Month / April 2007

by Edward Champion

Virginia Tech Killer Was a Frustrated Writer

Associated Press: “The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead was identified Tuesday as an English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service. News reports also said that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic, and that he left a note in his dorm in which he railed against ‘rich kids,’ ‘debauchery’ and ‘deceitful charlatans’ on campus.”

Okay, so maybe I was wrong about the guy not having an ego. I’m still stunned by the way he carried out this violence with calculated anonymity. I’m also wondering if he would have committed this violence if some brave soul dared to understand his writing. By this standard, Chuck Pahluniuk should have been sent to a counselor years ago.

Also, maybe I’m just a morbid guy, but I find it ironic that the English department chairwoman is named Carolyn Rude.

[UPDATE: Salon’s Joe Eaton has done some reporting and collected student impressions of killer Cho Seung-Hui.]

[UPDATE 2: Sarah has unearthed two of Cho Seung-Hui’s plays. Sample dialogue: “What are you, a Catholic priest! I will not be molested by an aging balding overweight pedophilic stepdad named Dick! Get your hands off me you sicko! Damn you, you Catholic priest. Just stop it, Michael Jackson. Let me guess, you have a pet named Dick in Neverland ranch and you want me to go with you to pet him, right?”]

by Edward Champion

Roundup

by Edward Champion

Why I Can’t Get to Your Book

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Since there’s been an upsurge in author email requests in the past few weeks and since I’m being pilloried by a few of them for having the temerity to respond, pointing out that I’m so sorry and that quite honestly I can’t devote my limited time to their vanity press whatsit or the strange package with the T-shirt or what not, let the above image stand as visual evidence.

All of the books in my hall have come in during the past three months. And that’s after purging.

I’ve read 42 books in 2007 so far. I’m sorry. I’m doing the best I can.

by Edward Champion

Vollmann Club Update

It’s been far too long, but I’ve updated the Vollmann Club site to reflect Mr. Vollmann’s current output (and I’ve also added a few additional links). Again, if you are a blogger who has (a) been to a Vollmann reading and (b) written about Vollmann, then please let me know. You’re qualified for entry into the Vollmann Club!

Although we’ve assigned specific Vollmann books to certain bloggers, we don’t mind multiple people covering it. We still need entries for a number of Vollmann volumes. At the very least, I’m hoping to fill in a few gaps before year’s end.

Next up: the Jack Butler Club?

by Edward Champion

Cinematic Dreck

Wikipedia’s Worst Films Ever. (via Papa Rory)

Films I’d include: Monsignor (which I caught on a plane last year and which absolutely baffled me in its badness), Urban Legend (the only film that I have walked out on in fury, not owing to audience conditions, during the past ten years), Buz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (the worst Shakespearean adaptation ever made), Hook (the most sentimental of all Spielberg movies), Toys, The Story of Us, Eye of the Beholder (the incomprehensible 1999 Ashley Judd film), and anything from Uwe Boll.

by Edward Champion

More Thoughts on Virginia Tech

My emotions are high.

What nobody has observed (at least as far as I can tell) is that this is the first American mass murder along these lines (at least that I know of) in which there was absolutely no ego involved. This madman did not want to be recognized. He didn’t carry an ID. Didn’t carry a cell phone. He willfully disfigured his face. He was not Charles Whitman shooting from a tower, knowing full well that his handiwork was going to be discovered. He was not Eric and Dylan getting vocal revenge on classmates. There was no ego.

And beyond the family and friends of the victims and the wholesale incompetence of the Virginia Tech Campus Police, who had jurisdiction here, to call in city, county and state police to contain this situation, that’s what creeps me out the most about this. There is absolutely no human component to this. This guy went in and, as far as we know, just started shooting the shit out of people. There is nothing that we can empathize with here. Not a common grievance that saner humans can identify.

I’m still sifting through the information, stunned that this happened and trying to find some trigger effect. But there’s nothing. I’m wondering if there was some kind of personal connection between the shooter and his victims. But the more articles I read, the more it looks like this was a carefully calculated plan of evil upon the human race.

And that’s what scares the hell out of me. That a person walking this earth would be incapable of even the tiniest sliver of good. That a person would butcher so many without even a warning. That the blood of this killer may very well be colder than a year in Eureka, Nanavut.

by Edward Champion

Pulitzer Winners

This year’s Pulitzer winners have been announced. On the literary front, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has won for fiction, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff’s The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation has won for history, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole has won for drama, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard for poetry, Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher for biography, and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 for general nonfiction.

by Edward Champion

BSS #109: William T. Vollmann II

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Distancing himself from emus.

