Category / Uncategorized

by Edward Champion

We Regress the Error

Dear Peter:

I write to impress my most profound apologies for our recent disservice to your book, Cup in the Hole: My Year Puncturing Baltimore’s Yeastern District. Had we been aware just how much these typographical errors had infected your work, we most certainly would have cleansed up the mess earlier. But we did not catch this problem until it was too late, and we were near the end of our reproduction cycle. We have suffered as much as you have. There are no excuses, but I assure you that our offices have been both labiarus and pro-active in preventing such grafts in the future. We funged up. I can’t tell you of the pain and embarassment that this mistook has caused us. I wish to assure you that we are now committed to reprinting your grate book in a cleaner and more hygienic light so that readers will at long last know how vulvid your account is.

Please also be advised that the entire stuff in our orifice have been undergoing remedial Anguish courses to insure that this will not happen again. We have plunged deeply into this matter to clean things up, so that a redouche will not occur. The main copy auditor for your book has been told that his services are no longer required. It was a tough decision, but we cannot afford to be tax about such matters. We have looked into our books to ensure that there are no additional errors.

I hope that you can accept our deepest apoplexies. We take these matters very serially and we will be doing everything in our powers to ensure that future additions of your book will not be butchered. But if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call my direct wine. I’m alway happy to clear everything up over a lengthy phone fermentation.

Deeply and sincerely bores,

DICTATED BUT NOT READ

Peter Doughboy
Director
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

by Edward Champion

PEN: The Three Musketeers Reunited

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Sadly, this website’s proprietor could not attend PEN World Voices due to contracting a particularly nasty bug. Thankfully, the more robust Eric Rosenfield was able to pick up the slack. What follows is his report from the Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa panel.]

The theatre at the 92nd Street Y was packed. It was a sold out house for three prominent international authors. Umberto Eco read in Italian from his well-known novel Foucault’s Pendulum in Italian, while its English counterpart scrolled across a screen behind him. (This surprised me. I expected him to read from his more recent novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Foucault’s Pendulum had come out twenty years ago.) I liked the idea of the author reading his work in the language it was originally written (as Rushdie later said, we should hear the words the author actually wrote). But the text scrolled far too fast and the last lines didn’t move for a long time as Eco finished his reading. Next, Rushdie emerged. In a major blunder, ushers paced down the aisle asking for question cards. You see, the Y decided that the best way it would conduct its audience Q&A was by having the audience write down their questions on little cards provided in their programs, then giving these to the ushers, who would then pass these cards up to the moderator. However, it wasn’t right to collect the question cards as one author stopped reading and another author started. We were too busy listening to think about the questions we might want to ask.

Rushdie read from The Enchantress of Florence, a book that will be released in the States next month about Akbar the Great of the Mughal Empire, a sultan who apparently set up a kind of debating house where people could freely discuss philosophy and religion. Akbar’s relationship with his Muslim religion was best summed up during a funny moment where he proclaims “Allāhu Akbar” — the words meaning either “God is Great” or “Akbar is God.”

Lastly, Mario Vargas Llosa read from his latest novel, The Bad Girl. Again, the English text scrolled too quickly and ushers asked for comment cards. The excerpt itself was the touching story of an adolecent boy’s first crush and the cultural clash between him and that crush’s Chilean origins.

Finally the three sat with the moderator, Leonard Lopate. Lopate himself didn’t have to do very much; with the slightest prodding the three would go off on tangents about writing, language, politics or anything else. They were called “The Three Musketeers” because Eco had dubbed them that twenty years before just after a similar event in London. Other names were discussed, such as the Three Tenors — “you don’t want to hear us sing,” Rushdie dryly commented — or the Three Stooges. (For my money, bombastic, energetic Eco is Curly; dry, even-toned Rushdie is Moe; and Llosa, who waited his turn to speak and tried not to interrupt anyone, is clearly Larry.) The Musketeers theme gave Eco a platform to start talking about Alexandre Dumas. Eco explained that, while the Three Musketeers was a well written book, the later Count of Monte Cristo was awfully written. Eco said that he had once tried to rewrite Monte Cristo and cut it down by improving the style, but doing so made it somehow lose its magic. This led to a discussion about whether a book could create a myth without being a great work of literature. Rushdie said this was true of The Last of the Mohicans, which was also a terribly written book. Llosa disagreed about Monte Cristo. He said that he had cried when he’d read it and that’s what made it great literature: It had touched him. Sentence-by-sentence reading wasn’t as important.

The role of politics in literature and among literary figures was also discussed. Llosa had, after all, run for president of Peru. Rushdie said it was a great thing he’d lost, since he could now write more novels, and Llosa agreed, quipping, “The people of Peru loved my novels so much that they didn’t vote for me.”

Moderator Leonard Lopate asked why authors in America tended not to get as involved in politics, as opposed to other countries where this was more the norm. Rushdie said that Americans had been involved in politics as recently as Norman Mailer, who had “waded in completely” and made himself a figure of cultural consequence. Eco said that the problem with America, and England as well, was geographic. In other countries the universities were in the cities, while, in America and England, the universities tended to be outside of them, leading to the intellectuals being less involved with the general cultural and political scene.

Lopate suggested that in America, writers are seen more as entertainers. Rushdie said that “you can tell the importance of literature by the apparatus in place to repress it.” Llosa agreed, saying that you need a dictatorship: if a society and a government is functioning properly, literature is entertainment. Rushdie said that another part of the problem is the “professionalization of the commentariat.” In England, when there’s a major political event, the media goes to well-known intellectuals and asks their opinions. In America, the people who have opinions on political events are professional opinion-havers, and they’re the only ones who are allowed to have one. Eco pointed out that the exception was Noam Chomsky, but nobody in America knew how to take him.

Llosa also said that a lot of intellectuals weren’t trusted in other parts of the world. Think of all the intellectuals with terrible politics, elaborated Llosa. The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Heidegger, was a Nazi and never repented for it. Ezra Pound was a fascist. Sartre was a Maoist. This has, as a result, made people very suspicious of intellectuals.

Eco still thought it was strange that in America we have some of the most important writers in the world, that these writers are read all over, but they have no political power in their own country.

When the time came for the audience questions, there were predictably very few of them. Lopate commented that there were all these people and only five questions were passed up. The Y really dropped the ball on that one.

Despite this setback, the event was amazing. The three authors offered fascinating outsider takes on America and literature, and I think we need more of this type of event. Other mass-media events where authors are interviewed, such as The Charlie Rose Show or NPR, are always more structured and hindered by time constraints. Having three people like this capable of conversing with each other and talking freely about a range of topics was both refreshing and fascinating.

by Edward Champion

Concerning Poshlost

From John P. Marquand’s Wickford Point:

No one could teach anyone else to write. You could be as industrious as you pleased; you could steep yourself in the technique of all the Flauberts and Maupassants and Dickenses who had gone before, and out of it would come exactly nothing. That was the problem with Allen Southby.

There is something revealing about amateur fiction which is particularly ghastly, for in this type of effort you see all the machinery behind the scene. I could tell exactly what Allen had been reading before he had set to work. He had made a study of Hardy — it must have been a dreary task — and then he had touched on Sherwood Anderson and Glenway Westcott and O’Neill. He had been reading a lot of those earth-earthy books, where the smell of dung and the scent of the virgin sod turned by the plow runs through long paragraphs of primitive through slightly perverted human passion; but those others could write, and Allen Southby never would if he lived as long as Moses. Nevertheless I was finding the thing stimulating again. I was thinking of ways in which I might have changed it.

Allen was back at his desk, fiddling with his folio volume. He saw me right away when I paused and reached for the whisky glass.

“There’s nothing the matter with it, is there, Jim?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s very provocative, Allen.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Allen. “Thank you, Jim, but we mustn’t disturb Joe.”

