Month / July 2008

by Edward Champion

An Open Reply to John Twelve Hawks

Dear Mr. Hawks:

I feel uncomfortable typing those last two words — “Mr. Hawks,” that is — because it provides the faint hope that I might be channeling Howard’s great spirit or addressing an eccentric falconer. But I have received your message. I have my considerable doubts about whether you are indeed the John Twelve Hawks who lives off the grid. For if you are aware of my work, surely this runs counter to your secular manifesto? Or is this all the secular marketing whipped up by others? Whatever the case, if you are who you say you are, I accept your proposal, although I’m sure both of us have plenty of time left to live. If you wish to follow through with your idea, then you can send me another message at some future point with additional details and I will confirm it all here. Rest assured, as a man of my word, I shall not reveal your secret identity. Although I must confess that I was highly amused by the envelope and the postmark. You have friends in very interesting places, sir.

Very truly yours,

Edward Champion

[UPDATE: It appears that Jeff VanderMeer was also contacted by “John Twelve Hawks.” I received the same letterhead, same envelope, same postmark. Matt Staggs offers additional speculation.]

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Rachel Shukert

Rachel Shukert appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #217. Shukert is the author of Have You No Shame? Incidentally, she’ll be appearing at the July 17th installment of the In the Flesh reading series.

Condition of the Show: Contending with tenuous widows and the mysterious circumstances of Mr. Segundo’s death.

Author: Rachel Shukert

Subjects Discussed: Whether Ms. Shukert is still on the Viacom blacklist, the soul-crushing aspects of temping, working odd jobs in Amsterdam, Anne Frank as a constant in life, the holy similarities between Northw__t and G_d, plane crashes vs. car crashes, airlines and gods, the legal system and divine repercussions, lawyers in Nebraska, talk show hosts who come from Nebraska, Montgomery Clift, the relationship between Jewish identity and location, Omaha vs. New York, the notion of stretching out time, writing truthfully about scatological topics, placing a parental advisory warning, expanding the limitations of personal experience, on being perceived by others, limits on confessional writing, room for the persona to grow within annotation, elevated prose, abandoned sets of footnotes left out of the book, David Foster Wallace’s “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries, Will Self’s The Book of Dave, Newt Gingrich, writing letters vs. email, using all caps in print vs. online, grouping people into taxonomies, Fred Savage and Jason Priestley, first crushes, being published as a paperback original, The Anorexic’s Cookbook vs. The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and performing pieces in front of a crowd.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Shukert: Jason Priestly and Fred Savage were the two guys on TV who I had big crushes on as a child. I had a picture of Fred Savage in my locker that I cut out from the newspaper. I remember that he was holding a candy box. Like a Valentine’s heart box. And I would pretend that he was holding it for me. And then when I got a little older, I thought Jason Priestly was the handsomest man I had ever seen. I mean, when I say “a little older,” I mean ten. But I had a big poster of him in my room too.

Correspondent: Who was the first crush you had?

Shukert: Gene Kelly.

Correspondent: Really? And he’s not referenced in the book.

Shukert: No. That’s private. (laughs)

Correspondent: Not anymore. It’s public now. But this is an interesting distinction. Are you slightly ashamed of these crushes?

Shukert: No, I’m not ashamed. But there’s a difference between being ashamed of something and just having something close to your heart. (laughs)

Correspondent: Wow. Well, I’m curious. How much does a crush linger over the course of one’s life like this? I mean, you can be safe with Jason Priestly and Fred Savage, but…

Shukert: I don’t have crushes on them anymore.

Correspondent: But you still have a crush on Gene Kelly.

Shukert: Yes, but he’s dead.

Correspondent: He’s dead. The dead people are the ones to really lust after the best.

Shukert: Yeah, I think that that’s true.

Correspondent: Because there’s no way that you can possibly consummate it.

Shukert: I also loved Paul Newman as a child.

Correspondent: What are you going to do when he dies?

Shukert: I’ll be sad. I’ll mourn like a widow.

The Bat Segundo Show #217: Rachel Shukert [ 49:24 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Mort Walker

Mort Walker appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #216. Mort Walker is the creator of Beetle Bailey. A volume of the first two years of Beetle Bailey is now out.

Condition of the Show: Observing fifty years of development.

Author: Mort Walker

Subjects Discussed: Walker’s drawing pace, the Beetle Bailey production cycle, filtering through the gags, rejected strips sent to Sweden, Beetle’s early days as a slacker in college, the military as the common experience, Walker’s relationship with the syndicate, the curly hair look of Buzz and Lois, portrait-like illustrations of women, early attention to background, the shrinking space of newspaper comics, Berkeley Breathed and Bill Watterson’s fights for space, appealing to the greatest number of readers, the development of Sarge’s girth and teeth, Plato as the only other character carryover, covering the eyes of characters, Dik Browne, Beetle’s early square form and perpendicular limbs, Walker as Lt. Fuzz, Lt. Jack Flap, African-American characters in comic strips, being confronted by editors by Ebony, Colin Powell’s approval of Flap, code numbers associated with the comic strip, writing a military-based comic strip without reference to Iraq, General Halftrack’s skirt-chasing and later sensitivity training, the circumstances that will cause Walker to change his strip, why Walker hasn’t included women soldiers, aborted cliffhangers, and characters staying the same in the Beetle Bailey universe.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Here we have a military strip. But there’s no reference to Iraq. And I wanted to ask you about this kind of balance.

Walker: I try to avoid anything controversial. Because if you do something pro-Bush, fifty percent of your readers are going to get mad, fifty percent of your readers might like it. But I’m after the whole broad spectrum. So I’m really avoid those things.

Correspondent: But to talk about the broader audience, I mean, Bush’s approval rating isn’t exactly the best in the world. It’s under 30%. So you have 70% of the audience if you were to play around with this kind of thing.

Walker: Yeah. Well, anyway, I try not to get too topical or controversial. That’s why I’ve avoided the war pretty much. I don’t mention Iraq very much. Very seldom.

Correspondent: Even though this war has lasted longer than World War II? I mean, doesn’t it seem…?

Walker: But there’s so many people that are angry about it that I’ve got to be really careful about how I treat it. Mostly, I just ignore it. People say, “Well, when is Beetle going to go to Iraq?” I said, “Jesus Christ. I hope never!” You know, I don’t want to send him there because it’s very difficult to deal with. I’m just keeping him in basic training. It’s the common experience that all soldiers have. If I take him out somewhere and specify into some particular kind of work, I’ll lose a lot of my readers there. They won’t be interested or they won’t understand it. But everybody understands basic training. That’s where I keep him.

Correspondent: I mean, you had this similar situation with Jack Flap. That’s why I present this as well. I mean, that didn’t hurt you. In fact, that got Beetle Bailey more attention, you know?

Walker: Yeah, but it was a common experience. Anyway, that hasn’t hurt me.

