.:: chuggnutt ::. | Free Palm Reader eBooks – I’d say this is, like, self-explanatory.

Of course, I should note the $4.95 Complete Mark Twain.

I spent the past few weeks plowing through a double-feature, prompted initially by the release to DVD of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. About the time that the disc hit shelves a few weeks ago, I found myself, like others, reflecting on the film. In the theater, it was a frustrating viewing experience; it was clear that there was in fact a great film inside the exhibited picture that just didn’t make it to the screen. However, six months later, I found that significant sections and images from the film had stayed with me. My curiosity about Mr. Scorsese’s source material – and the historical veracity of those sources – led me to keep a sharper eye out for New Your history books than usual.

I scored not only the book that inspired the filmmaker, Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, but also a work of recent vintage, the scholarly Five Points by Tyler Anbinder, a professor of history at George Washington University. I had previously read The Murder of Helen Jewett, by Patricia Cline Cohen, a recent work of historical research that looks at a scandalous 1836 murder in New York. As I read both Gangs and Five Points I was driven to consult Jewett more than once, and so I think I should touch on it here.

Mr. Asbury’s book is the most familiar of the three, both from the drumbeat of hype for the film and as a genuine work of literary and historical merit, having drawn favorable commentary since publication in the 1920s. It belongs to a currently undernourished genre that flourished in the era of its’ publication, the anecdotal metropolitan history. Each American urban center seems to have these colorful tomes somewhere in their spittle-and-chewing tobacco stained past, perpetually reminding the city that the towers grew on foundations of hard work, graft, greed, violence and ambition.

Generally these books were written by journalists with strong connections to the rough-and-tumble culture of American cities before World War II, frequently police reporters who saw that elderly survivors of this political battle of the 1880s or that riot of the 1860’s were not long for the world. Mr. Asbury’s book is the current standard bearer. The incredibly entertaining and surreal Bosses of Old Chicago, also published before WWII, and Murray Morgan’s Seattle contribution, Skid Road, published in the sixties, also come to mind. Readers in other areas of the country will doubtless know their local version of these wonderful books.

Asbury’s book largely upheld its’ reputation, and I am sorry to say that Mr. Scorsese’s film suffers a bit in its shadow, for all that it’s a valiant effort to transform the setting and themes of the book. The book covers a considerably larger field and time than the film and where the film rang false the book reverberates with what appears to be truth, sparing nothing in its description of the racial focus of the draft rioters, for example.

However, the joy of Asbury’s book is that it’s essentially a collection of entertaining and colorful anecdotes and character studies, the sort of interesting thing you really expect a police reporter to hear whilst bending elbow in a saloon somewhere near HQ. Stories told in bars contain one kind of truth; but that truth is the truth of tragedy and myth, not that of the historian, and so when I had made the acquaintance of Mr. Asbury’s mooks, goons, and politicos, I felt it meet to drop in on the professor for some clarification and demystification.

Five Points is a history of the neighborhood that is the focal pont of Scorsese’s film, an intersection just around the corner from the remaining Italian restaurants of Mulberry Street in lower Manhattan today. The neighborhood, my high-school pal who now patrols the streets as an officer of the NYPD tells me, is now mostly Chinatown. I found it fascinating to realize that the street I’d walked down with Ken and his then sweetie was one of the primary stages of the stories in both books. The corner I watched an indecisive teenager hesitate on before entering a limo with his posse was the location that a Five Points gang leader had been gunned down one hundred fifty years before.

The book is unusually structured – each chapter opens with a prologue, focused on the life of a specific individual that lived in the milieu covered in the body of the chapter. The device permits the scholar to develop his research and present his conclusions cleanly, pointing to the prologue’s narrative as example and freeing the writer from the responsibility to present a story-arc or narrative in the chapter proper. Despite this structural decision, I did not find the reading dry – the characters that populate the neighborhood through time are too colorful.

Mr. Anbinder rarely expounds upon characters that Mr. Asbury explored or made much of, preferring, rightly, to examine either less apparently colorful and therefore more representative individuals or conversely individuals whose remarkable accomplishments, being not of the criminal variety, were outside the scope of Asbury’s book.

