Bear with me as the new incarnation is being tinkered with.

Here are some links to recent activity.

Recent Reviews, Essays, and Articles:

“The Perils of Literary Biography” (Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2007)
Gonzo and The Gonzo Way (The Philly Inquirer, December 30, 2007)
In defense of the single-sentence paragraph (The Guardian, January 2, 2008)
Review of Stephen King’s Duma Key (Penthouse, April 2008)

Bat Segundo Podcasts:

#160 — Will Self
#161 — Stewart O’Nan
#162 — Ken Kalfus
#163 — Jess Walter
#164 — Peter Fernandez and Corinne Orr (Speed Racer)
#165 — Howard Jacobson
#166 — Dave White
#167 — David Rakoff, Part One
#168 — David Rakoff, Part Two

While I contemplate just what the new version of this site will entail, sans Reluctant, here are recent articles, essays, podcasts, and other strange things I’m involved with that you can find at other places. I’ll update this post as the output propagates.

Recent Reviews, Essays, and Articles:

“The Perils of Literary Biography” (Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2007)

Bat Segundo Podcasts:

#160 — Will Self
#161 — Stewart O’Nan
#162 — Ken Kalfus
#163 — Jess Walter
#164 — Peter Fernandez and Corinne Orr (Speed Racer)

This morning, I filed for divorce from Return of the Reluctant, citing irreconcilable differences. It was an amicable parting. No children, no property to squabble over. No embarrassing deposition testimony read to the jury. No alimony. Reluctant and I have had ourselves a good time over the years. But I’m a different person now. And I finally confessed to a good friend on the phone that I really had nothing more to say about books or the literary world in the Reluctant format. And I laughed for ten minutes over how absurdly simple the choice was. When something stops being fun, it’s pretty easy to become decisive.

You see, four years ago, this blog was started by a guy who worked a drab day job. But that guy is no more. Six months ago, I quit my drab day job, moved to New York to try and write for a living, and became much happier. Production stepped up on The Bat Segundo Show and the show’s tone changed to something more thoughtful, controversial, and interesting. It was much more to my liking. Yeah, there are a few clunkers in the 160 or so odd shows. But for the most part, I’m proud of the output. There are some incredible conversations in the archive and I really don’t care who hates it or ignores it. The great thing about blogging, podcasting, and the Internet is that there is truly nothing to lose.

Nevertheless, Reluctant was more of a chore. Often a thankless one. A daily grind in which I regularly asked myself why I wasn’t putting this kind of energy into the novel I’ve been working on, which is about halfway done, or the old-time radio project that I can’t stop dreaming about. Or just about any wild or ambitious idea that enters my noggin. There seem to be many of those.

I may be back. Old habits die hard. Maybe there will be something even half as fantastic as Black Garterbelt in Reluctant’s place. I don’t know. But if I do come back through a blog, and, frankly I’m on the fence right now, it will be in a new form.

For now, however, I’m done with blogging. And I’m serious this time. There are pages of crazed dialogue to bang out. Stories and essays to write. Podcasts to unfurl. Actors to recruit. A troubled protagonist to flesh out, who I’ve been learning more about over the past year.

If you’re looking for new content in the meantime, well, you’ll find all that over at Segundo — including, very soon, that Will Self conversation that some of you have been asking about.

But thanks very much for helping to make Reluctant what it’s been over the past four years.

— Edward Champion

[TANGENTIALLY RELATED: Lawrence Tate observes that my Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “The Perils of Literary Biography,” can be found here.]

[UPDATE: I learned this afternoon from Josh Glenn that apparently Keith Gessen and n+1 are responsible for my decision. Actually, Gessen had nothing to do with it. It was Dan Fogelberg’s recent death that caused me to sob for days. I sang “Same Old Lang Syne” to myself several times because I couldn’t steal behind her in the frozen foods section without getting arrested. As regular readers here observed over the past four years, I was never capable of an independent thought. For all decisions, I consult Dan Fogelberg for advice. Had Fogelberg not passed on, I suspect things would have been different.]

