0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 11/12)

Gates was defiantly optimistic. “A revolution is taking place in the world of computers today,” he told Pious, “and software is where the innovation is coming from. No longer do we need to go out and build better, more powerful hardware to achieve productivity improvements. We simply develop a new software package, and people can put it to use immediately on their existing machines. The revolution is here—and it is soft.”

Pious was skeptical. “The competition is here, too,” he wrote, “and it is hard.”

Aside from their English-major ghettoes, Microsoft and Butterworth had nothing in common. Butterworth, in fact, was as moribund as Microsoft was thriving. Two years in the typesetting business had taught me to recognize the signs of incipient business failure—I once had delivered a typeset book about NASA’s cover-up of the civilization the Apollo astronauts had found on the dark side of the moon to a publisher whose door was padlocked and festooned with notes from outraged creditors—and I could see Butterworth’s demise coming. This was distressing not only because the company was subsidizing half of my sloth, but because a good number of fellow faint-hearted, underachieving English majors worked there.

Chief among these was Jan Allister, a newcomer to Seattle from Chico, California. Allister had been a divorced mother, named Jan Willis, of three, and teaching at California’s Chico State College when she remarried. Soon after, she moved to Seattle with her new husband, Mark Allister, who came to the University of Washington to work toward his Ph.D. in English Literature. Jan was working at Butterworth to help put him through school.

Whenever I came out to Butterworth, Allister and I would start talking about writing and books like two languagelorn English-speakers who suddenly encountered one another in a remote foreign country. And somewhere along the line of exchanging book recommendations and life stories, I told her about my years at Ardis, in Ann Arbor, and she passed that story on to one of her co-workers, Ann Senechal.

Senechal was a newcomer to Seattle who had taken a temporary job at Butterworth while she was waiting for her new job as managing editor of the Weekly to begin. I spent a lot of time at Butterworth explaining the salient points of Seattle culture to her—particularly the rich, astonishing and Seattle-appropriate record of futility being compiled by the Seattle Mariners—and she always listened with intense interest. But nothing I told her interested her nearly as much as something Allister told her about me: that I had known the poet Joseph Brodsky when I lived in Ann Arbor.

I was in the Butterworth offices one afternoon when Senechal came up to me and asked, disbelievingly, if what she had heard was true—“that you know Joseph Brodsky?” I was acutely embarrassed by the question because it made me feel as if I had been boasting, intent on making myself seem more interesting than I really was—no self-disrespecting Seattleite, after all, would ever stoop to name-dropping.