He also takes some joy in researching anecdotes to reveal that the historical outcome of well-known events is quite discrete from what might be expected. In a notable instance, he concludes both that intermarriage and cohabitation between persons of European and non-European ancestry was relatively common, in this instance supporting Mr. Scorsese’s filmic vision of a more-integrated society than might be expected. In another, he shows that of the five-hundred or so Five Pointers who were actually called in the draft that triggered the famous riot a grand total of two actually served, calling into question the commonly understood reasons for the riots.

Ms. Cohen’s book, The Murder of Helen Jewett, was first published in 1998. I believe I read it in early 2001. It’s more like Five Points than Gangs, in that it’s a contemporary book by a professional academic historian, and in that it relies on research and current techniques of history writing to accomplish its’ goals. However, by focusing on the story of two young New Yorkers – the unfortunate Miss Jewett and her killer – she ties her detailed survey of manners and economics, of place and time, to a story that interpenetrates the book as a whole.

It’s unfair to critique Jewett and Five Points as narrative entertainments, as this is not their sole or perhaps primary aim. I very much enjoyed all three books; I still wished a bit more of the garrulous and smoky barroom air had made it into the two historian’s books. I anxiously press these books upon you, fellow admirer of urban histories. I found them endlessly fascinating.

Coloring Outside the Lines: a punk rock memoir
Aimee Cooper, 132pp, published by Rowdy’s Press

Back in January or February, author Aimee Cooper sent me an email, asking if I’d like to review her self-published book, Coloring Outside the Lines, apparently in response to a dual review of Please Kill Me and American Hardcore I’d posted under the title “I’m so bored with punk history”. I concluded that blog entry with the bon mot, “Next time you see me picking up a copy of ‘Midwest Punk Rock Archaeology Review’, please kill me.” I was understandably reluctant, then, to take a look at Ms. Cooper’s book.

I needn’t have worried. Ms. Cooper’s book is a non-fiction memoir of her days working as the first receptionist for Slash records and as the accidental house-holder for a tribe of punk kids circa 1979-1981 in Los Angeles. These kids were seen onscreen in a fairly fictionalized presentation, Penelope Spheeris’ second film, Suburbia.

Despite the obvious romanticization of the people and lifestyle seen in the film, for many years, Suburbia was the best fictional American film about punks. It may still be, but the film’s flaws grated on me even then, and I have long wondered about both the real kids in the film and the story of how it came to be.

Ms. Cooper’s book provides part of the answer to these questions, as the kids in the film were both played by and based on her peers. The kids referred to themselves as The Connected, or TC, in an early echo of what would come to be the gang-like ethos of certain later LA punk bands and fans. Reflecting the differences in the development of punk in America during the 1980’s, the majority of the kids in TC were teenagers with home and discipline problems.

They tended to be younger and less experienced and educated than the older LA punks, again, a pattern seen in New York and elsewhere. When I was a kid, it was a distinction drawn between the “artpunks” and the “fuzzies,” so named after the first super-short haircut many younger punks would get as they sought entry into the scene.

As an adult, I think it’s also somewhat reflective of class distinctions: the fuzzies, who later became the basis of the hardcore period in American punk, tended to be from both more working-class and more mainstream family backgrounds. Instead of artist or academic parents, their families worked blue-collar jobs, or if their parents were well off, the adults in the family were professionals, doctors and lawyers.

Ms. Cooper reflects the transitional period, in that she was older than her peers in TC, having graduated from UC Santa Cruz before moving to LA. This helped her to convince the Slash people to invent the job she took, but as she recounts, she was to remain an outsider at the record company.

Over time, she found herself becoming friends with a number of younger punk kids, who eventually moved in with her and her roommate, founding a communal living space that is clearly recognizable as the classic “punkhouse,” where all is in common, even the giant resulting mess.

As the unstable living situation produces various escalating misadventures, Cooper’s narrative is focused ever more closely on her relationship with a young woman named Maggie, who appeared in an illustration on the cover of LA Weekly in 1980. That source may have helped to inspire Jaime Hernandez and his character of the same name. I was not able to confirm this, however.

