a popularity problem. Thanks to its "Libraries for All" building expansion program and an unprecedented increase in use of the library's online catalog, the number of holds -- reservations -- placed on books and other library materials has tripled, from about 1.01 million in 1998, when voters approved "Libraries for All," to 3.35 million in 2006.
  
  
• Users are using the catalog to find and place holds on books.
  
  Libraries nationwide, including the King County system, are grappling with the fact that a computer-savvy society has learned to tap into library collections online.
  
  

What is weird about this is that there has been a huge amount of hand-wringing lately about the decline of media as a result of the spread of digital media such as video games, YouTube, and the ease of producing over consuming media for digital media such as web communities, YouTube, did I mention YouTube? Studies throw about such sobering statics as twenty-five percent of adults have not read a book, any kind of book, in the last year.

So then who is putting holds (and presumably reading or at least paging through the books and returning them which I think still counts in the fine art of data gathering) all of these books?

I think it is probably useful to look at what is happening in the music industry which has made several successful transitions to digital production and delivery that books have yet to cross. Amazon.com was probably the first successful model for the presentation of a “limitless� catalog and this elimination of the brick and mortar bookstore with its limited shelf space and sometimes snooty, underpaid retail book clerks and this itself has a massive effect on books that appeal to a small number of people and used be hard to find (and now is just a Google, Amazon, ALibris search away). So books were there first. But CDs quickly benefits from this same infrastructure.

And then, people discovered that they could convert their existing CDs into digital files that anyone could download. In 1999 or thereabouts, Napster extended the CD catalog to include the oddities, rarities, and life recording that only a small number of people cared passionately about. Jerry Garcia said, “Our audience is like people who like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.� And with the conversions of old bootlegs, demos, and live recording to MP3 Napster began to deliver the thing that fanboys care the most about: the obscure shit

Unlike a CD, an MP3 track is cheap, easy to store, and contains rich data-handles so that it can be discovered by fanboys trolling for obscurities.

Music delivery has matured rapidly because of the pressure of pirated music. Napster was always a crapshoot in terms of file quality, file completeness, or even if you were getting what you thought you'd downloaded. A common trick was to make a homemade file or spoof and then label it is a popular track. iTunes and other commercial services have provided service to music downloads. You aren't just paying for the music, but also a rapid download, quality in the bit depth and conversion, and also rich meta-data associated with the file. If you have ever converted your CDs en masse to MP3s, you know how painful it can be to go through hundreds of files making sure they have the right artist name, genre, song art, etc.

I think in terms of music delivery the essential nature of the new industry is there. Music is produced on computers, distributed through servers where it is cataloged and made accessible to the web, loaded into computers, and then reloaded onto hand held devices. This supply chain is as accessible and simple as someone recording a song on their laptop and mailing to their friend. Or it can be as complicated as iTunes which has “inserted value� into several of these steps: professionally produced music, professionally cataloged, stored, and curated music on the iTunes store, a fully supported music storage application for your computer, and handheld players.

Notice none of these steps require music stores with physical space, A&R, record labels. The problem here is one of scale: how to find the “rare� stuff? How to store the massive amount of obscure shit on your computer? In a sense, it isn't do I listen to music? But, how do I manage the massive amount of music I now listen to?

And this precisely is what has happened in the music world. Music sales are horrible. The mass market for music is horrible. Less people as a percent of the population buy music. But, conversely music consumers listen to more music and buy more music than was conceivable ten years. My scale of my music library is understandable not in number of tacks, but in days of music. And soon this will be weeks of music. I would have to spend three weeks listening to my music nonstop before I repeated a track.

Is this sensible? This seems like over consumption to me. Maybe I should stop buying new music?

No way. That would be like stop buying books because I haven't read all the ones I already own.

I suspect that books are very similar to music. I have no idea if digital books will become viable: I hope they do because that will make it easier for me to make and consume books. But, these figures of library usage point out it hardly matters. Less people may read books, but those that do are getting their hands on a lot of books and they don't want bestsellers. They want the obscure shit.

July 18, 2007

Before the list [of the dead] was released, Lamir Buzzanelli said his 41-year-old son, Claudemir, an engineer, had called him from Porto Alegre to say he was in the plane and about to return from a business trip.

"My hopes are not too high because I've been calling him on his cell phone, and all I get is his voice mail," Buzzanelli said, his eyes tearing up. -- The Associated Press

Presence (or lack of presence) is no longer indicated by life in the physical body (or lack of life in the physical body) but rather the ability of the network to respond to a query. I am here because if you e-mail me I will respond. If I do not respond--

June 26, 2007

Beginning as of, well, now, more people are writers than readers. Some 80% of Americans report they would like to write a novel someday, and according to the NEA report Reading at Risk less than 50% of American have read any kind of book within the last year. When you consider the ubiquity of written communication what with e-mail and texting and even blogging, more people are producing text than reading text.

This is often a reason to sound the alarm. People want to be published, They want to be read, but they don't want to read. They don't care about books! I'm not being alarmist. I'm being a realist. Nine out of ten books sell fewer than a hundred copies. So what if more people write novels than read novels? At least they are still thinking about novels. 30% of Americans know what a novel looks like well enough to want to have written one even if they haven't opened one in who knows how many years.

This turns the old economy of author-audience on its head. In the future (er rather now) readers will have an audience of writers. If a person is an avid reader (a categorization of the NEA report) then you read more than 50 books a year. Say it takes two years to write a book. Then an avid reader supports a hundred writers. If you've taken all of that time to write, edit your book, and publish it through lulu.com, then why not take the trouble and pay an avid reader to read your book?

Supply and demand dictates it. Avid readers will be supported doing what is that they love, which is read. And writers who demand an audience will get what the love, someone who even if they don't appreciate their published book will have read it and will, at the very least, appreciate the paycheck.

June 21, 2007

Corrina Wycoff posted an interesting essay about her experience as a single mother and writer. Wycoff wasn't born into a middle-class family, and she still managed to begin writing, attended college, grad school, and finally started teaching around Seattle and publishing work, including this year's O Street. She also raised her son. She notes as a teacher at a community college, she encounters single mothers who are managing to make it. At the root of the Wycoff's post is a validation of the American Dream. I've posted one of these stories as well, "The Age of Uniforms", about my mother's jobs in uniform: a waitress. Her escape, too, from bad jobs was through community college.

Wycoff seems to suggest in this post that because the story of single motherhood often conform to The American Dream trope, that there is an audience and markets for them. She writes, "triumphant underdog stories are always popular." She then tentatively supports the idea that this myth has some reality in it. Wycoff's own story for instance fits The American Dream, and she sees the possibility in a number of female students at her school.

But, these stories popularity I think are mainly for other qualities than the fact their characters are "underdogs." Underdog status signifies desperate straights, a call to action, a motive for these characters to act. In many cases, it could be substituted for another motive. Underdog stories are about individualism, where a person -- single mom or no -- is able to make moral choices and can gain traction. These characters live in a world where action=result. In talking to an otherwise, liberal friend about West Baltimore and its generations of poverty, the solution seemed simple. The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns has a great essay about the collapse of Baltimore's economy and the slide of a formally vital neighborhood into decades of poverty. "If I lived there," my friend said, "I would just walk the hell out." The Corner includes several characters who try this very thing. They take a bus out to an affluent suburban mall. They might as well be visiting Paris.

O Street by Corrina Wycoff is not committed to The American Dream in any way. Her book belongs I think to a tradition of books about urban poverty and how people carry it with them even after they manage to live straight lives. Maybe the the story begins with the muck-raking journalism of How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis. In this book, there is a chapter, "The Problem of the Children," and she writes, "Home, the greatest factor of all in the training of the young, means nothing to him but a pigeon-hole scarcely of the elevating kind." A much later example of this subject is Jerome Gold's book Prisoners:

One time my stepfather told me to go into the bedroom and get his gun. He said he was going to shoot my mother. We were at the dinner table, all of us--him and my mother and my sister and me. I didn't say anything, I just didn't do it. So he told me again and this time I told him no. Then he went into the bedrom and came out with the gun, and I got up and hit him in the face. He pistol-whipped me with that gun. It was the worst beating I ever took. But, he didn't shoot my mother.

This story echoes many of the stories (not in subject exactly) the stories in O Street or The Corner or a long list of books that address lives at the edge of poverty, such as Well by Matthew McIntosh, After Nirvana by Lee Williams, DrugStore Cowboy by James Fogle (for some Pacific Northwest Lit examples). The American Dream in these stories becomes a kind of sick joke if it is even present. In the story from Prisoners the idea of individual determinism is nearly parodied--the boy takes action but he is in a situation in which all of the available choices are bad choices. There is an audience for books like this, but it is not a wide or deep audience; I don't think. Americans cannot help but separate "character" from their circumstance. To think that people are a result of their circumstance or that an organization creates a person, context is everything is, well, unamerican. After all, Lyndee England is one the one who is smiling in the photographs. Armies don't torture prisoners, people do. Poverty doesn't make people poor, laziness does. Any fiction that overturns this logic would seem irrational to the American public.

