The book's crippling flaw is Striphas's decision to ignore the other half of an indivisible subject
- Full review below.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Minding Each Others' Business: Publishers and Booksellers in the Late Age of Print
The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control
Striphas, Ted, New York, Columbia University Press, c2009 - 978-0-231-1814-6
242 pp., rrp $27.50
– Review by M. F. McAuliffe, Contributing Editor, Gobshite Quarterly
Striphas suggests that we are currently living through a paradigm change, "tectonic plates pushing against one another". It has also seemed to me that we are living through an epochal convulsion. The convulsion in this particular case is from printed books to e-books.
The Late Age of Print is essentially an investigation of history to make three arguments. The first is that the move from printed books to e-books is (no more than) another turn of the wheel in the evolution of communication from personal utterance, to handwriting, to print.
The second argument is that through digital rights management, a matter of copyright law, e-books finally offer publishers a way to stamp out the 2nd-hand book trade. Striphas assembles evidence to show that this "uncompensated" circulation of books has exercised publishers for over a hundred years.
The third argument is that major publishers, using copyright law to prosecute locally affordable (pirate) editions in the 3rd world, notably in eastern and southern Asia, are actually penalizing–and suppressing some parts of the cultures of–those regions, for the poverty which western commercial interests, such as the currency manipulations of the late 1990s–have themselves created.
In the Harry Potter chapter Striphas describes publishers and booksellers both now artificially creating scarcity–simultaneous, world-wide release-dates for mega blockbusters–in order to maximize sales; publishers hiring lawyers to police the printeries of the world in order to quash pirated editions (book-alikes, knock-offs, parodies), and to physically destroy these locally-affordable products; publishers going to court to assert that Bengali and Chinese knock-offs, which also may include folk-variations from those cultures, are both actionable and suppressible.
That's most of the book in outline.
Striphas's account of the lock-downable features of e-books is fine; his history is unexceptional–literary history, industrial history–supermarkets were actually modeled on bookstores, built-in bookcases were designed to stimulate book sales during the Great Depression–until the case study of the Barnes and Noble Superstore in Durham, North Carolina.
Striphas points out that the establishment of a superstore is a complex, multi-dimensional affair, not the simple fall from grace–the friendly, organic, local independent bookstore–it is often claimed to be. As a general claim, that is also unexceptionable. He goes on to point out that though the Durham store did increase traffic, and did have the deleterious effects on the environment the Charlottesville protesters said it would, it gave jobs to Durham's black residents, who had been unfairly denied jobs for decades.
Immediately following this, the matter of possible unfair trade advantages given to chain bookstores is set aside very quickly with a not-proven verdict in one court-case, and a possible future court-case prevented by the death of the original plaintiff (pp. 75-76).
There is no further mention of the chains' effects on publishing decisions or of their dealings and decision-making with major publishers. Redressing unfair unemployment in the black community is a trump card, a conversation-stopper; at this point the book takes on the smell of special pleading.
It might be said that the focus of Striphas's book is book-manufacture, delivery-infrastructure, and bookselling, that his subject is the evolving mechanism of delivering the objects we call books in sufficient quantity to meet ever-growing demand; that his subject also includes some unexpected consequences of maximizing profit via copyright law, such as publishers' expanding the definition of pirate editions to an unprecedented degree and prosecuting them globally with unjust and unprecedented force; and that that the chains' dealings with major publishers in terms of book content (particularly fiction) lie outside the scope of this subject.
I would argue that books are objects, but we read them for what they tell us or invite us to imagine; they are experiments in controlled consciousness. What we buy is that experiment. Ignoring the changes to the way books are bought, and changes to which books are bought via the way books are sold, is to ignore the at an ever-increasing profit half of supplying the ever-increasing demand.
The book I was expecting after reading the first two chapters of The Late Age of Print would have contained an examination of the chains' effects on publishing; it would have shown the employment-bump in Durham as part of a much larger complexity.
It's not just the 2nd-hand circulation of books that's being controlled in new and absolute ways.
For decades corporate publishers have sought to control consumers' behaviour via copyright. See, for example, The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture–Levin, Bob, Seattle, Fantagraphics, 2003–a book that details the ways in which Disney, using copyright laws, defended certain social norms and condemned others. The war abroad is the war at home, and always has been.