The Bat Segundo Show #216: Mort Walker [ 28:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

Confessions of a 21st Century Book Reviewer

In a hot and overpriced room littered with phantom cigarettes (now only for the reckless and rich at $9 a pack; so much for the legal vices) and warm, half-empty beer bottles that he’s hoping will meet his alcoholic needs for the week, a man wearing nothing but boxers and a half-hearted smile sits at a rickety OfficeMax desk that he assembled despite the incomprehensible instructions — written in three languages, none English. He checks his email and RSS feeds. He hopes to hell that he hasn’t pissed off an editor by accident and that maybe that snot in accounting might finally send him the check he needs to make this month’s rent. It was only a few hundred bucks for a review of a 1,200 page biography he wrote four months ago; all told, he probably made just under minimum wage for all the time he put into the piece. He emails pitches to more editors, not hearing back from any of them. He remembers a time when they actually returned emails. But even the nice ones have gone corporate and can’t even be bothered with this professional courtesy. He’s been trying some bastard in the Midwest for a year and a half, but the guy hasn’t even had the decency to write back, “Fuck off.” But when he learns from the RSS feed that the editor lost his job, he pops open a bottle of champagne that he had swiped from one of the literary cocktail parties. He receives many invitations to literary cocktail parties. He’s not sure why. But when he has the time, he attends some of these affairs, telling the bartender that he’s a friend of the author. And if that doesn’t work, he drops a name of a publishing executive. But he generally walks out with a few bottles of gratis, half-decent liquor. And since it’s all tax deductible from the publisher’s perspective, he sees no real ethical conundrum.

He’s sent fifteen or twenty emails to these editors in the last week, offering unique insights on obscure novelists that he believes the public might want to know about. But they want to hire the same aging, burned out midlisters to write about the same books in the same hackneyed way. They always use that damn word “limn,” even when they’re told not to. He even called a few of these editors over the phone. He also said hello to one of these editors at a literary cocktail party just the other night. Alas, the editor was “just swamped” and quickly bolted to the other side of the room. This editor also owes him a check, but the editor swaggered about as if he should be paid for the privilege of being looked at. The man considered tossing a drink, Appointment in Samarra-style, onto this editor’s expensive suit to demonstrate the true meaning of the verb transitive in question, but thankfully thought better of it. After all, his books section would be cut eventually. Just as all the others had.

Section cuts, they say. Or sometimes don’t say, as it turns out. It might help the man if they would at least give him the consolation that he could not write his way out of the green bag he takes to the supermarket because he wants these needlessly belligerent eco-freaks to stop shrieking at him. If they could just be honest and transparent. The way the blogosphere is sometimes, when it isn’t fighting yet another battle against the print people or when the print people are playing the bloggers against each other by hiring some bloggers and not hiring others. But despite the ostensible passion for books that all of them share, they stopped playing fair sometime in 2005.

He wonders whether he should fulminate against these editors on his blog, but then he might not get linked by the humorless woman who runs the blog of a book reviewing organization that he figures should link to him from time to time, given that he pays them $35 a year for the privilege of being bombarded by dire emails announcing “the death of book reviewing” and a vote that will never be counted at their end-of-the-year book awards ceremony. But this woman has never linked to him, nor will she. She lost her passion for books a decade ago, and it’s pretty clear that this listlessness extends into her life in general. (Is this the fate of the book reviewer in the end? he thinks to himself.) But she got the job because there was nobody within the approved coven who wanted to run the blog. It was apparently just too darn hard to upgrade to WordPress. Never mind that they could probably ask the bloggers to do this for them. But that would be beneath their perceived stature.

He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He downloads porn, masturbates on a regular basis, and, in light of recent developments, he has considered switching over to homosexuality just to be sure. Because he is still reviewing books for practically peanuts at an age when a few of his school pals have risen up the ranks to become “self-starters,” with one climbing up to become a menacing partner in a cold transactional law firm, he has not exactly been what women might call “a good catch.” One woman dated him twice, but scurried away when she caught a glimpse of his bank statement. At present it is half-past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago. But he has played several games of Minesweeper and even fired up a first-person shooter for a while, suffering a humiliating loss to some teenagers who were not only more adept with the mouse and keyboard than he, but who shrieked crude insults about how gay his playing methods were. He is unmarried, and, unless he can find a sugar mommy, he would likely not be reviewing books if he had a child. When he sets foot outside, his threadbare sneakers crunch on crack vials deposited by friendly neighbors. All part of the neighborhood character, he says to anyone who dares to visit him out here. But they all know damn well he was lucky to get this apartment at this rate, even though nobody else wanted it based on the “unclean” conditions of this city block.

Needless to say this person is a writer. If he still has any literary aspirations, it’s an uphill battle. But he maintains a popular blog, hoping that this might be some small leverage he might use for a book deal. But he never writes fiction. He’s too busy reviewing it. He’s too busy blogging about it. There’s scarcely any time for anything else. A website for a European newspaper has asked him to write a 350 word blog post on an author who died last night. Nobody else had read this author’s books. And he had 30 minutes to bang something out on the keyboard. He fires up Wikipedia, rephrases a few sentences for this piece, tries to “search inside the book” at Amazon to dredge up some example from a book he read fifteen years ago and can’t remember. Nobody reads this blog post.

Do I seem to exaggerate? If anything, the scenario that George Orwell once described has grown tenfold worse. Literature itself may not be dead. It is a zombie legion regularly defying the odds, even as literature is increasingly devalued in our media, our culture, this nation on the whole. The publishers will keep on churning books. But if you’re still in this crazy game — whether as a reviewer or a blogger or a semi-participatory literary acolyte — then you’re certainly not in it for the money.

Of the many solutions that have been presented to overhaul the newspaper scenario, very few account for the most basic of needs. A fair rate to ensure that those who write about books have enough time to spend on the piece without banging off hackery, or that they can use some of the time they need to spend hustling to work on some literary side project. A timely payment of the same funds for the freelancing writer’s most immediate concern: paying the rent. But because newspapers are tanking, because the rates that newspapers pay reviewers have not changed in relation to inflation, who on earth but the most febrile literary enthusiast would lead such a life?

In the first of a two-part post entitled “Hypatia and the Burning Library,” Hart Williams ably pinpointed the problem:

Think about it, the publisher actually SPENT TIME with the writer. It’s almost as though … writing MEANT something. As if the words of a gifted poet and writer were WORTH something, had VALUE, and were worthy of cultivation. If that sounds normal to you, you are sadly off the beaten track. You see, in the 1970s and 1980s, all those book companies were bought up by conglomerates, usually with a movie studio and a record company attached, BOTH of which made so much more money than the publishing arm, that landing as the corporate manager of the poor print arm of Engulf & Devour, Inc. was the corporate equivalent of being sent to an Alaskan Arctic Radar station, or in the old USSR, being sent to Siberia. Those of you who’ve seen the Charles Bukowski documentary will recall Bukowski’s publisher, who went into his own pocket to make sure the poet had money to pay rent, buy cigarettes and alcohol and WRITE.

One can say the same thing of today’s book reviewing climate. Many book review sections are doing the best that they can to keep their sections and maintain some basic modicum. But the conglomerate mentality — ushered in by the Sam Zells (corporate dictator) and Sam Tanenhauses (subliterate corporate sycophant) — has eliminated the ability to develop and to appreciate talent. Mark Sarvas is coaxed to write for the New York Times Book Review, even as the editors contrive a smug and thoughtless takedown in place of a constructive disapprobation. (There are other shenanigans behind the scenes that I wish I could share. But I am sworn to secrecy. Rest assured, the writer — whether she be the novelist or the reviewer — is most certainly valued last at the NYTBR.) Many newspaper sections have certainly assembled fine freelancing ensembles in these days of dying book sections. But if each contributor appears, say, once a month and earns a check that only covers one-third of the rent, is this truly equitable from both the writer and the book section’s perspectives? And since the books editor is under a constant fight to keep her job and her section, things must be played safe, leaving innovation and iconoclasm to be prioritized last.