June 10, 2007

When I returned from Basic Training, I started looking for classes to take in writing. I was just past the registration date for the University of Washington Experimental College where there was a short story class taught by Richard Berman, M.F.A. The title at the end of his name, tacked on like P.H.D. seemed to indicate a professional status as a writer, certification by a board that confirmed his abilities as a genuine writer, although I was unsure what it meant. I had missed the registration date, but I called the school in the off chance there might still be a spot. They took my name, and I thought, that was it, I had missed my chance this quarter to study writing. I viewed this as a major setback because I only had nine months before I went to Whitman College in Walla Walla and I intended to have a novel finished before I went. Every week counted. I had to prove to myself that I could become a writer. I had a schedule to follow. As I understood it, it was a lot of work to write a novel.

Richard Berman, M.F.A., called me himself. He said if I brought the check directly to him with my application, he could almost certainly find room for me in his workshop. I asked him, how would he evaluate the material?

"I don't understand," he said.

"Don't I have to apply?"

"I can hear that you are a serious writer," he said. This was enough for me. Someone could hear how serious I was.

He gave me his address, and then described his apartment building at the top of the Central District between First Hill and Leschi. I followed his directions imagining what his life would be like as a writer. I imagined the long hours at a desk in his room with the windows open, listening to the ambulances going to First Hill, and then the lingering lunches in a neighborhood deli with a book that perhaps he was reviewing for the newspaper. A triangular park with crumbling cement steps and a single, gigantic maple tree that had left its leaves to rot in heaps on the dying grass sat across from the large yellow brick structure of his apartment building. I imagined the writer Richard Berman stepping out to this park to ponder a particularly difficult passage, smoking maybe, as he mulled over the dialogue -- she said and he said. Seattle from my White Center vantage point seemed to be the place to be if I wanted to be a writer. I felt removed from whatever was going on by the divide of I-5, the West Seattle Bridge, and the Duwamish Valley. There was no way for me to be a part of the writing scene, wherever that was hiding, living so far out. Berman's doorway smelled like fresh urine, still very strong and very ammonia. I prepared to say something -- ask about his work-in-progress or how the work was going today, perhaps; I couldn't decide on the precise phrasing. "How did your work go today?" Or more directly, I decided, "What you working on?" This way if he had, had a bad day I wouldn't put him on the spot. I found his name on the intercom. "Come up," he said without even asking who I was. The door buzzed, and I walked up the musty stairs. A ragged carpet, plush at the margins and worn to the floor in the middle filled the slightly white hallways. The plaster had been nicked and gouged and marked with long black rubber streak from someone moving. The stairs smelled like mold. A gaunt, stubbly and mostly bald man answered the door. He lead me to the main room of his apartment, a living room full of a mish mash of used furniture in good repair, but clearly worn, and vaguely of the arts and craft style. The apartment smelled, too, an odor like cat and incense. None of the windows were open. I saw no evidence of writing. There really weren't even many books. There should have been more books. He sat down and asked if I'd brought the money. I didn't understand what he wanted. I handed him my ten-page writing sample. Then he said, "The tuition check?"

I handed him the check. He sat the manuscript on the coffee table, and glanced over the check to examine the character of my handwriting or more probably I realized then to see if I had filled it out correctly. He folded it up and tucked it into his front shirt pocket. "What are you working on?" he asked me.

This was my question. I hadn't thought about how to answer it.

"I'm writing stories," I said. "I'm learning how to write stories." I was writing stories because I assumed that the writing of successful stories would be good practice for writing successful novels. Most people think this and what did I know arguing with what most people thought? I didn't tell him this though because the one thing I'd picked up from my reading was that to write good stories with the aim of writing good novels would mean you wouldn't write good stories.

"Short stories," he asked me.

"They aren't long," I said.

When I was seventeen years old, I moved into the remodeled basement of my stepfather's house. He had just moved out. Before bed, I would sit down at my Atari ST. this was Atari's attempt to introduce a computer mid-way between the mass-produced children's machines such as the Atari 400 and 800 and the Commodore 64 and the still fairly new and very expensive IBM machines running DOS or the very new Apple Macintosh. Computers were still sold through department stores. The keyboard of my Atari was spongy. The keys clattered as I hen pecked my sentences. I wrote one page of single spaced, blocky, glittering pixilated text on the screen every night, writing until I saw the dotted page break line flash over my line.

I wrote because I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a writer because I liked writing, and there was a kind of deep back of the basement obsession in my mother's family about writers -- not as literature but as an elevating force and weapon that they could use to protect themselves against other people. Everyone in my family was going to be a novelist one day. This idea was flung out as a kind of threat when things were going bad. "Just wait until I put them in my novel." It was a hopeful statement as well because bad things always made good stories. My mother always had a story going, spiral notebooks filled with story ideas and paragraphs. Her brother had studied literature, and I suspect he wrote stories and books and then had stopped. Unlike my mother he didn't talk about it -- and this silence only magnified the seriousness of his work. I was driven by something -- an urge that was biological in origin like a bird that pulls out its feathers or a dog that chews off its skin -- to write. The writing itself was not solely a way expressing myself but also a method of containing and making something tangible out of the uncomfortable realities of my life. I sat in my basement with its new carpet and the odor of the carpet paste, a sweet clay scent, and the smoke of the pumpkin spice I burned. I was writing because I wanted to be a writer. It is common wisdom that a writer should have lived life first; but this is supposing that writing is some kind of communication, that there is some observations a writer is making about the world and they must have enough practical knowledge of the world gained through experience to have enough raw material to make observations about. Flannery O'Conner addresses this, saying that a child of seven has experienced enough of human relation to become a novelist -- but even so -- this entire track is wrong headed because it supposed that a writer's function is to communicate meaning when really a writer's function is to make meaning, and anyone capable of forming sentences is capable of making meaning. This perhaps accounts for the paradox that writers can create profound and knowledgeable work, but this in no way makes the writer profound or knowledgeable. The big figures of modernism, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Virginia Wolf, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald being examples -- these people did not for the most part live admirable or particularly knowledge-filled lives, and yet they have made works of profound knowledge.

I had become fixated with the look of books on shelves in bookstores, the displays of stacked books, the physical presence of books on tables. I was obsessed with the names on the books and the thought my name could be in the stack of books, too, that I would always go to bookstores and place my name in the alphabetic list in the fiction section, that my name mechanically reproduced and the idea that an activity as simple as sitting down at my computer and making words string out on the screen could turn into a book THAT I COULD SELL, this began the practice. But gradually as I wrote and as I began to use the stories as a tool, I felt compelled to write.

There was an addictive thing that happened in my brain. Writers talk about this as a kind of melting away of the difficulty of writing of the physical process of putting words on the page and then it is almost as if the writer transcribes the words. Transcribing the voice that is in your head that is at once your own voice and not your own voice. After this happen a few times, I strove for this effect. The troubling thing about this was that it didn't always happen, but it did on occasion and often enough that part of the reason I wrote was to achieve this state.

I wrote a story a week as I started to write in the basement in the spring of my junior year in high school. My stories were essentially what Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouc's marathon composition of On the Road, "That isn't writing, that's typing." I sat down to write and began to type. After some time I had a dozen or so short texts.

I realized it would take a long time to learn to write, that it was a project that would take me years. I was fortunate to a degree to know as I started that I was a rank amateur, and that I had things to learn. But I had to start if I wanted to pass through those years of study. I liked my stories and reading them now they weren't bad -- considering -- but they were odd, personal stories half informed by the science fiction and fantasy I'd been reading. I read heaps of dripping, suppressed hormonal literature written by Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, and HP Lovecraft. I aspired to be like the writers that interested me in high school literature classes, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and TS Elliott and I also aspired to be like the writes admired in my family -- the standard American Modern icons like Faulkner, Hemingway, but also Dashiel Hammett, SS Van Dine, and Robert McDonald. I aspired for my writing to cause the same kind of puzzlement and absorption after the fact as The Pearl had caused in me when I was in sixth grade.

My model for success as a writer, though, was Stephen King. When I started to write it was all about Stephen King, whose books I could feel superior to because even at seventeen I could tell they weren't well put together and this rough edge quality to his books made it seem like success hinged on other things other than an ability to write. I was very unsure of my ability to write coherently. I felt like I had "some imagination." The years of telling verbal stories had made me certain of my imagination -- but I wanted to write more than I wanted to do anything else that is paint or graphic design or make movies not because I didn't like these things but because I wanted to control the vehicle -- the medium -- that carried my story and writing the words that were also the medium for delivery was the only thing where I could do that. Stephen King's books were at the root of it about the kind of thing I wanted to write about it -- his books showed a pragmatic feel of American culture that was both drawn to the B-grade crassness of hamburger joints and rusting classic cars and the way the counterculture had bled into rural areas like Maine. His rural but not country settings also captured a world that was more familiar to me than the kind of writing being done about places like the Pacific Northwest.

I was terminally cut off from the world working in my basement isolated in suburban Washington. It was in this isolation listening to copies of records I'd bought at the second and third hand record store, Golden Oldies -- Pink Floyd's Ummagumma and the soundtrack to A Clock Work Orange that I really started to work. I wrote a poem a day and worked steadily through a short story a week. Outside the winter began to turn and the tulips came up in the bed outside the front window. I was in the basement so the tulip beds were above my head. Clouds and rain came down on the nearly silent suburbs.

I began to mail my stories out to get published. I mailed my stories to a local fantasy magazine because the Seattle Times had profiled the editor and said she was a rare example of success as a writer because she earned a living from her work. I wanted to be such a writer; so I mailed her my stories. She wrote back a scathing letter. She read my story, she said, because of the title, "Leaves Can Shatter Like Skulls." The letter analyzed me -- rather than the story -- and was a rejection of the fictional personae she invented as the real life author of the story. She said I exhibited deep psychological problems and needed professional help.

