Burnin'

SEATTLE—Out-spoken and fearless urban planning expert, social critic, author and journalist James Howard Kunstler is a man on a mission. He wants to shake the American people awake with his special brand of righteous anger, and tonight he’s on stage in a grand ballroom at the Westin to do just that.

Kunstler is here to deliver the opening keynote at Living Future 2010, “the unconference for deep green professionals” put on by Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of the U.S.G.B.C. (and my wife’s employer). Kunstler is an interesting choice to open the unconference, for he is a rabble-rouser of epic proportions.

He says, “People call me a ‘doomer,’ but I call myself an actualist.” One of the things he’s being “actual” about is suburbia, which he says is “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” Kunstler says, “We’ve invested our identity in this. Suburbia is part of the American dream.”

Kunster claims the suburban dream is over, despite our lingering dreams. He claims builders and others are waiting for the bottom, so they can resume building, but “no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run suburbia.”

Americans are conditioned to want something for nothing, he says. Kunstler reminds the liberal audience that President Obama said, “We won’t apologize for the American way of life.” Building on that, Kunstler says he is sorely disappointed by the nation’s elite cadre of environmentalists who are more concerned about producing electric cars than they are about living in walkable communities. His word for it: techo-grandiosity.

“We are not a serious society, not at all,” he practically spits form the podium. He tells a story about speaking at the Googleplex in Mt. View, CA. “The whole place is like a kindergarten. It seems the whole idea in business today is to be as infantile as possible.” Worse yet, Kunstler says the Googleites don’t know the difference between energy and technology, which is his way of saying technology isn’t going to solve all our problems.

Lack of political will is another sore point. He says we’re spending stimulus money to fix highways, when “we have a train system that would embarrass the Bulgarians.” Sadly, “we can’t afford to be clowns.”

During the question and answer session, a psychologist in the audience asks Kunstler if he doesn’t have a more hopeful image he can share, one that will make an already paranoid people feel less paranoid. In true Kunstler fashion, he says, “we can’t fix everything with therapy.”

When the talk is done, people applaud, but not as vigorously as they might. It seems the air’s been sucked out of this vast ballroom.

One attendee tells me he found Kunstler’s talk depressing. And therein lies the crux of the matter. Kunstler paints a broad canvas where all sorts of American ugliness are put plainly in view. Yet, most people working on solutions—like creating green buildings—are busy addressing one small part of the problem, not the entirety of the matter, and they want to feel good about their contributions. But Kunstler doesn’t care about making people feel good. His thing is to sound the alarm and make it ring loudly in our ears.

[UPDATE] Here are two other takes on Kunstler’s Living Future speech, one from Sustainable Industries and another from Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce.

I’m grateful to literary blogger, Maud Newton, for sharing this 1964 documentary from BBC on poet Phillip Larkin, widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Also from YouTube, these excellent clips of the poet reading his poems, “Water” and “Aubade”.

Cathy’s Book is a transmedia storytelling experience written and produced by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman (with illustrations by Cathy Brigg). First published in 2006, the book includes an evidence packet filled with letters, phone numbers, pictures, and birth certificates, as well as doodles and notes written by Cathy in the page margins.

Cathy’s Book is a huge success and now two more books, Cathy’s Key and Cathy’s Ring round out the trilogy. All three are presented in print and online in a complimentary and overlapping fashion.

One of the author’s, Sean Stewart of Fourth Wall Studios, spoke to ARGNet about building “interactive arcs” into the stories, so that a reader might send an email and go through a 3 or 4-step investigation to arrive at a satisfying endpoint.

Online or off, the magic here is the series of interactions taking place between readers/followers/fans and the storytellers. Stewart explains:

MA: What was your favorite out-of-book element in the trilogy?

SS: Actually, I think my favorite thing we did was to build a gallery for readers to post their art…and then put some of those pictures in the printed books. There is something very beautiful to me about closing that circle: the books invite you into Cathy’s life beyond the page, and then, eventually, circle around until your life is part of her printed world. That for me is a lovely version of The Dance – that cooperative give-and-take between artist and audience that is seems so clearly to be part of what the next evolution of art will be.

With the rise of digital culture, writers are now required to think beyond their manuscript. And while the writer remains the architect of the story, as the larger experience of the story unfolds, others with a deep interest in the story emerge to help bring finishing touches and/or new ideas to the table. This could be somewhat off-putting to the storyteller, put in needn’t be. When you tell a story in the ancient tradition–around a campfire!–the people gathered there clearly impact the pace of the story, the details left in or taken out, the ending, etc. Thanks to the interactive abilities of today’s always-on mediums, we’re getting back to that more familiar model.