So some of us find ourselves in safer territory out here in the litblogosphere, knowing that we can write just about anything we damn well please. No editors. But then no word count limits either. Even John Sutherland was forced to confess that “the liveliest opinion and the sharpest exchanges are currently to be found on the weblog.” And while this all feels at times like a happening party, who’s out there to spend time with us and understand us but our peers and the publishers? The publishers want us to write about their books. Our peers, like us, are trying to figure out that immortal formula:

1) Literary blog! Punk rock!
2) ???
3) Profit!

There remains no answer to the question marks in the second item other than some kind of financial support. But by who? Grants? Crazed philanthropists? You certainly won’t find it from the NEA or its puppet spokesman David Kipen, who viewed my WPA-style solution as something vaguely Communist. At the present time, you won’t really find it through advertising, whether for blogs or for newspapers. (And on this point, who can blame the publishers? Let’s say you’re a science fiction publisher. Are you really going to want to place an ad in the NYTBR when they hire an uninformed regular like Dave Itzkoff? When they constantly belittle and disrespect genre?)

And you’re sure not going to find the money in book reviewing, unless you’re one of those freaks happy to dance, pitch, cajole, read, and write like a mad demon.

So we’re left here with a regrettable expanse that might be filled in with a rethinking of our priorities. Or perhaps it might come down to the workers seizing the means of production. To some degree, they already have in the form of blogs. And while I disagree with Sutherland that writing “hastily and thoughtlessly” is without interest (indeed, this impulsive approach to passion is one of the main reasons litblogs took off in the first place), I think Sutherland is write to suggest that we really haven’t gone far enough in what we might be able to do. Are any of us potential John Careys or A.S. Byatts? Is there raw talent that can be transformed into something exceptionally beneficial to the literary scene?

Perhaps it will take the end of newspapers to actuate bloggers into answering these questions. But the key step may be #2. Restoring the worth and the profession of a writer. Figuring out ways to make books matter again. Creating a safety net.

Literary folks, are you up to the challenge?

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Christian Bauman

Christian Bauman appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #215. Bauman is most recently the author of In Hoboken.

Condition of the Show: Contending with contentious Midtown diners.

Author: Christian Bauman

Subjects Discussed: Defining a rock and roll novel, writing an ensemble novel with Hoboken as a character, references to paper storms and 9/11, chronological foreshadowing, using real-life Hoboken locations vs. invented locations, the Hoboken-New York rivalry, playing the rube vs. genuine sincerity as a reflection of irony in the 1990s, balancing real-life incidents and invented narrative, the benefits of vaguely knowing someone, whether or not a particular city is important to a narrative, writing about the worker hierarchy, writing about characters who live cheaply, socioeconomics in literature, locative contexts that make novels different, trying not to anticipate the next novel, songwriting phrases, reconfiguring essays and other pieces into a novel, and the modified omniscient voice.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You have this particular rock ‘n’ roll novel dwelling upon Hoboken, as well as Mona Smith, who is this Erica Jong-like figure, who is the mother of Thatcher. But I wanted to ask you about this. Because it’s very fascinating to me. I have the belief that if you write a rock ‘n’ roll novel, there needs to be some additional element. Some additional hook. Because if you dwell too much on rock ‘n’ roll music, well, it’s going to possibly be something of a circlejerk. So I wanted to ask you. Was this a consideration in setting this book in Hoboken? The Hoboken aspect came first? What happened here?

Bauman: Yeah, I think the Hoboken aspect came first. Well, first of all, I should point out that everyone keeps calling it a rock ‘n’ roll novel. It is actually a folk novel. So we should just be clear here. There’s a lot more Woody Guthrie here than anything else. But it’s a good point. You know, the whole thing I wanted to do, in as far as I wanted to anything and it didn’t just happen the way it happened — I was trying very hard this time to do two things. One was to write about a place. A very specific place to the point where the place became one of the characters in the book. And of those places where I’ve either lived or been alive in my life, Hoboken was one of them that stood out as a good place to go. And the other one was that I really wanted to try and write an ensemble novel to the best of my ability. And I kind of failed in that aspect.

The Bat Segundo Show #215: Christian Bauman [ 36:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Ralph Bakshi

Ralph Bakshi appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #214. Bakshi is the director of such films as Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and American Pop. There is also a recent book, Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, now out that collects his work.

Condition of the Show: Caught in a musical daydream.

Guest: Ralph Bakshi

Subjects Discussed: The role of music in Bakshi’s films, making good films without a lot of money, emotionally correct songs, daydreaming, Bakshi’s record collection, the original idea of using Led Zeppelin for Lord of the Ring, Leonard Rosenman, Bakshi’s relationships with composers, Andrew Belling’s Wizards score, the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic, artistic freedom, why Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” was the final song in American Pop, the relationship between writing fast scripts and revising in animation, the ending of Heavy Traffic, subconscious symbolism, the use of long shots and extended takes, Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksander Nevsky, giving Thomas Kinkade his first big break, on Fire and Ice not being a Bakshi film, using imagination with pre-existing visual elements, rotoscoping, getting the little artistic details, Edward Hopper, designers vs. montage, operating in the present as an artist, being honest, The Last Days of Coney Island, the impending collapse of America, Barack Obama, burning out, American avarice, and Bill Plympton.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about music in your films. It’s certainly important in American Pop. You pilfered from your record collection for that, as well as the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic. And there’s “Ah’m a Niggerman” from Coonskin, which you wrote. I’m wondering if you did this because you have an aversion to Carl Stalling-style orchestral music.

Bakshi: First of all, I love music. I’ve always loved music. And I’ve loved various kinds of music. Music is part of our lives. It’s part of the soundtrack that what we all grow up with. Especially in my day. I don’t know today. There’s so many things going on. I’m talking about yesterday and my day, which are the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Music is so emotionally important to the movie. It’s just as important as anything else. If the song is emotionally correct for a scene, the scene plays better. Or the scene plays better than it would have with a different song. So music is so critical to movies. I chose songs that I knew emotionally worked with these scenes that I wrote. Because whenever I listened to music while either driving in a car or sitting at a bar or listening to Coltrane or Billy Holiday – you daydream. If you don’t daydream to music, then you’re not listening to good music.

(Lengthier excerpts from this program can be found here and here.)

The Bat Segundo Show #214: Ralph Bakshi [ 43:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

Barack Obama is Unamerican

You bastard. Let us be perfectly clear about what happened here. Obama pledged that he would support a filibuster of any bill involving telecom immunity. And what did he do this afternoon? He allowed Americans to be sodomized on this point. Even Hillary voted against this. If this centrist prevaricator keeps this up, I’m voting for some third party loon on principle. The Daily Kos, true to its hypocritical and opportunistic stance, remains silent about this disgrace. I guess Kos and the gang don’t like to advertise when they’ve been thoroughly betrayed by their ostensible savior. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald is on the case.

[UPDATE: And if this flip-flop doesn’t piss you off, perhaps Obama’s astonishingly sexist remarks on abortion will. “Mental distress?” Why don’t you just say that these women are suffering from hysteria?]