Whirring wind, the whistling of asthmatic ghosts, the clinks of cans and other detritus thrown out windows by careless neighbors and left to pick up in an unpredictable gust. Spooky and grandiloquent gestures in lieu of snow. The slush well melted. Two inch puddles evaporating before tomorrow morning. Footfalls beyond walls. Eight days before the unfulfilled promise of a wintry wonderland. Mere weeks before year’s end. Party poppers and streamers and the clinks of champagne flutes, but not today. The phones are dead at this zero hour, batteries left to expire and the monitors dissolving into screensavers. Everyone is shaking. Jittery souls packed in thick soles, stampeding through powdery barricades. The other half packed inside clinging to lovers and protective blankets. Times Square half-deserted, the heavy credit card swiping primed for the robust nor’easter of Penn Station procrastinators. Subways chug and conductors repeat MTA warnings. They are the lonely drivers of this city, saturating these barely populated cars with lonely chatter. The rest ride silent in cabs because it beats shivering in shelters.

The smarter and richer ones have fled to warmer places, to friends and families, to wintering — although they’ll never use that gerund. There are still places that pulse with life. Warm tableaus where everybody seems mystified that the holiday hasn’t come to pass. Which explains the reliance upon safe tunes that everybody knows like the Beatles blasted over speakers, defacing the silence and filling in for the thirty-seventh version of “Jingle Bell Rock.”

Daylight’s at a premium and everyone knows it. In particular, the nine-to-fivers are sad because they’re inside when the sun stabs through the clouds. It’s hard to smile, but jokes come easier. And sometimes there’s the prospect of a shared flask. Conversations are quieter, subjects less scintillating. It’s as if we’re all part of a mandatory Secret Santa operation. Brain cells dwindle, fires kindle. But cats and dogs jump on laps and are walked around blocks, whether sun or sleet. Kids bristle with energy and anticipation. The haul might be pretty good or anticlimactic. The alone hole up with big bottles and are left alone.

If you are receiving email replies from me from several months ago, do not be alarmed. I’m simply very thorough about the email backlog. Many replies still forthcoming.

New York Post: “Ike ‘Beats’ Tina to Death.”

Terry Pratchett has early onset Alzheimer’s. (via Bill Peshel)

Orson Welles has made appearances in four dreams I’ve had over the past week. And I don’t know why. Either old-time radio is very much on the mind or Mr. Welles’s spirit has found a way to collect residuals from Morpheus.

Sorry, eNotes, but any list of ball-busting women writers without Dorothy Parker, who had the glorious effrontery to tell Norman Mailer, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell ‘fuck,'” is woefully inadequate.

I am now lying on a bed looking through blankets of billowing wool to where I am told there is a world beyond the bed. Yesterday I tried to venture off the bed and internal forces — some of them responding to the name Phil — held me down. You could call this laziness, but I call it reality. It was easier to leave the bed in 1996. There was a most beautiful world beyond that bed, but that was when we didn’t have the Internet. No wi-fi. No laptops. No inanities.

This is a Brooklyn apartment in 2007. I email. I blog. I pick up my cell phone. Sometimes, I do all three at once. And my life is pointless and inane just for even doing one of these things. Even if I turned the computer off for a week and just thought about doing it. Doris Lessing told me all this. It seems that I am incapable of reading a book, no matter how many notes I take. And it’s all because I haven’t visited Zimbabwe and met some starving young black boy telling me he wants to write. Even if I were to go onto IRC and find a boy in Zimbabwe typing “i shall be a writer too :),” this would not be enough. For the boy in Zimbabwe could very well be a forty-two year old psychopath in Dayton, Ohio who would want to fly me out somewhere and meet me in a sleazy motel and offer me a special treat if I pretend to be a fifteen year old girl named “sucker69” who likes to try new things. This is assuming I have the time or the inclination to pretend to be a fifteen year old girl. Again, the inanities. The whole day wasted on blogging. Worthless.

I do not think many of the people on IRC will really chat with a boy in Zimbabwe who wants to write.