My mother drove me to Port Townsend to turn an application to a high school creative writers camp called Centrum. I established for myself a mythology of me in my basement turning out works of unheralded genius or rather the unheralded juvenilia of a future heralded genius. I fancied that I was outside of the literary establishment of my high school, when in reality anyone who wrote anything was a freak. My mother and I pulled into the Ft. Warden campus where the Centrum office were located among the white washed military buildings and the view of white caps on Puget Sound. I clumped up the steps and dropped my envelope into the slot and we drove away. I was accepted into the program.

Centrum lasted a week. During that week I learned that beyond the entertainment driven glossy racks of B. Dalton there were dusty, handmade bookcases in the independent bookstores. My bookstore growing up had been a small bookstore called Heritage Bookstore in the Renton Mall -- run by an older and woman dispirited by the existence of the mall, kept alive by specializing in science fiction and fantasy and military books -- profiles of famous battles, biographies of generals, and guides to weapons. The tiny, poorly lit store did have other kinds of fiction, but it was the back room full of racks of sword sorcery books that where I spent my time and the glass cases full of translucent polyhedron dice, the bubble packs hanging from hooks full of gray, lead-based miniatures.

After Centrum, I began to understand the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle. This large store had been established in the early seventies in a wave of independent bookstores opened as the counter culture began to age. A number of small presses opened as well. Both of these things established the roots of a small press culture that has managed to withstand to varying degrees the gradual consolidation of literary culture into a few global media companies and also the spread of super bookstores (which are modeled on the large community oriented stories like Elliott Bay -- Barnes and Noble itself being an Ann Arbor Store.) In the late eighties, though, before the superstores began to descend on the city, Elliot Bay revealed the chain stores for the magazine racks they really were.

I began to understand how to use this store and find uncommon books written by living people who were not a one-man industry like Stephen King. This kind of successes seemed manageable to me. While I did read a kind of slag in bulk, I was trying to crush the weak ore down to a kind of mineral component. There was just not enough there. The independent bookstores sold a heavier, richer kind of book. It was this recognition in the carefully modulated language of instructors like David Romtvedt and Marilyn Stieblin -- and in trying to track down their work -- that made me aware of literary magazines and small presses. Once aware of these things, when I attended Bumbershoot in Seattle I recognized then what was in the Book Fair.

I assumed every obscure writer such as David Romtvedt and Marilyn Stieblin earned a living from their work and did teaching because they liked to teach. What were they doing here if they had jobs? The practical reality of writing remained unresolved for me. (It still is.) If I wanted to dedicate myself to something, I would have to be able to earn enough money to buy groceries and pay rent. I didn't have the confidence that I would somehow survive. I had to earn money at my vocation. I didn't recognize the evidence displayed by the writers at Centrum. They didn't have two nickels to rub together. They wore ratty, worn clothes not out of some kind of poetic affectation but because they couldn't afford new clothes. They worked jobs at bookstores and at a ranch not because they wanted to keep their hand in the world, but because they had to earn enough money to have a room where they could write. The poverty of bad jobs is more than a lack of money, but a kind of spiritual sink. Once your bosses and customers being to treat you as you are paid -- and they do from day one -- everyone begins to treat you as you are paid.

I asked David Romtvedt about becoming a writer. "How do you do it?" He said, you can go to school. "Or you can just get on with it. You can just write. That's the real way there." I liked the sound of school because then I would have something to tell people. I would have some intermediate goal aside from the vague long-term goal of getting published. It sounded like a short cut.

I regarded the letter from the fantasy magazine as evidence of my progress. When the high school literary magazine didn't publish any of my fiction the year I submitted a bunch of stories, I published my own magazine called Pools of Sky, a rushed and addled thing produced on a borrowed Macintosh from spare manuscripts of people willing to give me what they had then printed and Xeroxed and stapled at my mother's work place in the middle of the night in Everett. Mom drove all of the way to Everett and smuggled me into the office and I produced this and passed out copies to in turn distribute to my co-conspirators.

I continued to write a story or so a week the season before I left for basic training. And then after Basic Training, I resumed writing a story or so a week after, when I was in San Antonio. I found a magazine rack and bought a copy of a Seattle Literary Magazine, Fine Madness. I wrote my story at the desk in the barracks where we studied for our laboratory classes. I drank instant coffee and set my cup down on the cinderblock windowsill. Outside, I could hear the trainees playing volleyball. On Saturdays I typed up my stories on a typewriter on onionskin paper I'd bought from the PX thinking the onionskin was the appropriate paper for a serious writer. Weeks later the ink started to fleck off. I managed to hen peck out my finished stories. I kept at finishing a story a week working toward a portfolio of stories by the time training ended in January.

Over Christmas, I went to the Brentano's bookstore, one of the first chain stores -- aside from the inconsequential B. Dalton's near Westlake -- to appear in Seattle. The chains have essentially eaten themselves, now. A Borders opened across the street and down the block a Barnes and Noble opened. But it was in this bookstore that had yet to fade into stuttering florescent lights, worn carpet, and an oversized magazine rack, that I found a book that served as my key to contemporary literature. I found it on a long shelf of recently released hardbacks. I told the clerk I was looking for a collection of stories, and he handed me the heavy, ornately typeset, mustard yellow hardback of Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver. These stories on top of my Stephen King fetish eventually opened me up to a different way of thinking about writing. Up to this point I had thought of stories as personal things, really, but finally they were for entertainment. A writer performed and diverted his audience just as movies or vaudeville acts did. Raymond Carver's collection was not entertaining. However, his blunt, ham handed and oddly musical sentences managed to convey meaning in a way that I think music conveys meaning and this was along with the fact that his writing was about a world I understood, a rural America without noble outdoorsmen and farmers, and populated by working class drop-outs, dope smokers, waitresses, and bankrupts.

I read the collection straight through twice and then spent the next five years trying to find another writer who would open things up for me as much has this book did for me.

After reading his collection, I strove for a kind of realism that to me had seemed, well boring before. My stories were slowly becoming less gothic. The better sequences in these stories involved mundane moments. I also wrote fantasy about growing up alongside the Snoqualmie River and a series of work and relationship stories about a man named John Clemmons. I didn't really consider the subject of my stories but instead a kind of kind of a compulsion to keep at it. I think I had this idea that I would eventually learn what I needed to do by repeatedly doing it and it would just come to me. When I returned from Texas, I wanted to find other writers in Seattle.

At the Experimental College, I sat in an evening class of short story writers who were much older than me, more literate, and who lacked the fundamentalism that I had about writing. They had a number of reasons to write -- it was something interesting to do or they wanted to publish a book with their name on it or they wanted to teach creative writing. I had descended into a kind of feverish urgency to transform myself through my writing. But I didn't know how. They had all written some stories. I turned in one of my Snoqualmie Valley fantasies called "Maurice Dreams Like Winkle" -- a retelling of Rip Van Winkle -- that had been infected by my nascent understanding of realism. It was about a man who was despondent over a break up who goes into the mountains and falls into a lake. In the lake, he sleeps for thirty years, and he comes back then out of the mountains, thinking he might have passed out or something. He is a little startled by his beard and his long nails, but the day looks the same the trees look the same and he comes down through the land and back into a much changed world. This was the full story. It was written in my awkward run-on prose peppered with cliches, and unrelated clauses growing out of the sentences like polyps. Often sentences collapsed under their own weight into complete incoherence. Richard Berman didn't like my story. Something about the story, in fact, pissed him off. He used the class to pin the story against the wall. We went through each run-on sentence line-by-line. "What does this mean?" He asked. He was particularly angry about the phrase -- a stock romance cliche -- "the smell of sex." The narrator has the small of sex on him, I think I wrote. And Richard Berman asked what this was? I didn't know. I hadn't had sex.

The class was populated with older students many who worked during the day -- but I wondered where they came from and I was struck with their need to jockey for Richard Berman's attention. When he jumped on a story, they began to jump too. The class bean to dismantle my story cliche by cliche. I don't think many of my classmates had read the story. I know I hadn't read many of their stories. Certain writing was good and certain writing was bad and our stories were there as an example of the bad. Our weekly reading of The New Yorker held up the example of the good. The class was bored and confused and hungry for the off chance that their story would merit a praise fest.

Rather than trying to understand what each student was working toward, rather than learning any skills, we acquired certain gestures. We worked on pruning stylistic excess and on maintaining a check of quality so that we could present a uniform, unobjectionable surface to our stories. Berman M.F.A. did what he was trained to do, which was to cut and shape our stories into the kind of quality fiction taught at the University of Washington and published in journals like The Missouri Review and Iowa Review. He picked out some of the clotted hunks of my prose, like "smell of sex," and dropped it with a ring onto the aluminum autopsy tray. He turned it around so that everyone in the class could cringe. My years of reading Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, and Stephen King (with the added insult of Raymond Carver) weren't just going to vanish. I had meant the smell of seamen and the acrid bodily reek of sweat and feces and the smell of whatever skin oil from the food my characters had eaten. Smell of sex was a short hand, stock, and I needed to understand the cost of using a stock phrase, the cost being unspecific. The UW and Iowa Creative Writing Instructors seemed to think that shaming their writers like puppies who had tinkled on the carpet was the way to obedience. Only I wasn't interested in obedience. I was interested in lies that sounded like the truth; in lies so convincing that the truth would no longer matter.