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • The Frank O’Connor Award people have given the latest prize to Jhumpa Lahiri. But they haven’t even had the decency to serve up a shortlist. The jurors claim that Unaccustomed Earth was “so plainly the best book that they would jump straight from longlist to writer.” But what you may not know was that their secret goal was to enable Jhumpa Lahiri’s out-of-control ego. Never mind her $4 million, two-book deal. Having taken pivotal NEA money away from other writers who still have to work a full-time day job (and do indeed have children to support), Lahiri will not rest until she has taken every last dollar from every last award. She’s the Brenda Walsh of the literary world. And Darren Star has been trying to find the right television hook for years.
  • Tribune inside man Lee Abrams has expressed a few words about books sections, calling them “too scholarly” and in need of being “dramatically rethought.” While I disagree with the notion that a book on the “Phillippine Socialist Movement in the 1800s” (are Abrams and Zell even aware of the underlying reasons for the Spanish-American war?) can’t be interesting, I nevertheless agree that any 21st century books section should involve something fun, engaging, intelligent, and even a bit iconoclastic. It involves respecting the intelligence of readers (they are much smarter than you give them credit for; I’m looking in particular at you, Garner and Tanenhaus) and getting them excited about books, even if it means sometimes going a little over-the-top (although in a justifiable way). It involves being flexible to genre, debut fiction authors, books in translation, and crazy titles that nobody else would think of reviewing. Mark has an idea that goes much further. [UPDATE: Mark Athitakis also has some thoughts about this. As soon as my time clears up a bit, I plan to offer a sizable post later this week on additional problems plaguing book review sections.]
  • If by “Woody Allen for the new millennium,” you are referring to Allen’s woefully unfunny films of the past decade (for my money, the last funny Allen film was probably 2000’s Small Time Crooks and that was only because of Elaine May), then I suppose there’s a case to be made. But let us consider a more suitable comparison. At the age of 51, Sedaris has written the unfunny book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. At the age of 51, Woody Allen made Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days — inarguably two of his best late-period pictures. Apples and oranges, to say the least. (via Books, Inq.)
  • Yeah, I’m with Pinky on this silly Steve Erickson profile. People certainly have the right to read a book any way they want to, but the reader who sits down with Zeroville without laughing her ass off leaves me somewhat suspicious.
  • I’m pleased to report that Brockman has seen the light.
  • And Good Lord, I’m old enough to remember watching this Stephen King AMEX commercial on the tube.
by Edward Champion

Cysted Twitter

Maud has a very interesting post on how Twitter may very well be doing its part to divulge publishing deals to the public. What’s fascinating about all this is that, unlike blogging, corporate blocking software won’t prevent some folks from Twittering. They can, after all, type in sentences from their cell phones. You no longer need a keyboard to blog. Because the Twitter people have made this all so easy. So if there is now such an overwhelming urge to confess (the new form of resistance?), then why not encourage workers to do so anyway?

I must likewise confess about my own confessions. In the early years of this blog, when I had a day job, about 90% of the posts were composed on the clock. The fact that most of my co-workers were not readers made it all somewhat esoteric. To this day, I still heighten and downplay minute words and phrases just to see how close the readers are paying attention. Indeed, the scary verities elucidate remarkable yammering from unexpected nomina.

As to whether I have a Twitter feed, and whether I confess anything there, well, the Internet’s a grand adventure, isn’t it? To me, Twitter seems to be blogging’s answer to the David Markson novel. But now that every word we type is fair game for speculation, a whole grand cabinet of fun has been presented to me.

by Edward Champion

RIP Bruce Conner

Jesus, July is a bad month for the iconoclasts. If you don’t know Bruce Conner, one of the found footage masters, heaven help you, start here.

Also, The Great Search is available in its entirety on YouTube: (Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three) (Part Four) (Part Five) (Part Six) (Part Seven) (Part Eight) (Part Nine) (Part Ten) (Part Eleven) (Part Twelve) (Part Thirteen) (Part Fourteen) (Part Fifteen) (Part Sixteen) (Part Seventeen) (Part Eighteen)

by Edward Champion

The Spirit of St. Louis

The Slow Death of a City Block: “A hundred years ago, fifty, even 30 years ago, the city was full of life, the streets vibrant and bustling, the neighborhoods full of people and activity. But today you can walk around many of the streets in the old city and they’re empty. Nobody’s there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America’s most devastated urban landscapes.”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • While self-appointed pundits wax ignorantly about how they’ve finally learned to appreciate comics years after everybody else has, it is refreshing to read a piece by someone who is candid about what he does not know.
  • Bob Osterhag summarizes Obama’s opportunistic bolt to the center quite well, and he echoes my own gripe about invasive wiretapping being retooled into “an important surveillance tool,” a noun phrase that is one masterful piece of bullshit. Well, I’ll vote for the smarmy fuck, even if he’s managed to fool Laura Miller. Then again, at this point, I’d vote for Mickey Mouse if he were on the Democratic ticket.
  • Sarah and Orthofer report that Dutch crime writer Janwillem van de Wetering has passed away.
  • David Crystal offers a defense of text messaging, pointing to its creative potential. And I’ll remember Crystal’s article the next time I drunkenly type “wr r u? out of $! pls buy me nthr pnt!” on a sad Saturday night in a pub. Apparently, there’s genius within those two sentences. Not desperation. The real question here is whether I can the transcripts of these text messages to some university library equally foolish enough to take my collection of aborted manuscripts. (via Magnificent Octopus)
  • Trouble in paradise? Gawker has reduced the pay rate per page view. It’s only a matter of time before Nick Denton comes up with the bright idea of having contributors pay him to write for Gawker. (via Persona Non Data)
  • Apparently, a controversy has erupted over the Colt 45 beer can.
  • In Brazil, authors are treated like rock stars. In Brooklyn, authors are treated like deadbeats who should get a real job.
  • CBS News has talked with Richard Ford. And there’s an accompanying photo of his marked up manuscript. It remains unknown, however, whether or not he has changed his mind about basements in Terre Haute.
  • Well, Rob Peters, you may be an incurious bore and all, but I assure you this blog is still maintained for fun. Why don’t you team up with Springsteen and write a new song called “3 Million Blogs (And Nothin’ On)?” (via Mental Multivitamin)
  • I’m still looking for this year’s quintessential summer album, but I have to say that The Ting Tings’s We Started Nothing is a hell of a lot of fun. And I particularly dig the closing rocker, “We Started Nothing.” And incidentally, if you’re in New York, The Ting Tings are playing a free pool party with MGMT and Black Moth Super Rainbow at McCarren on July 27th. [UPDATE: Alas, perhaps my enthusiasm was misplaced. I certainly hope that this isn’t a typical live performance.] [UPDATE 2: Also worth checking out: Revolver, who I find more interesting than Fleet Foxes.]
  • And a demolition worker has uncovered a Tolkien postcard behind a fireplace. Apparently, Lord of the Rings is so huge on this planet that even the termites were salivating.
  • Also, this just in. McNally Robinson NYC is changing its name to McNally Jackson, a move that the store hopes will reflect its commitment to independence instead of a chain store mentality, among other reasons.
by Edward Champion

Helter Skelter

Vincent Bugliosi is having a hard time trying to book interviews for his book. Well, if Bugliosi comes to New York and Vanguard goes to the trouble of sending me a copy of the book to read, Bugliosi is welcome on The Bat Segundo Show.

