Kevin Allman

Portland Spaces

Portland Spaces, the new shelter-dwell title published by Portland Monthly, is on the stands after nearly a year in the development hopper. As of this afternoon, there was only one copy left at Powell's Books on West Burnside, so it seems to be finding its intended audience.

Review: Nathan McCall's "Them"

I have a review of Nathan McCall's new novel, Them, in today's Willamette Week. McCall is going to be reading from it at Powell's Books on Friday night.

Them is about gentrification in an inner-Atlanta black neighborhood, but it could just as easily have been set in Portland:

[I]n this uneasy tale of gentrification the road to hell is paved with good intentions, lined with reasonably priced fixer-uppers, and blessed with fine architectural details and a great view of downtown.

Here's a 2-minute webclip of Nathan McCall walking the streets where the novel is set, discussing how it came to be:

Portland's peripatetic café diaspora

From Melissa Lion at Metroblogging Portland I learned of Portland's latest creative-class diversion: the Writers Dojo, a membership-only "writers' space" where people go to, well, write things. Or, as the center's website puts it:

    Writers' Dojo is a new, shared, creative office and center of excellence for serious writers...a homebase for that peripatetic café diaspora known as the writers' group.

Putting aside my vague concern about a center of writing excellence that doesn't seem entirely clear on the definition of diaspora, I clicked through to find out what amenities were offered, and at what price. The electrical outlets, the printers, the coffee, the Wi-Fi -- makes sense, all well and good. (The showers? I don't know, and I don't want to know.)

And all this can be yours, serious writer, for the low low price of...

...$120 a month.

$120 a month.

Once I scraped my jaw off my shoes, I burst out laughing thinking of the "serious writers" I know, and how many of them have an extra $120 per month of brass in pocket. (Answer: None...and if any of them did, they'd be spending it on books. Or charity. Or booze.)

Look: if spending $120 a month to write in public whips it on for some people, then God bless 'em and it's money well spent. But sitting around in a room with a bunch of other writers is the surest way for me to be not-writing (and I don't need any help on that front).

Writing, for me, has never been some communal activity. I'd rather do it in my own living room, in a pair of old sweats or boxers, not worrying about what I look like or how I smell. I have a printer, and a coffeemaker, and a shower, and all the professional accoutrements for which the Writers' Dojo would like to relieve me of $120 a month.

And if I want a change of scenery, I can take my laptop or a pad to the park, or to the neighborhood coffeehouse, or to the public library, which even has a beautiful room reserved for use exclusively by writers -- and it's free.

But, of course, it's not about writing; it's about being seen writing, and it comes from the same impulse that drives some people to join a country club and others to pay for a public humidor with their name on a brass plate, when a municipal tennis court or a cigar box at home would do. When the Writers' Dojo e-zine promises "podcasts, updates, party invites, and writers' resources," it's surely no accident in which order those things are listed.

I wonder what Walker Percy, a Pulitzer prizewinner who managed to scratch his writing-in-public itch at the Waffle House, for Christ's sake, would say about a "creative class" whose members paid $120 a month to swan around with their laptops, call themselves a "dojo," and find their muse in bamboo flooring.

The Moron-American community

The Fox TV affiliate in Dallas brings the world this story about the arrest of one Bryan Moron:

Efforting

Just heard on KGW-TV, which is broadcasting a special report on possible tornadic activity:

"Do we have that picture of the tornado that our viewer sent us?...Okay. It's not ready yet, but we'll be efforting to get that to you."

AP dictum: "Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal"

Jim Romenesko at Poynter's Medianews posted a morning memo from the Los Angeles assistant bureau chief of the Associated Press:

From: Baker, Frank S.
Sent: Tue 1/8/2008 11:58 AM
To: News - Southern California Editorial Staff
Subject: Britney

All:

Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal. That doesn't mean every rumor makes it on the wire. But it does mean that we want to pay attention to what others are reporting....