As the story moves along, Maggie and the young Cooper have a falling out that leads Cooper to withdraw, disillusioned, from the whole punk lifestyle and scene. According to her, she was unaware of the next few years’ development of the national punk scene, as she was traveling in Europe, and really only learned about it on beginning the publishing process for the book itself.

I found this book to be very enjoyable and quite well written. A memoir, it’s loosely structured, but the simple narrative thread that underlies it, the hoary device of a coming-of-age-tale, served it well. When the plot focused on the development and loss of the bond between Cooper and her friend, I literally thought to myself, “This would make a great movie.”

Ms. Cooper confirmed to me in an email that the subject’s come up. I had hoped to place this review in a publication more appropriate than the blog, but having heard nothing in response to some queries, I felt I should simply go with it. Ms. Cooper expressed interest in another interview, and I may do that here as well.

This book was the opposite of Blush’s American Hardcore; it has only a minimal interest in scene politics and the name-dropping that unfortunately accompanies any creatively-based cultural endeavor. For me, that made the book intrinsically worthwhile. That’s not to say that Ms. Cooper does not provide anecdotes of some luminaries of the LA punk scene. There are several stories set in the Slash offices featuring Slash honcho Bob Biggs, his wife Penelope Spheeris, X leaders Exene Cervenka and John Doe, and a dinner hosted for the band Black Flag by Ms. Cooper and her roommate.

Johnny Thunders brackets the book, as well. He inspires Cooper’s interest in punk, and she meets him again as his junkie slip had gathered fatal momentum.

However, her attitude to these stories is detached and disillusioned: she kills her idols, indeed. The only thing more punk rock is self-publishing your own book about it, and I’m happy to recommend it to your attention. Any punk or person interested in the history of the subculture should find the book interesting; however, if your interest in punk is primarily and specifically musical, well, fuck off.

Coloring Outside the Lines website

Rowdy’s Press
P.O. Box 847
Elgin, Texas 78621

Here’s a couple more links about it: an interview with the author by No Front Teeth, a UK zine; a review by loserjames.

I saw a couple copies on the shelf at the new Confounded Books location on Pike.

Argall
William T. Vollmann
746 pp. Viking, 2001.
ISBN.nu listing

I already ran a quick piece on Vollmann’s Argall, and noted, foolishly, that I hoped to complete a formal book review of the work before going on about the book for another five hundred words, which permitted me to start to say what I wanted to without expending any particular intellectual energy. Absurdly, yet obviously, my need to review the piece became much less urgent as a result.

Nonetheless, it’s past time, so here we go.

Argall is volume three of Vollmann’s seven-volume “imaginary history” of the mythic points of contact between the native peoples of North America and the inbound Europeans, Seven Dreams. In my earlier gesture toward a review of Argall I outlined the plan and scope of the series, which is not necessarily published in the chronological order of its’ subjects. Thus, volume six, The Rifles, preceded Argall to the bookseller’s stall. To date, including these two books, four of the seven volumes have seen print.

Argall tackles what is likely to be the best-known of the historical-cum-mythic events that Vollmann will tackle in the series, the fateful encounter of one Pocahontas and one Captain Smith of the Jamestowne colony in the reign of King James, father of Elizabeth. Previously he’s tackled the Viking colony at l’Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland; Franklin’s ill-fated polar expedition in the mid-19th century, and the arrival of French missionaries among the Huron in the 1500’s. While I have never seen subjects listed for future volumes, it would be reasonable to expect a work that covers the encounter on the plains at Little Big Horn, possibly with reference to the later one at Wounded Knee; perhaps one covering the meeting of the Aztec and Spaniard, and so forth.

My interest in Vollmann’s work is multifold. I was introduced to his writing not as a reflection of his status as one of the most interesting, ambitious, and challenging writers of his generation, but because he is the son of one of my father’s long-time colleagues and close friends. I first met him when we were both teenagers, but I can hardly say we know one another.

When he was in Seattle for the release of his fugue-like, carefully developed collection of short stories, The Atlas, I introduced myself and expressed hope that we might correspond or have a beer together sometime. This was reciprocated, but due to laziness and ill-fortune that’s not yet happened. He did not have a recollection of our childhood encounters, I think.