The next day I won’t be giving a talk anywhere, unless you count climbing up the fire escape to the roof and braying at the moon in an effort to beat my insomnia. Because I am one of those insignificant Internet people and there isn’t so much as a sliver of hope that I’ll be able to formulate any meaningful thoughts on a screen. The best thing I write is bound to be insignificant because it isn’t bound in buckram. So there is no prize.

Maybe I will talk with myself, underneath the blankets with the billowing wool. Zimbabwe will be on my mind as I look at my mildly expectant fingers reaching onto the laptop and try to tell them to stop because Doris Lessing said that it wasn’t good enough.

I do my best. My fingers are not polite.

I’m sure that there are other people out there with fingers like mine and that some of these mysterious strangers with laptops will win prizes.

Then the talk with myself will be over. Maybe my super will call the police. Maybe I’ll be evicted for all the loud noise. Maybe nobody will care. After beating myself up for not knowing anybody in Zimbabwe, and being too lazy to try and contact anybody in Zimbabwe, I shall go down to my local bodega and try to talk with some of the people in my neighborhood. I will ask them if they know anybody in Zimbabwe and they will tell me to either buy something or fuck off. And I shall return to the bed and the blankets with billowing wool and the laptop, and it will all remain inane and insignificant.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where meeting somebody from Zimbabwe was once a sure thing if you had a lot of expendable income and you were 88 years old and you felt like bitching at someone because you weren’t quite dead yet. This is no longer possible. In this culture, we can celebrate writers like Doris Lessing, who make silly generalizations about people who work with computers being incapable of reading and sound like utter loons. And it all sounds important because it’s delivered in front of the Nobel Foundation and because it’s Doris Lessing saying these words.

I remember a day in 1980 when Carter was still President and there was a nest of singing birds. Should I tell you the rest of this story? No. Because writers are made in Zimbabwe. And I grew up in California. I was not a black boy. I’m so sorry.

Despite this difficulty, I became some third-rate writer. And we should also remember that I became a third-rate writer not in Zimbabwe, but in Brooklyn, a place where there are too many writers. In one or two generations, there may even be more people from Zimbabwe in Brooklyn than there are writers. I do not shed any tears over this fact. This is the way of things.

If I do not leave the bed soon, I will be a poor girl trudging through the dirt, dreaming of an education for my children, should I lack the foresight not to spawn. I think I shall stay in bed and not eat for three days. I’ll think of the children. I’ll think of Zimbabwe. Then I’ll think of Doris Lessing and ask myself whether she banged out her speech in a few hours or whether this was just an easy way to get the Nobel ceremonies over with.

I have nothing bad to say about Sloane Crosley, except that I’ve yet to receive The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (and that’s really more my fault, because I didn’t voice my affinity for that pulp period). Apparently nobody else has any dirt either. Normally, I’m suspicious of such people. But since this is a piece from Observer journalist Leon Neyfakh and Ms. Crosley has the additional imprimatur from a figure known only as “Mr. Park,” I believe that Mr. Neyfakh did pound the pavement and looked vigorously for a contrarian take, only to find none. Perhaps there are quids pro quo going on that we simply do not know about that have involved certain muckrakers disappearing into the East River. Either way, I don’t know whether to be skeptical or sanguine in this case. There’s nothing here beyond hosannas.

The 50 greatest fictional weapons of all time. (via Quiddity)

The Independent: “The frustrated efforts of Catherine O’Flynn, a former postwoman who tried and failed 15 times to get her work published, were finally rewarded yesterday when her first book was shortlisted for the £25,000 Costa Book Awards.”

Incidentally, Rupert Thomson made the shortlist too.

(via Keir Graff)

My review of Paula Kamen’s Finding Iris Chang appears in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am holed up writing like a maniac, trying to meet deadlines and cackling like a misunderstood nymphomaniac. So if it ain’t exactly a snow day, it’s certainly a light blogging day. But I will try to check in later.

Los Angeles City Beat talks with Michael Silverblatt. Surprisingly, Silverblatt comes off not sounding too pompous and even quite gracious. (via Sarah)

My review of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville can be found in today’s Philly Inquirer.

Ira Levin has passed on.

Perez Hilton has stolen from Pamela Ribon, who, like all WGA members, is on strike!