See also Other Peoples' Words–McPhee, Hillary, Picador, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2001–where the backstory to the rise and fall of a small Australian publishing house is Penguin UK's requirement of Penguin Australia to return ever-increasing amounts of revenue to the home country, regardless of what that meant for Australian books and the Australian book market.
Corporate publishers have demonstrated, over a considerable time, a determined and quite conscious decision to quash any kind of competition, even of material which has nothing to do with previously copyrighted works.
After Star Wars, movie studios decided to concentrate on blockbusters to generate unprecedented profit, instead of making small movies that generate modest profits. The major publishers, which had just been bought by the movie studios, followed suit: they decided to kill the mid-list–small books by fairly unknown writers, which made modest profits – and to produce blockbusters instead. That decision was the single greatest factor moving the publishing industry towards its current grotesque shape. The major publisher, with its bulk copies sold through bulk stores, large objects with EAN-numbers, whose evolution Striphas details, precisely shipped all over the world, oppressively priced, absurdly well-guarded, at amazing cost in money, trees, labour, industrial production and design, pollution and planetary stress, has constructed a boggling chain of transport and management… to deliver the object but not the goods.
In the late '80s representatives from the chains' marketing departments sat in on editorial meetings. The vote of the marketing department or an editorial consultant was equal to the vote of a senior editor. The chains' demand for ever-increasing sales, if unmet, resulted in a writer's next book either going out under a pseudonym (the writer having to begin to establish a reputation, from scratch, with a new body of work), or not being bought by that publisher at all.
(Full disclosure: I have friends and acquaintance whose careers and occupations and, sometimes, health, have been ended by chains' decisions not to carry any more of their titles and by publishers' consequent decisions not to acquire more titles from them. Sometimes their earlier titles had been doomed by the same chains' lack of publicity and shelf-time, or overlap between the return-and re-order cycles.)
Refusing to print certain books is not beside Striphas's point about copyright law being used for cultural suppression; it is an earlier exemplar of his point about the book trade evolving in order to keep increasing sales and profits. It was as maximum-profit-driven a decision as Barnes and Nobles sliding book-display panels and as Harry Potter's global roll-out date.
If the advent of e-publishing means that publishers can lock down the reader's ability to control the text after "buying" it, the previous deals between publishers and chains locked down readers' content choices before those choices could even be made.
There is no prohibition anywhere against corporate censorship.
However, desiring only blockbuster-level profit and sales-driven deals between chains and major publishers has mummified a lot of Anglo-American fiction.
Profit-level requirements have led to endless series, held to guarantee readership no matter how thin or uninteresting the later installments may be. (See Dune–everything after Children of Dune, which is when the original conception became the Herbert family's, and Bantam/Doubleday's, bread and butter and cheese and jam.)
They have led to branding by the author's name, held to guarantee readership no matter how thin or uninteresting the later volumes may be. In James Patterson's case the only thing done by Patterson is the outline and the editing of the final text. He can no longer actually write the books, there being too many to be published before the market is saturated.
Brand names not to be trusted: Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, Jack Higgins, Ken Follett – who would have thought James Michener to be a precursor–all began with one book of fair average quality or better, and have continued to pump air or sludge long after the well ran out of water; John Grisham's Bleachers is so stereotyped and derivative that reading the first 30 pages is like eating the packet instead of the cornflakes. The Saxon Shore, by Jack Whyte, was clearly sold on 3 chapters and an outline...
These novels contain no factuality, such as Oprah's Book Club espouses (and which Striphas does a sterling job of explicating); no truth of imaginative insight such as Flaubert used to illuminate Madame Bovary. (45 years after Tolkien, epic fantasy–Sara Douglass, Steven Erikson–is now written for people addicted to a particular story-arc. In that it is the counterpart of the romance novel. Both genres now function as narcotics, rather than stimulants.) It could be said that in their attempt to make novels as mass entertainment (which they never were, movies were that) the major publishers have attempted to empty them of all content. Isn't the advice to writers to explain which of the publisher's previous releases his/her book most resembles and to pitch his/her manuscript to the editor of that book?
