Month / July 2007

by Edward Champion

Report from the Trenches

I have decided to grow facial hair for the first time in seven years. In two and a half weeks, I have managed to surprise a few people in New York. I get odd stares from people who have espied me clean-shaven and I sometimes respond, “Humidity, baby!” They do not understand that there are certain sacrifices to perfecting follicle growth. By growing practice facial hair now, I am actually preparing for the winter, where the extra insulation will come in handy should I grow it again. I like to keep my options open. I like to perform trial runs, get measurements, and see if I can come up with some amazing chart after feeding the data into OpenOffice Calc. I like to have some dubious facial hair experience that I can put on a resume and then perhaps get an interlocutor at a job interview to talk to me about it — just to break up the flow for the benefit of others, because interviewers often ask the same questions and they always seem to look austere and professional. And I like to have fun with these things.

Anyway, the facial hair has been a success so far. It’s well past the itching phase and settling in quite nicely. I am not sure if it makes me look any wiser. But I like to think of my facial hair as Robin Williams facial hair: the way that Williams grew beards when he wanted to win an Oscar. I have no real desire to win an Oscar or any award for that matter, but it is fun to be taken seriously sometimes, only to flap out my tongue or blow a raspberry or do something decidedly not serious. Call me an iconoclast of small moments. I suspect that men with facial hair, discounting the buskers of course, aren’t allowed to be silly in certain parts of Manhattan. But then I don’t know. I only have their stern faces to go by. Hopefully, I will start a movement for more silliness from men with goatees, moustaches, and beards. Unless, of course, someone has already initiated such a study. I don’t wish to step on anybody’s toes, or fail to acknowledge the appropriate antecedents.

Can I recommend growing facial hair in New York during July? Well, why not? Live dangerously. Grow something! It’s like having your own personal garden! The only real difference between facial hair and a garden is that you don’t get any ripe fruit with the former. But you do get plenty of whiskers! Who knows? Maybe there’s a barter market somewhere that trades in whiskers for fruit?

by Edward Champion

More Than Meets the Eye

Anthony Lane: “Long ago, when the impact of ‘Star Wars’ was beefed up by a line of merchandise, some of us noticed that the five-inch Lukes and Leias possessed a depth and mobility that was denied to their onscreen counterparts, and, decades later, we have reached the reductio ad absurdum of that rivalry: rather than spin the toys off from the movie, why not build the movie from the toys? ‘Transformers’ is not the first effort in this direction; I distinctly remember finding a couchful of children enraptured by a DVD of ‘Barbie of Swan Lake’ and realizing that Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’ had not, after all, signalled the final disintegration of human personality. Bay’s movie, however—as befits the bringer of ‘The Rock,’ ‘Armageddon,’ and ‘Pearl Harbor’—is the grandest proof so far that, when it comes to movie characterization, flesh and blood have had their chance. From here on, it’s up to metal and plastic.” (via Brockman)

by Edward Champion

I Love the Smell of Right-Wing Media Consolidation in the Morning

The Business: “Rupert Murdoch has succeeded with his $5 billion bid for Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal, according to sources acting for the Dow Jones board. Negotiations have been completed and the board is confident the terms of the deal will be accepted by the Bancroft family, which controls a majority of voting shares in Dow Jones, over the next few days. A formal announcement is expected next week.”

Does this mean we’ll see Bill O’Reilly’s web column in the Wall Street Journal now?

A deal, incidentally, has not yet been reached.

by Edward Champion

_________ Is/Are Killing the Novel

Here’s a helpful list for New York freelancers who need to write a needlessly alarmist newspaper piece about what may be killing the novel. So if you’ve run out of ideas and don’t quite know an angle, here are some casuistic ideas for your future pitches! Remember, if you collect a check from any of these ideas, I’m only asking 5%. Be sure to send a check to me within 45 days after the piece runs. Good luck and Allah’s speed!