One thing I did learn in my first story class was how horrible most of the students' where. They were really very bad. In a way this was a kind of consolation, but it was also demoralizing because I knew my writing was not only as bad as their writing was, my writing was far worse. Their stories were very similar and predictable. The better-written stories acquiesced to the prose fashion of the moment -- in the early 1990s this was a kind of spare, Ann Beattie realistic writing peppered with a lot of witty observations about life and relationships. I didn't know prose subjected itself to fashion, then. I assumed that writers aspired to timelessness. I assumed they read the classics and strived to place their own writing in The Cannon -- the way lawyers aspired to make partner in a law firm. I didn't have much reading behind me, and so I didn't know for instance that I was turning in these longish, stilted, private obsessive tracts that only resembled a story because they had characters and were printed on eight and a half by eleven paper.

After forty minutes, we went on to the next story and I just sat with my stack of Xeroxes and looked out the chemistry library window at the street lamp through the fir tree boughs. At home in White Center, I reviewed my mostly blank stories that evening and threw them into the dumpster.

At Highline Community College I enrolled in an advanced English class, Creative Writing 101. It was a non-genre class taught by Lonny Kaneko, a Japanese-American writer who was part of the group of writes who rediscovered John Okada's No No Boy in the 1970s, writers who have since attained the kind of fame that is common in the literary world. Among scholars of North American Asian writers and Pacific Northwest writers, they are a famous club. Lonny Kaneko, Sawn Wong, Garret Hongo, Peter Bacho, Frank Chin, but even in the general population of well-read readers they are obscure and among the general population there are completely unknown. I knew about this group of writers because the history of the group retained a kind of homegrown authenticity for Seattle, something generated on the West Coast of interest to writers on the West Coast. I wanted Lonny Kaneko to take my writing seriously and he did, but he also seemed a bit troubled by my writing fundamentalism and about what I was writing; on one hand he clearly acknowledged my obsession which was important to me but on the other hand he seemed suspicious of it or even threatened by it. I think part of this was my role as a student has always been to combat the teacher, take a beating, and complain about my wounds. This kind of confrontational approach didn't sit well with him. I was too easy to demolish, and then demolished what use did I make a student? The other students were in the class because it was a creative writing class and therefore seen as an easier load than literature or a critical composition. But this class required a lot of written work -- work too that was studio based and demonstrated knowledge of specific writing technique. We wrote point-of-view exercises, scripts, scenes, sonnets, everything having form and purpose. He broke down the writing problems, and then concentrated on that problem as part of technique. Where drawing is about transferring observed three-dimensional images to the page and to make an illusion of life and captured the process of observe action, writing was the similar framed transformation of events from their inexplicable flow to a meaningful casual chain where one event really did, indeed, lead explicably to the next.

I hardly engaged in the process of that class. I was fixated on earning the title Writer. I wanted to already be a Writer with a capital W because I had spent so much time writing. I wanted to already know all of this essential material. I learned the material because I wrote and then rewrote each exercise, but I worked through them not so much to learn them but to demonstrate to Lonny Kaneko that I was a Writer.

The campus was full of blooming rhododendrons. Cedar trees lay in clumps next to the expanse of cut grass and totem poles. Spaced out crumbling cinder block classrooms coated with spider webs and moth pills sat across the campus. I sat in the classroom with the door open to the smell of the grass and the sea. This was in the spring. Because I kept rewriting and rewriting my homework, I fell behind on my homework. I dropped the class. I think I told Lonny Kaneko I was going to a "real college" in the fall. I think I told him that this class didn't matter in the scope of things. I said I'd deal with whatever grade I got in the course, but he let me drop anyway. This was a failure. I failed to earn the capital W. I wrote, but I wasn't a Writer. Through all of this I kept writing.

June 6, 2007

Companies or non-profits are founded because they provide a public service (a good) of some kind or another. A writing center supports writers. A cancer research center works to cure cancer. A secure storage company stores valuable records. The enterprise is founded to meet these needs. The need (customers) in a sense own the company in that their demand of the company's services or products dictate the viability of the company.

However, the enterprise is also interested in "owning" itself and so begins to defend its resources from external draws on its resources. When this identification happens for the enterprise, customers are no longer seen as customers but as parasites feeding on the organization's resources. The enterprise begins to starve the parasites (not realizing it is more of a symbiotic-deal) and they start to fall off. Perhaps the enterprise realizes it actually needs the parasites, but from then on the question is no longer about providing service but doing as little as possible for the blood sucking bastards.

Thus, you end up with an off-site secure record facility becoming the place most likely to thoroughly burn and destroy all of your records. In fact if you set out to destroy your valuable documents, there wouldn't be a better place. If you wanted to discourage writers, found a writing center. In fact, if there is anything you want to accomplish, find a way of making money to the opposite thing, and the resulting business will accomplish your ends.

A dialectic is established on the vector of a perceived value: record storage or the support of writers. Similarly, value travels from the customers to the company or back from the company to the customer. In order, to defend itself the enterprise must actively work to tilt the transaction in its favor. Thus, it might cut corners in areas that are normally invisible in the transaction. They might use slave (or intern) labor or not building any kind of tested and effective fire safety system. The end result is that the company ends up inadvertently working against the public good for which it was originally founded.

(I recall now that someone else wrote about this, but I can't recall where I read it.)

May 28, 2007

Wikipedia's inaccuracies put forth by people interested in defaming famous figures is well documented. I still find the communal junk heap of information useful in the same way I find I find a casual search in Google useful: it will tell me what people are thinking and what people have felt strongly enough to post. I have long ago lost any sense that what I'm reading is actually factually accurate, but I do take a random webpage to have some insight into whatever subject I'm trying to read. When I want to find facts, though, I consult ProQuest and hope the newspaper article I pull has been fact checked.

Yesterday I found myself reading the voluminousness and apparently rapidly growing body of knowledge of Star Wars. And realized that Wikipedia easily has more information relating to George Lucas's fantasy life than it does to the entire city of Seattle or the Pacific Northwest. I discovered that Jedi when using lightsabers use eight historical combat styles. Yoda and Darth Maul use Form IV - Ataru which means the Jedi uses the Force to throw around their body. Darth Maul is that face-tattooed guy from the first of the new movies played a marital artist who threw himself around. Yoda flitted around in the same series during sword fights, a random green CGI blob.

I'm enough of a geek that it didn't occur to me that I was reading this on the web's version of the encyclopedia. It didn't occur until I began to the history of the Jedi space craft that these entries put to bed the entire idea of inaccuracies about famous people, the infiltration of the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia with the gnats of buzz marketers, that the entire foundation of a communal repository of fact is flawed since it assumes that fact has any kind of residence inside the communal mind.

Even if we were able to create a digital version of Borge's Library of Babel, I suspect people would spend more of their time consulting this complete set of all human knowledge looking for information on Star Wars or Lost or finding crackpot theological scrolls. Well, maybe not everyone, but I would.

May 23, 2007

I just read a biography of Theodore Roethke -- and toward the beginning of his career there is a bit about how much of an operator Robert Lowell (Roethke's rival, Robert Frost (previous generation) and Roethke were -- they were always writing letters, sending postcards, and working at dazzling influential critics. Roethke had Louis Brogan who pretty much paved the way for him. I'm not that cynical about it -- I mean if Roethke or Frost or Lowell weren't writing very good poetry it wouldn't have gotten them far I suppose. But on the other hand I can't help but think they were also all creatures of this system. Anyway it is a very interesting biography by Allan Seager (a famous Michigan novelist and teacher who has faded into obscurity) called The Glass House.

The book has weird shifts from present tense to past tense within the same paragraphs. It also hops from one point of view to another. The entire book is written from Seager's pov after Roethke's death. He includes then conversations about a particular episode that Seeger had much later after the incident. I kind of like the way it works because it is clearly a reconstructed thing -- you get the sense of the author's affection for Roethke but also the sense that a lot about his subject really bothers him. Roekthke for instance harrassesses women, feeling obligated to have parties, get them drunk, and then paw them. There a couple of funny rebuttals to this behavior. One woman after being unwillingly fondled asks him, "So Ted, there is a bedroom. Let's go." His death is very well handled as well -- he just dies. He is going about his business several pages before the end of the book, typical schemes of working on poetry, trying to get someone to pay him way too much money for his poetry, drinking, and then he jumps in a pool where he has a heart attack and dies. No build up. Just his life drunkenly and manically swerving along until he is dead.

Roethke is often held up as the beginning of Northwest Poetry, or at least, as the moment when Northwest poetry began to become really serious. While Roethke liked the Seattle and the Pacific Northwest and made friends with some locals such as Morris Graves and Ned Rorem, Roethke like the Olmsteads (who desinged the University of Washington campus) was an import. In Roethke's case at least he was an import from the Michigan rather than the full-on East Coast. A couple of years ago I saw Tess Gallagher read at the Universtiy of Washington. I asked her some question under the pretense of disputing Roethke's reputations as "Northwest Poet." Tess Gallagher was kind of flummoxed by question. She said, "How can you say that? He taught here. He taught within these very walls." Some northwest poets were fortunate (suppose, more on that in a minute) to have Roethke as a teacher. Tess Gallagher had him a year or so before he died. Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, and Madeline DeFrees were students of Roethke and probably benefitted from the experience. In so far as regionalism is useful in thinking about a poet's work (I think it is useful but understand the otherside of the coin that it is perhaps not essential) Richard Hugo or Tess Gallagher are Northwest Poets. Roethke isn't.