Wow, the AP really meant it. Check the date and time stamp on this very important breaking story:

Oops, now Britney's lost her car
1/8/2008, 8:54 p.m. CST
By JOHN ROGERS
The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It was just another night on the town Monday, and then another headline in the tabloids on Tuesday, for Britney Spears after the pop star had her car towed away....

John Rogers, you poor, poor bastard.

Red Room! Red Room!

I don't have a MySpace (and never will), but I do have a Red Room. What's a Red Room? A new online salon and social network for writers:

Redroom.com, which premiered Dec. 21, is one of the more ambitious online communities for writers to date and perhaps the most timely, aiming to capitalize on the current potential for profitability of social-networking sites. It features 150 authors (with 400 more to come), ranging from Amy Tan and Salman Rushdie to Edinburgh Castle Pub owner Alan Black; Graham Leggatt, executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, who moonlights as a sci-fi writer; and local mystery writer Cara Black.

Here's my page (with more content to come), and I have to say that Redroom is one of the most stylish startups I've ever seen; it's beautiful and informative, with videos and podcasts in addition to print essays and interviews, and I imagine the site will fill up with even more content in no time.

There's a philanthropic component as well. Authors can designate their favorite charities or nonprofits, and a portion of the revenue generated from page and ad views goes to good causes.

My choice is Make It Right NOLA, Brad Pitt's audacious attempt to help rebuild New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward...because it's a good cause, and because everyone I know who's run into the Pitt-Jolie family in New Orleans says they're about the most down-to-earth neighbors imaginable given their circumstances. And Red Room founder Ivory Madison established a chapter of the National Organization for Women in New Orleans, so I hope she has a soft spot for the recovery effort as well.

Scoopiness

Kudos to Willamette Week for starting out the year with a genuinely worthy cover story: the upcoming mid-term resignation of Portland city councilman Erik Sten. Their website not only has the whole scoop, but a downloadable recording of the interview, and reporter Nigel Jaquiss managed to get the whole thing done so secretly that he caught the rest of the PDX media completely flat-footed.

It's clear in the interview that Sten wanted to shiv The Oregonian, and he did it: the morning edition on the street doesn't carry a word about one of the biggest local political stories of the year, and at the moment the paper's website carries a story containing only a confirmation from Sten's head of staff and a note that the councilman could not be reached for comment. Ouch.

WW and Sten also scooped the Portland Mercury (whose city hall reporter, Amy J. Ruiz, had the good grace and good sense to link to the competition's story on the paper's blog) and the Portland Tribune, which has a few comments from Sten outside his office in City Hall.

Not a good start to the year for The Oregonian -- which is, of course, precisely what Erik Sten and Willamette Week wanted to achieve. In any case, it's nice to see the local media competing for genuine scoops for a change, rather than just bitching at one another. (Not to mention bitching at the bloggers.)

Sustainably awesome: the banned words of 2008

This year's list of "banished words" includes some of my personal bêtes noires, including "authored," "give back," and "____ is the new ____."

The Lake Superior State University's annual New Year's List of Banished Words has some great nominees, including "organic" used when the writer means "natural," and "decimate," which is used increasingly to denote the opposite of decimation (reduction by one-tenth vs. near-total obliteration), a misuse committed almost daily by cable-TV newsheads.

Others on the list: "Give back." "It is what it is." "Perfect storm."

LSSU missed the two which, for me, are like chewing glass: "sustainable" and "awesome." Both of these are in (mis)use everywhere, but they seem particularly widespread in Portland. Sustainable has become a catch-all synonym for not wasting a bunch of stuff, as well as a general adjective of praise; I've even heard people refer to "a sustainable political campaign," which sounds like the candidate is going to be composted at the end of it. (If only.)

But nothing -- nothing -- is as bad as "awesome," which was annoying enough back in the Valley-girl craze of the 1980s and has been revived as an all-purpose idiocy. I'd be fine with it if it was reserved for images from the Hubble telescope, but now it's everywhere. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Awesome. Free Tater Tots with that burger? Awesome.

It's un-awesome. It's awesomely stupid. Do people really want to sound like Rachael Ray?

LSSU is taking submissions for next year's list. Hmmmm.