  • Global warming
  • David Hasselhoff
  • Sudoku puzzles
  • People who are really into Settlers of Catan
  • Tao Lin
  • The bottled water industry
  • Right-wing French joggers
  • Waffles and pancakes
  • Men who leave the toilet seat up
  • Women who leave the toilet seat up
  • Pet dogs who have been trained by their masters to keep the toilet seat up with their paws
  • Marxists
  • Eucharists
  • Tom Cruise (or any famous Scientologist, really)
  • Eco-friendly organic pizzeria owners
  • Pot smokers
  • Golfers
  • Matt and Daniel Mendelsohn
  • Lev and Austin Grossman
  • Edward Champion
  • Killroy
by Edward Champion

Attention to Correspondents

I have been receiving letters sent to my address from people hoping to reach Norman Mailer and a few other authors. I am not Norman Mailer. Nor do I have any way of contacting Mr. Mailer. I am Edward Champion. I’m just some bastard with a blog who happens to interview authors. If you hope to reach an author, please direct your correspondence to the publishers. Not me. Thank you.

by Edward Champion

Google Maps Street View: Deplorable Exploration

I’ve had reservations about the Google Maps Street View option — similar to Annalee’s objections. But I offer one more: Where’s the sense of adventure? Part of the fun in having a vague idea about where you’re going is that you get the opportunity to explore a neighborhood you don’t know, discovering places, people, and details that you might not otherwise have known about. What of the wandering impulses that Rebecca Solnit has written extensively about? The street corners where one can stand for about an hour and simply listen? The way that one can walk into a bodega and ask a random stranger about the neighborhood? (The latter rhetorical question assumes that the explorer is not a jaded misanthrope.)

It’s bad enough that Google Maps has become the ipso facto reference point to meeting up with someone. Much like Google itself, we willingly abdicate our memory banks to Google Maps, which has all the answers. We follow the directions and, if we’re in a rush, we might immediately forget the street names, little realizing that there might be a history to these streets or an enchanting public place few know about to be found behind a set of doors.

Now with the Street View option, Google has granted us the option of pre-judging a particular neighborhood and it diminishes this sense of mystery. A random snapshot, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the neighborhood at its best or its worst, determines whether one should go out and explore it.

It’s precisely because of these reasons that I’ll be avoiding the Street View option whenever possible. While a picture can certainly reveal visual qualities, it is by no means truly representative of a location’s complexities. And some things in life simply aren’t meant to be discovered exclusively from a laptop.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • National Review: “One promising development in the culture today is that mainstream critics are more and more growing tired of postmodern fiction.” Actually, this is not promising at all. This is, in fact, a serious problem that runs counter to literature’s natural developments as a form. I will have a lengthy post on this subject in the not too distant future. (via The Valve)
  • If you enjoyed Austin Grossman’s appearance on The Bat Segundo Show, he also chatted with Rick Kleffel.
  • It hasn’t been mentioned by anyone other than Tod Goldberg, but it appears that the New York Post is axing its book coverage.
  • Vlad the Impaler’s castle is now for sale. In an effort to respect “the property and its history,” prospective buyers are being asked to demonstrate their bloodletting talents before closing escrow. (via Slushpile)
  • Book artist Gloria Helfgott has passed on. (via Ron Silliman)
  • I’m a few episodes into the third series of Doctor Who. But with the horrible news of Catherine Tate returning, as well as Kylie Minogue appearing (what the fuck?), in future episodes, I fear the worst. Pardon me if I go all geeky on you, but I’m convinced that Freema Agyeman is one of the best things that has happened to the show. Here we have a strong female character who is educated, curious, and who takes action when she needs to, instead of standing doe-eyed and helpless — as Rose often did — marveling at the Doctor’s genius. That it would take so long for the show’s producers to rectify this dated gender imbalance to the program is bad enough. But it would appear that Agyeman will be returning in the middle of the fourth season. The message here? Russell T. Davies and company like their companions dumb and helpless, instead of smart and kickass. (via Ready Steady Blog)
  • Yes, “inhaling” is really the only way to describe reading Sarah Waters’s books. But think of it this way. Better to snort crafty narratives up your nasal lining than Bolivian marching powder.
  • I don’t care for Sarkozy very much, but I think it’s pretty damn silly to declare jogging a right-wing activity. Outside of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, since when did exercise have any political agenda? Besides, if you really want to get right down to it, were I blessed with a bountiful expendable income, I’d expect a personal trainer to demand that I exercise hard rather than have him pat me on the back and offer an Alan Alda-like hug if I couldn’t make my crunch count. If you want to get rid of flab, you have to do the work. Does doing the work make one a Nazi? More from Josh Glenn.
  • Personally, I feel “devastated” that so many words were devoted to J.K. Rowling feeling “devastated.” Next up: a series of 2,000 word Rowling profiles in the Telegraph about how Rowling feels “almost euphoric,” “less than stellar,” “pretty darn okay,” and “just peachy keen.”
  • What the Dallas Morning News layoffs mean for the paper. (via book/daddy)
  • The Heritage Book Shop has closed. (via Bookninja)
  • Hamlet translated into modern English. (via Books, Words & Writing)
  • Armistead Maupin on why he loves San Francisco. (via Colleen)
by Edward Champion