The delicate feeling of liking that I was experiencing for him, born possibly from a sense of remorse, vanished with this remark. He was an intellectual snob and an intellectual climber. He had intimated without much tact that any admiration of mine was inconsequential now that Joe was there. He would never know that my remark had been completely truthful. Southby had been provocative because he was writing about something which I could understand far better than he could ever understand it. It was not the plot, which was horrible, that arrested my attention so much as his manner of writing. His pages resembled the efforts of visiting writers, who had spent their summers in Maine and on Cape Cod, to depict the New England scene. The effort was the same as when some Northern writer attempted an epic of the South, and could see nothing but nigger mammies and old plantations and colonels drinking juleps. These others,when they faced New England, saw only white houses, church spires, lilacs and picket hedges, gingham hypocrisy and psychoses and intolerance. Not even Kipling, the keenest observer who had touched our coast, could do it. There was something which they did not see, an inexorable sort of gentleness, a vanity of effort, a sadness of predestined failure.

by Edward Champion

PEN: In Absentia

I must have the same thing Tayari had. A deadly strain, not unlike the vicious superflu portrayed in Fiona Maazel’s Last, Last Chance, has knocked your faithful correspondent on his ass. So PEN World Voices coverage remains stalled for the present time. I’m going to see how I feel tomorrow and, if I feel better, I will venture out and report what I can. In the meantime, you can check out my review of Susan Hubbard’s The Year of Disappearances in Saturday’s edition of The Los Angeles Times.

by Edward Champion

Standard Operating Procedure

It seems particularly fitting to remark upon Errol Morris’s latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, as Armond White offers yet another hysterical fulmination about how online culture is apparently destroying exegesis, ranting in particular about “the shame of middle-class and middlebrow conformity that critics follow each other when praising movies that disrespect religion, rail about the current administration or feed into a sense of nihilism that only people privileged with condos and professional can tenure.”

This colorful sentiment is, to say the least, a disingenuous generalization. For Morris’s documentary (and the accompanying book written by Philip Gourevitch) would seem to suggest that one cannot approach an important subject like Abu Ghraib without a sense of outrage. That no matter how rational one is in investigating the events behind this nightmarish aperçu into America’s dark underbelly, journalist, filmmaker, and audience member alike must shout to the high ethical heavens. But is it really an act of conformity — class-driven, no less — to be appalled by what is revealed in the photographs? Is it conformist to speculate upon why Sabrina Harman offered a thumbs-up signal or whether or not Lynndie England was coerced by Charles Graner into holding a dog leash?

An innate sense of inquiry cannot be called conformist if it involves an independent series of perceptions that involve grasping some aspect of the truth, subject to change upon additional thought and information. And yet the main problem with Morris’s fascinating new film is that, with the ancillary and rather fixed reenactments photographed by Robert Richardson, it is possible that Morris may be holding the viewer’s hand too much, urging her to care when the interviews alone offer enough unknowns and the horrific glimpses into a soldier’s dead eyes four years later are enough to make one uncomfortable.

In watching these soldiers, I couldn’t help but consider the scene in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in which barber Abraham Bomba works in his shop, reproducing the precise grooming moves he employed while cutting the hair of victims about to be gassed in Treblinka. It is an eerie echo from the past that cannot altogether be shaken off in the present. And in my painful determination to understand, however limited, why these soldiers had done what they did and how the Abu Ghraib experience had shaken them, I wanted to know more about how the idea of getting used to anything — even the rough interrogation and humiliation of prisoners — was carried back to the homeland. This may not be an entirely fair request of Morris. His film is, as he contends in the press notes, an investigation into the Abu Ghraib photographs. But if, as Susan Sontag observed, “the photographs are us,” is it entirely unreasonable to ask the investigator to venture further?

It isn’t mentioned in the film, but Javal Davis, who comes across as a smooth, free-wheeling raconteur, is revealed, in Gourevitch’s book, to be “in sales. The career path that I have now, you know — comfortable. I deal with people on the regular basis. I’m not handling anybody’s problems. I’m not dealing with anything violent. So I’m business to business, all personal, ‘How you doing? I’m Javal Davis. Nice to meet you.’ Everybody’s happy. I like that. Sales. I’m a salesman.” And because Morris has flown out Davis, along with all the other soldiers, to his Cambridge headquarters to conduct these interviews, we do not see these soldiers in their current habitat. For all we know, Davis could have viewed his trip to Cambridge as a business trip. Business to business. And he could have adjusted accordingly.

It’s possible that Richardson’s visuals serve as a device similar to Comte de Lautréamont’s unusual narrator. In Maldoror, Lautréamont offered a unique device in which the narrator often parodies feelings by willfully distorting or rethinking the sordid events that are presented. Likewise, by illustrating what his interviews are telling us through these visual reenactments, this may be Morris’s heavy-handed help to us that we must rethink our own thoughts and feelings concerning these photographs. Or perhaps it’s more visceral. As I learned in an interview I conducted with Morris this week, outrage was also involved in these reenactments.

The outrage is conveyed as a prisoner is described having his eyebrows shaved off, with Morris including a close-up of a razor deracinating a tuft of hair. Morris likewise dramatizes a dog that terrorizes another prisoner. But Morris has the dog menacing the prisoner in slow-motion, with a melodramatic sound mix depicting the dog’s bottom jaw snapping shut like a steel trap.

Given the intriguing ambiguities unearthed during the interviews, this seemed to me to spoon-feed the audience too much. And I wasn’t alone. In an essay for Artforum, Paul Arthur took umbrage with these visuals, observing:

Their style, however, belongs to a film genre that provides titillation through horror. To employ this rhetoric in a documentary about actual horror is obscene, yielding familiar aesthetic thrills as a substitute for specificity of meaning. We aren’t prompted to contemplate the Iraq occupation’s signature scandal as the product of a mercenary chain of executive decisions, cultural attitudes, venalities, and personal pathologies; we are, as it were, let off the hook. It’s only a movie.

If a generic sense of horror is what is required to get through to the average moviegoer, then I cannot quibble as strenuously as Arthur does (and perhaps White will). But if a complex issue requires complex consideration, then any reenactment that will help a viewer construct a “map of reality” must not dictate too much. It is reasonable to accept the shaved eyebrow, but the dog goes over the top.

Likewise, in the book, Gourevitch maintains a level-headed, mostly objective tone for almost 160 pages before writing:

There is a constant temptation, when rendering an account of history, to distort reality by making too much sense of it. This temptation is greatest when the history is fresh and deals with crises that are ongoing — crises that mold our understanding of our world and ourselves. Surely, if you have come this far in this sordid tale, you must crave some relief, some release, from the relentless, claustrophobic annihilation of the dungeon: a clear and cleansing note of sanity, an interlude of avenging justice or an eruption of decency, the entry of a hero. But surely you don’t want to be deceived. There is no such solace or sanctuary in this story.

Gourevitch then launches into a grand attack on what the Abu Ghraib atrocities say about America, pointing to the famous precedent of treating enemy prisoners well set by George Washington and fulminating against the Bush Administration. Not even a journalist as dutiful as Gourevitch can look at the photos and the complicit involvement of these bad apples without exploding.

Others will likely perceive this film to be mostly about the visuals atop the visuals, the analysis atop the analysis, the meta within the meta. But the real “standard operating procedure” explored in this film isn’t so much the pedestrian issue of how war caused the lines of basic human decency to become fuzzy, but the manner in which a great filmmaker has partially abandoned his subtleties to get Americans hopping mad. The faults lie not in the filmmakers and not, as White suggests, the critics. They’re doing their best to continue the dialogue, but their efforts have increasingly fallen upon deaf ears. For Abu Ghraib does not entertain. And neither does moral outrage.