Of course, despite the purported “aggressive Internet campaign,” I haven’t received a single email or phone call on the book. Perhaps the problem here is that the publisher and the publicist on this book don’t seem to understand that this isn’t so much a question of mainstream and alternative. Or could it be that they assumed they would get on all the “big” shows and that they failed to contact the “small” ones? Did they put all their eggs in one basket? Was it hubris or ignorance on their part? Bugliosi’s inability to get on the air reflects the current journalistic shift from legitimate intellectual inquiry to frivolous celebrity gossip. In other words, this isn’t 1974 anymore. Unless, of course, you go online.

I’m firmly convinced that if Bugliosi wrote a book called The Prosecution of Paris Hilton for Carnality, he would have no problem getting on The Daily Show. (Conversely, a book with that title would have a difficult time getting on The Bat Segundo Show.)

by Edward Champion

Thomas M. Disch Found Dead

Matt Staggs telephoned me this afternoon with extremely sad news. Science fiction legend Thomas M. Disch was found dead on July 4th. He committed suicide. I am especially stunned, because I interviewed the man only a few weeks ago for The Bat Segundo Show. And as soon as I get my emotions collected here, I’m going to work on mastering this hour-length conversation and get it up as soon as I can. I will have much more to say about this visit very soon.

But in the meantime, you can read Ellen Datlow’s remembrance here. To hell with genre. The literary world lost one of its most acerbic voices. And it’s a damn shame that so many of the snobs didn’t appreciate Disch because he “merely wrote science fiction.”

[UPDATE: You can now listen to the interview here. Disch lived in an apartment with scant decor. There were books and a few paintings. But that was pretty much it. He told me that his other home in the country had been overrun with mildew. And he had nowhere else to go, no place to live other than this apartment. In the end, Disch lived entirely for his art and paid the terrible price for daring to stick to his guns.

I have been informed that this was the last face-to-face interview that Disch conducted. Because of these circumstances, this was the hardest podcast I’ve ever had to put together. But I felt compelled to get it up as quickly as I could. It took a few minutes for the two of us to get into a groove, but he did seem to enjoy the conversation, smiling and laughing, lighting up and cracking many sardonic jokes. The discussion touched upon death and literary posterity. It seemed evident from Disch’s book that these were important themes for him. But because of the unexpected prescience of Disch’s answers, this podcast is now very painful for me to listen to. Listening to his answers in hindsight, part of me wonders if he had already made his decision.

When the conversation was over, Disch asked me many questions about what I did, the people I interviewed, and asked if he could get a tape of the podcast. I wondered if these inquiries arose because of his loneliness. I told him that I would certainly send him a copy of the podcast when it was finished, but I never got the chance. He also asked if our conversation would appear in print. I told him that I would do my best, but that I was at the behest of editors and shrinking newspaper space. I pitched a few editors on a profile piece, but these efforts fell on deaf ears. I remain extremely saddened that Disch, who merely wanted to be appreciated as a poet and who hoped that he could hold onto his apartment on Union Square West, felt that suicide was the only answer. Perhaps he was a lonely man still trying to come to terms with the death of his partner. Perhaps he had declared himself a deity so that the world would finally notice his literary contributions. I don’t know if I’m really in the position to judge. But I do hope that this conversation can, in some sense, allow others to appreciate his very special talent.]

[UPDATE 2: A number of remembrances can be found at Enter the Octopus.]

[UPDATE 3: Thoughts from William Gibson, Jeff VanderMeer, Quenchzine, Scott Edelman, Bruce Lewis, Tom Moody, Locus, Cory Doctorow, Wet Machine, Scott Woods, Stephen Frug, Mark Kelly, Suzanne Fischer, Dotan Dimet, Daily Kos, and Marc Laidlaw. As of Monday morning, there isn’t one obituary or notice in a single American newspaper, with many litblogs egregiously silent. Think Disch will get even a mention from Paper Cuts? Yeah, right.]

[UPDATE 4: I’ve been informed that there will be a memorial service for Disch in September.]

[UPDATE 5: Barista reports that Disch was fighting to stay in his home and that the landlord had won an appeal on the basis that the apartment was rented out to Disch’s partner, not Disch. Terrible. More here.]

[UPDATE 6: Here’s another of his last interviews. (Forget the Dr. Blogstein interview. It is outrageously idiotic, uninformed, and disrespectful. In fact, Dr. Blogstein is now sending really tacky emails to people trying to promote this garbage. As such, I have removed the link.)]

[UPDATE 7: Threads at Crooked Timber and Metafilter.]

[UPDATE 8: I’ve written a Disch tribute for New York Magazine.]

[UPDATE 9: Some tributes have rolled in from newspapers and magazines: Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and The Advocate. But there remains nothing from the New York Times.]

[UPDATE 10: Official obits from The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.]

[UPDATE 11: A lengthy post at The Tomorrow Museum and an official obit overseas at the Telegraph. On the homefront, there remain no acknowledgments from the Observer, the Sun (You call yourself a books editor, David Wallace-Wells? All that space!), the Post, or the Daily News.]

[UPDATE 12: The Guardian now has an obit and a letter from Michael Carlson. And His Vorpal Sword has a devastating and well-researched post on the factors that the late Disch and other freelancers face.]

Photo credit: Flickr

by Edward Champion

Remember to Relax

To give you a sense of the wonderful laziness that a three-day holiday weekend affords, I should point out that, speaking personally, yesterday’s greatest achievement was making dozens of chocolate chip cookies. Other than that, there was some reading, a considerable amount of slacking off, and many hours in which nearly nothing was accomplished.

I confess this with the hope of informing all that it is perfectly okay to be a bit lazy right now. It seems that workaholics and many freelancing pals are experiencing some difficulties understanding that we are, indeed, in the throes of a holiday weekend. And the only reason I’m serving up blog posts is largely to deposit stray bits of information that pop up while I am essentially doing nothing.

For example, I have spent a portion of the morning contemplating the unusual architectural design of some of the Best Products stores. Best was a chain that died off in 1997. Sadly, there appears to be no visual record of the strange diagonal corner at the Arden Fair outlet in Sacramento. This corner was demolished a good decade ago, with the building revamped to a more boring rectilinear design that befits the mundane exigencies of suburban architectural requirements. But if you were lucky enough to experience this structural quirk, the corner slid out when the store was open and folded neatly into the building’s recess when the store was closed. When the corner was pulled out, the slope was particular ideal if, like me, you were a clumsy teenager with a borrowed skateboard. And it appears that the Houston Best building was even stranger, offering one of the wackiest superstore apices I think I’ve ever seen. So do good things sometimes come with chain stores? Or have we become so committed to relentless homogeneity that we can’t even allow for a flourish or three within the boxy buildings that come with gentrification? And is gentrification remotely justifiable if these monolithic entities divert from the building boilerplate a bit? I was pleased as punch to learn that 600 Starbucks outlets were biting the dust in the forthcoming months. With rare exceptions, I only enter a Starbucks if I have to pee. But would I be more forgiving of Starbucks if, say, they served up a building that was even a tad incongruous? Not bloody likely, given that they’ve attempted to abscond with our language with their ineffable terms for small, medium, and large.