What the Dickens?

Once again, John Freeman offers a preposterous essay. In bemoaning the ostensible popularity of The Sopranos, Freeman writes, “[C]ritics were calling Chase the Dickens of our times.” And from there, Freeman’s article can be summarized as followed (and it’s best if you read the next four sentences in a high-pitched voice to get the hysterical timbe right): Oh noes! The novel is dead! The sky is falling! The literary landscape is in trouble because of uncited empirical evidence!

Again, Freeman refuses or is simply incapable of citing specific examples to prove his thesis. Maybe it’s because calling out Michael M. Thomas or Alessandra Stanley — writers who both offered this not so unreasonable comparison — involves taking a stand against fellow New York journalists, something that runs counter to Freeman’s notorious streak of passive-aggression.

But no matter. If we examine the Dickens comparison to David Chase closely, it’s not as unsound as it seems. After all, Dickens’s work arrived in installments, much like television episodes, with Dickens often corralling mammoth plot threads as he wrote (ergo, his much cited tendency for coincidental run-ins) and tailoring his novels in accordance with reader reaction. Consider the case of The Old Curiosity Shop, surely the most reviled of Dickens’s works. (As Oscar Wilde once famously noted, “One would have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) While Dickens’s close friend John Forster kept his editorial contributions fairly low-key in his Life of Dickens, it was Forster who read all of Dickens’s proofs and who gave Dickens considerable advice. Observing the close audience reaction to Little Nell, he pointed out to Dickens that he would have to kill her off.

With Forster’s hand in the Dickens editing process, what makes him any different from a script editor or a more benign version of an HBO studio executive? And with the great controversy over whether the Sopranos finale was any good, what makes the Sopranos finale any less different from the way people reacted to Little Nell’s death?

Further, if an acclaimed television series can’t be compared with a Victorian serial, then what the Dickens is David Simon doing recruiting crime novelists like George Pelacanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane to write episodes for The Wire? Surely, there is some convergence afoot. People like Simon wish to inject television with a more ambitious quality: the contained serial with deaths and developments that television has sometimes failed to live up to.

Unable to discover an explicit connection between the apparent fall of books and the rise of television, Freeman quotes the oft-cited NEA “Reading at Risk” study — an examination which collected its data in 2002. But what business does Freeman have drawing upon data from five years ago to contextualize a series of unsubstantiated delusions he views as a present-day problem? After all, it’s the “white-wine sipping yuppies” who are “talking.” Pretty soon, it will be the rabbits in Freeman’s walls confessing their unanimous preference for Edie Falco over Edward Falco.

And there is this preposterous leap: “To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people’s outlook on the world, and so far only George Saunders and David Foster Wallace have adequately described the way this framework is murdering our language.” What of Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, with its hip-hop neologisms and affluent fat man protagonist? What of Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which used a bitter divorce to comment upon said language? What of Mathew Sharpe’s Jamestown, in which an apocalyptic scenario is predicated entirely upon trade and communication? I could be here all day rattling off titles. Is Freeman simply not paying attention to the current literary environment?

There is no need to plunge further. Freeman’s piece is uninformed and hysterical poppycock of the first order — the kind of nonsense I’d expect to be published in a college newspaper, not The Guardian.

by Edward Champion

David Halberstam’s Last Essay

Vanity Fair: “We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.”

There’s considerably more. And this essay is yet another reason why Halberstam will be sorely missed.