The last thirty years of print have been defined by the paradox of booksellers deciding what major publishers will publish; the late age of print is defined by the paradox of publishers deciding that the 2nd-hand book trade will end–and being able to enforce that decision technologically.
But, through fundamentally misunderstanding books, confusing the object with the process of conceiving and constructing the text, what the major publishers have done is made the e-book necessary to writers. New publishers, sick of corporate control, are working on new web-publishing software and formats. Sites like Smashwords are open to any writer.
Killing the mid-list turned a great many acceptable popular, non-literary writers into the kind of new brand that's good to begin with and then, once the market for the brand is established, lowers the quality and raises the price. (The loss of quality is not necessarily intended by writers; but how many very good books can you write, one after another, in quick succession? The first time I came across the word potboiler was in a book on Joseph Conrad.)
Killing the mid-list told all writers that continuously increasing sales (the percentage of increase specified) leading to blockbuster books was the only way to a future in writing.
Killing the mid-list meant a great many other writers couldn't get published at all, or, if they did manage to sell a book, would be paid about enough to run a small household for 2 weeks.
No wonder writers will take to the web. And for a while the web will solve some problems.
In the short term, for everybody else–the cost of e-readers will exclude a lot of readers; reading onscreen itself will exclude a lot of the old, who read a lot; eastern and southern Asia will make pirated works available on pirated devices.
Striphas's 3 main points are good and well made, as far as they go. The flaw in the book, and I found it a crippling one, was his decision to pull up short at the edge of the other half of an indivisible subject.
But there is one more point that Striphas makes.
His fourth and final argument is that the lockdown capacity of e-books may come to prevent "cultural politics" (such as embodied in the pirate works, if you envisage them as disputing the cultural hegemony of the originals' copyright holders).
The State of Victoria has tried to do this with respect to graffiti: to buy spray-paint you need a builder's (contractor's) note/purchase order. If large corporations succeed in controlling the web, the end of unauthorized, web-based works and cultural disputation may well be the future.
This situation is implicit in the capacity of the technology (see the recent Amazon Fail matter, for example). Striphas probably outlines something of the truth of the future. However, with so many of us struggling to keep our homes/jobs/health-insurance or health-care, these possibilities are too remote to get the attention they might turn out to have needed.
And then again, as Bobby Sands once pointed out, people will write in shit if they have to.
==
1 – Striphas argues that superstores are selling a new image of bookselling, rather than a new type of book, and that the old image, where sales depended on the virtue of a particular book, is what is being superseded.
I have worked in libraries, and have found some new books to be less useful than their titles would suggest: though it is better now, given to chapter outlines and more flow (the "global warming" title), when they began (e.g. "Windows 95" title), the For Dummies series chopped its subjects into innumerable small bits, leading to cul de sacs of frustration and confusion; for learning about computers For Dummies was noticeably inferior to the Teach Yourself Visually series. But people ask for For Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide. When people wanted to learn how to operate Windows and PCs, I had to hand-sell Teach Yourself Visually, as it were.
I suspect the difference was the result of advertising, as it turned out to be in the case of Ingles Sin Barreras and Rosetta Stone. Pimsleur's and the other language-learning packages are no worse than these, but are not advertised on radio and TV.
In this sense Striphas is right–sales do not depend on the virtue of even the non-fiction book in question, but on how thoroughly advertising has trained people to ask for the series. Another case of branding.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Obama, Nov 4 2008
I volunteered for the Obama campaign: these pix are from the Democratic Party results-watch and celebration at the Convention Center...
(tinycam pix m. f. mcauliffe)
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
12 mayo 2008
12 mayo, 2008
HOLD THE PICKLES HOLD THE LETTUCE SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…
It was almost 30 yrs ago that the punk provocateurs first album came out, released by Warner Bros., & produced by Eno, after Eno & David Bowie had competed over who would produce this new band.
Devo were a bigger joke than the Ramones and equally as serious. (And ultimately Devo and the Ramones wound up with different franchises.)
People laughed and didn’t get it, or they laughed and got it.
And a few got the joke and got mad (cranky assholes afflicted with perception, like Robert Christgau).