What would divide them? Roethke for most of his life wrote about a very specific part of his life, the years of his father and uncle's operation of a massive greenhouse in Michigan. The greenhouse sat on a large plot of land and included virgin timber, a massive field, and the greenhouse itsef. Just as Roethke entered high school, his father and uncle both died within a very period of time and the greenhouse was sold. The time and place Roethke is writing in the vast majority of his poems was very short and specific. It was in Saginaw, Michigan. It is probably from 1917 - 1924. I wonder if this isn't the case for a lot of writers? There is a specific time and place that becomes abstracted. Flannery O'Conner said about novelists and experience that a novelist has all of the experience they need by the age of seven. Once Roethke identified his plot of ground in 1948's The Lost Son and Other Poems, he began to really develop the features of his poetry that he is known for: overpowering metrical control along with a combination of the sound and underlying sense of his poetry. In terms of lyric poetry and the kind of poetry that has been taught and honored by the University of Washington, Roethke essentially laid out his own version of poetry as the target, as the goal, as the logical end of poetry.

Roethke only wrote a handful of poems using any reference to the Northwest and by the time he wrote those he was well past the point of learning anything new.

It makes sense to me to tie writers like Roethke down to a location. Although I would argue that "regionalism" (especially in the context of a globalism is more slippery than this.)

Roethke's greenhouse has a physical location. It has an historical reality. Roethke, in this vein, is a Michigan poet. Richard Hugo has two sites where he locates his poems. One is the Duwamish River Valley near Pidgen Hill, at the base of Delridge in West Seattle. The other is a less nailed down location, but are the ghoast towns of the Montana and the West. It may seems kind of simple (and this is part of the argument against regionalism) but simply, if you're going to locate a writer you locate them in this plot of land that they write about.

March 2, 2007

My father recalls visiting his family -- the Rooney’s -- in the 1960s and to buy store bought bread was still an event. I image it was difficult to control homemade bread. It is difficult now when even homemade bread is manufactured with a machine, so that what you are getting isn’t homemade by their standards but instead a freshly made machine made bread.

To make bread then required mixing the dough as carefully as possible, but in a day packed full of other chores, I imagine the care required to make sure the bread didn’t turn out gluttonous was difficult, and then they would bake the bread in an oven -- wood and kindling -- would they be able to keep the temperature modulated. I have read how households like this could keep the oven at a very specific temperature, feeding the fire with calibrated sticks. Even so the bread would come out cooked a little odd, lumpy, still good and bread-like while fresh but as it sat on the counter it would turn hard and stale. This hard stale bread is pretty much what they ate. To buy them Wonder Bread, which is what they bought, was a symbol then of everything this poor, Irish family was not. And getting the stuff like Wonder Break was a wonder.

February 27, 2007

My father knows he came from Maine. But the presence of the State of Maine in his life has only been a mystery. To say a mystery sounds like it is something to be solved. The potential for resolution is part of the pleasure of owning a puzzle. Put together the puzzle is a New England water mill on a day it snows -- the same picture as the one on the box. This isn’t worth anything. You’ve already seen the picture. But apart, it is the potential of being put together. For my father Maine was like this. He sometimes took out the pieces and thought about them, but he never put them together. And this conception of gathering things and storing them in a box was how my father remembered his life. I don’t have a narrative shape to my father’s life -- even the parts I know. For a son, I know a great deal of my father’s life, nearly half of it I share with him. He was nineteen when I was born, and in my earliest memories, he was only twenty-three years old. I hardly remember myself, now, at twenty-three. Even though I have known him as I have known my mother, longer than anyone else in my life, I still don’t understand the shape of my father’s life. I know certain events happened to him, but unlike my mother who constructs the story of her life over and over again, each version layering over the old one, each one controlling some nuance of her present life, my father exists mostly without a story. “I didn’t do it,” he would say. If you were to ask him, “What’s your story?” he’d feel put on the spot. It is simply enough to know he came from somewhere that isn’t Seattle, a somewhere that is Maine. And it is simple enough to know some of the incidents that have happened to him in his life, his drunk driving arrests, a short stint in jail, the death of his brother, Fred, but these are pieces and do not fit into a whole. Maine means certain things to me that they don’t mean to my father. For my father they mean the childhood he can’t remember in the way that West Seattle means the childhood I can’t remember, and to you, these things mean something else entirely. He was a child. Now he is grown. That is my father’s story. To put together the pieces I do know wouldn’t even result in a kind of solution but rather questions in how they relate to each other.

October 28, 2006

Jackson’s Books in Salem where I read in 2002 and where I just read last night from Shoot the Buffalo (after a four drive there/four drive back) is closing at the end of this year. The co-owner of the store, Greg Millard, hid in the back well past the time the reading should have started. I wandered the stacks and tried to recognize anyone (the two or three patrons) who happened to be in the store. I could tell I freaked them out because they left. I was the only one in the store.

This was the first time where the host of a reading actually hid. The day before another prose writer read read. She too, despite the excellence of her book, despite its laudatory reviews in People and Entertainment Weekly, despite a publicist, and the supposed support of a major press (Houghton Mifflin / Mariner) didn’t have any takers for her reading either.

The bookstore sits between a university campus and the Oregon governmental buildings in a pretty 1970s era campus mixing stands of trees, flowing water, and cement planks hanging over the water. When I read in 2002, a very modest crowd associated with the press who published my book Misplaced Alice, StringTown Press, showed up. The book was reviewed in the daily paper, The Statesmen Journal. i didn't except an around the block crowd. But I thougth someone would come, at least one someone. On this trip, there wasn’t anyone in the bookstore.

In 2002, going to Salem seemed worth the trip. Part of this was that I had been to very few bookstores when my first book was released. I was trying to figure things out about how a writer might find people interested in reading their work. Going to bookstores seemed like a logical thing to do. Polly Buckingham who publishes StringTown really loves independent bookstores and for a time come every late summer, she would drive around to all of the bookstores in the Pacific Northwest to distribute her magazine.

During my trips in Oregon for Misplaced Alice, I often visited nearly abandoned stores. I read in a bookstore in Seaside on the Oregon Coast called Tillamook Head. I read with a poet, Karin Temple, and we drove at dusk to the tiny bookstore. When we arrived in the bookstore, the owner and his wife had baked cookies and set up a modest number of chairs that were too many. Aside from Karin, her friend, myself and the owners of the store, there wasn’t anyone. But are small company was someone. We read seeing as how there were cookies and punch. At one point while I was reading a possible customer opened the door and then seeing us reading, closed the door. The owner jumped out of his chair and chased after them to encourage them to come into the store. But they walked as quickly as possible away from the reading.

As odd as it seems, though, readings in bookstores even if hardly anyone or sometimes no one, worked. My books inexplicably sold a modest number. I still don’t know why.

But in Salem this time around at Jackson’s Books I kind of confronted the possibility that the bookstore as a source of literary culture and the point of contact between book culture and the civic life of the city is past it. Jackson’s Books does a number of old-fashioned things I’ll be sad to see go away. They stack new hardcover books for instance in heaps near the front door. Most of them are turned with their spines out. A table had the books not in stacks with the covers up but in rows with the spine up.

Jackson’s Book was one of the central stores in the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA). For many years Greg, who was hiding in the back, was the president. He is currently the Secretary/Treasurer of the PNBA. On the wall above the empty seats, he had framed posters from past Booksellers awards. Tellingly the posters ended in 1998. But from 1992-1998 they contained many titles that I have come to associate not only with the prize, but the vitality in the economy of independent booksellers and their customers to create an audience for books written in and often about the Pacific Northwest, books such as The Brothers K by Robert Duncan won an award in 1992. Other books included, Field Notes by Berry Lopez, The Gift of the Body by Rebecca Brown, and Spirits of the Ordinary by Kathleen Alcala. I think it should be noted that almost all of the books awarded the prize were published by New York presses, with the rare northwest press, Copper Canyon, StoryLine, and the UW Press winning a prize on occassion. Otherwise the names of presses are all of the big, East coast powerhouses, HarperCollins, Doubleday, and Random House. It should not have to be pointed out that these big, East coast powerhouses are not independent at all nor are they Pacific Northwestern at all, but are rather the subsidiaries for the most part of massive international media conglomerates.

It seemed telling to me that Jackson’s Books series of posters ended in 1998, because it as at the end of the 90s that the forces that would undo the vital economic relationship with their readers was already in place. In the mid-1990s, Barnes and Noble had spread throughout the urban and suburban areas of the Pacific Northwest. Borders followed closely behind. Borders, itself, is based on the large independents bookstore in Ann Arbor and as such represents many of the features that one would seek in an independent bookstore. They have coffee. They offer “staff” picks. They offer a wide selection. In fact it is in this matter of selection alongside the deep discounts they offer where an economy of scale has allowed Barnes and Noble (and Borders) to do the same business the independent bookstores do, but better. You can buy your bestsellers for a lot less money. You are also more likely to find the entire current catalog of any of the big, East coast powerhouses. Why go to a dusty independent bookstore that may not have coffee in order to be told, “We can always order it for you?”