Author: William T. Vollmann

Subjects Discussed: The relationship between The Atlas and Poor People, the dimensions of poverty vs. the moral compass, I.A. Richards’ poetic experiments, photographs, the problems with objective solutions to poverty, “More aid, better directed,” poverty based on psychological makeup vs. poverty based on environmental circumstances, the exploitation of people as a result of Kazakhstan oil, ethical choices and poverty, Vollmann revealing personal flaws in his text, Kurt Eichenwald, and why Vollmann pays his interview subjects.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Vollmann: I think that one of the mistakes that we have made with so many problems — including drugs, poverty, illegal immigration, sexual conduct that we don’t agree with — is that there is a technocratic solution, or even a one size fits all solution. Alcohol is clearly bad and it’s addictive. It’s dangerous. Fine. Let’s prohibit alcohol. Well, that didn’t work so well. And of course it didn’t stop people from doing the exact same thing with drugs and we’re just beginning to sense that maybe that’s not going to work so well either. It’s not working so well with immigration. And we haven’t made a lot of progress with poverty either. And one of the reasons is that people talk about some kind of objective solution. We throw a certain amount of money at the problem. If people are in bad housing projects, let’s tear them down and put them into new housing projects. Maybe some of those things might have useful effects. Maybe not. But they’ll only go a certain degree in addressing the problem. Because poverty is a state of being. It’s the way somebody feels. And if somebody feels that he doesn’t have enough. Maybe he has enough to eat, enough to sleep on, whatever. But he has so much less than the people around him that he feels humiliation and rage, and yet he’s above the minimal monetary standard for poverty, let’s say, then what solution do we have for him? So it’s a problem like so many of these social problems that involve communication skills and particularly require the ability to listen and individualize on the part of the prospective benefactor. And that’s something that we’re not good at.

by Edward Champion

Don’t Say Goodbye Quite Yet

Terrene Rafferty: “But what Altman does in ‘The Long Goodbye’ goes way beyond simply stating the idea that the private eye’s day was over. Instead of trying to correct, or ignore, the creeping vagueness of the landscape in which his lonely hero is a figure, he actually emphasizes those qualities. The images captured by his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, are as un-noirish as they can be: sun-bleached, unstable, heat-shimmery as mirages. And the camera moves constantly, always slowly, and just enough to keep every shot from settling into anything fixed or too easily readable.” (via Sarah)

I’ve always thought The Long Goodbye to be the most underrated of Altman’s films. Even more so than 3 Women.

by Edward Champion

RIP Don Ho

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Washington Post: “Legendary crooner Don Ho, who entertained tourists for decades wearing raspberry-tinted sunglasses and singing the catchy signature tune “Tiny Bubbles,” has died. He was 76.”

I never got to see him, but my sister did. She reported to me that Ho had the decency to confess to his audience that he was sick of “Tiny Bubbles,” but he performed it any way. As kitschy professionals go, Don Ho was sui generis.

by Edward Champion

The Balding Report

There is currently a tiny thatch of hair on the left side of my receding hairline. I thought it would go as swiftly as the others. But it appears to be clinging to the rock, like some leech that the finest blade devised by humankind couldn’t t even remove. It apparently didn’t get the memo that the other follicles got. Perhaps this thatch wishes to distinguish itself, but it seems to think that I’m still 28. It’s an area of hair on my head that wants to attend nightclubs again and maybe MDMA. Of course, I know those days are pretty much over, and my drug habits, for the most part, have been limited to the legal stuff. Drug-wise, I’m that garden-variety taxpayer you want to kick repeatedly in the ass. I’m sorry for being so unhip.

Mind you, I’m happily balding. I intend to be a badass bald motherfucker. I intend to tell people to get off my lawn, even if I don’t have one. There have been plenty of fantastic bald men, and I hope to be one of them. I just wish that the process had some kind of logic or consistency. There is no reason for this stubborn patch of hair to remain. Yet it does, with stunning resilience.

I only write about this because recent emails my way have suggested some confusion on the subject, when my hair should be a dead giveaway. While I am happy to be thought young, the truth is that, depending upon how you view the age spectrum (my own observational window conflates it with a value associated with Andrew Carnegie), I’m in the beginnings of early middle age. So I can’t exactly be called young or precocious. But I assure you that I’m still a silly person.

