More than one million women (or 500,000 from the more conservative media outlets) marched on Washington yesterday. But apparently it wasn’t enough to dominate the news. The Mobilization March on November 15, 1969, the largest antiwar protest in U.S. history, had a crowd estimated between 250,000 and 500,000 and it caused Nixon to announce two months later that ending the war would be “a major goal of United States policy.” Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be getting anything like that from Bush (with twice the turnout of Mobilization) in June. That’s nothing less than a goddam travesty.

[UPDATE: And a psuedo-blackout from the blogosphere too. Nothing whatsoever about the rally at Megnut, another tired potshot at Wonkette, an acknowledgment over at Oliver’s (although overshadowed by a long essay, “Can the Right Fight Terrorism?”), a photo at Atrios, and some live coverage at Kos. But it’s all pretty much reflecting the status quo. 1 million people. What does it take to be newsworthy? Or have protests lost their efficacy? Or is “feminist” a dirty word? Or does nobody want to talk about it? And, no, Scribbling Woman, you ain’t chopped liver.]

[4/29/04 UPDATE: Just talked with someone who got back from Washington. She said there was definitely a million.]

I mean, George wrote the thing in an hour and all. But that hasn’t stopped “Yellow Submarine” from being turned into a book.

Apparently, in Rochester, NY, the late John Gardner still has groupies. It’s been twenty-two years since Gardner died in a motorcycle accident, but that hasn’t stopped folks from festooning leather jackets.

Either The Magic 7 has spent years in development or someone really knew how to plan for a 2004 release in the early 1990s. Or there’s some digital weirdness. Or…well, you make the call. Two dead talents, John Candy and Madeline Kahn, are involved with this animated production. Candy himself has been dead for a decade. Now it’s worth noting that writer-director Roger Holzberg hasn’t helmed a film since 1995. But I’m seriously creeped out by the idea of taking voices from the past and putting them down to contemporary cinema. Is someone sitting on some John Belushi tapes? Can we expect Andy Kaufman to voice the next Disney extravaganza with unreleased Janis Joplin audition tapes set to horrid Sting sequencing? Holzberg owes us all an explanation.

Carrie A.A. Frye’s over at Maud’s this week, “primed in her tangerine muumuu.” This makes a good deal of sense to me, largely because I’ve always associated prime numbers with the color orange. Other immediate color associations which come to mind: sepia tones and oddball diner to-go cartons, goldenrod mimeographs, and the wild chartreuse decor of mid-1990s urban splendor. What happened to tie-dye camoflauge or Wired’s early chromatic schemes? When did pink and emerald green (the color that the eye perceives the strongest; hence, night vision goggles) become so dreaded? There’s a particular colored gel look in Dario Argento’s 1970s films that suggests an hyperrealized haunted house, and I haven’t seen it in a while. And a publicist has encouraged me to generate images in red and black. These days, it’s either over-the-top vibrancy or the subdued racket.

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Edward Champion, the proprietor of this blog, was a remote and occupied figure. Edward, a chronic expression of being caught up in some peripheral project on his face, stared at the screen which would lead to a seemingly enigmatic but altogether obvious conclusion.

He was too busy. The sun had dappled down on his shoulders as he scribbled pages outside a cafe, the steam of the coffee drifting upwards, creeping up his nostrils, causing the gears inside his head to stir. There was no pied-a-tierre, no book advance, no expendable income. There was only discipline and endeavor, as he heard the susurrating wind chimes of a wholly unnecessary atmospheric detail half a block away.

On a Sunday morning in April, almost twelve years after that inconsequential day he had turned eighteen, Edward realized that he would not have as much time to blog. Oh, there would be other times. Just not this week. And on this morning, he realized there were other engagements, pressing engagements, engagements suggesting greater things, engagements that would get at the heart of his heart’s pitter-patter.

There would be the usual day job subterfuge, but, this week, his blog entries would be sparse and not as frequent as they had been last week, and the week before that, and even the week before the week before that. Faithful as his devotion to his readership was, there was simply too much to do.

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I have seen the future and it is George. I’ve had my doubts about the Virtual Book Tour for some time (it seemed more of a glorified publicity stunt more than anything else), but this use of audio blogging illustrates how to do it right. Plus, it helps that George is a good interviewer.

