Reading Local Seattle

{ Kevin Sampsell, 2/12, 7 p.m., Elliott Bay Book Company}

From Kennewick, and then Spokane, and then for the last long while Portland, Kevin Sampsell will read from the expanded reissue of his experimental memoir, A Common Pornography. The original book was a sixty page slip of a book published by Sampsell’s own small press, the great zine-style Future Tense Press that has continually issued not only Sampsell’s writing but also booklets from the likes of Claudia Smith, Gary Lutz, and Elizabeth Ellen. The 0riginal Pornography walks a tight line between not saying enough and yet saying just the right amount. Each section is probably under 500 words. If you have ever spent anytime in the central part of Washington State with its endless sky, barren hills alternating with lush irrigated fields, and perpetual dust, Sampsell’s book captures this landscape in glancing sentences and rich implications. I’ve used one of section, “Laynee,” several times in writing workshops for “short short” fiction. Every time I’ve used this little piece it generated interest: although as readers they understand it and feel that it is whole, as writers they wonder, “how can I get away with this?” The tiny story deals with when Sampsell’s father became infatuated and very friendly with a ten-year old girl.

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{ food is everywhere }

[ Fat of the Land | Langdon Cook | Skipstone | $26.95 ] Puget Sound once had one of the fattest natural environments on the planet. It was so well stocked and the local tribes had so much access to food that they had sedentary diseases and enough free time on their hands to create a culture as sophisticated as the elaborate bureaucracies of agricultural cultures. Unlike the culture of hunter-gatherers, the tending of crops required complex social solutions to manage the changes in season and weather from year to year, the moving of water and the storing of crop and seed. When the first settlers of European descent arrived in Puget Sound, during the salmon runs in the autumn, pioneers joked you could walk across the rivers on the back of the fish.

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Smiling in the cold rain.

[Pacific Agony | Bruce Benderson | Semiotext(e) | $14.95 ] Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson features a degenerate East Coast “street” intellectual of the type found in Brandon Stosuy’s Up is Up and Down is Up (an anthology of writing from the Lower East Side). Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and Benderson himself are some of the more famous denizens of this lit scene. As a regional literary scene it has been well-documented both in Stosuy’s excellent, if mammoth, anthology but also in literary magazines such as Between C & B, The KBG Bar Reader, the occasional output of The Unbearables.

Insofar as this work is governed by an aesthetic, it tends to feature memoir-ish fiction and fictional memoir of a confessional type. This is the same style used by William Burroughs in his first two books in the 1950s (also products of Times Square), Queer (not published until 1984) and Junky, and is the style-of-choice for jailed bank robbers and death row inmates. These are often hard-boiled, mostly naturalistic tales of urban life, often juxtaposing shocking material with mundane slice-of-life. The style seems deliberately flat and easily executed in order not to detract from the edginess of the lives being documented. Frequently these stories deal with poverty, vice, or transgressive relationships.

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{ Book Espresso Machine at Village Books (photo Lindsey Otta) }

This fall, three bookstores in the Pacific Northwest (Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island, and Village Books in Fairhaven) will be able to provide you nearly any book currently in stock with the countries largest digital book distributor, Ingram, or from the millions of archival books that have been digitized by Google. Instead of the three or four weeks required to special order a hard-to-find book, these stores will be able to provide a book in the length of time that it takes to order a cup of coffee and drink it. They will do this using a print-on-demand machine called the Book Espresso Machine.

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{ Margaret Atwood, 10/7, Town Hall }

Margaret Atwood reads tonight at Town Hall from her novel The Year of the Flood, which expands on her apocalyptic 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. This is the first time that Atwood has revisited a novel. She had this to say about why:

When Oryx and Crake came out, it seemed to many like science fiction–way out there, too weird to be possible–but in the three years that passed before I began writing The Year of the Flood, the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we might very well live through was narrowing fast. What is happening to our world?[*]

Atwood writes great novels, such as Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale, whose characters tend to display an inner chilliness or distance, or else she doesn’t allow us to feel empathy for her characters. In her often perfectly executed short stories (such as Wilderness Tips) this can have the unfortunate effect of narratives that seem to be produced by a machine like die-cast spoons, buttons, or license plates. In a novel this chilliness has time to be placed into context and I usually find myself won over.

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[ The Good Times Are All Gone Now | Julie Whitesel Weston | University of Oklahoma Press | $19.95 ] It is ironic that a region like the Pacific Northwest, that prides itself on rustic individualism, is also a region that was largely created and remains dependent on the legacy of massive corporate and federal projects. Although a miner, farm hand, or lumberjack doesn’t work behind a desk, they are just as dependent on a paycheck as an office worker, and are at the mercy of the company and finally the market. In fact, in many ways work and the dependencies of labor are more pervasive for a lumberjack then, say, a paralegal. A paralegal may return home at night, but until the middle of the 20th century, the lumberjack lived in a camp in the middle of his work site. Many of our towns were intentionally founded as company towns, such as Renton, Spokane, Boise, and the mining town of Kellogg, Idaho. For many years the boom and bust of towns followed the boom and bust of the company towns (even those dependent on Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, or The Bunker Hill Mining Company).

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