This segue should reveal that it is very difficult for some active minds to accept the notion of a holiday. I had a wonderfully disturbing dream last night that gave me a vital component to a narrative I am working on. But if you are afraid of relaxing, consider the Archimedes principle. Your mind will likely be set off by something anyway. So there’s no crime in stepping away from the computer. You have one day left before the crazed week begins again. Enjoy it while it lasts!

by Edward Champion

Russell T. Davies’s End

Longtime readers of this blog know of my antipathy for Russell T. Davies’s contributions to Doctor Who. So it was with no expectations whatsoever that I fired up “Journey’s End,” the season finale of Doctor Who, assuming that my intelligence and my emotions would be condescended to and that the fanwankery set into motion last week would be taken to new masturbatory heights. Yes, there was a gratuitous appearance from K-9. Yes, there was the Davros-Sarah Jane Smith showdown referencing “Genesis of the Daleks.” The less said about the phony resolution to last week’s cliffhanger, the better. And I could do without the ridiculous manner in which Earth was transported across the galaxy.

But despite these melodramatic flourishes, this episode worked for me. It was a fitting end to Davies’s tenure on the show, bringing in nearly all of his supporting characters and leaving the Doctor more or less where he started at the beginning. I enjoyed the Daleks floating above Nuremberg speaking German. (Alas, Davies’s German is not so good. He got the German verb for “Exterminate!” wrong. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the Nazi parallels.) I liked Davros questioning the Doctor’s motives, which not only echoed the lone Dalek from “Dalek,” but referenced similar talk of genocide from “Genesis of the Daleks.” Let’s not forget that in “Genesis,” the Doctor asked Davros whether he would let loose a virus that would destroy all forms of alien life. And this quiet reference to the show’s longtime continuity was a surprisingly restrained Davies moment that I have to give him props for.

The whisper into Rose’s ear, the heartening future of Sarah Jane Smith having a 14-year-old, and Donna’s fate suggested unspoken connections that called into question the notion of what it is to be a companion to the Doctor. Traveling with the Doctor, whether as a companion or a viewer, involves being at a specific time and place in one’s life. But Davies reminded us with this finale that no matter where one is at in the series, there’s always a thread one can pick up. So at the end of Davies’s run, I have to thank Davies for using his influence to revive Who, while remaining wary of his overall writing contributions during the past four years. Nevertheless, I have every faith that, in the hands of Steven Moffatt, Who will truly demonstrate its potential to capture our imagination. And I’m glad that Davies closed out the show with a rousing, if problematic denouement, without entirely taking the easy way out.

Having said all this, however, there’s a part of me that wonders if Moffatt will continue portraying Tennant’s Doctor as the amiable metrosexual we all know him to be. To some degree, Tennant is the Alan Alda Doctor. The geeky guy who knows how to order the best wine at an Italian restaurant, but who will probably get his ass kicked in a roadhouse if the cops don’t show up in time. There were a few reminders of the tough Eccleston Doctor in “Journey’s End,” and I believe Tennant is capable of inhabiting this emotional territory. But I certainly hope we begin to see more of the Doctor’s dark side over the next few years. If Moffatt wimps out, I’ll be one of the first to lock his writing contributiosn in my crosshairs.

[RELATED: Worrisome io9 speculation that Moffatt is overrated.]

by Edward Champion

Carolyn Kellogg: Not a Fan of Don Lee

Pinky’s Paperhaus: “It’s OK if you have a guy leave a highly successful NY art career, even a People’s 50 Most Beautiful People kind of successful art career, for a smalltown California Brussels sprouts farm, and it’s OK that he’s the last holdout against the evil corporate developers who want his land for a golf course, it’s even OK, despite the fact that we’re to believe he’s the misanthropist of the century, that he makes friends with a local surfer, of all the local surfers the one who lost a foot in a freak shark attack, I’m still OK, even here, but it’s not OK that the farmer has teamed up with said surfer to grow some pot on his property, the same property he so desperately is trying to save from the developers, and accidentally grows too much and he can’t believe the surfer has told his friends about it… because none of that fits.”

by Edward Champion

Subwaymarine

Ever wonder what happens to abandoned subway cars? Well, apparently, retired subway cars have proven to be quite helpful to the fish population just off coast of Delaware. Cars are dumped into the water, and the subway car’s roomy confines has resulted in fish taking to the cars like, well, water. (There have been other efforts to dump aircraft, automobiles, and other vehicles into the ocean to create these reefs. But the fish seem to like the subway cars the best.) Red Bird Reef, named after the famed Redbird cars being used for this experiment, has seen a 400-fold increase in marine food per square inch over the past seven years.

Red Bird Reef is not without controversy. The American Littoral Society has expressed concern that the small levels of asbestos within the glue used to affix floor panels and the like might prove damaging to the environment. And since there are only so many retired subway cars to go around, other states are trying to compete for the subway cars. (New York provides these subway cars for free.)

So is this a waste of manmade resources? A sullying of the environment? Or is it very possible that, given the declining fish populations in the Atlantic, it takes this extraordinary manmade reef to generate a sustainable fish population again?

by Edward Champion

Reason #482 Why Salman Rushdie is a Colossal Douchebag

Los Angeles Times: “It was as a puckish media figure rather than as that ’employee’ that he attended Vanity Fair’s post-Oscar party and met Robert Altman — one of Rushdie’s proudest moments. ‘Late that night,’ Rushdie said, ‘I found him leaning against a bench at the side of the room, cradling his Academy Award. I sat down next to him and said hi. And I said, ‘Can I hold your Oscar?’ He said, ‘It’s bad luck, you know. . . . If you hold someone else’s Oscar you’ll never win your own.’ I said, ‘Give me the damn Oscar.’ So I held Bob’s Oscar. He died a few months later. It was the last time I’d seen him.'”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • The publishing offices are closed. Many now salivate for fireworks, barbeque, and more intriguing acts of lunacy that serve as an excuse to celebrate the 232nd occasion of this nation’s existence. What then does another roundup bring to all this putative jingoism? Perhaps not much. Which is just as well. Perhaps I shall expatiate further into where my own doubts cross into solemn Americana on Friday. But for now, I collect links and annotate.
  • Morgan Freeman will, at long last, play Nelson Mandela. So the headline says. This is all fine and dandy, but I’m a bit alarmed. Are we to infer that USA Today believes that Freeman can play no other part? Freeman is an actor — at times, a very good one. But it seems to me that a very good actor should avoid typecasting whenever possible. Freeman is more than Mandela. He can play a good deal more than an elder statesman. So aside from the years of studying here, why then should we expect him to “finally take” this role? Because he’s 71? Because he comes across as authoritative? Will Samuel L. Jackson face similar problems in twenty years?
  • Dirk Gently is set to crossover into the Hitchhikers universe. Shall we expect the worst? I mean, the guy who’s whipping this up is using the whole “It came from Douglas Adams’s notes” excuse. And The Salmon of Doubt was hardly the great book we expected, despite coming from Douglas Adams’s hard drive. Is Douglas Adams the new V.C. Andrews? Can we expect more books and adaptations and liberties with the man’s name attached? Only time and the estate’s need for money will tell.
  • For those interested in the long tail’s effect on the book industry (there are still people who swallow this?), the Harvard Business Review has a longass article that challenges Chris Anderson’s theory. By the way, Chris, I’ve got your long tail here. It’s called long-term poverty. (via Richard Nash)
  • So where do you find John Banville interviews these days? Could it be Mark’s?
  • A lengthy review of How Fiction Works. (via ReadySteadyBook)
  • How ignorant is the average American voter? (via Pages Turned)
  • Some French historians are now claiming that King Arthur was propaganda. They have also lodged complaints against the Round Table, finding it an implausible invention because its elliptical design is unsuitable for adulterous affairs. I suppose they have a point. After all, a good rectangular table is more practical when bending another person over.
  • Benjamin Lytal revisits Revolutionary Road, which Callie is understandably ruined by.
  • How Hunter S. Thompson beat his writer’s block. Or did he? Is talking really writing? And is the editor not so much editing as he is enabling? (via Enter the Octopus)
  • Lost now has a book club. The hope here is that all the folks committing their energies in message forums over what the show actually means (here’s a hint: they’re making this shit up as they go along) will translate into similar theorizing about books. (via The Literary Saloon)
  • And is it just me, or do I get the sense that Kidz In the Hall’s pretensions will sound laughably dated in ten years? I’m telling you, The In Crowd is about as tough as a puppy running up to you in the hood and licking your hand. This is hip-hop for cowards and poseurs.
by Edward Champion