In a screwup worthy of Dortmunder himself, a few days ago, I posted some erroneous news about Donald E. Westlake reading a poem over a short film entitled “A Life of Death”. Whether it had something to do with enjoying the hell out of Thieves’ Dozen or just having Dortmunder on the mind, I was wrong (as many of you kind enough to write in informed me) and I removed the item. Well, I’ve now heard from filmmaker Dawn Westlake herself. Her film has apparently won two awards and was just nominated for a third in Sydney, Australia. The guy reading the poem is Donald G. Westlake, who is Dawn’s father. And Donald G. is a cousin of Donald E. I have no idea if a cousin of Richard Stark may be involved, but as a good faith effort to correct what was a ghastly mistake on my part, for the love of decency, check out Dawn’s site.

April: I Am No One You Know
May: You Are No One I Know
June: Love: A Rape Story After A Love Story
July: Brunette: A Novel
September: We Are No One Anyone Knows
October: My Quill Can’t Stop
November: Because the Heart Always Patters Twice
December: You Must Remember This Book

The Rake points to this very long, very detailed Paul Auster analysis that I too will have to read later. I haven’t been much of an Auster fan, for reasons similar to B.R. Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto.” But I’m always willing to give any well-regarded author another shot (even if The New York Trilogy left me very annoyed). Will someone explain why Auster’s the shit? Will someone tell me why this Peter Stillman nonsense is so important? (I should also note that I’m crazy about William Gaddis, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, David Foster Wallace, and Robert Coover. Hell, I’m even partial towards the manic detailer Nicholson Baker. So why not Auster? It’s not pomo per se that’s the problem here.)

Static, and therefore miserable condition of a man emerging from a Sunday morning hangover! One minute, joyful pitter-patter, the next minute, ache and perdition. I wish I could express surprise, or impute the same bemused wonder as my retinue of aching twentysomething acolytes, but, alas, there have been multiple notches on my belt, too many empty bottles, and not nearly enough experiences to get me to stop. Why do men drink so? We study the narcotic effects of these infernal beverages, deliberating upon how the malt and the shaker and the smooth texture of Kahlua enters our corpi and causes us intoxication, occasional fumblings, followed by distress. O miserable condition of drink! which was not imparted onto Adam when Our Lord granted him Paradise. If Adam had wrapped his fingers around the goblet, perhaps we would not have suffered Eve’s celebrated mistake, or perhaps the Serpent would not have distracted Eve so. For Adam and Eve, naked in Paradise, engaging in carnal play that, after their explusion, translated into shame and stigma extending into the current age, now a hue and cry pertaining to Janet’s Nipple! be still!

Before this topiary business, and presumably before drink, no doubt men and women were engaged in the Act which led to their shapes being contorted, and led further to interesting shadows caused by the flickering flames of their lust. Adjustments, multiple positions, one saying “Oooh!” and another saying “Yeah there!” Disgraceful banter that a proper lady or a distinguished gentleman would not utter while perambulating down a nave, or wolfing on wafers, save through unpredictable conditions of surprise, such as a Merry Prankster (not a PL or a DG) emerging from the pew’s mews, only to offer a Weegee in lieu of a Handshake. Is the Merry Prankster’s deportment related to the addled and aching head of our Sunday morning man or the originators of this carnal activity? Obvious rhetoric, tip-top conclusions, and Janet’s Nipple, alas, draped in some devilish adornment.

It is a question of what is profane and what is natural. Ancestors doing an enjoyable mamba (what non-PLs and non-DGs call “fucking” or “a romp” or “making love”), only to have desires besmirched by the iron fist of authority and reverence, further obviating the flames and the dilemma, in situ. And yet no reference to drink or cause or Paradise! This is the shame which hangs upon exorbitant fees and unnecessary protection from tiny pitchers having big ears, who will learn this anyway!

To which one can only reply, “Pass the bottle!”

Sadly, I have nothing really profound or funny to say this morning — at least, publicly. But thankfully, Sarah’s served up some solid commentary on the “book a year” problem. (Three adverbs in one post. Does that clarify matters?)

