(Stanislaw Lem, Poland’s greatest speculative-fiction export, from One Human Minute (1986)):

“The mass media, it said, are never completely objective. In fact, the pattern is like this: the worse the news in the local press, the more freedom there is and the better conditions are in the society that prints it. If journalists are wringing their hands, tearing their hair, predicting the end, and bewailing imminent ruin, then the streets are rivers of glistening cars, the store windows are packed with delicacies, everyone walks around tanned and rosy-cheeked, and a handcuffed wretch brought to prison at gunpoint is harder to find than a diamond in the gutter. And vice versa: where prisons are overcrowded, where gloom and fear prevail, where poverty is terrible, one usually reads—in the papers—news that is cheerful, uplifting, determinedly joyous (telling you that you had better participate in the general happiness), and syrupy press releases paint life in rainbow colors (except that it is a rainbow that will shine—but not just yet).”

…as you might expect, has a lot to say about the dichotomy between the Iraqi prison pictures and the words Administration officials have uttered about the pictures.

…upon our recent piece on Seattle writing, Ryan Boudinot has submitted “A Primer: How to Write a Great Northwest Novel.”

As most of you know I was an afficianado of Seattle-based writing since before there was much of it.

So I must start this piece by saying it’s great to have a lot more of it around these days—enough for a full-length anthology book.

I should also mention that Reading Seattle: The City in Prose, like Fred Moody’s Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, refers kindly to my body of work, for which I’m grateful.

I just wish Reading Seattle‘s editors, Peter Donahue and John Trombold, had done a more intriguing curatorial job.

Donahue (author of the fine short-story collection The Cornelius Arms) and John Trombold (a sometime Seattle U. prof) compiled passages from 41 fiction and narrative-nonfiction books. You get plenty (though not all) of Seatown’s big verbiage names (Emmett Watson, Richard Hugo, Roger Sale, Tom Robbins, Rebecca Brown, Sherman Alexie, Murray Morgan, Mary McCarthy, Betty McDonald, Earl Emerson, David Guterson, J.A. Jance, Thom Jones, Matthew Stadler). You also get some up-n’-comers (Michael Byers, Charles D’Ambrosio, Natalia Rachel Singer) and some unjustly neglected past prose-pros (Archie Binns, Mary Brinker Post, Josephine Herbst).

The book’s arranged into three chapters by eras: “1930s-1980s,” “1980s-1990s,” “and 1990s-Early 2000s.” This demarcation refers to when the fiction or essay excerpts were written, not when they were set. The settings of the excerpts go back and forth in time quite a bit. The sequence of pieces within the chapters appears to be thematic; though it can be hard to tell what exactly is the theme-link from one piece to the next.

For a town that un-ironically prides itself on ironic humor, there’s almost nothing funny in Reading Seattle. The cumulative emotional effect of some of the excerpts is the same somber, solemn, hyper-reverent tone found in hackneyed nature poetry; only in prose and about a city.

The challenge in Northwest writing has always been to draw portraits instead of landscapes. To draw attention to the cast, not just to the sets. Many of the full-length works excerpted in Reading Seattle achieve that. It’s just that too many of the excerpts themselves don’t.

Too many of the excerpts read as if one was watching a compilation of film clips consisting only of shots of actors walking across landscapes and entering buildings. As soon as they start acting, the scene’s cut off.

Some examples of this: A slice of Lynda Barry’s Cruddy consisting only of the heroine’s stroll down the waterfront; a similar stroll through the I.D. from Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter; a sound bite from Jack Cady’s thriller Street pontificating on, well, streets.

Some exceptions to this pattern: Binns’ re-creation of what Chief Sealth’s famous speech might have really contained; a piece from John Okada’s No-No Boy about a Japanese American man’s less-than-welcome return home from the WWII internment; McDonald’s girlhood memory of her failure at door-to-door sales.

The book’s editors, and seven of its contributing authors, appeared in a panel discussion last week at Seattle U. The ninety-minute chat didn’t lead to any big statements. They mainly mentioned the usual stuff about Seattle having rain and clouds and hills and water and distinct neighborhoods and moderate/progressive politics and a sense of community, and about it not being New York.