Los Angeles Times To Lay Off 150 Editorial Staffers

Radar is reporting that 150 staffers in the newsroom are to be laid off and that the number of pages published each week will be reduced by 15%. I have emails into the good people over at the Book Review to see what, if any, impact this has had upon them. If I learn anything that I can report on the record, I will. This is terrible. More at the LA Times. Nothing yet from LA Observed.

[UPDATE: My sources inside the L.A. Times indicate that there hasn’t yet been a list of names released. Only the number. Layoffs to come later. If I am able to determine any additional information that I can share, then I will keep folks posted.]

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • I read Sam Tanenhaus’s atrocious article and withheld comment. Conveniently elided it from my memory. It was not the work of a passionate reader. It was the work of a man who believes he has something to say about literature, but who must bang out a piece in five hours while overseeing two sections of a newspaper to prove that he is a “writer” by way of being published in the New York Times. But Jeff is right to call bullshit on this piece. Because Jujitsu for Christ blows A Streetcar Named Desire out of the water with its indelible description of summer heat. (And let’s face the facts. The weather was only a tertiary component to the more explicit issues of lust and frigidity running rampant throughout the play. Then again, as fucked up visceral playwrights go, I’ll take Edward Albee over Williams any day. So perhaps some tendentious sensibilities may be impairing my take here.)
  • Clay Felker has died.
  • “Literary agent” Barbara Bauer, Ph.D. has had enough. She’s now suing 19 bloggers and websites, including Wikipedia and the SFWA site, for writing critical things about her, which she seems to have misconstrued as defamation. And yet Bauer and her attorney couldn’t be bothered to talk to the New Jersey Star-Ledger. And why sue when you can revert changes or initiate a self-serving edit war? Seems cheaper if you ask me. But then I’m not the one with the Ph.D. Assuming, of course, that Bauer actually has a Ph.D. Her official site is strangely mum about which university actually accredited the doctorate to her. In the meantime, plunge into the experiences others have had with Bauer. That is, if you don’t get a crazy email asking for $1 billion because you used of her name. Incidentally, a search at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office turns up no record for “Barbara Bauer.” As such, Bauer is a person whose actions are open to fair criticism. And if she is indeed charging “processing fees” for reading the work of her “clients,” which is behavior that is commonly associated with the actions of a scam agent, then she is most certainly an agent you should not be dealing with. (via Pinky’s Paperhaus) [UPDATE: The judge has dismissed the Wikimedia portion of Bauer’s lawsuit.]
  • “You can’t be a decent martyr on an empty stomach.” These are certainly words to live by. And I intend to offer this maxim to the next suicide bomber I meet in a bar. (via Occasional Superheroine)
  • Is a war with Iran going to happen?
  • Stephen Burt offers a lengthy but critical essay on Philip K. Dick, suggesting that the Library of America should trot out James Tiptree, Jr. as well. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad idea.
  • Congratulations to groom-to-be Levi Asher!
  • By the way, does anyone know why old Newsweek articles from decades ago are now coming up as recent items in Google News? Is Newsweek trying to stack the deck and is Google on the case?
  • The Guardian attempts to track the sources of literary works used for spam email, but ignores the copious Lovecraft that seems to be hitting my junk mail.
  • And I agree with Jeff VanderMeer’s assessment on John Twelve Hawks.
by Edward Champion

Why I’ll Never Read Litblogs Again

I first heard about blogs last summer, after the word “Bookslut” caused me to break out in a foul rash. I have sensitive skin. I have sensitive ears. The doctors prescribed the toughest emollient, but it wasn’t enough. So I was forced to start stabbing myself with a plastic fork. It was a surprise to me when I couldn’t draw blood. After all, the words had hurt me. Why couldn’t the disposable cutlery?

“Bookslut,” however, was only the tip of the iceberg. Some man, fancying himself a humorist, ran a site called Black Garterbelt, daring to impugn the moral fabric of books with an unspeakable reference to lingerie. I did not laugh. Instead, I took to wearing a burqa and urging the children in my community to do the same. There was Critical Mass, the blog run by the seemingly respectable National Book Critics Circle, but the name suggesting a mass of something else you might find on the sidewalk. I hesitate to use the four letter words that these literary harlots bandy about with such frequency, but it was a filthy notion. It was as if these book critics, who I thought were made of moral character, had decided to not clean up after their dogs during a walk, if you catch my drift.

Bookshelves of Doom appeared to pilfer its name from the Holy Book of Revelations. It was bad enough that Marvel Comics had named one of their supervillains “Dr. Doom,” thus popularizing a noun of great import. A word not to be used lightly. But now these morally reprehensible blogs were encoding secret messages about the second coming in their titles. But of course, I knew that Christ would strike them down if they could not be saved! As far as I know, Anton Chekhov was a moral man. But, lo and behold, some sinner had conjured up Chekhov’s Mistress! I also understand from a friend that The Elegant Variation refers to the unholy act of premarital sex, and that Mark Sarvas’s blog is a place for unmarried pagans to hook up and commit foul and carnal acts. Enter the Octopus? Dear Lord, this is disgusting. I must also conclude that the writer Ed Park, in naming his blog The Dizzies, is addicted to the evils of alcohol. I do not know what Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks are, but I do not care to find out. And if The Publishing Spot is a coy reference to a woman’s nether regions, well then, Jason Boog is due for a public stoning. Assuming that this is his real name.

But I must stop. These words have been difficult to write. And I have my private doctor taking my blood pressure as I type these words. It had not occurred to me that those who champion literature in these online venues could be possessed of such perfidy and callous disregard for moral purity. The doctor now tells me I must confine myself to bed. Unlike the litbloggers, he chooses his words carefully.

[UPDATE: Apparently, Jessa doesn’t get satire, which includes material that, in fact, champions her site. Incidentally, Eric Rosenfield and I are pals, but we do indeed have independent minds and frequently disagree. It remains a mystery to me why the two of us having penises might lead any reasonable person to think that we were connected to some Y-chromosome hive mind. No different really from some ridiculous gender-based generalization about women that one would expect from a bigot. But there you go.]

