Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Literary history

In my occasional and passing moments of optimism, I believe that decades from now, when the literary history of our early digital era is written, critics will discover that the gems are found not from the shelves of traditional publishers but in print-on-demand titles, ebooks, blogs and other new packages of communication. On the list should be Michael Hollister, a retired English professor who authored a trilogy of novels about Hollywood (Holywood, Follywood, Hollyworld) that needs to be added to the list of "must reads" about the place. More recently, Hollister has turned his attention to politics and raising a little hell, first in a biting political epic Salishan and now with a new book, Interface Race, the publisher's summary of which suggests more fun with our era of political correctness:
Mark Olmstead is a young pest control exterminator whose company, Eco PC, becomes politically incorrect in the ultra green yet polluted city of Portland, where he is besieged by animal rights protesters, including the Militant Insect Alliance, who spank him with fly swatters. He moves back to rural eastern Oregon and commutes, only to find that his hometown Morehead Gap is now mostly owned by his new landlord, Wes Titus, a politically correct developer from Portland. The town church has decayed, is infested by vermin and occupied by Waldo Ralph, an old hippie who has reconsecrated the structure as the ecocentric Church of Highs, a refuge for wildlife where he grows medical marijuana in the basement. While trying to make enough money to buy a house, Mark courts a former classmate, Sally Chan, who is half Chinese, and takes a side job as an illegal marijuana distributor, involving him with violent hippies, a black drug gang, Islamic terrorists, political assassins, the FBI and a cabal of computer hackers playing God in real life through an Internet video game called Oz and the Flying Monkeys. Mark is targeted for deletion by the Monkeys when he turns informer and he suspects that one of the Monkeys is Yakov Tete, a radical professor visiting his neighbor Diana Hartfield, a book editor vacationing from New York.
Some one, some day, if the gods be just (a legitimate question), must document how much good work has been saved by the digital revolution. Of course, the other side of the coin is that at no time in history has more bad writing been available as well. I try to encourage my brighter students to do something about the digital chaos and create a respected (digital) journal that would be a champion of the best that is out there now. It can be hard to find. (But not with the links below.)
Holywood
Follywood
Hollyworld

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