The best, & most prophetic, lyric from that album was:
HOLD THE PICKLES / HOLD THE LETTUCE / SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY…
They firmly had their fingers on or up something of the emergent zeitgeist...the corpus politic…
Pulse, cock, asshole, whatever...
We were all bozos on this bus, all consumers in this shopping mall, and we were so determined to have it our way that the bourgeois individualists drifted apart...
& a true sign of the times was when public schools started removing social studies & history classes from the syllabus, hoping that college would pick up the slack (I had learned about the Hansiatic League in 5th. fucking grade)...
We have become so atomized & anathemized, that there are no common coins in the realm, no common references, no agreed-on map-coordinates.
A few years back and old friend died.
Her passing was mentioned on NPR, and on Salon, & in the Village Voice, and eventually in the New York Times.
She was an Afro-American science fiction writer and McArthur genius grantee. (And she was a better friend to me than I to her, even lending me money to attend a writing workshop and being gracious when I took years to pay her back; through the years we would get together for coffee when she was passing through town, and when appropriate she would give me the requisite son-of-a-bitch slap.)
I called a mutual friend to share the bad news, as this mutual friend was so against the wall as to not be able to afford internet access, not be able to afford the bus fair to the nearest library. (Absolutely tragic for a computer programmer.)
Even though he had been a friend of this decedent, he was much more upset over the death of an old radio-serial actor who had been in every sci-fi radio serial in the 40s and 50s.
He had met this person once, a long time ago.
Yet he did not want to hear about the death of an old friend, in her mid-50s, as he was still grieving over the death of this radio actor who he had only met once, an actor in his late 80s.
I know that there are elective affinities and that not every work of art will resonate with everyone.
Over a week ago I was greeted by an acquaintance who made an odd & sarky comment about Robert Rauschenberg dying.
At the time I thought he was kidding, making one his usual very bad jokes.
I went home and checked on-line.
Nothing in the Village Voice.
Later I found an item in the New York Times, and then on the Beeb…
I had been in a downtown gallery the week before and saw a very good Rauschenberg silk screen from the late 1970’s, a terrific knock-off.
And if it wasn’t Rauschenberg’s best, it was a very good self-parody.
And if an artist can’t rip themselves off from time to time, then who can they rip off?
Rauschenberg was a bridge between the abstract expressionism of de Kooning and the pop of Warhol and Jasper Johns, and he had obvious links to the surrealist and Dada couch boys. And he was king collagist…
Rauschenberg even co-designed an album cover for Talking Heads, a sort of sculptural jigsaw.
With Rauschenberg form not only followed function, but took notes and came back to take names and ask questions.
His work was a continually evolving demonstration of the William Carlos Williams axiom that the pure products of America go crazy.
And per L. Bangs or J. Feiffer, if anyone did a dance about architecture, it was Rauschenberg.
His work always had energy, a visceral and kinetic buzz that delights and informs the eye.
And it still does.
If you can’t get to a decent museum or gallery, then go to a few of these links.
guggenheim rauschenberg
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_133_0.html
rauschenberg link
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rauschenberg_robert.html
rauschenberg - erased de kooning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ
HOLD THE PICKLES HOLD THE LETTUCE SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…HAVE IT YOUR WAY…
It was almost 30 yrs ago that the punk provocateurs first album came out, released by Warner Bros., & produced by Eno, after Eno & David Bowie had competed over who would produce this new band.
Devo were a bigger joke than the Ramones and equally as serious. (And ultimately Devo and the Ramones wound up with different franchises.)
People laughed and didn’t get it, or they laughed and got it.
And a few got the joke and got mad (cranky assholes afflicted with perception, like Robert Christgau).
The best, & most prophetic, lyric from that album was:
HOLD THE PICKLES / HOLD THE LETTUCE / SPECIAL ORDERS DON’T UPSET US… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY… / HAVE IT YOUR WAY…
They firmly had their fingers on or up something of the emergent zeitgeist...the corpus politic…
Pulse, cock, asshole, whatever...
We were all bozos on this bus, all consumers in this shopping mall, and we were so determined to have it our way that the bourgeois individualists drifted apart...
& a true sign of the times was when public schools started removing social studies & history classes from the syllabus, hoping that college would pick up the slack (I had learned about the Hansiatic League in 5th. fucking grade)...