(via MeFi)

by Edward Champion

The White Collar Critic

Why aren’t there more white collar critics? Or, more specifically, why aren’t there more snobs who believe they’re championing blue collar critics when they have about as much interest in the working class as a permanent resident of a gated community?

It is a very good thing indeed that the white collar critics could care less about devoting their precious real estate to those scruffy baristas or those dirty steelworkers (despite NAFTA, believe it or not, there remain some mills open on American soil! Who knew?). How dare they quote Aeschylus? And how dare some of these overeducated white-collar doctorates remember their Greek playwrights? We all know the game: ignorance and conformist thinking is bliss!

The white collar critic’s limo liberal guilt has been a grand ruse for some time now. The book reviewing landscape has been a closed system. And a good thing too! Who needs some interloper with a mere bachelor’s degree ready to shake things up when you can embrace the lackluster “humor” of a complacent reactionary like Joe Queenan? He’s “funny,” because the superior white collar system says so! And because anybody who worked at Vanity Fair with Tanenhaus, washed up or not, is “Funny” with a capital F! Who needs speculation on Marianne Wiggins’s fascinating new novel when the white collar environment can explain every detail to you like you’re a rictus-mouthed literary socialite at a bland cocktail party? Intellectual conformism — the great stock in trade of the white collar critic — dictates that the white collar critics know what’s best, mostly because their shirts are so impeccably starched. They are the grand gatekeepers. The ONLY gatekeepers! So let’s take all the fun out of newspapers by populating these book review sections with a sea of Babbitts! The white collar critics will never permit their readers a scintilla of independent thought, much less an idiosyncratic insight. They dictate. They decide how you think. They’re white collar and they’re proud. And they live by the admirable mantra: We take no chances!

Support your white collar critics today! Don’t just buy one edition of the New York Times every Sunday. Buy twelve!

by Edward Champion

Fourth Recovery/Roundup

  • Until I observed last night’s series of fireworks displays across the East River, I had not encountered political fireworks in the literal sense. It seems that the Jersey authorities were extremely pissed off after Battery Park was closed to the public. So from Jersey’s side of the Hudson, the Jersey boys proceeded to offer as momentous a show as public money could offer — minutes before the Macy’s display had begun. Their fireworks, which declared with every burst that Jersey was as much a part of the July 4th celebrations as the big boys, were designed to be seen across a considerable expanse of water. At first, the assembled throngs on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade appreciated this. And I had to smile and empathize over the Jersey effrontery. Yes, it was a case of flagrant dick wars. But it was the kind of symbolic penis measurement that reminds everyone that there’s more to life than deep pockets. All of us ducked beneath umbrellas, buffeting a downpour that lifted shortly before Macy’s 9:20 PM start time. But the minute that Macy’s began launching jellyfish low-risers and smiley-shaped explosives into the sky, the crowd quickly turned on these apparent Jersey upstarts, becoming deeply vociferous about how “we” — meaning New York — had showed the folks in Jersey. Yet, “we” entailed Brooklyn and Queens for the most part. There was something deeply allegorical about all of this: private money vs. public money, proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, New York vs. New Jersey. And I soon began to understand that East Coast provincial lines were more ridiculous than I ever imagined. But it was still a good show. And I’m not just referring to the fireworks.
  • While I contend with the largest podcast backlog I think I’ve ever had (which includes APE and BEA coverage), the folks behind the BookExpo Podcast have released Maud’s interview with Shalom Auslander. There is thankfully at least one use of the word “foreskin.”
  • Mark Sarvas has inside dirt on Tom McCarthy and Soft Skull.
  • Manga turned into Noh drama.
  • Mark Sanderson reports on the Tina Brown launch party craziness in London. Apparently, Brown was upset that Tony Blair, Madonna, Helen Mirren, Julie Christie, and Shirley Bassey had crashed her party, or were rumored to attend. Here’s a PR hint, Tina: When you publicly announce that classy women like Helen Mirren and Julie Christie weren’t invited, this causes any slightly curious outsider to consider the questionable éclat in the party planning stages.
  • As if the email scammers weren’t bad enough, Nigeria also has a crisis in literary criticism.
  • I will have more later when the caffeine kicks in. (Will it kick in?) I blame incongruous holidays.
by Edward Champion

Ursula K. Le Guin Tears Ruth Franklin a New One

From Ansible: “God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?”