Among the panel’s more interesting statements:

• Tim Egan’s claim that “there’s a noir-ish, dark quality to our writing.”
• Lydia Minatoya’s observation of Seattle as “a metaphor for America; the shining frontier, the big dreams, but also the denial of racism and the other unpleasant facts.”
• Our ol’ pal Jonathan Raban quipping that this is “both a hard community and a soft community,” and “still a town of immigrants and dreamers.”

Seattle writing, unlike Seattle tourist promotion, should feel no need to strive for the “unique.” This is a human settlement like any other, in which men and women, boys and girls, eat, sleep, work, love, play, fight, travel, talk, think, create, are born, die, and all the rest.

It’s HOW individuals, by themselves and in communities, do all these things that make for fascinating stories.

The Great Seattle Novel has yet to be written. (My own new novel sure ain’t it.) And the Great Seattle Literary Anthology has yet to be compiled.

But that’s just one more challenge for a young city built on challenges.

…all of them made up, await you at the Dutch Geo Fiction Association. As the name implies, all the stories are set in imaginary nation-states and other sites, as the home page states:

“Geo fiction is fictional geography: devising, designing and developing a geo, a fictional geographic entity. In most cases the geo is a country, but it can be any kind of geographic area: a city, a region, a federation of countries, a planet, a star system, it doesn’t matter.”

Sometimes, our present-day life in occupied America seems like a bad science fiction novel.

By “bad science fiction novel,” I don’t mean a brisk, high-energy pulp adventure story of 1950s vintage.

I mean a ponderous, relentlessly grim-n’-geeky, multi-volume saga of 1980s vintage.

You know, those thousand-page trilogies that tried to shoehorn in all possible fan-favorite elements in the same story—”hard” science, magic, sword and sorcery, palace infighting. monsters, and a sniggering teen-nerd sexuality; all delivered in an ultra-humorless tone, with extraneous sublots and sub-subplots dangling every which where, distracting readers away from the lack of a compelling main narrative.

Sci-fi trilogies of the pre-cyberpunk years often depict scary, foreboding worlds. Similarly, the geeks running today’s conservative establishment posit a vision of a scary, foreboding America, eternally besieged within an even scarier, more foreboding world.

Trilogies are full of near-incomprehensible jargon, catch words, acronyms, and bureaucratic geekspeak phrases that often conceal more than they reveal. So does today’s U.S. federal government, with its straight-faced doubletalk about “weapons of mass destruction related program activities” and such.

Trilogies depict freakishly misunderstood stereotypes of human behavior and interaction, and demand the reader accept them as just the way things are in this fictional universe, with no questioning allowed. So do the likes of Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al., who, with their incessant screeching and posturing, insist that we can make the rest of the world adore us by shoving them around, that we can defend “freedom” by destroying it, and that anybody who disagrees with this is a terrorist.

Grim sci-fi, just as much as the less pretentious pulp sci-fi, wallows in physical impossibilities portrayed as hard science. Exploding spaceships might not make noises in trilogy novels (as they wouldn’t in real life); but the writers do play havoc with accepted real-life laws of mass, energy, and matter; often coming up with convoluted pseudo-explanatory excuses for doing so. Likewise, the right wing’s yarn-spinners insist to us, with no hint of irony permitted, that monopolies are good for competition, imperial invasions are good for democracy, pollution is good for the environment, conservative-only talk TV is “fair and balanced,” bigotry is Christlike, and the best way to persuade others toward your point of view is to insult and belittle them.

And most importantly, grim SF offers up a skewed definition of heroism and/or antiheroism. Grim-SF protagonists don’t have to be noble, inspiring, or all that heroic. They’re the good guys because the writers say they are; they can do evil things and it’s still OK. And in our century, we’ve got a ruthless gang of powermongers who regularly whore themselves out to big campaign contributors, who put the greed of the few ahead of the need of the many, who deliberately consign the domestic economy and the global environment to the figurative toilet, and who still, with total sincerity, believe themselves to be the noblest, most righteous figures on our planet.