Zadie Smith is torturing her downstairs neighbor. Smith has a tendency to relax in a whirlpool after writing all day. But the pool’s motor whirs so loudly that the walls have been shaking. Hendley Taylor, the man who lives next to her, has been losing sleep over Smith’s routine.

The pub frequented by Dylan Thomas has been sold to Morrissey.

This Saturday, Sony launches the ebook reader. (And if you can read Japanese, here’s the Sony page.) The reader resembles a PDA and allows a memory stick will allow 500 books to be indexed at one time. There’s no way to download books directly to the Librie. Honestly, if this is the best Sony can do, then they need to go back to the drawing board. Personally, until digital paper with flippable pages offering the same resolution as printed material comes along, I’m disinclined to stare at an LCD for several hours, even if it’s at 170 pixels per inch. (A printer, by contrast, is 300 ppi.)

From America in the Twenties by Geoffrey Perrett:

Following the declaration of war in April 1917, Congress had promptly passed the Espionage Act. Hastily drawn, it was a legal blunderbuss. In 1918, after a year’s pause for reflection, the act was amended and made worse. Virtually anything that could be construed as interfering with the war effort or offering a crumb of comfort to the Germans was a criminal offense. Words, naked, unsupported by action, sufficed for conviction. Anyone so foolhardy as to make an unflattering observation on American military uniforms, for example, risked going to jail.

Mrs. Rose Peter Stokes, a noted feminist and Socialist, wrote in the Kansas City Star, “I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers.” For this dangerous utterance she received a ten-year sentence. Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare also received a ten-year sentence for advising women not to bear sons, because the government would noe day consider them cannon fodder. Victor Berger, a noted right-wing Socialist, was under indictment when the war ended for his Milwaukee Leader editorials, which suggested that combat drove some men mad, that there were young men who did not want to be drafted, that the Bible sanctioned pacifism, and that the United States had entered the war to protect its investment in Allied loans.

Under indictment, Berger ran for election to Congress from Wisconson’s Fifth District and won. The next month he won a twenty-year prison sentence from Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He appealed his conviction. When the Sixty-sixth Congress convened in March 1919, Berger proposed to take his seat. The House proposed to take it away from him.

It was not socialism that the members objected to. Three Socialists had already served in the House. An espionage conviction, no matter how footling the cited offense, was considered tantamount to proof of treason (except in the Fifth District of Wisconsin). A new election was called for December 1919. Berger won again, by a larger margin. And although the war was over, Espionage Act prosecutions ground steadily on.

It was against this background that in 1919-20, thirty-two states passed criminal syndicalism laws. Four states that had abolished the death penalty (Arizona, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington) restored it. The loyalty of schoolteachers was screened by local vigilance committees. Hundreds of teachers appear to have lost their jobs for reading the wrong books, having the wrong friends, holding the wrong opinions, or joining the wrong groups.

A committee of the New York State legislature, chaired by Clayton R. Lusk, an upstate Republican, led the grass roots attack on radicals. His committee raided the unaccredited Soviet embassy, the IWW headquarters in New York City, and the Rand School of Social Research. These raids were illegal from start to finish. That made no difference. In 1920, over governor Smith’s veto, the legislature passed a clutch of statutes known as the Lusk Laws. These imposed a loyalty oath on teachers, made the Socialist party illegal and set up a bureau of investigation. This last measure proved Lusk’s undoing. The hero was a crook. He hired investigators only after they agreed to split their salaries with him. The hero went to jail.

The New York legislature had meanwhile held hearings on five Socialist members, decided that they were “plotting to overthrow our system of government by force,” and expelled them.

State criminal syndicalism statutes were more than empty gestures. In Chicago, 1920 saw the prosecution of a score of defendants in a single trial on charges of Bolshevism. An undercover agent from the Justice Department claimed that there was a special Communist party yell for important occasions that went, “Bolshevik, Bolshevik, Bolshevik, bang!’ He appeared on the stand wrapped in a red banner. He swore that one of the defendants had an American flag covering his toilet floor. All the accused were convicted.