(To listen to my podcast interview with Errol Morris, go here.)

by Edward Champion

Open Source Sodomy

“This should be a better world,” a science fiction convention attendee said. “A more honest one, where sex isn’t shameful or degrading. I wish this were the kind of world where you could say, ‘Wow, I’d like to sodomize you with my nightstick,’ and people would understand that it’s not a way of reducing you to an asshole and ignoring the rest of you, even though the request inherently objectifies the person you ask, but rather a way of saying that I may not know your mind, but your body is beautiful.”

We were standing in the hallway of ConStipation, about nine of us, three hadn’t had sex since the Twin Towers fell, and we all nodded. Then another friend spoke up.

“You can penetrate me,” he said to all of us in the hallway. “It’s no big deal.”

Now, you have to understand the way he said that, because it’s the key to the whole project. It was an Ayn Rand novel come to life. When dealing with a request along these lines, you have to completely ignore the meaning of the sentence in order to rationalize the manner in which you objectify someone. Consent is the important part of avoiding a sexual harassment lawsuit. You can tell your lawyer that you didn’t objectify the other person because they said yes. The spirit of everything was formed within those eight words. The Open Source Sodomy Project would have died had we not insisted that there was always a way to rationalize a request, to take the fun of seduction away, to simply pump my friend’s asshole right there in the hallway and ejaculate inside him.

Yet it wasn’t a come-on, either. There wasn’t that undertow of desperation because someone had said the sentence. When you skip out on hindsight, it’s always a marvelous thing. There was no promise of anything but a simple fuck.

We all dropped our pants in the hallway, our cocks erect and our friend quite willing to be part of our impromptu experiment. And lo, we all fucked our friend in the ass — taking turns to thrust, all of us coming. These were awesome asscheeks, plump but serviceable. And the sounds of all of us coming were beautiful. I understand that someone recorded all this and a podcast will be released soon.

And life seemed so much simpler.

It could have been base lechery. But in order for the Open Source Sodomy Project to work, we needed to flaunt our intellectual superiority, this quintessentially American way of justifying everything from looking at a complex moral dilemma with solipsistic naivete to stacking naked prisoners into a human pyramid and snapping pictures. There was always a reason. Always some excuse you could make to evade culpability. Now this wasn’t a case of only following orders, but of only following our desires. Innocence. We knew we couldn’t go further, but being allowed inside this area of somewhat restricted access with nothing more than a question was simply amazing.

We stood there afterwards, a little shocked, wondering if we should take some showers to get the smell of sex off of our bodies. Then someone else spoke in the same tone of voice.

“You can penetrate me, too!”

And my God! Many of us became hard and some of us exploded again! We weren’t degenerating into an orgy, but rather exploring the amazement of how beautiful the body was and how wonderful it was to have access to it. I should point out that those who requested sodomy only dropped their pants. They kept their tops on the whole time. Therefore, there was no objectification.

And every person in that hallway was then asked the question: “Can I penetrate you?” A few took offense and some of us were kicked in the nads. But some said yes. And the unfettered sex continued.

And my Lord, I’ve experienced sodomy in my time, but having so many sodomy opportunities in front of me was beautiful. We hadn’t even rented out a hotel suite! Who needed that when we could fuck anybody we wanted? And who needed to bother with getting to know a person? These were ripe assholes. Wondrous and mindless orifices to ejaculate into! We’d never consider sex with emotions again. We’d look at every person walking down the street and say to ourselves, “I wonder what it’s like to explode into his asshole! If he refuses, is he an asshole?”

We did not wish to offend. But one person we asked took offense when we asked to penetrate him. He was a large, muscular man who proceeded to beat the shit out of one of my friends after my friend posed the question. Something about assuming he was queer. We didn’t understand. Our friend’s in the hospital now. But, of course, he won’t be pressing charges. You simply don’t do that in an idealistic world. It’s like Esperanto. You believe in it no matter how problematic it is. Even though my friend was served with court papers and his attorney said that he’d require a five thousand dollar retainer. A small price to pay for the beauties of utopia!

By the end of the evening, others were coming up to us! Pretty soon, we were dropping our pants and there was more fucking.

I’ve left off the names, because frankly, people should reveal for themselves whether they’re Open Sourcers or not. People should speak out so that the natural spirit of evading the complexity of another person’s feelings can be sidestepped through this carnal simplicity. Who cares what the larger ramifications are? And who cares if an asshole is full of shit?

(Hat tip: Bookslut)

by Edward Champion

Simple as Pie

Ladies and gentlemen, you may have observed the relative silence around these parts of late. This is because I am very angry — furious about Hillary Clinton’s willingness to say anything to get elected, indignant about the White House’s denial about torture, prepared to apply a baseball bat to newspaper racks because the international food crisis and war casualties aren’t appearing in 42 point type on the front page, etcetera. I have been trying to figure out the precise way in which I can articulate my outrage, in which I can respond with something constructive. Why Americans aren’t storming the streets right now and why they continue to accept our slow slide into a Mad Max dystopic sideshow are mysteries I’m still trying to unravel.

But then my spirits were lifted by this YouTube video.

These kids may not know how to aim their pies properly. But it seems to me that throwing more pies at more figures is part of the solution.

And speaking of double standards, I wonder why we begrudge these merry pranksters, while we have no problem propping up a 75-year-old woman who took a hammer to Comcast. Casual dissent, it seems, is the new dissent.

by Edward Champion

On the Exchange of Moments

Dude, like, there’s this whole web conservation moment going down. The same bullshit about how there’s all this bullshit on the Web and how it’s up to us to be responsible and all for our content. I hereby abdicate editing on this post. Because I want to tell you about why I’m up right now and, hell, maybe I’ll go into the the mistake I made of imbibing two cups of coffee and a rather large bottle of Coca-Cola to meet two deadlines and to get through a rather long day. The thought of pressing the backspace key and giving into this prim and proper nonsense might appall me if I didn’t view it as so laughable. Ha ha! How trivial it is to type those five characters and a space! I just watched the first episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who and HOLY SHIT! Rose Tyler has returned! She looks utterly gloomy and it’s very clear that Russell T. Davies is trying to go for a big finish here before he hands over his car keys from the producer who’s going to take over. Within long paragraphs, there may be meaning or there may not be. In gushing about Doctor Who, which I railed against not long ago because of its campy qualities, am I confessing to readers that I am going back on my original promise, which involved something about boycotting the show and suggesting in some language or some such that Russell T. Davies should be stopped? I’m too indolent and otherwise worn out to drag up the post. I don’t think it’s particularly important. In dwelling upon that important moment, am I perhaps finding another important moment? Or am I discounting the importance of that moment by describing that moment as important? Well, all I have to say is that I found a YouTube clip and I watched the surprise disappearance of Rose Tyler FOUR times! In a row. Just to be sure. Now that particular process of watching Rose Tyler reappear with a melodramatic sad glimmer on her face was, for some strange reason, important. But it is not important by the new rules of the game. Queen Victoria has suggested that because that moment is not thought out, because I am simply gushing on about a YouTube clip replaying a moment that I watched on an illicitly downloaded torrent, it is therefore invalidated by the new criteria of selecting precisely what it is I need to write about. But since I have spent a good portion of the day — deadlines, yo — selecting text and moving it around, why then should I bother to do it again? Am I not allowed one moment of expressing this moment? Or is meaning exonerated here? If I am not permitted to write about a moment about a moment about a moment, then I am somehow a lesser life form by these new rules. If I am fumbling around in the dark for the keys to that moment, producing much noise and less signal, but otherwise removing myself viscerally into this great realm of Deep Thought and Substance, then I am doing the Lord’s Work. How one chooses to express themselves is their own concern, really. How one chooses to publicly embarrass themselves about, say, Rose Tyler returning in Doctor Who is really that one person’s moment. Who is anyone to take that moment away from this person? If I hear an annoying conversation, I ignore it. Or better yet, I participate it and see if I can raise some hell. I am my own filter. You are your own filters too. Together the common filters come together and we all boogie and bust out the bourbon and otherwise figure out what that moment might have meant. Perhaps we all shared some shred of that moment and wanted to come to terms with it. Perhaps all of us are fumbling in the dark and perhaps all of us can find moments atop those moments. And then just as we experience another seemingly inconsequential moment in the real world — by feeling a gust of air, by hearing the clink of a quarter atop the counter at a bodega, by examining the slide of a window going up so that it’s not so hot in the apartment — we can then find additional stimuli to respond to. And you know what? Even though the little scroll bar on the right side of this window within a browser window is advancing, I’m not going to go back and check what I just wrote. Perhaps there’s some purpose in simply rattling on like this. Perhaps not. But once it is out there, it’s up to others to make sense of it or ignore it. I think it’s a colossally arrogant thing for this Publishing 2.0 guy to say. And I say this as someone who does value the editing and massaging of content. You wouldn’t tell some person spinning a hula hoop to stop spinning the hula hoop because it’s purposeless. Because it doesn’t add anything to the universe. Because it’s utterly trivial and without intelligence. The point is that the person spinning the hula hoop is having a good deal of fun and perhaps others who are watching this person with the hula hoop are also having fun, and maybe they are thinking that they should go out and get a hula hoop and have a bit of fun themselves. And they in turn might inspire other people to spin hula hoops around their hips. And then perhaps the sensation of the hula hoop might inspire another thought, another feeling, that could lead to something important. The Archimedes principle in action. People often blog or produce content because it leads to other things, other thoughts, other feelings. And to wave a schoolmarmish finger at those who produce blather is to be a humorless asshole. When you can just ignore it and move on to others who are spinning the hula hoops that keep things grooving.