Read more about transmedia storytelling on AdPulp: Brand Narratives Will Benefit from Transmedia Storytelling

Darby and I have been intently viewing seasons one through four of HBO’s The Wire (care of Netflix), which leaves just season five to go. I’m afraid we’re already dreading the end of the series. We don’t want it to end, the way you don’t want a great novel to end. But end it must.

In preparation for this coming conclusion of what one critic calls the “greatest TV show ever made,” I’ve begun searching for and processing the criticism.

Mark Bowden of The Atlantic called the show’s co-creator, David Simon, “the angriest man in television.” In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Simon says he doesn’t mind “being called that” and asks rhetorically if there’s a better response to the America of the last decade.

Bowden also makes note of the literary form advanced by The Wire.

Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary” fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.

It’s a point well taken. I’ve often thought that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would be successful in Hollywood. It’s also interesting to understand Simon’s background as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. For 12 years the man told detailed, well researched, fact-filled stories, but those stories didn’t change policy in City Hall, Annapolis or Washington, DC. Simon isn’t holding his breath to see these changes come as a result of his TV show either. He sees the problems in America (like the failed War on Drugs that his show dramatizes) as systemic, and argues that conditions will have to become much worse before they get better.

Here, let’s listen to the man:

Simon says our economy doesn’t need the underclass, and that’s why these urban black communities have been pushed completely from the frame of American life. He’s right about the extreme marginalization, but I would counter that this nation does need the underclass and that poor, under-educated workers can become productive and change their station in life and possibly the country’s future in the process.

President Obama is conducting a “jobs summit” this week to help spur jobs training and jobs creation. In my opinion, we need to get off our collective ass now and institute a 1930s-style public works program. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much work there is to do. The nation’s roads and bridges need repairs and we must build high speed rail from Seattle to San Diego and from Miami to Boston. Moving to energy, the nation’s entire electrical grid needs to be refitted to store and conduct DC current produced by solar and wind. And the list goes on. Meanwhile, little progress is made.

In one episode of The Wire, “Bunny,” of Baltimore city police, says he doesn’t know what the answer is to getting kids off the corner and returning the streets to the citizens of Baltimore, only that it can’t be a lie. That’s correct, and it can’t be a lie in real life. Yet, empire is a lie. The wars to maintain it are a lie. The war on drugs is a lie. Saying we don’t have the resources nor the will to house the homeless, feed the hungry and care for the uninsured is a lie.

It’s easy to get fired up by The Wire, and that art’s role in society—to challenge us, to make us think, and help us to care. On these fronts, HBO’s gritty crime drama is a huge success.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Law professor William J. Quirk, writing in The American Scholar, examined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns from 1919–1940 and came away with a detailed portrait of a rich man–perhaps unexpectedly, for Fitzgerald portrayed the rich from close physical proximity, but with (mostly devastating) emotional distance.

Quirk’s direct examination of the writer’s records indicate:

• Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition.
• The publication of This Side of Paradise when he was 23 immediately put Fitzgerald’s income in the top 2 percent of American taxpayers. Thereafter, for most of his working life, he earned about $24,000 a year, which put him in the top 1 percent of those filing returns. Today, a taxpayer would have to earn at least $500,000 to be in the top 1 percent.
• His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.

Fitzgerald wrote short stories for magazines to earn money which provided him the freedom to pursue less well paying but artistically significant works. He also moved to Los Angeles and wrote scripts for the studios. During his Hollywood years, he was never paid less than $1,000 a week. By contrast, Warner Bros., in the 1940s, paid William Faulkner $300 a week.

Also by comparison, I received a check in the mail from Google today for $100.73. According to Technorati, I’m among the 28% of bloggers, a.k.a. writers, who make some amount of cash from their efforts today. That’s a lot of people making a little bit of money, when the trick–one clearly mastered by Fitzgerald–is to be one of the few writers making lots of money.

Books are like babies. They take time to conceive, develop and eventually stand on their own.

According to The New York Times, a star of the print media business–now deep into her first big digital project–thinks she can speed the incubation process up considerably.

In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books.

“There is a real window of interest when people want to know something,” Ms. Brown said. “And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.”

Perseus is paying The Daily Beast a five-figure management advance to cover the costs of editing and designing the books, and Perseus will distribute the titles through its existing sales force. The writers will receive low five-figure advances from Perseus, then split profits from the sale of both the e-books and paperbacks with Perseus and The Daily Beast.