At any rate, what a pleasure it’s been to come across his work. It’s very nearly perfectly to my tastes, although his fascination with squalor and extremes surpasses mine. His playful intensity in the use of language and his commitment to a kind of transparent authorial subjectivity and honesty are both unique, in my experience, and of a depth that invests them with the resonance of poetry. They are not merely the work of a clever wordsmith, but also express perceptions and emotions that can be hard to convey.

For example, the works of Tom Stoppard are often knocked for a kind of surface gleam that is said to prevent deeper emotional resonance. I believe this criticism is misguided, but it’s founded on the density of Stoppard’s wordplay: it’s not uncommon for viewers or readers to have to work so hard to keep up with the language that the material is drained of emotive intensity.

In Vollmann’s work, this is not the case. He certainly engages in pyrotechnic displays of both structural and linguistic virtuosity, but the material he covers is generally so compelling – or so distasteful – that it never flags into coolness.

Argall features Vollmann’s most mannered linguistic game to date. The entire book (save the eighty or so pages devoted to glossaries, personal and place names, chronology, and exhaustive sourcing notes) is written in a kind of neo-Elizabethan English, complete with shifting spellings of common words, names, and places. The frontispiece of the book announces the game. It emulates, with a modicum of winking, the frontispieces of any number of pre-modern publications, with their exhaustively florid typography presenting a long-winded précis featuring the citation of a higher being. The higher being is Okeus, the name that Powhatan and his people gave to their god or patron demon. Reader, mark it well.

A passage, selected at random:

While his Soldiers doff’d their armor at last, then cleansed it by rolling it in a barrel of sand & vinegar until it glistered again like unto new, Sweet John (fearing to un-brigandine himself, on account of President Radclyffe’s malice) strolled about the Fort, discovering that most were sick or idle, as ever, and the rest dissatisfied.

–page 286, Argall

It might seem that the lingo, daunting as it is, would prove wearing. Vollmann has such control over the language that one readily adapts to it. This is partly due to a sort of stagecraft. The language he employs is a gesture to genuinely antique language, but once one adjusts to the unexpected frills of “doff’d” and “glistered” and “un-brigandine,” the architecture of his stage-flat stands revealed as contemporary spoken English.

Under the surface of the ornamented, metric prose, Vollmann’s up to still more trickery. He writes of social activity between the people from whom Pocahontas comes in plain language, if there’s no European on stage. While retaining the rhythms of the rest of the prose, he employs shorter sentences and has “doff’d” the flowery ornament-words. When the narrative centers on this or that individual in the company of the English colonists, a similar shift in voice occurs. Vollmann notes in the end matter that he has sought to employ not only temporally appropriate phrasing and floridity in the prose and speech but also to use vocabulary elements that are regionally specific to the region of England that the individual character in question came from.

The sum effect of this meticulous craftsmanship is to cast the characters in the book into remarkable relief and definition. It’s truly striking, as one swiftly gains a sense of the persons he’s writing about without fully apprehending how it’s done. He allows the character’s voice to overflow the directly attributable quotes and thoughts and to momentarily appear to inhabit the authorial space.

Of course, for all this mummery, it’s Bill, Bill, Bill behind the stage, and as is customary, he interweaves direct personal narrative – of his visits to England, his visits to the strangely barren site of the original colony in Virginia. He looks at the graves and rusted buckles of the multitude who perished of starvation and disease. They lie next to a river so full of fish that it was a constant source of comment by the starving, poxed aristocrats of the little fort by the River James.

Adding to my enjoyment of the book was my family’s Christmas Eve, 2000 visit to the colony site itself. The visit enabled me to more clearly visualize certain aspects of the locale. Additionally, while I was reading the book, National Geographic’s earlier article about recent archaeology at the site was consulted. They published a reconstructed view of the stockade and information about the Starving Time, when so many of the colonists died.

Vollmann closely focuses the book on the historical relationship of Pocahontas and John Smith, concluding that there was no lovers bond between them, but as he imagines it, a loving relationship as between an uncle and niece or even siblings, of a sort. The Native girl was truly a child when they first met and eventually married another man in the colony before traveling to England with her husband, were she died still quite young.