ComicCon podcast forthcoming!

by Edward Champion

200

Today, there are two notable pieces of news: The Bat Segundo Show has now crossed the 200 episode mark, with shocking developments involving Mr. Segundo, and Mark Sarvas‘s Harry, Revised hits bookstores. In an effort to tie both pieces of news together, one of the podcasts released today involves an interview with Sarvas himself. But if you’re thinking this is squeaky-clean literary stuff, an excerpt from the show should rectify this impression.

Correspondent: Anna is actually a palindrome. Is that intentional?

Sarvas: No. And the thing that really troubled me with Anna was that I was, I think, a year and a half into writing this book when John Banville’s novel, The Sea, came out. And in The Sea, the main character Max is mourning the death of his wife Anna. And I thought, “Oh my God. Everybody’s going to think that this is my Banville homage.” And this was really not. I was looking for a simple and an elegant name. And Anna floated into my mind. That was a more instinctive choice than anything else.

Correspondent: And yet there’s inarguably an elegant variation in this. I have to ask you about “a dancing St. Elmo’s fire of the groin.”

Sarvas: Okay, you…

Correspondent: This was really — all you had to say was that it was an erection.

Sarvas: Well, see, you mentioned that. You sent me a text message, and…

Correspondent: I asked five people about this and they said, “What the fuck?” (laughs)

Sarvas: But, and look. First of all, this is a book of nearly 300 pages. Not every single metaphor’s going to sail. There will be those that don’t.

Correspondent: Well, it’s definitely memorable. That’s for sure.

Sarvas: But to my mind, I was not describing an erection. I didn’t intend to. And the fact that you thought that that was what I meant argues that I didn’t do my job well. Because what I was really hoping to describe. And this is perhaps not the stuff of a normal Segundo podcast and I hope my wife isn’t listening to this….

Correspondent: (laughs)

Sarvas: …is that weird sort of tingling, pre-erotic moment that announces the onset of an erection. Where you’re beginning to feel that surge, that electricity in that way. But you haven’t actually flown the flag up the pole yet. And that’s what I meant. If I wanted to say erection or boner or some other, I would have said that.

Correspondent: But the fact that it’s ambiguous is very interesting. Because then it leaves — I mean, this could be discussed endlessly in book clubs across the country.

Sarvas: And I think it’s actually better that way.

Correspondent: It’s the phrase that definitely I can’t get out of my mind and makes me look at you in a sort of cockeyed way.

by Edward Champion

Interim

Reports on the Mailer tribute at Carnegie Hall, the Baker/Julavits/Siegel talk* at the New York Public Library, and a review of the documentary Young@Heart are forthcoming. In the meantime, there are interviews to conduct, panels to attend, deadlines to meet, and taxes to finalize. But there will also be more Segundo podcasts as well. So bear with me while I catch up on the backlog.

In the meantime, as others have noted, please support Tayari Jones’s efforts to provide funds for the Dunbar Village rape victims.

I’ll have more later. A lot more later.

* — To give you a small taste, in one of many of his straw man arguments, Lee Siegel informed the crowd that I wasn’t a writer because I had written the line “Edmund Wilson is a douchebag.” To be clear on this, I wrote “the man was a bit of a douchebag” and offered an argument supporting why I felt this to be the case. Nevertheless, I will inform the editors who hire me on a professional basis that Lee Siegel has insisted that I am not a writer and that they should begin calling me something else. Perhaps something along the lines of “intellectual nigger” because I also happen to write for the blogging medium.

by Edward Champion

David Kipen: A True American

In 2007, the French Ministry of Culture had an annual budget of €3.18 billion. (To give you some sense of how this fits into the grand scheme of things, France’s national budget in 2005 was €288.8 billion. So that’s roughly around 1% of the national budget.) While the National Endowment of the Arts budget is at its highest mark since 1995, the NEA budget as a whole amounts to $144.7 million. A mere €91.94 million to France’s €3.18 billion.

A few more things to consider: Irish writers live tax free. In Cuba, art school is free and artists often earn a better living than many other professions. The German public arts funding model permits the nation to have 23 times more full-time symphonies per capita and 28 times more full-time opera houses than America. Last year, Italy raised its annual arts funding to $573 million — an annual budget more than three times that of the NEA. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, unlike the NEA’s site, explains why it’s important to build a society that values culture on its front page and had an annual budget of 100.6 billion yen for 2006. (For those playing at home, that’s a little under a billion in American dollars.)

As an American, this embarrasses me. It’s bad enough that we’re the only industrialized nation without socialized medicine. It’s terrible that this nation, when stacked against others, is especially shameful on parental leave. But one would think that the “richest country in the world” would be somewhat capable of doling out a few dollars more to artists. Because, as anybody who works full-time in the arts knows, this is hardly a lucrative occupation.

Of course, there are grants. But the ones that the NEA does mete out must fall under “general standards of decency” — a coded phrase for “play it safe if you want to work full-time as a subsidized artist.” That’s hardly the democratic thinking one expects from a federal republic that frequently misinforms its citizens about its purported democratic values.

On Wednesday night, shortly after attending the big Mailer tribute at Carnegie Hall (a lengthy report of this will follow), I entered the appropriately named Commerce Building for a reception devoted to the NEA’s latest title in its Big Read campaign. There were few people there under the age of forty. David Kipen stood before the crowd, preaching to the converted about the current crisis in literature.

I listened to Kipen talk. He described his apparent frustration with the San Francisco Chronicle failing to hire another full-time book critic to replace him, conveying the reality of newspaper book sections facing serious cuts, and suggesting that the Big Read campaign was intended as a partial answer to the Reading at Risk hysteria.

When the talk was over, I approached Kipen. He was stunned to see me — in part because he still thought that I was in San Francisco. He thought that I was Kevin Smokler, a man who had collected many essays in his book, Bookmark Now, ably pinpointing the folderol behind the Reading at Risk hysteria and observing that reading was quite alive in many corners.