In Connecticut a clothing salesman named Joseph Yenowsky attempted to discourage a persistent bond salesman by making crucial remarks about capitalism and John D. Rockefeller. To Yenowsky’s astonishment, the bond salesman went for a policeman. Connecticut had what amounted to the shortest sedition law ever, and probably the broadest. In its entirety it read: “No person shall in public, or before any assemblance of 10 or more persons, advocate in any language any measure or doctrine, proposal or propaganda intended to affect injuriously the Government of the United States or the State of Connecticut. ” Yenowsky received a six-month jail sentence.

An aroused citizenry was inclined to take matters into its own hands. In Hammond, Indiana, in February, 1919, Frank Petroni, a naturalized citizen, was tried for murdering Frank Petrich, an alien. The defense was that Petrich had said, “To hell with the United States.” The jury, after solemn deliberations that lasted two minutes, set Petroni free.

On May Day that same year Socialist red-flag parades were broken up in a dozen cities by outraged mobs. Three people were killed, more than a hundred injured. In New York the offices of the Socialist Daily Call were ransacked by uninformed servicemen to ecstatic applause from a crowd in the street. In all these riots the people arrested, and later tried, were Socialists. Their attackers were left alone.

It was also in May that a spectator refused to rise for the national anthem at a Victory Loan rally in Washington. As the strains of “The Star Spangled Banner” faded, a uniformed sailor ended his salute, drew a revolver, and fired three shots into the back of the lone seated figure. The man fell over, critically wounded. The stadium crowd broke into ecstatic applause.

This spontaneous identification with wanton violence occurred because many Americans believed the country was under violent attack.

As noted by Maud and others, Toby Young is guesting at Slate this week. But apparently, some folks are pissed. I wasn’t aware that a seedy memoir had this much staying power. In 2002, I took a look at the book for Central Booking (now defunct) and I reproduce the review here:

There was a time when memoirs involved deliberation. Whether it was Frank McCourt recalling his impoverished childhood or Caroline Knapp probing a conquered alcoholic wraith, memoirs hit the stacks without the obligatory run-in with a celebrity or boastful chapters of self-affirmation. But when Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius became the dog-eared darling on every slacker’s bookshelf, the rules changed. Everyone from Dave Pelzer to Rick Moody published memoirs well before experiencing a midlife crisis, much less the beginnings of a hoary head. Remarkably, these thirtysomething memoirists never offered a single excuse for why their tomes were so premature. They didn’t need to. They were more than happy to receive lucrative advances, even if it wasn’t intended to pay for any terminal illness.

Enter Toby Young, the bad-boy British journalist who has no problem trashing himself and former employer, Condé Nast in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Da Capo Press, 368 pp., $24.00). Young’s tell-all book carries the moniker “A Memoir,” but it has about as much in common with Eggers’ much-loved book as guano has with chocolate mousse. Same color, different texture.

Young, “a short, balding, Philip Seymour Hoffman look-a-like,” didn’t coax Judd Winick into a Might Magazine photo shoot. He interviewed Nathan Lane, first asking if he was Jewish and then asking if he was gay, before being led away by jittery publicists. Young didn’t watch his mother and father die within 32 days or have a younger brother to care for. But he did let a girl freeze outside of his apartment. He was supposed to pick up her cab fare. She didn’t have the cash. Why? He was too busy sleeping off a nose candy binge. Young didn’t audition for The Real World. He dated supermodels with little success and hired a company for $750 to have a focus group rate him on his dating “marketability.”

Young’s shit stinks, but, unlike other memoirs that hide behind self-important WASP flummery, his memoir pulls no punches. The book became an unexpected bestseller in Britain partly because of its pugnacious approach. And it translates well here. One of the book’s virtues is its determination to relay the first-person account of a scoundrel. The memoir mixes assessments on America (Tocqueville is unfurled as a repeated, but surprisingly unsuccessful qualifier) with Young’s problematic life. While coming up short in the insight department, it does make for some funny observations.

Young jetted out to Manhattan on the dime of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, portrayed here as an avuncular snob. Young was a hotshot Oxford man and Fulbright scholar who had made a name in the Fleet Street skids with The Modern Review, a highbrow look at lowbrow culture that featured early work from such contributors as Will Self and Nick Hornby. On his first day of work at Vanity Fair, Carter’s secretary told the Brit that staff dressed “real causal.” He showed up in vintage Levis and a Keanu Reeves T-shirt with the tagline “Young, Dumb and Full of Come.” Months into the gig, Young hired a stripper to bare all on Take Your Daughters to Work Day.