We have become so atomized & anathemized, that there are no common coins in the realm, no common references, no agreed-on map-coordinates.
A few years back and old friend died.
Her passing was mentioned on NPR, and on Salon, & in the Village Voice, and eventually in the New York Times.
She was an Afro-American science fiction writer and McArthur genius grantee. (And she was a better friend to me than I to her, even lending me money to attend a writing workshop and being gracious when I took years to pay her back; through the years we would get together for coffee when she was passing through town, and when appropriate she would give me the requisite son-of-a-bitch slap.)
I called a mutual friend to share the bad news, as this mutual friend was so against the wall as to not be able to afford internet access, not be able to afford the bus fair to the nearest library. (Absolutely tragic for a computer programmer.)
Even though he had been a friend of this decedent, he was much more upset over the death of an old radio-serial actor who had been in every sci-fi radio serial in the 40s and 50s.
He had met this person once, a long time ago.
Yet he did not want to hear about the death of an old friend, in her mid-50s, as he was still grieving over the death of this radio actor who he had only met once, an actor in his late 80s.
I know that there are elective affinities and that not every work of art will resonate with everyone.
Over a week ago I was greeted by an acquaintance who made an odd & sarky comment about Robert Rauschenberg dying.
At the time I thought he was kidding, making one his usual very bad jokes.
I went home and checked on-line.
Nothing in the Village Voice.
Later I found an item in the New York Times, and then on the Beeb…
I had been in a downtown gallery the week before and saw a very good Rauschenberg silk screen from the late 1970’s, a terrific knock-off.
And if it wasn’t Rauschenberg’s best, it was a very good self-parody.
And if an artist can’t rip themselves off from time to time, then who can they rip off?
Rauschenberg was a bridge between the abstract expressionism of de Kooning and the pop of Warhol and Jasper Johns, and he had obvious links to the surrealist and Dada couch boys. And he was king collagist…
Rauschenberg even co-designed an album cover for Talking Heads, a sort of sculptural jigsaw.
With Rauschenberg form not only followed function, but took notes and came back to take names and ask questions.
His work was a continually evolving demonstration of the William Carlos Williams axiom that the pure products of America go crazy.
And per L. Bangs or J. Feiffer, if anyone did a dance about architecture, it was Rauschenberg.
His work always had energy, a visceral and kinetic buzz that delights and informs the eye.
And it still does.
If you can’t get to a decent museum or gallery, then go to a few of these links.
guggenheim rauschenberg
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_133_0.html
rauschenberg link
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rauschenberg_robert.html
rauschenberg - erased de kooning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ
4 aprilis 2008 - Part II
4 április, 2008
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE:
NORTHBOUND ON I-5,
PART II.
Elliott Bay Book Co. did a terrific calendar listing for their newsletter flyers & website: “The Elliott Bay Book Company / Seattle's legendary independent bookstore / R.V. BRANHAM & Friends / Friday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. / Various forms of fun will roll off the tongue no doubt, as a contingent of people arrive from the delightful, Portland-based, internationally-inclined literary journal, Gobshite Quarterly, in the presence of editor R.V. Branham and others, all to inform, educate (and entertain), with the newly released book, Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages (Soft Skull). Depending on where one is and under what circumstances, there is much that could prove quite handy. "Overflowing with invectives, curses and blasphemous belittlings, the book is more than a resource guide for becoming a multilingual potty mouth. This is a valuable book for bridging communication barriers, making it possible to say such important things as 'millananyawshanmi' - Quechua, for 'I feel like throwing up ...' - David Walker, Willamette Week.”
Channing had gone up to Seatac the night before ... he used to live there & has all sorts of ties, family & otherwise.
Channing would join us at the bookstore. Sarah, however, was studying for finals...
So twas just Moira & I.
We’ve been up to Seatac several times, usually for something at Elliott Bay, and have gone all the way up to Canada, & to Vancouver BC several more times. But we always stayed on I-5.
I am familiar enough with the highways & by-ways of Northern California & Oregon... & what problems could there be with Washington.