“I’ve got an idea that will kill two birds with one stone,” I said. “Something that addresses what you were talking about.”

“People were actually paying attention?” said Kipen, apparently astonished that anyone would take what he had to say seriously. This seemed a surprising attitude from a “Director of Literature.”

I asked Kipen if he really believed that reading was dead. He confessed that the Reading at Risk report was more of a “diagnostic.”

I then begin to outline to him a very simple idea. If newspapers were dying and reading was “at risk,” why not have the NEA sponsor an online book site that would function very much like the WPA Federal Writers Project? A place where emerging critics hustling from newspaper to newspaper could find a place to hone their thoughts about literature. A place that could subsidize current print critics, litbloggers, literary podcasters, and other parties. Something that would involve hard editing and encouragement. Essays that were just as committed to novels in translation, small presses, genre, and the like as they were the latest volume from John Updike. Not only would such a site be a training ground for emerging critics, but it would also be a place for freelancers to go when the newspaper markets dried up. Why not put the money in the hands of the impassioned and the thoughtful? After all, if they have the ability to get people thinking about reading, doesn’t this make more sense than spending money on a program in which the NEA deems one book — in this case, The Maltese Falcon — that everybody needs to read?

(To give you a sense of how little this idea would cost, $104,000 could pay for five reviews a week, 52 weeks a year, with each writer paid $400 per piece. Given this math, I’m wondered how much it had cost Kipen to rent out the Commerce Building and to pay for hotels, flights, food and drink. $10,000 maybe? Kill ten social functions along these lines and give the money to writers.)

Kipen attempted to brush this idea off, presumably because this sounded somewhat Communist. But I wouldn’t let him get away. In Kipen’s defense, I should also point out that I was quite effusive about all this. And this vivacity on my part tends to frighten some people. But since Kipen was likewise an animated person, I figured he could take it. Little did I realize that, over four years, Kipen had transformed, espousing the kind of muleheaded resistance to fresh and lively literary coverage that Frank Wilson once alluded to about management. Kipen had become a company man.

He had no real clue about what was happening on the Internet. (He still believed that John Freeman was President of the NBCC. But he intimated that there had been a few talks. I’m wondering, however, if Freeman’s efforts had encountered similar resistance.) I told Kipen a few things that I had accomplished with The Bat Segundo Show. Nearly 200 conversations, with more in the can. Emails from people who told me that I had transformed their commutes from plodding sessions with FM radio DJs playing lousy music into intelligent and entertaining talk that made them alive. I told him that a number of people had also emailed me about the Jeffrey Ford interview, pointing out that they hadn’t heard of Ford before and that, because of the interview, they were planning on checking out his work. I also told him about an interview I had scheduled with another author who was coming through New York. I had learned that this author didn’t have any additional interviews lined up except for me. The publisher had likewise dumped this incredible novel into the market as a paperback original. This was a considerable injustice that something like a NEA-sponsored program could correct.

“You’ve got something against paperback originals?” said Kipen, desperately trying to change the subject, his interest more in canapes than concepts.

I told him that I didn’t. I told him that he knew very well what the reality was. And that he was in the position of doing something about this in the NEA. Grants had helped the likes of Sherman Alexie. Why not help others? There needed to be more podcasts, more writing, more places for the literary. More places that could help starving writers so that they wouldn’t have to turn to day labor or temp work. The whole thing could be kickstarted on comparatively little cash. It could be initiated by the NEA.

Kipen was more fascinated by a drifting salver.

He showed somewhat more interest in a woman, who was not forthright about identifying herself to me. This woman declared that she was on a board of directors for an “online book review” project with Eric Banks and Nan Talese. This, of course, has been in the works since November and is highly suspect — given that Talese insisted that “the best book reviews are the ones in People magazine and Entertainment Weekly.” I don’t want to be a snob about magazines for the vox populi, but how exactly does this emphasis take into account the quality reviews frequently found in Bookforum or the New York Review of Books? There was also one major ethical conundrum: this venture would be subsidized by publishers. But what review space would there be for publishers who weren’t sponsoring the site? And would such a cozy relationship encourage more favorable reviews?

I told this woman that, contrary to her “innovation,” there was, in fact, an online book review already. It was known as the litblogosphere. There was Dan Green and the Quarterly Conversation. I told her that there were essays on my site five days a week (or thereabouts) and that everything was edited. Apparently, I grabbed her attention. I was out of cards. So I wrote my email address on the back of Kipen’s business card.

The fact that this woman showed more attention about the future of literature than the NEA’s Director of Literature suggests that the NEA is in serious trouble. It can’t be an accident that private interests are more intrigued than those governmental agencies purportedly set up to provide for the public. Kipen can bitch all he wants about the decline of the book review. But if he truly believes that “the indicator species for American daily journalism is the book review,” I certainly don’t see the NEA offering any kind of alternative, much less listening to people who have ideas.

So unless David Kipen can demonstrate that he’s less interested in dictating to the public what they need to read and more interested in helping those who are effectively getting people excited about books, I must believe him to be an unsuitable representative for promoting literature in this country. Then again, given the penurious support this nation gives to the arts, I’d say that Kipen is as American as apple pie.

[4/14/08 UPDATE: Clarifying the extent of this venture, Eric Banks has emailed me: “I’m not sure who the woman was who approached you at the Good Reads event, but there is no ‘board of directors’ for the review that Nan and I have at various times discussed. The way you outlined the funding for such a review is not correct — and what I have to stress as well is that this is at this point no more than a theoretical idea (guess that’s slightly redundant, but you know what I mean) that Nan and I have talked about. At one point we did speak to the AAP about some sort of advertising commitment on its part (and that was for collective support), but that would have been under the auspices of Bookforum–it would have been proposed as an expansion of bookforum.com and was intended precisely to allow Bookforum to cover more books than it is able to do given the size and frequency of the review.” I will, as time permits, conduct some additional investigations about this “theoretical idea.”]

by Edward Champion

Old-Time Music

Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay this morning
Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay this morning
Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay
Old-time music never went away this morning

—Bubba George Stringband, Ithaca, NY

You see them on street corners and bars, sometimes in the corners of restaurants. Fiddle and banjo players. They congregate in alleyways and parking lots; they come together in houses, apartments, behind barns, next to railroad tracks, all across America, a network of steel strings squealing and thumping. You can see the lines of cars along the side of the road, hear the din through the windows, and if you like what you hear, once you step inside, it’s almost impossible to get back out. You don’t want to.

It must have happened something like this: Somewhere in the early nineteenth-century American South, a sharecropper from the British Isles, a fiddle hanging from his hand, sat down with a West African slave holding a banjo, and they hammered out a sound from the fiddle’s drive and the banjo’s shuffle that nobody had ever quite heard before, desperate and joyful, the sound of parties and arson, two ways to burn down a house. It’s unclear exactly how it spread, but it was all over Appalachia by the 1920s, when Okeh Records put the label of “old-time music” on their recordings of scratchy fiddles and stabbing banjos, howling singers already fifty years out of date from the hot new jazz 78s Okeh was cutting. But it was a stubborn thing; it survived for decades, spawned bluegrass and country, sending out those kids to get on the radio while it stayed in living rooms, porches, dance halls, parties in the woods. It made Pete and the rest of the Seegers, it made the folk revival, but it also made Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and all the purveyors of the roots rock and alt-country that followed, the ones tapping into the Old Weird America of last card games and murders by the river. It made all of these things but stayed itself, our country’s ecstatic and violent pulse.