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Steven Greenhouse

Steven Greenhouse appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #213. He is the New York Times labor reporter and the author of The Big Squeeze. My review of the book can be found here.

Condition of the Show: Reporting upon the darker truths of America.

Author: Steven Greenhouse

Subjects Discussed: Whether economic factors of the 1970s or Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous maxim caused the current strife between corporations and workers, the social contract that came from 20th century labor negotiations, why workers settle for less, temps exploited by HP, being treated like dirt, mock memos circulated to cope with downsizing, The Office, why workers aren’t revolting, Bowling Alone, The Pursuit of Loneliness, how what we do for fun has transformed in the past few decades, the worker-friendly company policies of Patagonia, prodigious cafeteria options for workers, the shocking disparity of parental leave policies in different nations, tracking the lunch hours of workers, computers vs. martinet managers, call center workers, workers who slack off vs. a robust economy, Cooperative Home Care Associates and the benefits of workers on the board of directors, independent contractors, job security, the New York Times hiring freeze, Neutron Jack Welch, The Disposable American, companies who display “too much loyalty” to workers, workers who “get used to” hard and immoral company tactics, climbing the Wal-Mart ladder, the workplace as a cult, unrealistic American dreams, billable hours, the allure of promotion, Greenhouse’s proposed solutions, and a living minimum wage.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Look at Jennifer Miller, who is this woman who worked at HP for ten years. She didn’t have to work as a temp for that long. She could have easily cut out. She could have gone and demanded more from the HP managers. So I would argue that the workers who have allowed themselves to be placed in these particular conditions are perhaps just as responsible as these businesses and these corporations that are trying to squeeze out more profits and also trying to combat the influx of low-cost imports.

Greenhouse: Again, Ed, you ask a good question, and it’s hard to say. Jennifer Miller was a worker at HP. High school graduate. Very little college. She started as a McDonald’s worker. She became a McDonald’s manager. She got tired of that. Then she got a permanent job at HP. That job was sent overseas. So she was kind of bought out. Then a few months later, she was approached. “How would you like to return to HP as a temp?” She thought it was going to be a two-month gig. And as I explained in the book, she was there for ten years as a temp. She said that the job was good. It used a lot of advanced skills. She was often treated with respect, but she said the bad thing was she was a temp and didn’t get the same benefits as HP workers. She didn’t quite get the respect. So you ask why didn’t she quit?

Correspondent: And I should point out that she was even barred from the company parties. I mean, this is a key indicator. In my view, I would say, “Well to hell with this. I’m going to find someone who I can be on staff with.”

Greenhouse: It wasn’t just she. But all temps were barred from the company — you know, they might create a wonderful new piece of software, created a wonderful printer, and all the regular permanent employees could go to the party and celebrate and go for the two-day ski holiday to celebrate. But the temps who work alongside the regular workers in a crazy situation, they weren’t invited to the parties. So yeah, for someone like Jennifer, there was some eating humble pie there. So the question is why didn’t she quit? She said, “For me, Jennifer Miller, a mere high-school graduate living in Idaho, that was a terrific job. I was making $30 an hour. I was really using my brain. I was often working alongside terrific people. Sort of semi, somewhat treated as an equal. But on the other hand, no.” And she said, considering what else was out there, going back to McDonald’s working as a manager, which isn’t such a bad job, but she said working at HP as a temp was better. Her argument was HP was good in many ways, but there was this one big negative. That she was treated as a temp.

BSS #213: Steven Greenhouse [ 46:55 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • It appears that NPR plans to expand book coverage on its website, largely because “books are among the top three topics attracting traffic to the NPR site.” I can only ponder what the other two topics might be, but I’m guessing that it’s neither gerontophilia nor Half-Life mods. Nevertheless, this does demonstrate that the current demise of books coverage may be greatly exaggerated. If newspapers and other publications wish to carry on as if books don’t matter, and if they wish to live in a future in which they choose not to associate themselves with books, whether it be the coverage or the brand, then people will go elsewhere. To places more reasonably associated with books. So the question that any publication should be asking right now is whether it wants to lose such a prized audience. (NPR, incidentally, is ranked 1,633 on Alexa. So this ain’t exactly a small potatoes question.)
  • The rather appropriately named Perry Falwell was accosted by a woman who insisted that he purchase a bundle of books from her deceased husband. He discovered a kinky alternative usage for these tomes. It remains unknown whether the woman in question has been informed of her husband’s sordid secret or if she may have been one of the subjects photographed for these clandestine purposes from beyond the grave. But I’m thinking that she did know what was going on and was only being friendly. We should all be asked every so often if we must really love to read. By the same standard, those at a sex party should probably be asked every so often if they must really love to fuck, so that they might be afforded new literary entry points. (via Bibliophile Bulletin)
  • Meanwhile in a London high court, freelance journalist Shiv Malik is being asked to hand over source material and pay legal costs for a book on terrorism. The source material in question was limited to a specific terror suspect only after he fought an overbroad judicial order at the cost of £100,000. What’s striking is that the judges criticized Malik, pointing out that the journalist had “achieved very little from these proceedings.” If by “very little,” the justice is referring to tiny sliver of UK journalistic freedom that now costs a comfortable annual salary to fight, then I suppose he’s right. But I doubt that Josh Wolf and Vanessa Leggett going to jail for similar purposes here in the States amounted to “very little” for them personally. “Very little” is also one of those handy modifiers one can just as readily apply to the probity of such unwavering authoritarianism.
  • Character actor Don S. Davis, a man who was born to play authority figures and who I’ll always remember as Major Garland Briggs, has died.
  • Ruth Wajnryb kickstarts a linguistic meditation from a sentence taken from an email. Me? So long as the article’s typo stands, I’m now contemplating just what “a friend of mind” is. Does the cerebral attachment to “friend” suggest that one is not permitted to feel when communicating? That there should be some separation between conceptual riffing and giddy exuberance? Did Ms. Wajnyrb type “mind” instead of “mine” deliberately? Is this an Australian thing? And why didn’t she opt for “my friend” in that lede? If she truly meant to pin down a cerebral friend, should it not have been “a friend in mind?” Or is this a reference to Toni Morrison? Sixo loving the Thirty-Mile Woman? Could it be that my problem with this phrase has something to do with my feelings for Morrison? Or perhaps my hesitancy here comes from my objection to the societal expectation that we must separate thoughts and feelings, choosing one or the other. Particularly when we’re writing letters. But if T.S. Eliot objected to this dichotomy, then I feel sufficiently justified in lodging my own complaint (even if I don’t possess even a tenth of Eliot’s poetic knack and acumen) and I would encourage others to do the same. There are some days in which I am careful with my words, and other circumstances in which I am overtaken by a wonderful emotional torrent! To acede to one or the other (and it’s often wholly the mental) seems a rather humdrum and uninteresting life to me, but the choice seems to suit many people and ensures that a swimming pool can be constructed in the backyard or the last ten payments on the luxury car will go through. But for me, it’s resulted in a few awkward social encounters in which I feel compelled to suggest that there is an inverted, if not anarchically fused, way of living.
  • And this is most certainly the way to respond to a rejection slip.