Oh yeah—grim SF “trilogies” don’t always top out at three volumes. They can go on for seemingly ever, spreading their joyless aesthetic of bitter struggle, until people stop buying them.

Let’s hope people stop buying the fictions of our federal storytellers soon.

…for MotherJones.com that “The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged.” He depicts online commentary as a tertiary exercise of homebound pundit-wannabes snapping frenetically against the outrages of other homebound pundit-wannabes; an “online echo chamber” unsuited for “real” in-the-field reporting, or for the types of research that can’t be accomplished via search engines.

And Packer dismisses the type of three-dot prose seen on sites such as this one:

“I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so much candy into a bloated — yet nervous, sugar-jangled — stupor. Those hours of out-of-body drift leave me with few, if any, tangible thoughts. Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There’s a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere — every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or “fisk” (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) — is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women). I imagine them in neat blue shirts, the glow from the screen reflected in their glasses as they sit up at 3:48 a.m. triumphantly tapping out their third rejoinder to the WaPo’s press commentary on Tim Russert’s on-air recap of the Wisconsin primary.”

I beg, as I often do, to differ.

Packer’s analysis isn’t so much wrong as it is incomplete. Perhaps, as a pundit himself, he’s drawn toward those blogs that specialize commentary about commentators. But there are countless others, as well, in which people write intimately about their own lives and their own political experience. There are others, such as Progressive Review, which link to direct reporting on important issues.

What the Web doesn’t currently have is a lot of original, online-only or online-first, direct reportage. In the post-dot-com-crash era, budgets are tight for such labor-intensive content gathering. All the top “news” sites are outgrowths of print, broadcast, and cable news organizations.

One possible answer could be found in old-time radio. As revealed at radio history sites, the early network radio “newscasts,” just before and during WWII, were pundit-heavy. Individual commentators lucidly talked for up to fifteen minutes, in the studio or (via shortwave relay) on location. But they’d done their homework before the came to the mike. The studio-bound commentators were often scholars and historians; even those without postgraduate degrees still read up about whatever they were discussing. Commentaries from the field, such as those of Edward R. Murrow, went out and witnessed events they later talked about. They didn’t use “sound bites,” which didn’t really emerge until the spread of tape recording after the war.

This original concept of “eyewitness news” could become the next step in web journalism.

ALL LITERATE PEOPLE (hint, that includes you) need the site of Strange and Unusual Dictionaries.

I’ve avoided reviewing Fred Moody’s personal-essay book Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story in the half-year it’s been out.

Perhaps I didn’t want to potentially hurt the feelings of Moody, a former acquaintance (and a fellow member, with me, of the dwindling breed of humans who still remember how to run a CompuGraphic phototypesetter).

Of course, Moody would cite that reluctance to criticize as part of the Old Seattle mindset, a zeitgeist marked by reflection, introversion, and near-fanatical politeness. To that, he contrasts a New Seattle, both dominated and demonized by rambunctious corporate go-getters out to unwittingly fulfill the city’s original name of “New York-Alki” (“…Pretty Soon”).

To his credit, Moody acknowledges the superficiality of this dichotomy. He also acknowledges his contradictory affections toward each side of this divided ideal. Too bad he doesn’t acknowledge some of the other holes in his narrative, and in the image he constructs of himself as your near-perfect Mr. Progressive Seattle.

Throughout the book, Moody tries to psychoanalyze his former home as if the city was one collective entity. He may have learned this limited perspective as an early staff writer at Seattle Weekly. He spends a lot of his book’s verbiage waxing about Weekly founder David Brewster, a benevolent dictator who’d imposed a singular ideological vision on what was, for a decade, the town’s only major “alternative” rag. Brewster’s vision of Seattle, to which Moody writes about eagerly agreeing, was of a town in which white, upscale, professional-caste baby boomers (such as Brewster and Moody) were the only people in sight, or at least the only people who mattered. Moody admits the paper’s myopia caused it to miss out on Seattle’s biggest arts story, the rise of the local rock scene—even though the Weekly and Sub Pop Records were housed in the same office building, and future Pearl Jam member Stone Gossard worked as a barista in the ground-floor cafe!