We loaded the icechest with tuarine energy drinks, lemonade, & proscuitto hoagies, & kettle chips, & mapquest quest maps, and left NE Portland at noon. (We live just south of the Columbia River, and a mile & a half east of I-5, so it was just a few miles to Washington State proppah.)
It was pouring, but I had just replaced the windsheild wipers, and the traffic on I-5 was not too insane. (What you have to worry about more than anything on I-5 are sudden fog banks, and their zero-visibility.)
We had to stop in Olympia & see someone at Evergreen College about some CURSE+BERATE related business.
This involved leaving I-5, & going onto 101, & entering the maze of Evergreen College.
Evergreen is one of those beautiful wooded campuses, like UC Santa Cruz, rendered truly hermetic by its physical isolation.
Once done, we asked about getting back to I-5, as our mapquest quest maps.
“Just take 101,” we were told. It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
At this point we were theoretically 60-70 miles from Seatac.
Theoretically.
One of the problems with natives of the Pacific Northwest is that they lack the gene for giving directions.
Things like north or south or left or right are not in the vocabulary, not even filed in the cortex, not available conceptually, ontologically, not on any level.
In Oregon they will say, “Just turn at the next Freddy’s...” (Fred Meyer stores are everywhere in Oregon, and as map references completely useless.)
In Washington they say, “It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
Remember, we were at this point theoretically an hour or so away from Seatac.
But we were heading west & then north, passing military bases we had not seen before, and then suddenly in a National Forest.
We saw a huge deer with huge antlers cross the road and then a moose. After the deer, the moose somehow seemed anti-climactic.
And we saw a body of water, a part of the great Puget Sound, or one of its canals. But it was to our right. And sometimes there was a rail, and sometimes not. But there were no shoulders.
The traffic was one-lane each way, and heavy, and the rain made the road look like a creek.
And clouds came down to the trees to scratch their backs.
And more deer, and more traffic snaking each way, wanting to exceed the 45 mph postings.
We began to feel like location scouts for McCABE & MRS. MILLER.
Eventually, near Port Townsend, we saw a utility truck by the side of the road.
The worker, originally from New York or Pennsylvania (by his accent) said we needed to either go up to Port Townsend, still 50 miles ahead or go 15 or 20 miles to the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, which would lead us to the Kingston Ferry, which would take us to Edmonds, 15 minutes north of Seattle via I-5.
After 12 miles, & no signs, we stopped at a café, & were given semi-coherent directions on the turnoff for the Hood Canal Floating Bridge.
A nearby gas station, where we spent $60 on gas & got even more muddled directions.
A customer gave yet another version on finding the turn-off.
By triangulating the directions, and thoroughly fucking them up, we actually managed to find the turn-off for the bridge.
The Hood Canal Floating Bridge was one of the most impressive bridges I’ve ever seen.
The rain got heavier once we got to the other side and we were passing mile after mile of bed & breakfast & antique shop.
We were now on a two-lane highway, and the traffic was Friday-afternoon-heavy.
Finally a sign, indicating Kingston & a ferry. There were seagulls everywhere...part of the local ferry seagulls guild. (They were very different from the seagulls we occasionally see on the Columbia, naot necessarilly a different species, but a different seagulls guild.)
We queued into a parking lot to a far-end lane. Another twenty minutes, and we were directed onto the boat, and parked on a second deck. We were able to get out of the car, and consider the cafeteria, the restrooms, the various large scale maps, the stacks of the Seattle Weekly & the Stranger (which had failed to list us, the bastards, the fascist mother fuckers) and the observation seats with their floatation devices stored beneath.
Moira photographed gulls & other ferries & our ferry’s wake.
Just when we were getting comfortable, we had crossed the sound, and were about to land in Edmunds. We were told that the main road from the ferry led straight to I-5, and that it would be easy as pie from then on. It was still raining, and indeed was overpowering the local storm drains, if the curb tsunamis were any indication. Eventually we got to I-5, and into Seatac, with its Tarkovsky-Solaris freeway, and of course we missed our turnoff because we were coming from the north instead of the south.
Having gotten lost in Seatac more than once, I know some of the side streets fairly well, so we took the first turnoff into the industrial zone and dog-tailed our way back to Elliott Bay Book Co.