The imprint’s first book, scheduled to be published as an e-book in December and a paperback in January, is “Attack of the Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America,” by John P. Avlon.

“The Raconteurs of Madison County” is a title I came up with one day, after encountering the Web site Name Your Tale.

Name Your Tale asks for a title and if they like it, one of the site’s writers creates “a very short story, in fact, exactly 100 words.” Jenny Nicholson, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and works in advertising by day, “while plotting world domination at night,” was kind enough to write to my title idea.

Name Your Tale was started by Nick Faber. Jeremy Griffin is also part of the project.

On other micro fiction fronts, we have Two Sentence Stories, Fifty Word Stories and Six Word Stories.

I just submitted three “six word stories” for consideration. They are:

• Will work for mansion in Wilmette.
• It takes beer to make wine.
• Before Twitter she did not type.

Maybe these bits will be digitally elevated on Six Word Stories. Or maybe I need to work harder to get away from bumper sticker copy. Either way, it’s a fun exercise and I appreciate the efforts of those involved.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff’ goes on sale June 2, 2009. In the meantime, here’s a trailer for the book to pique our interest:

I like that “create your own currency” idea. Sounds like Rushkoff has some radical, but right on, advice.

Here’s how the book begins:

Commerce is good. It’s the way people create and exchange value.

Corporatism is something else entirely. Though not completely distinct from commerce or the free market, the corporation is a very specific entity, first chartered by monarchs for reasons that have very little to do with helping people carry out transactions with one another. Its purpose, from the beginning, was to suppress lateral interactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a select group of investors.

This agenda was so well embedded into the philosophy, structure, and practice of the earliest chartered corporations that it still characterizes the activity of both corporations and real people today. The only difference today is that most of us, corporate chiefs included, have no idea of these underlying biases, or how automatically we are compelled by them. That’s why we have to go back to the birth of the corporation itself to understand how the tenets of corporatism established themselves as the default social principles of our age.

Rushkoff is the author of ten books on media, technology, and society. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and the upcoming Digital Nation.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve long dreamed of an escape from cubicle nation. Yet, it’s a long, dark passage from here to there. Thankfully, there’s a new book to help show the way—Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur by Pamela Slim.

Guy Kawasaki spoke to Slim about some of the challenges of starting a new business. American Express’ Open Forum has the interview in its entirety, but here’s an important segment:

Question: How do you decide which business to start?

Answer: Business ideas are a dime a dozen. From my perspective, which is firmly rooted in the idea that the purpose of a business is to allow you to live the kind of life that makes you happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy—or at least well-fed, a good business idea has four components. First, it is rooted in something you are passionate about and which energizes you. Entrepreneurship is too darn hard to manufacture enthusiasm. Second, you have the skill and competence to make it happen—or at least a really great contact list of smart and enthusiastic friends to help you figure it out. Third, you need to do enough business planning to know whom you are trying to serve, and how you are going to make money. Finally, you want a business model that you have the resources to support and that delivers the life you want to live.

In my own experience, the “how you are going to make money” part is absolutely critical. Without that, you end up with a time consuming hobby, not a business.

I like to meet other writers, particularly writers that have scaled the book mountain.

image courtesy of Dharma Communications

Tom Crum, the writer I picked up at PDX on Thursday, has scaled said mountain three times and he tells me it’s all about having a deadline and the discipline to meet it.

Crum has lived in Aspen for 40 years. He taught mathematics to Hunter S. Thompson’s kid, worked in business, established a Martial Arts school, co-founded the Windstar Foundation with singer John Denver, and founded Aiki Works, a company which provides motivational speaking, workshops, publications and other services to aid people in their becoming more effective, happier, more centered humans.

His first book, The Magic of Conflict: Turning a Life of Work into a Work of Art was a best seller. Crum is also the author of Journey to Center: Lessons in Unifying Body, Mind, and Spirit and Three Deep Breaths: Finding Power and Purpose in a Stressed-Out World.

He was in Portland to give a keynote at Living Future ‘09 put on by Cascadia Region Green Building Council, Darby’s employer and the group responsible for the “Living Building” designation, which pushes green building standards beyond LEED Platinum.

The Wall Street Journal is offering a little lifestyle essay from novelist and short story writer, Thomas McGuane.

McGuane in many ways is a close literary relative of Jim Harrison. Interestingly, both hail from Michigan, where hunting and fishing are practically a religion. Maybe the fact that I hail from Nebraska—where hunting and fishing is absolutely a religion, along with football—makes me a prime candidate to be a big fan of these unabashedly western writers.

