Results tagged “jonathanraban”

Pandora is batting a perfect 1.000 for Seattlest HQ this morning with Kanye West's "Jesus Walks" as the seeder (does it get better than Outkast, Jay-Z, Talib Kweli, the GZA, and Missy Elliott on a Tuesday?). But what really put this morning over the top in terms of all-around greatness was finding this Wall Street Journal article about the writer's life, Obama, and the White House by local author Jonathan Raban, via Slog. An excerpt from Raban's essay:

In politics, "realism" is usually just another term for pragmatism, or Realpolitik. But "Dreams From My Father" suggests that for Obama the word is rooted less in a political than in a literary tradition, where it has a far richer meaning. It signifies the watchful eye and patiently attentive ear; a proper humility in the face of the multiplex character of human society; and, most of all, a belief in the power of the writer's imagination to comprehend and ultimately reconcile the manifold contradictions in his teeming world.

all in a generation; still we pioneer, homestead.

What does the Noo Yawk Effing Times have against Seattle?

Seattlest has been through our fair share of earthquakes, and while Jonathan Raban's book Surveillance gave us a quivering reminder of the Nisqually quake, we understood the optimism inherent in his ending. Seattle is still there; shaken, likely forever changed, but still there. We know quakes can be insanely devastating, but they don't scare us nearly as much as what we discovered in grad school in central Illinois: tornadoes and wind storms. The first time we set foot in the plains outside Champaign-Urbana, we were gripped with a paralyzing terror that we would simply float up off the planet, untethered by mountains, water...hell, even a small hill would have helped. Our brain would conjure far-off mountain ranges from cloud formations, and we would engage in the explicit delusion that they were indeed there, comforting us with their solidity, mass, and means of escaping the never ending flatness. We lasted a mere three and a half years there, and ran screaming back to the West Coast.

We're going to spoil the end of Jonathan Raban's Surveillance. If you haven't read it yet and don't want to know, stop reading now.

FANTASTIC FICTION SALON: Novelist, nonfiction author, and short story writer Terry Bisson has swept every honor in the science fiction field as well as France's Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. He joins Hugo House's Writing Fantastic Fiction workshop series, where he will teach "Who Likes Short Shorts? We Like Short Shorts!"

Michael Dirda, in the New York Review of Books:

In contemporary America, as Jonathan Raban reminds us in Surveillance, any quest for anonymity—"to live obscurely" according to the Greek ideal for happiness—has grown increasingly difficult, if not impossible. And it's not only an Orwellian Big Brother who is watching. We track each other. We check out the backgrounds of friends, Saturday-night dates, and business associates; we data-mine and Google-search; when on line we worry about hackers, viruses, and identity theft. Schools and playgrounds are patrolled by guards, while spy cameras observe our children in the hallways and bathrooms. Only those who know the code can unlock the steel gates to our "planned communities." Amazon monitors our taste in books. Our cell phones take pictures and record conversations. People can't walk their dogs now without taking along their Blackberry or wearing their Bluetooth.

Jonathan Raban's Surveillance is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on Capitol Hill.

Well, we're finished with World War Z, which means we'll finally have time to pick up Jonathan Raban's Surveillance and that some lucky souls at the library will move up a notch on the hold list. Surveillance, of course, is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on...

The first rule of Seattlest Book Club is you have to read the book.

Christopher Lydon's Open Source did a show last night, "One Nation, Under Surveillance," partially inspired by Jonathan Raban's new book Surveillance and his article in the Guardian, "We have mutated into a surveillance society -- and must share the blame."

READINGS: Jonathan Raban continues his all-out assault on the bookstores of Seattle with a reading tonight at the University Bookstore in support of Surveillance. How many times can we say it: Go.

SEATTLEST BOOK CLUB PICK: For March, we're reading Jonathan Raban's Surveillance, set in a not-so-distant future, when everyone's actions are highly monitored. Get a head start on the conversation by hearing from Raban himself. (We'll know if you went or not.)

DEMOCRACY: There's a Seattle school levy election today. If you don't know where you are supposed to vote, but know your name and the day you were born, you can look it up online. If you can't get to that place, you can cast a provisional ballot anywhere--just march up to the nice poll-worker ladies at your local school or church and say "I'd like to cast a provisional ballot, please." We did it last election and it worked like a dream.

AIR SUPPLY: Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Fighting for Air, examines how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, is interviewed by Michael Fancher, Seattle Times editor-at-large.