Elliott Bay is on First Street, near the Alaska Viaduct (where there is lots of free parking). We had agreed to meet an hour before the event so we could rehearse and tighten the sequence.
Rick Simonson was our contact person, personable & enthusiastic about the book. I mentioned that The Stranger had failed to list us, despite press releases & phone calls & review copies. Rick was very apologetic, and had been a Stranger intern, and knew were the bodies were buried, & told us how The Stranger had failed to list their calendar for the coming week. (Apparently Constant or Frizelle managed to get us into their on-line calendar with a suitably cheeky & snarky & accurate listing.)
Channing was running late, & a couple of cell-phone calls revealed that he was caught on the freeway in Tacoma.
We began without him. I did a brief reading from my intro, and Moira improvised some comments, & read a brief something from Channing’s intro.
There was an okay turnout, including Channing’s girlfriend & her mom & another friend. (Yet no Channing.)
And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.
We were in the Q & A section when Channing arrived, so I had him read some of his favorite invective & insults, especially the Japanese & Gaelic bits.
& I asked the audience members what were their favorite swear words, in whatever language. We signed an immense stack of books, & then retired to a local bar to gossip with an old friend who now lives on Vashon Island, but works for a stock photo agency in Seatac.
But that is the batucada of another carnivale, so here endeth this account.
A CAGE WENT IN SEARCH OF A BIRD, A CAR WENT IN SEARCH OF A SEATTLE BOOKSTORE:
NORTHBOUND ON I-5,
PART II.
Elliott Bay Book Co. did a terrific calendar listing for their newsletter flyers & website: “The Elliott Bay Book Company / Seattle's legendary independent bookstore / R.V. BRANHAM & Friends / Friday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. / Various forms of fun will roll off the tongue no doubt, as a contingent of people arrive from the delightful, Portland-based, internationally-inclined literary journal, Gobshite Quarterly, in the presence of editor R.V. Branham and others, all to inform, educate (and entertain), with the newly released book, Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages (Soft Skull). Depending on where one is and under what circumstances, there is much that could prove quite handy. "Overflowing with invectives, curses and blasphemous belittlings, the book is more than a resource guide for becoming a multilingual potty mouth. This is a valuable book for bridging communication barriers, making it possible to say such important things as 'millananyawshanmi' - Quechua, for 'I feel like throwing up ...' - David Walker, Willamette Week.”
Channing had gone up to Seatac the night before ... he used to live there & has all sorts of ties, family & otherwise.
Channing would join us at the bookstore. Sarah, however, was studying for finals...
So twas just Moira & I.
We’ve been up to Seatac several times, usually for something at Elliott Bay, and have gone all the way up to Canada, & to Vancouver BC several more times. But we always stayed on I-5.
I am familiar enough with the highways & by-ways of Northern California & Oregon... & what problems could there be with Washington.
We loaded the icechest with tuarine energy drinks, lemonade, & proscuitto hoagies, & kettle chips, & mapquest quest maps, and left NE Portland at noon. (We live just south of the Columbia River, and a mile & a half east of I-5, so it was just a few miles to Washington State proppah.)
It was pouring, but I had just replaced the windsheild wipers, and the traffic on I-5 was not too insane. (What you have to worry about more than anything on I-5 are sudden fog banks, and their zero-visibility.)
We had to stop in Olympia & see someone at Evergreen College about some CURSE+BERATE related business.
This involved leaving I-5, & going onto 101, & entering the maze of Evergreen College.
Evergreen is one of those beautiful wooded campuses, like UC Santa Cruz, rendered truly hermetic by its physical isolation.
Once done, we asked about getting back to I-5, as our mapquest quest maps.
“Just take 101,” we were told. It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
At this point we were theoretically 60-70 miles from Seatac.
Theoretically.
One of the problems with natives of the Pacific Northwest is that they lack the gene for giving directions.
Things like north or south or left or right are not in the vocabulary, not even filed in the cortex, not available conceptually, ontologically, not on any level.
In Oregon they will say, “Just turn at the next Freddy’s...” (Fred Meyer stores are everywhere in Oregon, and as map references completely useless.)
In Washington they say, “It gets back to I-5 eventually.”
Remember, we were at this point theoretically an hour or so away from Seatac.