In the Journal piece, McGuane speaks eloquently about his two dogs, Abby and Daisy, the Pointer Sisters.

Bird dogs plead with you to imagine the great things you could be doing together. Their delight is a lesson in the bliss of living. As Bob Dylan says, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” I serve my dogs and in return, they glom the sofa. Too many hunting dogs live depressing lives in kennels with automatic feeders and waterers, exercised only enough to keep them ready for work.

This last bit makes me happy, as Darby and I have a new bird crazy dog and she’s logging some pretty solid “on the bed” time, something my two grandfathers would never have allowed. Their dogs were “strictly for hunting” although they were fed manually, run daily and well cared for.

[BONUS LINK FRIM THE GOOGLE] Here’s a 1984 interview with McGuane in Key West.

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

I like seeing the open source concept made popular by hackers applied in this way by an Ivy League institution. It’s democratic, which is good for the community. It’s also a subtle form of “tryvertising” for high school students considering Yale, which is good for Yale and its prospects.

The nine stories in Livability by Jon Raymond are jangling around in my head, like chimes after the wind has come.

For me Raymond is a discovery, a new writer to follow and a local one at that. His book of short stories released just before Christmas has already garnered reviews from The Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle and LA Times. Raymond also did an interview with Seattle Times art critic, Michael Upchurch.

Upchurch asks Raymond about his priorities, since he also the Editor of Plazm, an art mag, writes screenplays—two of Raymond’s stories in this collection have already been made into films—and has a novel under his belt.

Writing fiction is the “job” I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s. As far as paying the bills, though, I’ve had the pleasure of falling into an odd series of freelance jobs over the years, mainly in advertising, or para-advertising capacities. I also teach from time to time and review books and art. So far it’s worked out all right, but long-term survival remains kind of mysterious to me. The father’s artistic/financial anxiety in “New Shoes” is definitely something I relate to, and something I think a lot of other artists probably would, too.

In the story “New Shoes” the screenwriter at the heart of the story learns to not get his hopes up. Here’s a sample of Raymond’s prose:

Along the way, dozens of people had proclaimed their love the project before ultimately, grudgingly, with great regret, etc., passing. In the movie industry’s spectrum of affection, Dan had come to find, loving something didn’t actually mean that much. It was all hyperbole. If something was “good,” it was generally terrible. If something was “great,” it was not embarrassing. Merely to love something was a form of neutrality at best. It implied fear that someone else might see potential there, and thus it might be worthwhile to buy the author a few lunches, but it foretold no commitment of any kind. In a world of delicate egos, Dan could see how hyperbole was useful. Loving ensured no one’s feelings got hurt. But he was not deceived by the word anymore either.

The only word that mean anything was “special.” “Special” was the highest praise. He never got “special.” (p.185)

There’s a deep yearning in Raymond’s characters. In “New Shoes” Dan the writer-director longs for the approval of distant producers and money men. His longing is palpable, but it doesn’t compare to the needs of other characters in Raymond’s book. In “The Suckling Pig” every character the reader meets has some sort of hole to fill with work, recognition, respect, and of course, love. The story “Benny” is another classic. Benny’s family needs to know their junkie son is safe. Benny’s childhood friend (and narrator of the story) needs to prevent himself from drifting too far away from his roots. Benny himself is desperate for his next fix. In the story “Young Bodies” a teen-aged immigrant from Russia is tough on the outside, but she’s desperate for the intimacy she’s never know. And so on.

What the reader is left with is a sort of melancholy. The kind one might find in a certain brand of indie rock songs, say by The Decemberists. That is to say, it’s a charming and welcome state of mind, even when it’s not joyous. I also get the sense that these stories are a 21st century update on the pioneer’s dream. All the stories are set in Oregon, which is a grand stage, however you look at it. Raymond intentionally showcases urban and suburban Portland, along with The Cascades and the coast. It’s complex, this dream we dream in Pacific Wonderland. And like it’s always been, the dream comes true for some while others’ have their hopes crushed and possibilities continually minimized.

The last story in the book, “Train Choir” is rib aching sad. It’s been made into a film by director Kelly Reichardt. It’s called Wendy and Lucy and stars Michelle Williams. You can see in the trailer the sense of living on the edge that’s inherent in Raymond’s work. You can also see the Western themes played out cinematically, the pace is slowed and one’s struggles are made to seem almost picturesque.

If Jeremiah Johnson (as depicted by Robert Redford in the 1972 film) were alive today and living in Oregon, I’m confident Jon Raymond would capture him in a narrative framework.