Where independent bookstores excelled was at this last step, “we can order it for you.” Unlike someone at a chain store, they would be able to work Books-in-Print and figure out where the book could be found. Small press books are often not distributed well or at all and might require personal contact with the press in order to get the book into the store. A chain will say, “We can’t find the book.” At one time, an independent bookstore would find the book for you.

But this was the state of things around 1998. At that time in order to fight the chains, Book Sense was launched and it has since consolidated independent bookstores into a structure that resembles Barnes and Noble, but has none of the benefits of scale. That is, much of the homogenization found in the chains are now voluntarily found in so called independent bookstores. They have piles of Book Sense catalogs and many of their websites points directly into the book sense database which has replaced Books-in-Print as the search of first resort at many bookstores. Instead of working Books-in-Print, a harried independent bookstore staff will invariably consult Book Sense and declare that they can’t find the title. This is the same response as a chain bookstore. One of the best distributors of poetry for instance, SPD, does not show up in Book Sense’s catalog.

The featured books in a Book Sense store are depressingly similar to the featured books at a Barnes and Noble. It is the point of predictability that a few years ago I was able to predict that The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova would become the Book Sense book of the year as soon as I saw it at my Book Sense affiliate.

This is not to say that Book Sense has killed the indepedence of all bookstores, but rather that I think it has become one of the terms of the survival for many smaller stores. The main kill off independent bookstores in the 1990s has slowed way down and in fact the American Book Sellers association reported a modest increase in business for independents in the last three years, and this in an industry that has seen an overall decrease in business.

Not all independent bookstores follow Book Sense completely lock step. I suspect if you find a bookstore not following Book Sense you will find a bookstore sensibly connected to its patrons. I asked the staff at City Lights in San Francisco about Book Sense and at first they had no idea what I was talking about, and then they said, “oh yeah, that,” and pointed at a faded sticker on the front window. The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle and Powells World of Books in Oregon have no real need for Book Sense and their business shows it. Jackson’s Books had no real need for Book Sense either and yet without exploiting its own qualities it appeared to be no different than Barnes and Noble, except that you paid full price for the bestsellers.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in bookstores this last year. It seems a few bookstores are thriving, such as Village Books in Bellingham or Powells in Portland. These bookstores though subsist on a complex relationship to their communities. They don’t just sell books. And they are in both cases in central, easily accessible portions of the city. But many of the bookstores I’ve visited seem deserted. Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane was empty except for the handful of people who'd come to hear me read and the host who was condenscending to the audience (customers) that did manage to show up. She was quick to point out that a lot of people came to see Chuck Palahniuk read. The room was full for him. I thanked her for pointing that out.

What I suspect has been the real kick in the ass for independent bookstores, though, has been the rise of the Internet as a social network and commercial platform. Everyone points to Amazon. And yeah, Amazon is THE reason. But to my way of thinking it is more pervasive than just Amazon. Greg Millard blamed two things for the death of his bookstore. He said lately the only time he hears about his best customers is when he is reading the obituary. All of his readers are dying off. The other thing he blames is the Internet. He said more than fifty percent of books are not even sold in bookstores. He also said that only nine percent of books sold are sold in independent bookstores. When one considers that the overall profit of books continues to fall, this does not look like a percentage that will grow much without some radical changes.

Because books are not sold in bookstores is why I can find success with a reading in a bookstore even if no one comes. I can find a success reading on a sidewalk because the activity of a reading stirs a variety of channels. In fact I dd just this in Baltimore last year when my alma matter The Writing Seminatrs decided not to provide me a room to read in. All I needed was an address and a time and so I booked myself on the sidewalk at the edge of campus and read. I read recently at a King County Library (also not a bookstore) and sold seven books. That week copies of the book sold from used bookstores, Amazon.com, and Powells. Additional holds appeared on the copies the library owned. My sales ranking which has been in near oblivion climbed back into the living (briefly.) A reading generates events listings, possible reviews, articles, and talk both online and in the real world. However just as sales do not need a bookstore, a reading does not need a bookstore and increasingly need not even been in be in the “real” world but can happen online.

I think these forces cannot help mean the end of bookstores who do not change their business practices. The practices are rooted in the 1930s, with the Great Depression, the rise of dime stores selling popular paperbacks, and the Book of the Month Club. Return policies designed to protect the booksellers have become the great hammer used by chains to crush small businesses. Bookstores can return stock they had not sold rather then being forced to buy it. This allows chains to buy and sell popular books at much greater discounts than smaller stores. But even so, the model of Jackson’s Books is that of a bookstore the only serious retail outlet for books in their town, a city with a defined downtown core, foot traffic from people conducting their business, in a media climate where just about all mass media was printed. We are a far cry from this in 2006.

And yet it is not as grim as it seems, I think. It’s certainly grim for bookstores like Jackson’s Books mired as they are in habit and a blindness to the economy of the written word in their own cities. What kind of regional book award is given to books produced in New York? In a sense the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association has been pissing in its own bed. Random House doesn’t give a damn about Jackson’s Books. -- why add value with an award to their books?

“One thing that is making it more difficult for some PNBA booksellers to survive difficult times is that they are having ‘less and less communication with publishers and their sales reps,’ [executive director] Chambliss said. ‘We're getting less and less attention.’ Several publishers have cut back on representation. ‘They just don't think we're a large part of the market, so it's our job to convince them that we are. We're hoping we can give them good numbers.’ The only positive side of this situation is, Chambliss went on, that ‘authors themselves are more eager than they ever have been because they don't get support from publishers.’ -- Publishers Weekly, March 5, 2003

If bookstores able to redefine themselves in the context of an actual the actual production of books by our community, I believe a sustainable literary culture will be possible. There are already bookstores like this and as they learn how to conduct their business, to me some remarkable things are in the offing. I’m thinking of Reading Frenzy in Portland, Open Books in Seattle, Quimby’s in Chicago, and Atomic Books in Baltimore. I’m sure there are hundreds more. Perhaps the ultimate success story is the amazing Powell’s in Portland.

A bookstore as a physical repository of books is a place. A place, paradoxically, become a valuable commodity in a partially virtual world. Eventually virtual people and audiences want to converge and meet in the flesh. Books themselves I suspect will remain tactile objects, and just as the vinyl record has survived the Eight Track, Cassette Tape, and CD -- the book will survive as a retail/fetish object despite or maybe because of digital media. Books have not been the central object of cultural production for some time, but I doubt they are going to disappear nor will the physical retail structure. Doubtlessly though it will change. I’m excited to see what it looks like.

More
Here are some recent articles about bookstores:

• What Are Independent Bookstores Really Good For? at Slate.com
  
• 
  Read Between the Lines: Book superstores threaten the American literary future. at Perspective.
  

October 14, 2006

What is Greenland exactly? It used to be a continent but has since been down-graded to an island, not even an island unto itself, but according to Wikipeda "an island associated with North America." In a map of actual continents Greenland is grouped with North America.

I have an atlas. An atlas is a book people used to use that contained maps drawn by cartographers and had very little to do with satellite images. An atlas is a type of book like a dictionary that the Internet does better and I suspect it will disappear. In my atlas, Greenland is missing. It is pictured in the Arctic Ocean. The Western Coast of the island appears in the map of North America. But, there is no map of Greenland. So on one hand, as a large shape distorted beyond its size in by the Mercator projection designed to fit a round world on a flat and square book, Greenland benefited. It was even called a continent. On the other hand in a book, Greenland could go missing because it did not handily fit into North America or Europe. But, Greenland as many other marginal things has a place on the earth and a place on the web.

I imagine that life in Greenland would be frustrating. Where are you exactly people might ask? Greenland you would say. Is that in Wisconsin? Commercial goods would be difficult to find because whose market would you belong in? There wouldn't be a VP of Marketing for Greenland. The North American VP of Marketing would be concerned with Canada, U.S., Mexico, etc. The European VP concerned with Europe.

Greenland, too, will most likely become an archipelago as the ice caps melt. A vast portion of Greenland is hundreds of yards under the level of the current ocean. In the future this will be sea ringed by the whatever remains above the higher ocean. Greenland will sink, and unlike Atlantis only few people will know it was even there. There used to be a continent that was really an island. Here is my atlas I will use to show them and will have to explain what an atlas is...

September 2, 2006

Just reading this thing by George Saunders and I'm kind of appalled. I'm easily appalled though, and then quickly I'm embarrassed at even using the word appalled, as if I were a Victorian grammar teacher hearing the word "ain't." In fact I feel like I need to do something about this sense of being appalled. The fact of being appalled is a common emotion these days. President Bush and Oprah are appalled. I don’t want to be a person who gets appalled. I don't want to feel moral outrage but rather a stoic and well worded response. There must be a Buddhist retreat or at least a Buddhist-retreat-in-a-can that I can consume on my commute to work since I am too busy to go to an actual Buddhist retreat. Being appalled is an expedient expression of moral outrage. Its kind of like burping.

There is something silly and sinister about Saunders's piece.

On the one hand, Saunders's essay is merely silly as it is supposed to be. It is self-evidently silly to hold back the flow of linguistic change. To outlaw linguistic change is an attempt to outlaw the vitality of language and create a sterile substrate. Death seems the ultimate form of conservatism. This point is pretty well made. It in fact was well made before George Saunders even composed his silly piece. The phrase "elastic loaves" for pizza gets the point across. And this is the Associated Press as satirist. But, the Associated Press is known for poetry. His bit seems pretty sinister to me and he did not strike me as the sinister sort beyond his ready ability to mock sinister sorts.