Growing up in Ithaca, New York, I heard old-time music a lot, saw it played, danced for hours to it. As a boy who liked to shake it, I was drawn to its energy and menace, the dark, hypnotic beat the bands could set up and let spin for hours. I watched the musicians start up a tune and get possessed by it, their bodies contorting, their eyes rolling back in their heads. I wanted what they had, I wanted to go where they were going. But as a budding musician, I was terrified of it. I had taken classical violin lessons since I was four, but when I watched fiddle players, I couldn’t comprehend how what I was seeing could produce what I was hearing; I didn’t even understand how they started the tune, when they knew to sing, when they knew to stop. It looked like telepathy. So for a couple of years I didn’t even try to play it. I played in orchestras, played trombone in a reggae band. Went to a lot of ska shows. But at last, in college, a friend of mine started playing banjo and needed a fiddle player, and I decided to give it a try. I took a couple of lessons from Judy Hyman. Went to a couple of festivals and a lot of jams. Got a banjo. Got my ass kicked around a lot; two hours into a long, loud session, my fingers were bleeding, my throat ragged with shouting, and the muscles in my arms were begging me to stop. I woke up the next morning with my voice gone, sometimes a bandage or two on my hands. But by my mid-20s, I was a good fiddle and banjo player. I could play for hours on end, drive the groove, get people to move.

The music, however, seemed to be dying. The actual old-timers, the ones who had taught the hippies how to do it in the 1970s, were actually dying, one after the other. On my first visit to a festival down south in 1997, I seemed to be one of about five musicians under the age of thirty. Old-time music had seen a big comeback with the folk revival—people my parents’ age—but from where I stood, it seemed like that might be the end of it, for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Nathaniel Rowan, a fiddle and banjo player, saw the same thing; we gravitated toward each other immediately, two moths to a dwindling flame, in New York City in 1998. I learned to really play the banjo on a park bench, with him playing fiddle and two punk kids cheering us on. Just about everyone else in the scene was decades our senior. Rocking players, full of energy, some of them could party us into the ground. But who would be playing the music in twenty years? Old-time had survived for 150 years already, but maybe we were it.

We’re not it any more. Old-time has always been everywhere, a skin stretched across the continent, but lately it seems like that skin is getting thicker. In New York, more people in their thirties age showed up, good players: Thomas Bailey, Rhys Jones and Christina Wheeler. They’d been playing for years already and sounded like it. But it was more than just people moving around, coming to the city. “In the last five years, I’ve noticed that it’s younger and younger,” Nathaniel says. “It seemed like suddenly it was really cool to play banjos and ukuleles—maybe because of O Brother Where Art Thou, but it seemed kind of punk rock, too.” Joe “joebass” DeJarnette of the Wiyos has been out to Portland, OR recently, where he says “the scene is these young punk kids. They live in these sheds and get their food from dumpsters and play old-time music. A bunch of kids from the West Coast are moving to North Carolina to be closer to the music and the culture. And there’s this back-to-the-woods thing that goes right with it.”

Musically, old-time is indestructible, a big, fat groove. You can bring anything to it and it survives—maybe because, like most genres of music, it was never pure, always a hybrid. It began as an American thing, the collision of Europe with the slaves of Africa with the ghosts of the native tribes that the Europeans destroyed and displaced. Over time, the people who played it—both those who grew up with it and those who found it later in life—brought to it the accents and inflections of other styles of music: parlor music, jazz, the blues. Today is no different, with people playing it like punk, like funk. Like Afro-beat, like smoked-out reggae. Like rock ‘n’ roll. Or they play it straight, no chaser. Any way they do it, it’s groovy.

Mr. DeJarnette lays it down thusly: “Old-time is one of the few kinds of music you can play without dealing with the music industry in any way, shape, or form.” All of the source recordings are public domain, but you really learn to play it—as I did, and everyone I know did—from person to person, at jam sessions, house parties, festivals. And the more you play, the more you meet people, and the more fun you have. To play old-time is to find yourself partying on a Wednesday, grooving in someone’s kitchen for ten hours, and all you need to start is a crappy instrument and the will to rock.

And Clifftop, the festival on the round peak of an isolated hill in West Virginia, has exploded into a ten-day, twenty-four-hour city of joy. It’s a sprawl of tents and campers, tarps and bungee cord, kitchens made from card tables and Coleman stoves, couches hauled out of vans. A place called Camp America. And there’s music all the time. It’s there in the morning when you wake up, it’s there in the hot afternoons; it’s there when the rain flows all around you and hammers on the tarps and roofs of cars. And at night, the warm glow from the thousands of lamps and lanterns lights the trees from below, and the music buzzes all around you like a million insects. If you walk around, you’ll see a campsite decked out to look like a Paris café, a gypsy jazz trio bouncing in the corner while a couple dances in the gravel. You’ll see a giant Cajun dance party under a carnival tent. Hillbillies rocking like they did a century ago. A dense ring of young hippies in the dark, heads bobbing, playing until their hands bleed and screaming out the lyrics over the din in their ears. But you won’t walk around that much. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in a circle of your own, with people you can’t recognize in the dark, two hours into a six-hour jam, and you’ll pull your grooves from the crickets in the trees, from the music all around you, from your fingers, which can’t stop moving, and you’ll remember everything all over again, why you’re there and how you started, all the jams and the faces of everyone you’ve played with in between. Why you started playing the music in the first place, and how the music will still be there long after you’re gone.

by Edward Champion

My Blueberry Nights

As the extreme closeups of gooey ice cream melting into viscous blueberry pie made my pre-lunch stomach grumble, I thought at first that Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights would turn out to be a brave and somewhat unusual art-house film for foodies. Perhaps Wong Kar-Wai would at long last inform snobs of food and snobs of life that there was indeed good eating and good living to be found in the more populist corners of the earth.

But as the film played out, the film’s major flaw presented itself to me: everything about it is too close. The characters talk in restaurants, hotel rooms, casinos, and ancillary pit stops. But their backstories are as unnaturally vacant as the streets of New York. Wong Kar-Wai and co-writer Lawrence Block seem to prefer gushing monologues — such as one delivered by Rachel Weisz while she sits on a street curb — over the minute human moments one observes quite readily in a glance at a restaurant.

For example, we see David Straithairn playing an alcoholic by night and a dutiful cop who orders chicken steaks in a diner by day, but, outside of the tall and quiet grace that Straithairn brings to his performance, we never get a true sense of his inner turmoil, save through his tab of unpaid bills bar swinging as dutifully as the traffic signals in Memphis.

A concern for peripheral objects may work well for the rudderless drifters in a Haruki Murakami novel or the precision one finds celebrated within Nicholson Baker’s work, but this film is absolutely clumsy on this point. Wong Kar-Wai seems to want a highly stylized fantasy predicated upon a vaguely gritty (and thus audience-friendly) portrayal of American bars and diners. Something he doesn’t quite seem to understand. Presumably, this is why he hired Lawrence Block. But while Block brings his pork chop chops to an entertaining Nevada hustler played by Natalie Portman, Block ain’t exactly a guy who can bring a meet cute gravitas to a relationship between Jude Law and Norah Jones, particularly when the pie-lipped propinquity is hinged upon a borderline date rape denouement.

This film may be something of a gamble for Wong Kar-Wai, but the die is miscast. You simply don’t hire a hunky leading man like Jude Law to be a cafe proprietor. Not if you care about verisimilitude. Law is as flagrant as John Wayne’s Roman centurion supervising Christ’s execution in The Greatest Story Ever Told. The good people who work in the service sector remain largely anonymous, and it would have behooved Wong Kar-Wai to settle for a more interesting character actor in this part. And you don’t hire a doe-eyed cipher like Norah Jones to play a character who has no goal in life other than to work all the time and wander aimlessly around the States. Let me put it to you this way: The paint currently peeling outside my window has more personality than Norah Jones’s execrable Elizabeth, who learns nothing from being mugged on a subway or being dumped by her main man.