And Ursula’s just getting started.

(Thanks, Andrew!)

[10/15/07 UPDATE: While I did not post the entirety of Ms. Le Guin’s piece, I realize that I may have posted too liberally and have revised this post to limit my excerpt to one mere sentence, which I feel is applicable under fair use. Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, seems to be under the mistaken impression that quoting an author’s piece in its entirety is “fair use.” I feel that Doctorow was wrong to post the entirety of the piece and that, likewise, I was wrong in presenting more than three sentences. I should note that I have not been contacted by LeGuin or the SFWA, but her thoughts on the subject can be found here.]

by Edward Champion

BSS #119: Berkeley Breathed, Part One

segundo119.jpg

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Jittery of Gittis.

Author: Berkeley Breathed

Subjects Discussed: The disparity between illustrating a daily strip and audience reaction, blond-haired boys named Milo, The Phantom Tollbooth, literary references in Bloom County, receiving a onionskin letter to Harper Lee, picture books and moral dilemmas, film influences, the importance of fun background details in illustrations, foreshadowing, how screenwriting has shaped Breathed’s storytelling, the strengths and weaknesses of moving from hand illustration to Photoshop, pink and purple color schemes, 300, self-editing vs. producing art, beating the procrastination impulse in middle age, chasing the FedEx truck during the Bloom County days, the infamous Opus couch strip, on not being able to get away with certain forms of humor in today’s newspaper age, the generational gap between print and digital, and trying to lure younger readers to the comics page.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Breathed: Certainly, in the ’80’s, when I had fifty to seventy million readers, it was virtually impossible to put it in context that meant anything. And it begins to happen when you go from city to city and you meet people and they talk about your work in ways that you don’t think about it yourself. And it puts it into a different kind of context and it’s good. Because you come back home with a renewed sense of responsibility in some ways. Without getting maudlin about it, you do not take it for granted sometimes, as often happens, when there’s a lot of deadlines. Things almost become rote. And you forget that there are people waiting to read it and what they read, they take very seriously. Even in a funny way.

by Edward Champion

BSS #118: Austin Grossman

segundo118.jpg

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Scared of Larry.

Author: Austin Grossman

Subjects Discussed: Retconned culture, the human qualities of superheroes, origin stories, the postmodernist trappings of comic book continuity constructs, grad school vs. superheroes, writing while driving, how Grossman’s work on video games influenced his work as a fiction writer, Max Allan Collins’s A Killing in Comics, the relationship between prose and illustrations in a novel dealing with superheroes, the mainstreaming of geek culture, the unusual domestic living arrangements of Superfriends, secret identities, the problems of making video games based on superheroes, and reconnecting with 19th century literature.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Grossman: I feel like superheroes debuted as the sort of archetypical gods and every once in a while, they get retconned back to that — just to kind of refresh them. But I like them — I like them now! When they’ve had so much layered onto them. When archetypes have been established and now they can sort of start to live inside them and be a little more human. But I feel that, in liking them that way, I’m caught in some kind of cultural cycle. That that’s why I like them now and that, twenty-five years from now, people will like them as archetypes again. So I can’t really understand why I like them that way. It’s just that I do. I like to feel like they have a consciousness that I can relate to, that I can live inside, and yet are also godlike in some way.

by Edward Champion

Vollmann in New York

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to determine what the Vollmann fan base is like here in New York. (Regrettably, most of the Vollmann enthusiasts I knew were back in California. But don’t worry. I’ve only been here one month and I will almost certainly create a few converts.)

But for those who might be interested, the good folks at the Whitney have informed me that Vollmann will be there next week, in a conversation with photographer Richard Drew. The two will address “where images of brutality meet the limits of representation.” All this is tied in with a two-part series pertaining to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. It all goes down on Thursday, July 12, 2007, at 7:00 PM. Tickets are $8; students and senior citizens get in for $6.