What makes me appalled about Saunders bit is that I identify with the position he takes in the satire. Satire is based on a moral position, and at one point I would without question accept the moral position Saunders takes in this bit. I am expending more text my thought about this then he did in his piece, but it is my own change from this position and the fact that I am at a loss for my current position.

I feel like I'm like a shard of a nut that's broken free from a tooth.

Saunders position comes from the long tradition identified in Edward Said's great book, Orientalism. Edward Said's book is about the invention of "The East" or Orient by the West to establish a pretext for cultural and military domination of by The West. It is also a story about the mechanism of cultural identity, how for instance this definition of an other place, The Orient, has been important in the defining the values of The West. Edward Said expands these themes in his book Culture and Imperialism.

The Myth
The East is a tribal, primitive, and occupied by highly sexual beings. It is the site of a lost civilization and filled with hidden riches inaccessible to those who live there. The West, by contrast, is egalitarian, technologically and socially advanced, and occupied by highly prudent beings who are prudent enough to share their prudence with the savages in Africa and Asia. The West is the site of the most advanced civilization on earth.

What makes me appalled about the Saunders essay is that it occurs to me that for the majority of liberals in the United States, they share the same underlying myth of The Orient as conservatives -- that this is an ingrained and difficult to escape narrative. I've been trying to identify how this works, but I am failing since I am deeply inside of the story of The West’s exceptionality and our promise to eventually bring about a global utopian order once pesky problems such as poverty, energy, and environmental degradation are resolved by progress.

Underlying all of this is the ideological means in which The West occupied The East. It was our duty to save them by blowing them up. It was our duty to liberate them by conquering them.

Perhaps Saunders blunder here is to use satire, an ironic form, in the context of an ironic ideology? He's just looking for laughs.

I was exposed to this ideology first hand. I've been working on a novel about my experience in the First Gulf War. This was a destructive war just as the current one is destructive -- but the First Gulf War realized some of the promises of postmodern warfare. There was a huge and rapid deployment using contemporary shipping -- container ships, container cargo, jet transport. There was a desert as the theater of operations. Rather than cities, tanks, and rockets with a clear satellite view engaged the enemy. By the time ground troops engaged the enemy they had been pretty much killed. And the majority of the Army left before the region realized the havoc wrecked by the war. The ruined water supply in Basra for instance leading to a skyrocking mortality in the Iraqi children in the early 1990s.

I was stationed in Saudi Arabia. We were given cultural training before we went. I am from Seattle -- and I was in a reserve unit -- and so we all gathered in Fort Lewis just south of Tacoma and in an old cinder block movie theater they told us things about the customs and habits of Arabs. They did tell us that Persians were different from Arabs -- but mainly this boiled down to the fact that Persians saw themselves as different from Arabs, but really from our perspective, they were all "Middle Easterners." They dressed the same and shared the same religion more or less. We were told some silly things about Arabs. Such as the fact, that we couldn't show an Arab the sole of our foot because that was disrespectful. We were told not to make the "Okay" sign because that was THE EVIL EYE. We were told not to wear skimpy clothing (if we were female) while jogging because we would be rapped by Arab men with an insatiable sexual appetite. Really. They told us these things. They told us that Arabic culture stopped in the twelfth century -- that the culture that had produced numbers, algebra, coffee was dead or at least in a deep coma and had been for eight hundred years. Our orientation trainer (orient/orientation, get it?) was a captain armed with a slide show.

At nineteen I took these things as bizarre US Army exaggerations. I heard, for instance that the targets in Basic Training had their name changed from Ivan (Russian) to Mohammed (Mid East). The US Army is prone to crass acts. But even dismissing the majority of the Army's story as a crass act, this still left me with the idea that there was something to what they saying, that Middle Easterners (Arab, Persian, whatever) were different, and deserved to be liberated in some fashion.

In my liberalism, I thought of McDonalds and Pizza Hut as great democratic forces. Voting boxes followed the franchises. This is what I thought. At the root of it they wanted my life even with the necessary evils of cul-de-sacs and strip malls. For a time I was against cul-de-sacs and strip malls. Now I'm less against these things exactly but I'm not sure what I'm for, except I am not for the logic that results in liberation as conquest.

September 1, 2006

Shoot the Buffalo is a bestseller! A bestseller in the Small Press Distributor's fiction list that is. It makes me wonder if in the future as the brick and morter store gives way to web-based stores if there will be bestsellers in all categories, bestselling titles with the word "Shoot" in the title, bestsellers among books with green covers, bestsellers by writers living on streets named "Ruffner."

Small Press Distributor's fiction list

August 2006

1. Sitt Marie Rose Etel Adnan (Post-Apollo Press)
2. Paraspheres
   Ken Keegan and Rusty Morrison, Eds. (Omnidawn)
3. My Walk with Bob
   Bruce Boone (Ithuriel's Spear)
4. Necessary Lies
   Kerry Neville Bakken (BkMk Press)
5. One Tribe
   Evelina M. Galang (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
6. Foam of the Daze
   Boris Vian (Tam Tam Books)
7. The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell)
   Robert Coover (Burning Deck)
8. The Activist
   Renee Gladman (Krupskaya)
9. Shoot the Buffalo (A Novel)
   Matt Briggs (Clear Cut Press)
10. The Girl Meridel Le Sueur (West End Press)
11. The Week You Weren't Here
    Charles Blackstone (Low Fidelity Press)
12. Abu Musa's Women Neighbors
    Ahmed Toufiq (Post-Apollo Press)
13. Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales
    Norman Klein (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions)
14. I Spit on Your Graves
    Boris Vian (Tam Tam Books)
15. Peter: An (A)Historical Romance
    Jeffrey DeShell (Starcherone Books)
16. Motorman David Ohle (3rd Bed)
17. The Cuban Mile
    Alejandro Hernandez Diaz (Latin American Literary Review Press)
18. Land of the Snowmen
    George Belden (Calamari Press)
19. 10:01
    Lance Olsen (Chiasmus Press)
20. Next Door Lived a Girl
    Stefan Kiesbye (Low Fidelity Press)
21. Real to Reel
    Lidia Yuknavitch (FC2)
22. The Singing Fish
    Peter Markus (Calamari Press)
23. Phallos
    Samuel R. Delany (Bamberger)
24. Sonny
    Mary Burger (Leon Works)
25. Trino's Choice
    Diane Gonzales Bertrand (Arte Publico Press)
26. Necrophilia Variations
    Supervert (Supervert)
27. Tales of Galicia
    
    Andrzej Stasiuk (Twisted Spoon Press)
28. The Way to Get Here
    Gavin Pate (Bootstrap Press)
29. Iroquois Creation Story: John Arthur Gibson and J.N.B. Hewitt's Myth of the Earth Grasper
    John C. Mohawk (Mohawk Publications)
30. Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories
    Gurney Norman (Gnomon)

July 21, 2006

The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford is is a classic of game design and contains to me a useful explanation of real interactivity. My own two cents are that text is vital to the function of the web, but it is vital as UNDERLYING medium and eventually a user would never encounter a full text -- they find themselves in a simulated environment which they would interact with as they interact with a room occupied by objects.

I don't think we are as far away from this kind of information environment as we may think -- we are probably as close to this as people were in 1992-3 to the WWW.

Just as the computer industry was taken unaware by the spread of the WWW, I think they're going to be taken unaware (perhaps to lesser degree) by the impact of that graphic information environments. Currently people are looking to the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web will be an important layer, but for the vast majority of users, text and misinformation will dissolve, as well our sense of geographical boundaries. Okay I'm getting utopian, but to me there is a reason that totalitarian states ban web access.

Chris Crawford's book to me explains why this is so:

* Text takes too long to process (as a reader)
* Hard branches feel like the crude manipulations
* Environmental responsiveness

The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford

Here is an article that talks about this the upcoming changes in the Web, "Building on the future of the web" on BBC News.

May 21, 2006

The New York Times just ran an article that lists in numbers and in names the state of publishing in a country dominated by four major publishers and 1 book buyer for Barnes & Noble (17% of the market). It's a sobering affair, and yet offers a kind of justification to lunatics and small press types that standing on a street corner and trying to unload your screed is the only practical way to conduct oneself.

This from Jonathan Galassi (FSG):

Publishers frequently argue for the bottom quarter of their list — the books that get the least marketing support and often sell the fewest copies. That's "where the major writers of the future usually start," Galassi said. "It's where much of the best writing is, the work of the odd, uncooperative, intractable, pigheaded authors who insist on seeing and saying things their own way and change the game in the process. The 'system' can only recognize what it's already cycled through. What's truly new is usually indigestible at first."

Read the whole article here.

May 15, 2006

I recently saw the movie Police Beat and really liked many of the things about it. Although I remain cautious about Charles Mudede cultural reporting, a caution I think he would ask readers have of any writer, Mudede has written a number of great things in The Stranger, such as this 2001 feature about the region south of Seattle, Negative Land.. He is also a source of contentious opinion, a commodity I think in Seattle where people tend to fall in line pretty quickly with the prevailing sentiment. I have heard Mudede read sections of a novel in progress for years. I’ve come across fragments of his fiction published here and there, and it has been a source of mild frustration that he hasn’t actually published a book yet. At one point 10th Ave East Press commissioned him to write a book. And then they left town. But finally in Police Beat, there is something. I wish it had been a novel where the overall work would have stuck to Mudede’s singular sensibility, but nonetheless, Police Beat is something whole and complete and at least novelistic.