Back in October we posted about not being able to get our grubby little eyes on Jonathan Raban's new novel until January. The month has come and, now, gone, and the book is available at all your favorite retail outlets - Tonight Jonathan's reading from it at Queen Anne Books. If you've never heard Jonathan Raban speak you're nearly as impoverished as if you'd never read any of his books. He seems to write out loud like he just can't turn it off. He can't stop this volume and density of ideas and observations from flowing out of himself, and then there's a way about his voice that's so conspiratorial, so peculiarly British, so charmingly agile in tone and inflection that... Uhm, we're fans.

Earlier this weeek we mentioned a cool map mashup that our sister site Gothamist has. They have feeds for both the police and fire departments in New York City and it makes for a really cool and really useful little application, and it's something that we'd love to have on our site here. However, we've never had a police feed in Seattle and now we don't have access to the fire department's data either. The Seattle Fire Department has decided that it's too dangerous to give the public data on 911 calls in a usable format.

About an hour ago, after learning of the existence of a new Jonathan Raban novel, we went straight to Elliott Bay Books to pick it up. The Guardian review is not unreservedly positive, but it doesn't really matter.

The Infernal Noise Brigade marched into the sunset for the final time recently, a fact which saddens us all. Something good has passed. The upside is that the former members of the INB are now free to pursue other projects and today WorldChanging gives us a look into what those might be. According to WorldChanging some of the Brigade are headed to the Midwest to particpate in the Miss Rockaway Armada.

Sometimes when you're preparing for an argument you spend so much time lining up all your facts and figures and imagining every possible counter and building such a gigantic monument of persuasivness brick by logical brick that you fail to see that if you do absolutely nothing it's probable that things will go your way anyway. Dave Sucher over at the City Comforts blog suggests that the People's Waterfront Coalition may be in that very situation with regards to the viaduct.

The Port is on a mission to kill Fishermen's Terminal and thereby stamp out one of the last embers of working Seattle. By "kill" we mean "revitalize" or "update for today's urban needs" or something else that means a healthy and functioning area of the city will be wiped away to make room for yuppie entertainments. No more liveaboards, the Port says, ostensibly in response to the four bodies that have been found floating in Salmon Bay over the past few months, but we know that they've been waiting for any opportunity to march into the area with a scrub brush and a couple thousand gallons of bleach for years now. The drowinings are to the new restrictions what 911 is to Iraq; the one has nothing whatsoever to do with the other, but you've wanted to do this thing anyway so why not call it a reason.

In 2000 or 2001 a number of shipping containers showed up at Harbor Island filled not with stereos and Nikes, but with hopeful new residents. Local author Jonathan Raban was so affected by the human smuggling operation at that time that he wrote it as central to his 2003 novel Waxwings in which an entrepreneurial-minded transplant from "Everett" arrives on our shores the sole surviver of a similar container cruise and sets about making good. If the news pieces from 2001 didn't cement human trafficing via shipping container into our regional mythology, Raban's novel did.

Seattlest saw a house party get senselessly attacked with a shotgun and end in seven dead. A local senator is debated and their version of the big dig is investigated. To truly get to the bottom of it they interview the writer Jonathan Raban.

From time to time we residents of this unique/Northwestern/American city develop blindspots into which it's difficult to see. Jonathan Raban has made a good go of assisting us in these situations --sometimes just by nudging the mirror a little-- so we contacted him hoping he could help with a little perspective on our viaduct dilemma. He doesn't disappoint. Discussed are the Viaduct, the waterfront, South Lake Union, Aurora Ave North, the Tube, traffic, money, legacies, neuroses, wagers against the future, Seattle's misconceptions, Seattlest's misconceptions and, finally, Jonathan's upcoming books.

We dropped our Stranger vs. Weekly faceoff feature (lawsuits), but we do occasionaly still flop those rags open for a scan. Last night we were grinding through the top-heavy feature section of this week's Stranger, when almost without noticing we began flying through one of them. Take us away, Stranger, take us away. Until suddenly we came to a screeching halt on a single word: gimcrack. Gimcrack..? Raban! Our eyes scanned upwards and sure enough, the one man in Seattle good enough to drop a "gimcrack" from time to time was our host for this trip. Jonathan Raban, we love you.

We've been through the Underground Tour several times and read Sons of the Profits, but it occurred to not-originally-from-here Seattlest that we could stand to increase our knowledge of Seattle history. So, encouraged by Jonathan Raban's recommendation of it as "one of the very best informal, intimate histories anywhere," we picked up a library copy of Murray Morgan's Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle to read between films at SIFF.

Welcome to another week of the pitched battle between Old Seattle and New Seattle, playing out in high resolution in the alternative weeklies. We have to give both of them this: their editorial control is pitch perfect. Outside of a tip of the hat to the other side here and there, each publication follows true to their Seattle View in article after article.