Law’s Jeremy has a jar in his cafe in which people deposit and pickup their keys. But Cameron Crowe was much better with this idea in Say Anything. At times, My Blueberry Nights was so humorless that I longed for John Cusack to emerge and say, “You must chill! I have hidden your keys.” Instead, we get pretentious lines like “If I throw these keys away, those doors could be closed forever.”

I should also observe that Darius Khondji’s cinematography is taken with doors. There are conversations in doors. A PULL sign on the door of a Memphis bar gets prominent coverage. If My Blueberry Nights doesn’t work as Food Network counterprogramming, then it will certainly excite any JELD-WEN employee who remains convinced that his hard work is a thankless job.

Of course, it isn’t all doors. Dark cars in the night are backlit by rain. There are limitless red and green neons. The film looks good, but it can’t transpose any of these intriguing symbols into the story. It’s a telling sign that moments in Elizabeth’s cross-country journey are interspersed with title cards such as DAY 57 — 1,120 MILES FROM NY. This is less a meaningful reference point and more of a Godard-like conceit.

Wong Kar-Wai is too great a fillmmaker for this. I’d hate to think that anyone unfamiliar with his work would sample this film first before Chungking Express, Happy Together, or 2046, all great films in which Wong Kar-Wai clearly found his thrill. But Blueberry, along with the remake of The Lady from Shanghai that’s purportedly in the works, suggests that Wong Kar-Wai is veering away from the distinctness that made him special. And if he isn’t careful, he may prove to be as ignored as the blueberry pie that sits uneaten in Jeremy’s cafe.

by Edward Champion

Samantha Power to “Give the People What They Want”

Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell and Chasing the Flame, has announced that she will turn her attentions to “more entertaining, less challenging” books in the wake of recent developments. Expressing dismay that her thoughts on weighty matters were overlooked by off-the-record remarks, and that she was now being relegated to the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times, Power pledged that she would now “give the people what they want.” And if that meant abandoning important probings into American foreign policy that the people needed to know about, this was simply how the cookie crumbled.

Power also showed less reticence to more base endeavors.

“I’m 37,” said Power in a telephone interview. “I still go to the gym. I still have a body. And if the American people prefer my body to my mind, then who am I to argue? I’d rather just move forward and put the Obama incident behind me.”

Power reported that her third book would be a meticulously researched biography on Beyoncé, with the working title, Dreamgirl: A Woman’s Only Choice in America.

“I’ve already talked to hundreds of people close to Beyoncé. Only a handful grew uncomfortable at the mention of Raphael Lemkin.”

Expressing approval for these unexpected developments, Larry Flynt offered Power $500,000 to pose naked in a future edition of Hustler. “That’s the great thing about America,” said Flynt. “Even when a woman’s as sharp as Samantha, she still has anatomy.”

Power did not offer an answer as to whether she would take this offer. But she did say that it was good to have some insurance “if the Beyoncé book tanked.”

by Edward Champion

New Podcasts

Apologies for the slack content here. It’s been busy. But things should be more or less back to regular prolificity tomorrow. Four more podcasts have been released at The Bat Segundo Show, including a return appearance by LBC-nominated author Jeffrey Ford that pertains to his latest book, The Shadow Year. Three more podcasts are forthcoming in a few days, all of them return appearances — including two authors who were nominated by the LBC. As time permits, I’m hoping to check in with many of the authors who the LBC once championed as they put out more books and come through New York, while also keeping the floodgates open for emerging and overlooked literary talents.

There are also some lengthy FH pieces coming from other authors. Keep watching the skies.

by Edward Champion

Meta Meta Meta

Darby Dixon points to a troubling new trend among today’s cultural tastemakers. Today, a professional writer can now be employed to write about reading about writing or reading about writing about reading, with several nots thrown in at random intervals, if we assume the writers to be keeping track. I must confess that all this gives me a headache. The silence is not pillowy exactly. But it is certainly quite silly and possibly Freudian.

I feel that I have contributed to this atmosphere with lengthy blog posts responding to reviews of books, and therefore exhort all to point to my culpability in the matter. In my defense, I should note that I never suggested to an editor that I should collect a check for writing such a piece. But now I am writing about writing about writing about reading, thereby adding a fourth layer of self-reference. And should you, dear readers, decide to comment upon this post, you will be writing about writing about writing about writing about reading. And how then can we live with ourselves?

All this sets a bad precedent for meta, dutifully putting the Quine in quinine. (Quite literally.) Or does it? Is there no limit to the onion?

Of the three paragraphs I have now written, I think the first one is probably the best, although I’ll probably change my mind when I approach this sentence’s period.

I am still unaware of how one “stabs over” to an online bookstore. This suggests that the online bookstore is a carapace to be pierced. And perhaps it is, assuming that it possesses the corporeal qualities of reference. Perhaps the preposition is the dagger I see before me or just a creepy beast caught in the morphological undertow. So I’ll see your self-reference and raise you with evidence to the contrary:

by Edward Champion

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

Nobody will replace Arthur C. Clarke. Not by a long shot. The inner cylindrical mysteries of Rama. The monolith concocted in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. The sad calculated way in which aliens conquered the human race in the unforgettable Childhood’s End.

He was one of the last of the Golden Age giants. Born close to the end of one world war and becoming a man in the middle of another war, where he served with the Royal Air Force, Clarke looked to the stars and to his imagination, creating a body of work that will live on for decades to come.

I was a scrawny and curious kid who found him on the rackety stacks of an underfunded public library. My mother had gone through her second divorce. There wasn’t a lot of food in the house. There were holes in my T-shirts, and no money. But then one Saturday afternoon in the library, I opened up a musty volume and discovered these amazing words:

The next time you see the full Moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the greatest walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium — the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

clarke.jpgThe story, of course, was “The Sentinel.” And I read it all in one gulp. I took to craning my head out the window late at night when nobody was looking, spying during hours when nobody knew I was awake. And I did catch a pockmarked indentation, wondering if this was indeed the Mare Crisium. (A later look at a picture book on the moon confirmed that this wasn’t quite the case. But I took to calling any detail I could see a Sea of Crises, for reasons that were comical to me.)

And I became indebted to Mr. Clarke for granting me a grand galaxy of awe, intrigue, and possibility. This was needed. Because at the time, my universe was quite limited.

So Clarke’s death came as a tremendous blow to me. I never got to meet him. Never got to thank him. Never got to tell him that he helped some kid get through a turbulent time.

And I really have nothing more to say.

Arthur C. Clarke, thanks for being there when I needed you.

by Edward Champion

Recovering

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I’m a bit wiped from last night’s interview with Marshall Klimasewiski, but thank you to all who came! I hope to offer content later. But in the meantime, recuperation is currently required.

I’m also pleased to announce that we’ve arranged for a number of people to discuss Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke and that, during the week of March 10, 2008, we’ll be offering a five-day discussion of this book, with a few unexpected cameo appearances. But in the meantime, don’t miss Baker’s “The Charms of Wikipedia,” in the latest New York Review of Books. This is a gloriously giddy essay that offers Baker’s first protracted perspective on the Internet and that, in light of Double Fold, you may be quite surprised by! (via Matt Cheney)

by Edward Champion

Interview with Marshall Klimasewiski — Tonight!

marshallklim.jpgTonight, I’ll be talking with Marshall Klimasewiski, author of The Cottagers and now Tyrants, at 7:00 PM.

The event will take place at McNally Robinson, located at 52 Prince Street, New York, NY. The event is free, the conversation will also be available later as a podcast, but we will also be taking questions from the audience.

For more details on this event, go here.