He pulls no punches, evenhandedly recounting the ways of low-intensity conflict on all sides. He renders the intricate political and social relationships between the Native Americans in their villages and the complex weave of familial relationships and personalities that constitute their society. He carefully delineates the dangerous ground of class and privilege that both fires the ambitions of and regularly kills off the Englishmen in their rusting helmets and listing stockade.

In fact, he’s obscurely chosen to name the book after one Captain Argall, in mocking contrast to the failed ambitions of Smith. Argall was a sea captain who was intimately bound up with the colony from its’ inception, and whose journeys of resupply gave him much the advantage of constant exposure to the swirl of London court and royal politics. The lesson of the book, based on Smith’s unfortunate trajectory, appears to be: do not serve your masters with the sweat of your brow, but with the bended knee, the embroidered lace cuff, and with large quantities of gold and treasure obtained in any way whatsoever.

As noted previously, of the published books, Fathers and Crows is surely the most accessible of the published works in the Seven Dreams to date. However there’s simply no question that Argall, with its’ intricate construction and obsessive craftsmanship, is the highest literary accomplishment in the series thus far. By now, I suppose it’s possible that the next Dream may be deep in final editing: from a purely selfish perspective, I surely hope so. If Vollmann continues to leap forward from book to book in this manner, there’s simply no way to know what to expect.

Edited by Michael Chabon
ISBN.nu

I picked this up at the same time as I did McSweeney’s 9, thinking it was a McSweeney’s spinoff or one-shot like the Hornby music thingy. It’s a stunt book, guest edited by the reigning high priest of high-and-low-brow, the Pulitzer-prize-winning Spider-man scribe (HA! that was fun to write) Michael Chabon, and it delivers exactly what it promises: McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Out in March (published, apparently as a gift to me, on my birthday), I just now completed the book. I read it as I once did Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction – over many short sittings, generally a story at a time, and had a great time. The book collects a genuinely impressive array of literary stars and up-and-comers with grizzled vets of genre writing.

Chabon welcomes readers in an agreeably reactionary introduction in which he effectively points out that the fashionably reflective, quiet, “moment of truth” short story has driven “plot” out of respectable literary journeyman’s bag of tricks. While the veracity of this claim is disputable, the essay is also a recognizable permutation of the genre writer’s defensive frustration with the ghettoization of American letters. Chabon proposes to rectify the matter by guest-editing an issue of McSweeney’s in which Each! Story! Will! Thrill! And! Amaze! As you might have guessed, this is that book.

One odd feature of the publication is the large number of mountain-climbing stories – apparently, if contributors couldn’t bring themselves write a real genre piece, a mountain-climbing story would do. I felt, in general, that these attempts at Outside-style adventure travel writing fell flat. This is possibly because I have a prejudice against adventure travel writing in general, a distaste which goes back to my dislike for Hemingway, so I shall refrain from reviewing or citing any of the mountaineering pieces.

(UPDATE: Upon reflection, it may be that I’m mischaracterizing these pieces – at least two of them concern the neocolonial power relations inherent in guided adventure-travel getaways, rather than the testosterone-and-landscape material I associate with the likes of Jon Krakauer.)

The balance of the stories (in my mind, about two-thirds of the book) are a mix of genre writing, from straight-ahead science fiction to a delightful cops-and-robbers piece set in 1930’s Oklahoma from the well-tempered pen of Ellmore Leonard. Neil Gaiman contributes a Gaimanesque memoir –cum-ghost story, Michael Moorcock weighs in with one of his yummy pastiches on prewar juvenilia, and Stephen King bangs out a deft post-apocalyptic tale which forcefully reminds one what a subtle writer he can be.

Moorcock’s piece offers the tale of the metatemporal detective Sir Seaton Begg‘s well-known intervention in the Nazi Party’s Night of the Long Knives. It should be noted that Moorcock is far too crafty to even hint that he’s writing about actual historical events, or that in his version, Himmler dies rather than the bumbling brownshirts.

I have always loved King’s short stories much more than his unutterably cruel and sadistic novels – I am always amazed that my fellow Americans take pleasure in these extended meditations on the nature and practice of cruelty and torture. You are all bad people, and should be ashamed of yourselves. Does your mother know you read that stuff? King’s a saint, though, and writes like an angel when he’s keeping to word-count.