All these little prejudices were fundamental to the “Old Seattle” Moody nostalgizes about; or rather to the transitional Seattle of Moody’s local-journalism heyday, between the Boeing-dominated past and the Microsoft-dominated present. And squarely in that middle era, as big as the shoulder pads on an old Nordstrom office dress, lie the roots of the ambitious Seattle Moody rues.

Moody writes, with no little degree of self-congratulation, how he spotted the Microsoft phenom almost from the start, and got plenty of work from it for his typesetting enterprise in the pre-laser-printer years. Imagine, right there in Seattle’s prefab Eastside suburbs, an outfit not just surviving but getting rich and huge, all from this ephemeral “software” stuff, stuff made by writers, and employing writers to document it all! Ex-English majors were making enough money to buy houses, and even move to Bainbridge! How cool! So what if this home-computer technology would make phototypesetting obsolete; Moody would simply bounce back by writing a couple of books about the whole e-revolution.

But soon enough, it got out of hand. Dot-com hustlers raised millions in venture capital based on faulty or nonexistent premises, went bust, and left behind hordes of overmortgaged, overqualified ex-employees. The bad old days of the 1970 Boeing crash returned, only this time the food-bank lines were filled by NPR listeners and Weekly readers.

Moody sees the high-tech depression and the jobless recovery a well-deserved comeuppance for Seattle, a collective spanking for the city’s previous lusts for wealth and glory. He even sees the 1999 WTO riots (in which mostly out-of-town protesters ranted about out-of-town conventioneers) as a rebuke to Seattle’s will to “world class” status.

But that’s a silly overgeneralization, one of many in Moody’s book. He chides the city’s political/business nabobs for trying to artificially inflate their own importance, as he artificially inflates the importance of his statements about them.

He frequently admits, in a doth-protest-too-much type of confessing, how he, as a dutiful member of the Seattle establishment’s favorite constituency (upscale boomers), got caught up in the hype he was supposed to be covering. But even his mea culpa moments seem hyped-up, in that smug Big Chill-generation way.

I know Moody; I’ve read his prior books. I know he’s capable of better stuff than this.

Which is what I’d say to Seattle as well. The city doesn’t have to be World Class. But it can still be the best darned regional gathering place it can be.

And that’s not putting anybody down. That’s criticism meant to instruct, to improve. It’s something Moody, Seattle, and I need.

…modern fiction is “more punk rock than music will ever be again.”

THE SPORTS PAGES have long been newspapers’ last bastions of passionate writing, so it’s a natural that there’d be a new wave of lively, provocative baseball blogs.

Seattle Weekly’s had two strong cover stories in a row.

This week’s piece by Tim Appelo wondering why Ken Kesey ceased to be a great writer expressed (and, thankfully, didn’t try to fully answer) all the questions I had when Kesey died and all the obits ran paragraph after paragraph about his drugging and drinking and only a couple of sentences about his writing.

Appelo’s piece followed Philip Dawdy’s long, haunting pontification about last summer’s suicide by beloved KUOW personality Cynthia Doyon. We’re just a couple of months away from what will probably be a string of media hype pieces marking ten years since Kurt Cobain’s death. We seem not to have learned a damned thing since then about taking care of ourselves or one another.

SOMEONE NAMED ONLY ‘MICHAEL’ has a lot of profound things to say about the differences between “movie people” and book people.” I read books, and even write them, but I’ve never considered myself comfortable among the proponents of what I’ve called “the writerly lifestyle.” This essay tells me why, at long last.

Who’d’ve thunk it? Noam Chomsky, academic-left theoretician and author of obscure incendiary anti-Bush tracts, has become a famous enough name, at least in this town, to become an ad slogan for a regional chain of seven bookstores.

You know you’re a word-usage freak when this sign makes you stop and think not about its message, but about whether it should say “1 in 7 is” or “1 in 7 are.”

Above and below, anonymous sidewalk chalk art found downtown.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE bad sex scenes in literature? Almost nobody, that’s who.