But we were heading west & then north, passing military bases we had not seen before, and then suddenly in a National Forest.
We saw a huge deer with huge antlers cross the road and then a moose. After the deer, the moose somehow seemed anti-climactic.
And we saw a body of water, a part of the great Puget Sound, or one of its canals. But it was to our right. And sometimes there was a rail, and sometimes not. But there were no shoulders.
The traffic was one-lane each way, and heavy, and the rain made the road look like a creek.
And clouds came down to the trees to scratch their backs.
And more deer, and more traffic snaking each way, wanting to exceed the 45 mph postings.
We began to feel like location scouts for McCABE & MRS. MILLER.
Eventually, near Port Townsend, we saw a utility truck by the side of the road.
The worker, originally from New York or Pennsylvania (by his accent) said we needed to either go up to Port Townsend, still 50 miles ahead or go 15 or 20 miles to the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, which would lead us to the Kingston Ferry, which would take us to Edmonds, 15 minutes north of Seattle via I-5.
After 12 miles, & no signs, we stopped at a café, & were given semi-coherent directions on the turnoff for the Hood Canal Floating Bridge.
A nearby gas station, where we spent $60 on gas & got even more muddled directions.
A customer gave yet another version on finding the turn-off.
By triangulating the directions, and thoroughly fucking them up, we actually managed to find the turn-off for the bridge.
The Hood Canal Floating Bridge was one of the most impressive bridges I’ve ever seen.
The rain got heavier once we got to the other side and we were passing mile after mile of bed & breakfast & antique shop.
We were now on a two-lane highway, and the traffic was Friday-afternoon-heavy.
Finally a sign, indicating Kingston & a ferry. There were seagulls everywhere...part of the local ferry seagulls guild. (They were very different from the seagulls we occasionally see on the Columbia, naot necessarilly a different species, but a different seagulls guild.)
We queued into a parking lot to a far-end lane. Another twenty minutes, and we were directed onto the boat, and parked on a second deck. We were able to get out of the car, and consider the cafeteria, the restrooms, the various large scale maps, the stacks of the Seattle Weekly & the Stranger (which had failed to list us, the bastards, the fascist mother fuckers) and the observation seats with their floatation devices stored beneath.
Moira photographed gulls & other ferries & our ferry’s wake.
Just when we were getting comfortable, we had crossed the sound, and were about to land in Edmunds. We were told that the main road from the ferry led straight to I-5, and that it would be easy as pie from then on. It was still raining, and indeed was overpowering the local storm drains, if the curb tsunamis were any indication. Eventually we got to I-5, and into Seatac, with its Tarkovsky-Solaris freeway, and of course we missed our turnoff because we were coming from the north instead of the south.
Having gotten lost in Seatac more than once, I know some of the side streets fairly well, so we took the first turnoff into the industrial zone and dog-tailed our way back to Elliott Bay Book Co.
Elliott Bay is on First Street, near the Alaska Viaduct (where there is lots of free parking). We had agreed to meet an hour before the event so we could rehearse and tighten the sequence.
Rick Simonson was our contact person, personable & enthusiastic about the book. I mentioned that The Stranger had failed to list us, despite press releases & phone calls & review copies. Rick was very apologetic, and had been a Stranger intern, and knew were the bodies were buried, & told us how The Stranger had failed to list their calendar for the coming week. (Apparently Constant or Frizelle managed to get us into their on-line calendar with a suitably cheeky & snarky & accurate listing.)
Channing was running late, & a couple of cell-phone calls revealed that he was caught on the freeway in Tacoma.
We began without him. I did a brief reading from my intro, and Moira improvised some comments, & read a brief something from Channing’s intro.
There was an okay turnout, including Channing’s girlfriend & her mom & another friend. (Yet no Channing.)
And then we did an orchestrated selection of words & phrases.
We were in the Q & A section when Channing arrived, so I had him read some of his favorite invective & insults, especially the Japanese & Gaelic bits.
& I asked the audience members what were their favorite swear words, in whatever language. We signed an immense stack of books, & then retired to a local bar to gossip with an old friend who now lives on Vashon Island, but works for a stock photo agency in Seatac.
But that is the batucada of another carnivale, so here endeth this account.
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