So far so good, eh? It’s sweet pleasure itself to read these people’s work in conjunction with other, more literarily conventional writers’ works, and in certain cases, where the non-genre folks put aside the fear or distaste or disinterest that has kept them out of the pool previously, they rise to giddy heights on the shock of the fireworks.

Predominant among these stories is Chuck’s Bucket, a hilarious, beautifully pomo sf story by Chris Offutt, son of Andrew Offutt, a prolific fantasy and sf author. In the tale, a blocked writer named, unaccountably, Chris Offutt, meets an academic who’s perfecting a time machine, and uses the time machine to get sufficiently unblocked that he can turn in his assignment for a magazine, McSweeney’s, assigned by the scalawag and generally more-successful author Michael Chabon to the somewhat sad-sack Offutt. The story struck me as so funny, and is so knowingly attuned to the conventions of the hack stories that certainly do populate the pages of many’s the pulp magazine, that it sort of took flight, managing to speak emotional truths at the same time as it took a burlesque turn on the stage of my mind.

Chabon himself contributes a pastiche, The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance. It’s an alternate-history sf tale set in Victorian Colonial Louisiana in the aftermath of the failed Ohio Rebellion of 1896. Interestingly, the story is a straight homage to none other than Michael Moorcock’s wonderful alternate-history Warlord of the Air series. Chabon does a great job on the too-short tale, which is effectively an origin story, setting the stage for full-blown serials should Chabon find himself suddenly out of work and in need of penny-a-word pickup gigs. It’s of particular literary interest to read Chabon’s work after the Moorcock piece. I came away from Chabon’s story confirmed in my appreciation for his work, and hope he takes the time to proceed directly into straight-up sf for a time. I could tell he read the right stuff when he was kid the first time I laid eyes on Kavalier and Klay.

However, and in some ways this is not surprising, the most original of the stories is by hometown hero Sherman Alexie. He turns in a brief zombie story called Ghost Dance. In it he imagines the shambling bodies of Custer’s long-dead Seventh Calvary rising from the graves at Little Big Horn. Alexie’s unique voice delivers the story with both greater brutality than is usual either in his writing or in horror generally, and manages to both respect and expand the boundaries of the genre he’s working in. At the same time the story packs an unmistakable rhetorical punch, which derives directly from the specific genre elements he employs. It’s quite a piece.

A brief aside about Alexie’s work – his stuff seems to me to be growing stronger with each story I read, and his stuff was pretty good to begin with. It’s getting to the point that I’ll be scouring for everything he’s ever written quite soon, I suspect.

So, in short, dear hearts, if you cleave to your Cheever, you might feel free to take a pass on this. But if you share the fine, manly tastes of the brighter classes among us, and savor the ozone tang of a laser-scored orbital liner on the tarmac after the dawn run from Istanbul, you’ll find McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales a suitably improving and civic-minded read.

From the reading deck, this is your Literary Commander, signing off.

Ed Emmer’s Wolfe essay from BOT is now available as scanned images hosted on my imageserver.

Ed, a fast talking brainslinger of no mean wit, wrote the nine-page stemwinder, a hilarious, withering dismissal of a specific essay that Mr. Tom Wolfe published in Harper’s just as the hardback edition of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” hit shelves.

Here’e how Mr. Wolfe‘s website describes the essay:

In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper’s magazine called “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast.” In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter — as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.

(“literacy community“?)

As Ed warms to his topic, the dismissal becomes broader and ever-more peppered with funny invective. It’s the literary equivalent of watching a friend grow frothy in rantful wroth over a couple glasses of beer.

Ed, as Anne has noted, also sweated his fevered brow in a heroic effort to precisely duplicate the layout of the original essay.

Goliard Dream: The Mall Hungers for Fresh Meat.

In which Felicity stewards Brittany and Sarah to the mall. There, the girls find they can’t find what they seek, for a time. How long a time? How long indeed, for the mall is large, and they are but Brittany and Sarah.

The Capitol Hill Branch of the Seattle Public Library opens today, finally, after a two-year construction process that sadly exactly coincided with the depths of the recession here. We might go have a look-see.