Before the reader can condemn Young as an exhibitionistic blowhard, Young manages to explain his motivations early enough to qualify some of his apocryphal tales. He has a passionate view of the Algonquin American journalist, “somewhere between a whore and a bartender,” lovingly lifted from the plays and films written by Ben Hecht. He bemoans political correctness and “clipboard Nazis.” He finds Condé Nast’s treatment of messengers and freelancers deplorable. And he remains awestruck over how easy it is for Brits like Tina Brown to embrace Manhattan superficiality.

But Young’s sentiments don’t empower him to find a bit of self-abnegation himself. Ultimately fired by Vanity Fair, Young turns to drink and cocaine. Young can proselytize John Belushi-antics all he wants, but his sentiments are undermined by the despicable treatment he ekes out to loved ones and peers. And there’s something troubling about a book so astute about American journalism’s inability to take chances while hypocritical in its generalizations of Americans.

Young’s book doesn’t add too much promise for the self-absorbed memoir, but it does steer the genre down an appropriately balls-out path. It’s refreshing to read a life story that is both unapologetic and frequently funny. But it’s too bad that Young’s tome is cut from the same attention-seeking cloth as its brethren.

Dear American Public (Or, More Specifically, That Very Scientific, Completely Unbiased Cross-Section Recently Polled by the Washington Post and ABC News):

49% for Bush? Are you nuts? If the President were to be photographed in Iraq standing on the bloody chest of an American soldier, would you still vote for him? If the President declared that all people who earned less than $50K would have to submit 82% of their income to the government, would you still vote for him? If the President lined up every world leader in a line and systematically punched each of them in the gut in the name of unilateral diplomacy, would you still vote for him? If the President revealed that the $87 billion Iraq aid package actually involved hookers, vintage claret and overpriced fillet mignons served on the naked backs of women hoping to get partial birth abortions, would you still believe this man was equipped to deal with this nation’s most pressing concerns?

Really, folks, I need to know what it takes. Because frankly you’re scaring the shit out of me.

I’d say more, but if I continue in this vein, I’ll reveal more wanton cliches, more ignnoble and vitriolic wonkage. And who wants more of that? But then since 6% of you are determined to waste your vote on that muddafugga Ralph, whose blustery ego seems incapable of comprehending that a second Bush term will undo much of the public service he’s spent a lifetime fighting for, perhaps what you secretly desire are these overbearing platitudes, no better than the pretzel logic placards you see at rallies. Perhaps the crooked status quo is what you’ve been pining for all along. Perhaps you’re all like that fulminating idiot I encountered on the N Judah the other day who demanded that the world listen to his vociferous protests, dammit, but who ostracized everyone in the streetcar because he couldn’t understand that a reluctant yet practical vote for Kerry doesn’t obviate a desire for greenjeans idealism, a cognizance of globalization, or a concern for social justice.

American Public, if you allow this chickenhead to win again, if you fail to evince the same pragmatism and solicitude that you expressed in the immediate days following September 11, when our President was Un-Presidential and it took an Unlikely Times Square-Destroying Mayor to Express Equanimity and Stature and steer this nation forward, then I will turn my back on you. You will, as Jefferson noted, deserve the government you get. Do you have any memory?

Begrudgingly yours,

Edward Champion

Lots of solid long-form author interviews up: Birnbaum takes on Edwidge Danticat and Stephen Elliott, and Laura Miller talks with Neal Stephenson.

Another great Philip K. Dick novel is destined for cinematic ruin. Keanu “Whoa!” Reeves will star in A Scanner Darkly. Hopefully, director Richard Linklater won’t have him speak that much, although given the talkiness of his other films, I fear the worst. And, besides, who can forget how awful Johnny Mnemonic was?

Chick Lit has a bigger problem than what you might expect: where are the black women?

What makes the wiping of prison imate hard drives more pernicious is that it comes as inmate Barbara Parsons Lane is set to win tonight’s PEN/Faulkner First Amendment award. If prisoners were not allowed to write, we wouldn’t have the words of Eldrige Cleaver, O. Henry, Jean Genet, or Marquis de Sade to stack on our bookshelves.