To listen to my previous conversation with Mr. Klimasewiski, go here.

by Edward Champion

A Can of Grape Soda

It’s safe to say that most of us fail to observe where our food comes from. I am currently examining an empty aluminum can of Welch’s Grape Soda, which was imbibed about four hours ago and was abandoned on my desk. In tall and semi-gothic lettering, the words NEW YORK appear — as if to suggest some homestate affinity, perhaps a reason for another beverage enthusiast to slap me on the back with an avuncular gusto as we down a few cans of Welch’s. Less comforting than these words is the NATURAL & ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, which was somehow invisible to me when I procured the soda in questions. These words are more troublesomely legible than NEW YORK. And I ponder whether this is really a strong selling point. Turning the can on my side, I learn that I have put into my system the following ingredients:

carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, grape juice concentrate, citric acid, natural and artificial grape flavors, sodium benzoate (preservative), red 40, blue 1

The drink was “produced under the authority of Welch Foods, Inc.,” which I am assured is “a cooperative” based out of Concord, Maine. And yet the drink was “canned by Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of New York, Inc.” So I’m wondering where Welch Foods’s authority left off and Pepsi-Cola’s bottling began, and I’m pondering what happened between Concord and Queens. (College Point is fairly close to LaGuardia.) There isn’t an answer on this can. We accept that some complicated process has occurred and we don’t ask questions about whether any of this is good for us.

I don’t know if I completely trust “the authority of Welch Foods, Inc.” And yet I placed my trust in this authority when I decided to enjoy a can of grape soda, little realizing that I was experiencing a form of “high fructose corn syrup” that Michael Pollan has probably fulminated about somewhere. I am especially disturbed that grapes are not a part of this beverage, at least not in any direct manner. It’s all concentrate and natural and artificial grape flavors here. But what of the grapes? Did anybody inspect these? In the rush to mass produce cans of Welch’s, did someone decide to skimp out on the grapes? “The authority of Welch Foods, Inc.” may very well be an austere and ruthlessly efficient force that keeps the cans running down their tracks on time and into the ebullient hands of consumers like me, but I really want to know where the grapes come from. And this website isn’t exactly forthcoming about which grapes are used.

When I obtained the can of grape soda, I naively believed that some jolly group of vintners had smashed the grapes with their feet, that there was some natural process that permitted the grapes to ferment, and that everybody had congratulated each other on a job well done. But the truth is I know nothing about the complex machinery that put this drink together. Perhaps there was scant human intervention. I’m pretty sure that what I happily ingested was probably quite bad for me. 51 grams of sugar in one can! I mean, that’s phenomenal and it’s certainly a sign of high fructose. At least Welch’s is being clear on that point. (Of course, they have to, what with federal law and all.) But Welch’s hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about how much sugar this is. They have informed us, quite predictably, that the can contains 12 fluid ounces (or FL OZ for short, which suggests that one should probably floss shortly after knocking back a cold can of grape soda). In parentheses, we are informed that this amount is also 355 milliliters. But why not be forthright about what this amounts to in grams? It’s probably because 12 ounces is roughly about 340 grams. Which means that one sixth of this beverage is composed entirely of sugar! That’s more sugar than someone is likely to spoon into a cup of coffee!

I must conclude that Red 40 and Blue 1 are both forms of food coloring that are hiding some terrible truth about what these grapes have been through or how they have been sullied by the fructose and the concentrate.

There is a 1-800 number on the side of the can urging me to leave a “consumer comment.” But it’s now too late for me to call and I fear that this number exists for me and other consumes to explain to Welch’s how I feel about their beverage, perhaps in polite and enthusiastic terms. But the truth of the matter is that I have questions, not comments. And the person who would answer at this 1-800 number might panic because they didn’t have these answers at their fingertips. Or I might have to climb my way up the bureaucratic ladder to find out who does know. “Uh…grape juice concentrate. I’ll have to get approval from Bob before I can tell you what this is.”

The Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of New York, Inc. is based in College Point, New York. It is a place that employs 1,100 people and made $166.60 million in 2007. There are two bottling plants and six warehouses. Yahoo! Finance assures me that this is “one of the largest private bottlers in the U.S.” But it doesn’t tell me where the grapes come from.

The Welch’s website assures me that their beverages are made from dark grapes. And there is this:

These dark grapes contain flavonoids, which are a likely source of heart heath benefits. Both red wine research and purple grape juice research have shown antioxidant, anti-clotting, and arterial flexibility benefits. Many scientists believe that these properties are linked to heart health.

I am somewhat suspicious of flavonoids. They sound too much like the “electrolytes” that the futuristic population of Mike Judge’s film, Idiocracy, so passionately believed in. And while flavonoids are indeed good for you, a UC Berkeley study in 2000 revealed that high concentrations of flavonoids, particularly in supplements sold at health food stores, may assist in cancer formation. A 2007 article from Science Daily is somewhat more encouraging, pointing out that high-sugar drinks with flavonoids are still beneficial because of the flavonoids.

So many questions! But then trying to find answers is what the Internet is for. Thankfully, there are a few enthusiasts out there who care about these seemingly pedantic but alarming issues. A new blog, Food Mapping, appears determined to use topographical technology to answer these questions. It promises “a visual representation of the how, where, and why of our food.” And it has (so far) explained the effects of humans eating too much fish and has provided helpful maps for local dairies. It also led me in turn to this map of New Orleans, in which one can view an overlay of stores, restaurants, and sundry markets across the city — important questions for anyone curious (and indeed hopeful) about how this ravaged city can restore itself after Katrina.

It’s self-evident that independent experts and enthusiasts need to investigate these culinary mysteries. And perhaps with serious inquiry, we might loosen a few answers into the great mysteries we blindly accept. Perhaps there is a can of grape soda somewhere that is completely transparent about the manner it is manufactured and canned and that doesn’t use nearly as much sugar. Or perhaps drinking grape soda is an unhealthy fait accompli. One obvious solution would be to avoid grape soda. But wouldn’t it be better to know precisely what one is avoiding?

by Edward Champion

Insert Interview Excerpt Here

Folks, I am a bit knackered. So I hope you’ll pardon the silence on this end. It’s been a six interviews in seven days and trying to meet deadlines kind of week — and one interview even involved a crazed three hour drinking session. But there are some really interesting pieces in the works from some other writers and some exciting folks in store for Segundo. And four new podcasts were released a few days ago. I’ll have capsules later. And I’ll also have an excerpt from a rather amazing figure up here tomorrow. Bear with me.

In the meantime, Nick Antosca has given me one very good reason to despise Jay McInerney.

by Edward Champion

Weekend Diversions: Lyrebirds

The lyrebird, most commonly found in Australia, is capable of mimicking an extraordinary range of sounds while singing to attract a mate. But as the below clip with David Attenborough demonstrates, humans aren’t always aware of the considerable impact they have upon nature. As reported in 2001 by the Register and in 2005 by the Hindustan Times, birds have also picked up an uncanny ability to impersonate ringtones. But perhaps the saddest part of this story is the possibility put forth by the National Audubon Society last year: noise pollution may be causing birds to lose their capacity to sing.

by Edward Champion

Do Not Trust This Man!

danwickett.jpg

“I think we should publicly shame him,” said one of our party.

“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”

There were five of us waiting to meet up with Dan Wickett at the Sheraton Hotel Hudson Bar. But Mr. Wickett was not there! We hung around for around 40 minutes. But no Dan Wickett! Et tu, Dan?

Despite the fact that there was a need to beat a deadline, your correspondent evaded his responsibilities and will be chained to his laptop for the next thirty hours to get the assignment finished. But shortly after the fruitless quest for Dan Wickett, there was then an evening involving many additional places with many magnificent people with many crazed text messages and many phone calls and people coming and going and perhaps too many drinks. And because of these peregrinations, which were somewhat unanticipated, there is no entry on Filthy Habits this morning.

But oh those margaritas! And oh those hugs and kisses and talk of randy activity!