There is an exotic gentleman named Joshua Henkin now blogging at The Elegant Variation. He is guest blogging with some prolificity and even referring to previous guest blogging appearances. I get the sense that if it was possible for him to guest blog for eternity, he would do so if he had the chance. In fact, I’ve now hit Page Down six times and there are still posts by Joshua Henkin. Which leads me to believe that it is no longer the place to find Mark Sarvas, but the place to find Joshua Henkin. Whether the exotic gentleman will become an exotic dancer, perhaps posting a YouTube video offering indisputable evidence that he has in fact made the switch from “gentleman” to “dancer” (or perhaps he is both!), is one of those maddening questions that leaves me in some suspense. I am convinced that Joshua Henkin may do something very crazy, something that will make my jaw drop like the final scene of a Hitchcock film.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to suggest that you experience the Joshua Henkin Experience. And if you don’t want to do this, you can always live vicariously through me with this post. And if that option isn’t good enough, you can always leave a comment here informing me how out of touch I am, or reminding me that I haven’t yet touched Joshua Henkin. And I will respond later with needless over-the-top bravado. All I have to say is thank heavens I’m wearing pants right now.

James Tata reconsiders that particular strata known as the mid-career (b. 1960 or thereabouts) Great American Novelist. It is, of course, most regrettable that Age should matter, but with so many GANs dropping off of late (Vonnegut, Mailer, et al.), one wonders who will be taught in tomorrow’s classrooms. The current crop identified by Mr. Tata do in part fall into a certain rubric of, as he suggests, “nothing more than comic book characters and escapist fantasy,” which suggests a new concern for the next hopeful pantheon. But this “hopeful” qualifier presumes that these writers care about being listed in syllabi, much less proscribing their concerns for what is Important Literature by writing Serious Novels. So I put forth the question to the peanut gallery: Who, born between the years of 1960 and 1970, has a shot at being tomorrow’s Great American Novelist? Is the list that Tata offers the True List? Or is it too early to tell? Has literature become something too specialized to make such a judgment call? (I respond “yes” to the last rhetorical question, but I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing.)

27 minutes.

John Leonard on The Spooky Art: “Still the book feels like one of those late-night cable commercials for Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits, or Conway Twitty’s: act now, call this toll-free number, and we will also send you, at no extra charge, a cool tool to sharpen your knives, whiten your teeth, and screw your neighbors.”

We all knew this was coming: the approbations, the lionizations, the veritable bullshit that Norman Mailer was a gift to the world. All this largely perpetuated by a man advertising for himself. Literally. Not just the book. Mailer was so insecure, so arrogant, so unwilling to listen, that he took out advertisements in newspapers that panned his work.

Well, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to dissent. I’ve been asked multiple times today about what I feel about Mailer kicking the bucket and I have quietly nodded my head to allow those who cared for him to have their quiet moments of consideration. But I never really cared for the man’s writing. There was an interview opportunity for The Castle in the Forest that I didn’t pursue a few years ago. Could have made happen if I really wanted to. But I didn’t, not only because the novel was the most trite and preposterous nonsense I had read in three years, but the idea of talking to Mailer was like being trapped in a closet with an insufferable narcissist.

What did Mailer give us? What was his chief contribution to letters? Mailer as King of the Universe. Mailer as knowing egomaniac. Mailer as hyper-masculine creature of the day and night. Mailer who never listened to anybody but himself. Mailer who, if he considered your work, did it because he wanted you to know he was Mailer and that you were not Mailer. Mailer the sexist pig who got his ass whooped by Germaine Greer.

Well, fuck Norman Mailer. Someone needs to do an HST-style obit for the man. I am not the person to do this, in large part because I don’t have the time. But if I read one more bullshit item about how Mailer was the King of the Universe, then I’m going to require a shotgun or something.

(This writeup, however, is a good start.)