The review starts, “If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with ‘The Color Purple,’ it’s hard to imagine how it could have been published,” and gets very close to Dale Peck territory. Someone give Michiko a hug. Or maybe attending a cuddle party will calm her down. (via Maud)

Yesterday, I picked up John Barth’s Ten Nights and a Night and began reading it. And I couldn’t stop laughing my ass off over the subtext. Not only are the book’s assorted inner voices reluctant to use the word “postmodern,” but they try to settle on the politically correct term of “post-invocation.” All this while recognizing that pre-9/11 tomfoolery (i.e., Autumnal Tales written before) may be more of a premium now than before.

If ever a case could be made for the return of postmodern subtext, Barth, one of its beloved grandfathers, is it. While other authors have tried to wrestle with how consciousness has changed since “Black Tuesday,” Barth gets at the dilemma quicker than anyone:

Their quandary (Graybard’s and Wysiwig’s) is that for him to re-render now, in these so radically altered circumstances, Author’s eleven mostly Autumnal and impossibly innocent stories, strikes him as bizarre, to put it mildly indeed — as if Nine Eleven O One hadn’t changed the neighborhood (including connotations of the number eleven), if not forever, at least for what remains of Teller’s lifetime. And yet not to go on with the stories, so to speak, would be in effect to give the mass-murderous fanatics what they’re after: a world in which what they’ve done already and might do next dominates our every thought and deed.

While there’s little doubt that these words were written closer to what Barth styles TEOTWAW(A)KI — The End of the World As We (Americans) Knew It, it still suggests that American fiction is playing it safe. The situation is compounded by how previous creative efforts have now forever had their meaning altered since that moment. To demonstrate this, Barth includes his famous “Help!” chart early on, a musical notation which displays an audio track split into Left, Right and Center, with assorted helps and variations of distress. Looking at the chart, I couldn’t stop thinking about how this could be interpreted to represent the cries of the victims, or the cries of civil liberties being stripped away, or the general sense of helplessness a lot of Americans feel about the actions of Our Current Government. Certainly the chart was funny, but it was more disturbing this time around.

It’s also worth noting that the chart originally appeared in a 1969 issue of Esquire, and I wondered how much the poltiically charged events of that time influenced its making.

What’s further amazing to me is that The Floating Opera is now nearly fifty years old. Yet this new collection of stories, with the uncompromising tying thread of “Greybard” and WYSIWYG, demonstrates that Barth, now close to eighty, is as much of a giddy deviant as he was in 1956, perhaps more important than we ever expected.

(Further note: If you’re new to Barth, I recommend Dave Edelman’s John Barth Information Center, which lives up to its name and is a grand diversion for any literary person with a dreary day job.)

It’s silly enough that this blog has a possessive before it’s name. But you’d never catch me claiming authorship for something this anachronistic. REiD Mihalko’s Cuddle Party is Susie Bright cross-pollinated with the Quirkyalone movement. In other words, it’s self-defeating nomenclature, a downright oxymoron, from the get-go. For one thing, there’s the problem of the modifier. Cuddling is nice, sure. But “cuddle” implies 8-year-old girls getting intimate with an oversized stuffed giraffe. It is not, shall we say, a place to bust out the bottle of Cuervo, start dancing like it’s 1999, and blast Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” So why party? Perhaps “cuddle gathering” or “feel-up frolic” or “casual groping” would have been more apposite.

Who the hell is REiD Mihalko? Apparently a bi-coastal Sex and Romance Coach who was (I’m not making this up) given the gift by his mother “of seeing and treating woman [sic] as sacred.” In other words, he’s one of those unemployed, guitar-playing guys you meet at a coffeehouse who claim that they’re as sensitive and gooey as a jelly donut, but have the closet desire to feel you up.

At least that’s the impression I’ll draw.

I’m all for cuddling. But this whole thing sounds like it’s one step removed from bukkake. I mean, what’s the difference between being groped by some stranger on a subway and allowing some dude you don’t know to grope you, with the queasy bonus of some guy moderating who doesn’t know how to use capital letters?

(via Gawker)

The 2004 Lyttle Lytton winners have been announced. The goal? To write the worst opening line in 25 words or less. The winner: “This is the story of your mom’s life.” (via MeFi)