(Dear god, I fear the search referrers this entry will garner. Cher googleurs: no Disney porn here, nuh-uh, just an over-clever title.)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is, of course, boingboinger Cory Doctorow’s novel, released not too long ago in print and online in a plethora of free formats.

Just about at release, I grabbed it in a Palm-readable format, figuring, rightly I think, that this was the proper aesthetic choice for the novel, at least until I can pickup a tiny eye-glass mounting wireless HUD on ebay for twenty bucks. I didn’t really want to wait a whole year, though, so I went with it.

The experience of reading the book on a backlit Palm V had the satisfying quality of virtuality I was looking for. Green text on a darker background scrolling by in the night on a three-inch screen above my head.

I liked that enough I’m considering looking for other aesthetically apropriate material to read in that manner. Mind you, a book – a real, paper-and-print book – remains technologically superior in every respect.

But it was still enjoyable.

I thought I’d decided to forego a bareknuckle review of Down and Out, however, largely because I feel that Doctorow simply never went far enough. Looking over this, it seems I went right ahead and worked out.

Where Gibson uses invented terminology, some of which has become real, Doctorow often uses real terminology, some of which has been around since the mumble-mumbles, such as ‘grepping.’ When he does not, and instead invents a term (“whuffie,” apparently now in the proces of being adopted), the etymology is either too clear (“utilidors”) or never clarified (“whuffie,” again).

Finally, and in common with some other post cyber-punk writers, (Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon LEAPS to mind), Doctorow’s cheerleading for a post-capitalist economy based on something other than the physical production and accumulation of goods is both internally incoherent and (to me, anyway) unconvincing. I think the parts of both writers’ works that leave me the coldest are the celebration of hyper-competitive economics as in some way inherently guaranteed to produce better stuff, better lives, better community, etc.

History, as I read it, stands against this particular rhetorical point. Increasing competitiveness in large scale economies both increases overall wealth and the concentration of that wealth, which produces power imbalances that are remedied by, well, wars. And plagues. And so forth.

Even without these misfortunes, the process of capital concentration produces extreme social stresses and upheavals, such as famines, mass migrations, and so forth. Our culture educates us to believe that this particular kind of upheaval is both natural and inevitable, something that I think is simply an example of taboos presented to discourage inquiry and experiment.

One of the things that bothers me about SF that engages in this kind of cheerleading is that the ecomomies of plenty generally imagined, while laudably looking for economic mechanisms that resolve these issues and challenge this perception – that is to say, plenty is envisioned as the solution to problems of hunger and war and so forth – I can’t recall any that actually reimagine the economic practice of our time – at best they magnify it. Mind you, I’m excluding old-time utopians from this discussion!

In Doctorow’s novel, he depicts a popular uprising in favor of “the reputation economy” and kind of anarchist takeover of Disney World, both valid imaginings that situate his tale and make the story possible. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine change in either case would be as unmessy as he depicts it, and this seriously undermined my willingness to take the ride.

On another point, I suspect that Doctorow is capable of more ambitious prose and structuring techniques. I wish that he’d attempted to imagine the formal, technical changes in grammar and spoken communication that might occur one we all have personal hyper-contextual access to all the data in the world that we woould like to see at any time. While he makes reference to transhumans and extreme body modification, there’s no effort expended to describe the effect that such physical modification might have either on the social interaction of the body-modifiers or their psyches. As mind is symptom of brain, and brain is part of body, re-engineered bodies produce re-engineered minds.

(Wait, yes there is. A character is shown entering into a failed marriage with someone who has effectively rebuilt themselves. She’s depicted as having nearly abandoned the habit of speech. I guess I wanted more, and more language play, instead of non-verbal people.)

On the plus side, I have no idea if Doctorow’s ever actually participated in the goofy giddiness of a mid-to-large scale technology development process, but he absolutely nails it. Although he’s describing two things – a physical rehab of the Haunted Mansion and a wetware-type reimagining of the late, lamented Hall of Presidents (the attraction is gone from Disney Land, at least, or never existed there) – the production process, political backdrop, and egocentric jockeying for position were all nailed, not neglecting even the put-upon, wool-blinded VP of Engineering buffaloed by management into giving a production timeline estimate of eight weeks, whittled down from his initial ‘five years.’