UPDATE: More on Mailer’s “genius,” from the comments in the above link:

Later, Mr. Mailer wrote a piece for a magazine where I worked as an editor, for which he was paid $50,000 (a shocking amount, then and now). The literary lion had trouble delivering and had to be given a conference room at the magazine (Esquire) and an “assistant” to help him meet his deadline. The piece was a routine interview. The final result was such a horrific mish-mash that, once again, I couldn’t finish it without much determined skimming. All in all, he seemed to have no special talent for either long-form works or routine culture pieces. So what was his talent anyway? Self-promotion, I guess.

Publishers Weekly reports that the writers strike is causing author appearances to be canceled. And I have to ask whether this is really that terrible of a development. Getting an author on Colbert may raise visibility, but it’s really just an excuse for Colbert to employ his schtick. Meaningful conversation about the books almost never happens on television. And certainly Colbert hasn’t read the books in question. I’m also wondering if there’s as significant a sales boost with a Colbert appearance as there is for an outlet devoted to books.

It appears that I chose wisely to go to Hoboken last night. James Marcus has a report from last night’s Atlantic Monthly party that sounds like a Fitzgerald nightmare. John Koblin was also there too. I don’t know who the consummate moron was who came up with the absurd idea of a VIP party on a stage that other partygoers could watch, but I must commend this person for demonstrating just how trivial and incompetent the Atlantic is at celebrating its apparent legacy.

You may recall that I initiated a pledge drive here. The reason for this was because BlogAds had failed to pay me out for ads that had run on this site. The remaining ad, for which I have still not been paid for, was a large, month-long ad in September from the Library of Congress that appeared here and on other literary blogs. The payment was due by the Library of Congress on September 30th. Well, the money didn’t arrive then and it didn’t arrive by October 30th. Which meant that even if it does arrive by the end of this month, I’m not going to see it until December 15th. (BlogAds pays out bloggers on the 15th of each month — for monies that have come in by the end of the previous month.)

Since I received no response — indeed, no information whatsoever — from BlogAds on what was happening, I was forced to become my own collection agency. After a few voicemails to Matt Raymond, Raymond was good enough to promptly inform me that the Contracts Office had indeed executed this order. Indeed, when I contacted him a few weeks ago, Raymond had passed along my concerns to Marc Wasserman, the middleman at BlogAds who had set this up.

But Wasserman has not given me any information as to when the Library of Congress paid BlogAds. Indeed, he failed to email me weeks ago and he has failed to reply to any of my emails on the subject. This presents Matt Raymond and I with an awkward situation, having to atone for the lack of communication and professionalism by Wasserman and BlogAds.

In other words, as far as BlogAds is concerned, bloggers come last and they can be paid three months after an ad appears, as far as they are concerned. If they are indeed holding onto the money rightly due to me and other bloggers who ran the Library of Congress ad, for which they have collected a commission, then this is an unethical operation. It does not help matters that Wasserman has remained dishonest and uncommunicative about the true status of payment. I understand that sometimes things happen. But not communicating is worse than laying down the cards of truth.

It turns out that BlogAds actually has a history of screwing over bloggers. Billy Dennis experienced a similar scenario. The monies were received before the end of the month and BlogAds failed to register it properly within their system and reducing a month-long ad after the fact to two weeks, causing Dennis to be paid late.

If Wasserman does not provide an answer to me in the next two days, then I am done with BlogAds for good and I will proceed with alternative options. (And if there’s a service along these lines who can promise communication and competence, I’m happy to entertain offers.) I’m not supposed to be the one making calls and trying to collect and clarify. Wasserman and BlogAds are.

The moral of the story: BlogAds cares more about “ads” than they do about “blogs.” And if you’re expected a professional and reliable sideline, you’re going to be in for a major disappointment.

[11/9 UPDATE: I’ve spoken on the phone with Miklos Gaspar at BlogAds. We had a constructive conversation about this imbroglio and exchanged respective information. Gaspar was apologetic about the lack of response. He says that the Library of Congress has not paid. I have also put in calls to the Contracts Office at the Library of Congress to find out what has happened, including one gentleman who gave me an elaborate overview of how contracts are signed and payment is allocated. It is very possible that this is caught up in governmental red tape. So for all the bloggers who ran this ad and didn’t get paid, I’m hoping to get a very specific idea about when everybody will get paid for this ad early next week.]