Now that we’re cleared up on that subject, let the balding commence!

by Edward Champion

New LATBR Site Goes Live

The revamped Los Angeles Times Book Review has gone live, with editor David Ulin announcing, “[W]e will also offer links to book-related stories from around the paper, as well as an array of Web-only material in the weeks to come,” and revealing new monthly columns from the following: Sarah Weinman on mystery (her first column can be found here, although the cheesy name “Dark Passages” has got to go), Ed Park on science fiction (a natural choice and one that should thoroughly combat Dave Itzkoff’s uninformed nonsense on the other coast), Richard Rayner on paperbacks, and Sonja Bolle on children’s books. Also in this week’s section: an essay from Jonathan Safran Foer.

by Edward Champion

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

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RESOURCES:

INTERVIEWS:

WRITINGS:

RECEPTIONS:

by Edward Champion

The Power of the Written Word

Pink India Ink: “All over the page, words were disappearing. Entire blocks of text were being replaced, one by one, with bare, unprinted paper, winking out of existence as soon as I looked at them. Also, my head was burning. Also, I was starting to sweat profusely. A wave of nauseau hit me, I closed the book, I noted in a casual sort of way that I could no longer feel my fingers, I realized simultaneously that I could no longer see anything at all, and then…” (via Bookdwarf)

by Edward Champion

Justin.TV: Hardly Exhibitionism

Justin.TV Guide: “Admit it. When you first heard about Justin.TV, your curiosity quickly wandered toward the scatalogical [sic] and the sexual. Justin has obviously had no qualms about the former, but the latter seems to have presented a line he’s not willing to cross. We’ve covered moments in the past where Justin has unplugged or pointed the camera away, so it’s perhaps no surprise that this landmark moment would similarly be censored. It’s still disappointing.”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Just one new area to hit: A neologism traditionally anticipates kleptomaniacs, expectant and frenetic. Underlying concerns, kidding, innocent nefarious gambol. Criminally, hearts inside lilt low, pandering in lecherous lulls.
  • The Guardian‘s John Lanchester examines the American concern with copyright, and what this means for Google Book Search and publishers. (via Scott)
  • Apparently, there’s a Casino Royale play has been commissioned. My fellow Bond fan wonders if there have been any others. Me, I’m wondering what resemblance this has to Bond’s first dramatic appearance on television (which, by the way, also included Peter Lorre).
  • Some details have been released on the forthcoming LATBR overhaul (as well as the general newspaper), and I happen to know that the writers being commissioned for the web-only columns are definitely going to be worth your reading time. Alas, I am sworn to secrecy. Not even torture flying in the face of Geneva Conventions will loosen my tongue. Of course, you’ll find out soon enough. What’s also interesting is that all this has caused the aforementioned Bond fan to pledge a revival of the LATBR thumbnail.
  • Fuck you, give me my car.
  • Attention, all reviewers! Can we put a moratorium to the use of “snookered” in relation to Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World? I mean, really, this is the best wordplay you can come up with? (See also Mr. Birnbaum’s views on the subject.)
  • With all due respect to Jessica, who is a thoughtful litblogger, now that it’s out in the open, the recent Chabon-signed copies of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union sent out to bloggers strike me as a more escalated and egregious version of last year’s Diane Setterfeld controversy. I’m exceedingly grateful that I wasn’t targeted. I can read this book on my own, judging it independently, without having to feel guilty that it may not live up to any kind or personalized proclamations offered by Chabon. I generally set aside any and all handwritten correspondence, press materials, or other ephemera into a file, permit the book to sit for some time (so that I will have forgotten about the note) and read and respond to any and all notes or kind gestures after I’ve finished the book. I do not wish for my opinion to be corrupted or tainted in any way. Even my friends know, when offering any manuscripts or work for me to look at, that I will tell them the truth, and it is because I greatly care about literature (and, particularly, my friends’ creative development; I wish to see them blossom) that I will be honest (sometimes quite hard) yet always encouraging. I’m wondering, however, if some of my fellow litbloggers who received these packages might, in some small way, have been unduly influenced by a personalized bookplate from a high-profile literary author. After all, I don’t believe Chabon is doing this for critics and editors who are requesting review copies (and such a practice would be a no-no on a newspaper). Sure, it’s a clever marketing gimmick. But this preys upon the general bonhomie I’ve observed in the litblogosphere.
  • I can’t believe that Jeff is ahead of me on this Vollmann item, but it seems that this reading has been made available by Politics & Prose.
  • Warren Ellis: doing his bit for a nice, clean blogosphere.