When I read that discussion, I laughed out loud, having previously experienced both sides of the chat.

I also enjoyed the Disneyalia greatly, as I share Doctorow’s boundless enthusiasm for the parks themselves, and in particular for the remarkable and unique works of art which we refer to as the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion.

My own belief is that Pirates kicks the pale, ghoulish stuffing right out of the completely unscary Mansion, but this is a Religious Matter. Doctorow’s fearless charge right into the heart of the buzz about the twin films currently in production by the Big D based on these rides is admirable. Is it coincidence? Did he plot the novel before the films were greenlighted? I don’t know.

The heart of these issues is fan concern and fear of creative innovation in beloved pop-culture objects, and Doctorow looks closely at what it’s like to be a creative person whose job is to balance these competing demands.

So, in sum, the book’s enjoyable, a quick little read, and just because I wanted more from it does’t mean you will.

Was This House Worth Her Life?: Eli Sanders reports from the Gaza Strip on the death of Olympia’s Rachel Corrie.

With this long, well-written, and unsentimental news feature, which anchors this week’s issue of The Stranger, Seattle’s once-beloved but lately somnambulant weekly, it’s clear that long-time editor in chief Dan Savage is now once again paying attention.

The article is a straightforward piece of first-person reportage, written by a Jewish man who notes that he’s visited Israel several times but never the occupied territories.

Sanders spends time with an IDF publicity guy, Corrie’s comrades in the ISM, and Dr. Samir and family, the residents of the house that Corrie died in front of.

What’s successful in the piece is that while Sanders is critical of the anarchist politics of the ISM people he speaks to, describing them as having a “confused ideology,” he’s nonjudgemental in general, not caricaturing any of the participants in the events as evil or buffoons.

A bit of background on The Stranger of late: when Village Voice Media acquired Seattle Weekly a few years ago, the better financed Weekly cherry-picked some of the more aggressive writers from The Stranger, and founding writer and then-til-now editor Savage didn’t seem to care, judging by the decline in cogency and quality of the paper.

Prior to Savage’s record-shattering tenure as editor, the paper had rotated the top editorial slot quite regularly. Now, Savage has been busy over the past few years, building a national media profile, writing a book, and so on, and frankly, I think that had much to do with the slide in the paper’s quality. The staff writers also settled in, there was little turnover, and the writing and content of the paper suffered greatly. This culminated recently in the biggest waste of newsprint the town’s ever seen, in which the primary staff of the paper was sent out to get drunk while being followed by another member of the paper’s staff, who then wrote the main feature recounting the event.

That’s right: that week, the paper’s primary subject matter was “Our friends got really drunk.” Who cares? Granted, it’s not as though it was the flaccid, self-congratulatory condos-and-Benz writing of the early 90’s Weekly, but still, with the Rocket gone and the new Weekly apparently offering alterna-culture scriveners a career path, The Stranger was adrift.

I totally wrote the paper off.

Then, as the war engine revved up, things got interesting.

One week Christopher Hitchens wrote a scathing, ill-mannered indictment of community activism as a means to political ends under the guise of chiding food-not-bombs grannies for their anti-war stance.

(Sadly, the website’s search engine is keyword-based and returns too large a result set, so no link for you!)

The next week, Sherman Alexie weighed in against the war. The week after that, Neal Pollack stopped by to say: “Shut the fuck up,” or more correctly, he was commissioned to write a piece espousing silence on the war.

Savage was up to his trickery, finally, and it showed. Pollack is back this week, by the way, describing how he himself has gotten into two bar fights over the war and his STFU piece, which he extrapolates into the thesis that America has been driven insane by the war talk.

So, Dan, here’s the deal: I’ll keep reading The Stranger as long as you keep pulling rabbits out of hats like this. In the meantime, could you please discourage the in-group bullshit that so strongly characterized the paper in the long, leaden years leading up to this string of editorial successes.

Oh, and I wanted to say that I think it sucks that necroscopy appears to have been the goad that improved the paper. However, war does funny things to publishers and editors, so I’m happy your response has been generally to avoid the warnography.