In Police Beat, the narrator, a West African named Z (incidentally the puzzling name of this album which I suspect was named so that the album could be easily found in an MP3 player) wanders around Seattle. There are plots in the movie, a relationship between Z’s partner and a junkie, Z’s worry over and attempt to connect with his girlfriend on a camping trick, but they are broken into pieces and fit into the Z’s rolling response to various incidents presumably based on Seattle police reports, which Mudede writes about in The Stranger.

A repeating image is the projection of the different codes used to describe incidents in the city, and it is this a structure that is inert and implies a kind of statistical relationship to the narratives (or incidents in the city). It is inert in that unlike the subplots in the story, the rolling fragments pictured in the movie do not relate to a larger narrative of individuals making moral choices. Rather the incidents happen in the way that other geographical incidents happen: mud slides, scattered showers, floods. In a typical narrative each incident signifies the interplay between characters making moral choices. Because of the random and implied “nonfiction” report of many of these incidents, the movie creates a tension between an event signifying its relationship to a plot or just occurring because it happened in the geography of Seattle.

For me, the most effective images and incidents in the movie are stripped of their relationship to the subplots. Z runs down a flight of stairs on the ship canal in Montlake. Z walks in the forest in Seward Park. Z responds to some mild and domestic crisis.

Where I was less engaged with the movie was during the longer plots of Z’s missing girlfriend, the junkie girlfriend of Z’s partner, and sequences that felt as if they were chosen for their lurid appeal: sex and drugs and handguns.

However, these were small distractions and perhaps necessary in some way. I don't know how to make movies and barely know how to watch them. Sitting in the dark seems so, well, passive.

Like a piece of music, the movie finds a natural and organic structure that relates more to the typology of the police report and its attempt to document the kind of behavior found in the geography of Seattle. We are left then with something that requires decoding and are not given the received values of a typical narrative. A moving picture does not require three acts, good guys, and bad guys. A movie is a narrative like a sentence because both things have a beginning a middle and end and a subject and object.

May 13, 2006

Orphans: Essays, was released last year by Astoria-based Clear Cut Press, about which he says, "I have so little good to say about them I am refraining from saying anything." -- Karla Starr’s profile in the Willamette Weekly of first-rate writer Charles d’Ambrosio

Matthew Stadler, the publisher of Clear Cut Press, said it was like a divorce. “He won’t return my e-mails,” Stadler said.

Here is what happened with Charles d'Ambrosio and Clear Cut as best as I can tell. D'Ambrosio tried to resell Orphans to Random House (Knopf), something he is free to do under Clear Cut's utopian terms.

All was going fine in this plan until Clear Cut actually published Orphans. Publication means they sent out galleys to book reviewers, had copies printed and sent to distributors and subscribers. At the time of the book’s release, d'Ambrosio said, "Clear Cut hopes to sell books primarily through subscriptions (and also, but secondarily, online and in a smattering of bookstores)."

Clear Cut, as a small press, is only equipped to sell through mail order, online, and through a smattering of bookstores able to deal with their distributor, the great, SPD. SPD is a nonprofit with the specific function of supplying poetry, cultural criticism (like Orphans), experimental novels, short story collections, etc pretty much only to independent bookstores. Even here, not all independents can readily access books from SPD for some reason. Their books show up as special order, for instance, through the Booksense Program. This in effect means the book is published but difficult to get through the regular channel of book commerce: the brick and mortar bookstore. It also means that many of the commercial mechanisms of the large bookseller don't come into play: book reps, trade shows, store placemen, payoffs to the various chains promo channels such as The Barnes and Noble Discovery Series.

By the time of the book's release, industry reviewers went crazy for Orphans. It got three stars in Kirkus Reviews, I think, and ended up getting very widely reviewed for a small press book. Even though the book (from my angle) is really good, I suspect the size and volume of this praise had mostly had to do with the fact that when d'Ambrosio made plans to publish Orphans, he hadn't really been publishing stories for ten years and then his fiction began to appear regularly in The New Yorker and Best American / O'Henry series. So by the time Orphans actually came out, the trade was ready for him.

I think d'Ambrosio's plan to resell Orphans was actually a good and one and fair. It sounds in line with the situation at McSweeney's. Clear Cut even less than McSweeney's doesn't share the same audience as Random House (Knopf). With Random House (Knopf), D'Ambrosio is hoping to hit the readers who frequent the Borders in stripmalls across the nation, a market Clear Cut will never reach. For David Eggers or Neil Pollack books come out through McSweeney's and then through Vintage or what have you; the mass market paperback is where these writers found a potential mass audience. In this kind of scale, which is the kind of thing that seems far beyond my own modest means, Clear Cut has actually added value to d'Ambrosio's book. They have created a word-of-mouth among people who have paid close enough attention to have heard of Clear Cut. What is Clear Cut's 1,500 copies to Random House (Knopf) infinite supply?

A recent study demonstrated, for instance that used book sales actually increase the overall market, which is kind of counterintuitive. “The used book market creates a lot more value than it destroys,” The New York Times. The logic I guess is that there are readers who will buy books if they know they can resell them and there are readers who will only buy used books. A similar logic must behind the tradition of publishing a hard copy book and then a paperback edition. It follows that if another layer is added, a semi-secret small press layer, that this would also increase the overall commerce associated with the book. A similar effect can be observed in retail, where competition results in an overall increase of consumers because in order for two companies to sell coffee for instance, they don’t just steal each other’s customers but increase the overall number of consumers.

Random House (Knopf) then actually benefits from small presses bringing them future readers of future d’Ambrosio, Eggers, Pollac, etc. books, much less readers who may prefer the actual Knopf product over Clear Cut’s product.

On Amazon, someone even says this of the Clear Cut edition of Orphans

HOWEVER, this book's format is an insult to the first-rate work it contains. The book is only slightly larger than a deck of cards, and if your hands are any bigger than a small child's, it is problematic to hold. The pages resist opening in such a way that it's often a pain to read the words closest to the inner margin. The print is small and tightly packed, and, physically, it's just ridiculous. I feel a bit irritated on behalf of D'Ambrosio, whose wonderful work is given shoddy packaging that will not age well. I hope a real publisher gets the rights to this book some day, and prints a decent edition.

So, clearly we are looking at least one reader who would cough up 23 bucks for a new edition. With the advent of easy on the eyes typography for aging boomers, there could be a real need for a special reading edition.

Of course Random House (Knopf) big behemoth that it is, doesn't think this way, I guess because they pulled the contract for Orphans. This is typical when numbers are applied to books. Black Heron Press has a hard time selling paperback reprints for their books because if their books do poorly, the industry doesn’t think there is a market for them, and if they sell well, then the industry things Black Heron has sold books to all of the readers who want to read the book.

On the Emerging Writers Forum, d’Ambrosio expressed regret once he realized he had to make a decision to either publish with Random House (Knopf) or Clear Cut. Never mind the sequence of events that Clear Cut had planned to publish this collection years before Random House (Knopf) had entered the picture, in retrospec picture d'Ambrosio saw that a clear choice had been offered, Clear Cut or Random House rather than Clear Cut and Random House:

Clear Cut changed their model, or something, and crossed over into traditional publishing terrain; and as soon as Publishers Weekly reviewed their edition of the book, I realized that I would have to pull my contract at Knopf. I'm a little heartsick at this moment, heartsick and pissed off. Things have been a little frosty between me and Clear Cut. Had I known the full story, I would never have published with them. It just wasn't smart for me --I lost money, the books won't ever be on the shelves at bookstores, and Clear Cut just can't reach the readers Knopf would have reached. Plus, Knopf is publishing my next collection of stories, and it would have meant a lot to me to have both books at the same house. I'll regret this move for a long time. I lost a lot, publishing with a small press. I thought I was doing them a favor, I thought I was being nice, but really I was just being stupid.

In addition d’Ambrosio has joined the long line of macho self-styled outsider writers who go about severing their connection to their community and then claim they’ve somehow appeared in whole cloth brilliance before the reading public. Hemingway stole from Gertrude Stein and then spent the rest of his career exploiting a few hunks of her style (to great effect I think); but he also went about portraying her as an old bat. Raymond Carver leaned on Gordon Lish and then distanced himself from the camp of Minimalism, admittedly a container that was shortly filled with gasoline and set on fire.)

I'm not much of a joiner, and at times I've bristled at the corporate identity of [Clear Cut Press], its tendency to elevate itself or the group endeavor over the individual writers involved. I’m slightly uncomfortable with the idea of a band of writers, confederated under an imprint, and the suggestion that we share an aesthetic or political or regional outlook. And even if we did share these things, I’d like to reach out a little further than Idaho for an audience.

As a member of the community he’s rejecting I can’t help but feel rejected myself, although I don’t feel called out in this rejection since I have the sense that he has only regarded me or my work as a part of the general lump of Clear Cut/Seattle/The Stranger, which naturally stings a bit since the first half of The Point is a book I regarded for a long time as an essential part of the architecture of my