by Edward Champion

Late Night Roundup

  • I looked at the clock a minute ago and it read differently from how it reads now. I do not know if it is a reliable clock, but I am considering taking it in and getting it replaced. The problem is that I purchased the clock quite some time ago and have since lost the receipt. I believe I purchased the clock for about $20 and I am wondering if any exotic entrepôt exists to understand and remedy my circumstances. Perhaps I have simply misperceived the clock. Or perhaps I should simply accept the clock’s strange temperament — that is, once I get past the sentiment that the clock is not cognizant. Maybe I’m the clock and the clock is the observer who reads me differently. I’d consider drinking at this point to place this predicament into some perspective. But I have accidentally ingested a double dose of Tylenol Chest Congestion pills, which indicates that it “helps loosen phlegm (mucus)* and thin bronchial secretions to make coughs more productive.” It was an accident because I relied on this clock, expecting to take my next dose “every 4-6 hours,” and the clock lied to me. I have also not detected any “thin bronchial secretions” and I have no way of knowing if my coughs are “more productive.” This phrasing seems to suggest that I am more a machine than an actual human being. And perhaps I look to the clock with the hopes of commiserating with a fellow machine. But what am I doing relying upon Tylenol catechisms and phrasings for advice? The whole point of this post was to offer a roundup at an incongruous time and here I am going into a needless segue about clocks and expectorants. Expect the unexpectorant. Expect further a bulleted item (or more) that actually pertains to current literary news.
  • Nicolas Cage and his son have decided to have you pay for their father-son bonding experience. If you ask me, this is a very shrewd marketing move, although the tax consequences now pertain to the paternal consequences and it could get very ugly, if Mr. Cage and his son Weston are not careful.
  • Like Carrie, I wish I could report upon my athletic triumphs. Alas, there have been none to speak of these days — in part because I contend with the effects of acetaminophen, which I don’t believe is particularly helpful in maintaining an exercise regimen. But I’m very happy for those who do report their athletic triumphs. We should all do this before what little remains of our personal liberties is taken away.
  • Tayari Jones offers a response to Martha Southgate’s essay. Southgate also offers this addendum.
  • I haven’t read as many romance novels as I should, but if it’s bad for me, perhaps I can report on this instead of athletic triumphs. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, demonstrating its dubious commitment to literature, has decided to serve up a bizarre she-said, she-said matchup over the issue of whether reading romances is bad for you. A few strange leaps in logic later and the romance defender is claiming that porn is bad for you. What neither of these two silly columnists tell you is that the National Foundation of Irresponsible Statistics has determined that asinine columns, particularly two extremely histrionic ones juxtaposed against each other, are 425% more harmful than porn, romance novels, and second-hand smoke combined. (via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books)
  • Arthur Salm talks with Susan Vreeland about what she reads.
  • Michelle Richmond goes Hollywood.
  • The Star investigates Jim Harrison’s gourmand tendencies.
  • This week’s New Yorker features a lengthy Margaret Talbot piece on liars.
  • Elizabeth Hand on Rick Moody.
  • Hasdai Westbrook on the Gunter Grass 92nd Street Y appearance.
  • As is typical of these “roundup” posts, they have become mere one-sentence summations. There is no witty barb to match each link. I have failed you, blog reader, and I shall flagellate myself with the nearest weapon when I am not as lazy. Because I realize this is unacceptable. Whether this is because of temporarily diagnosed ADD or fatigue, I cannot say. But with this, I send this post into the bristling online pastures — as sure an athletic triumph as I am bound to experience tonight.

* — Helpful, don’t you think, of the Tylenol company to offer this parenthetical comment, yes? All this time I had thought phlegm and mucus were two entirely separate concepts, without a biological Venn diagram to connect them. But now I have learned that phlegm is mucus too! Did I know this before? I shall ask the clock, which knows all!

by Edward Champion

Fourth of July Listening

Finishing touches are being put on two more Segundo podcasts, with Larry N. Gittis momentarily replacing Mr. Segundo. One interview features a guest correspondent and involves superheroes; the other is the first part of a candid two-part interview with a cartoonist of some note. What could be more American than superheroes and cartoons? Stay tuned.

by Edward Champion

Putting Your Examples Where Your Mouth Is

Kevin Burton Smith displays intellectual cowardice in proclaiming how horrible some of the “new noir” books are. What’s so wrong with this position? Well, Smith has failed to cite any specific examples for his argument. And what’s more, he appears more terrified than a mouse squirming in a glue trap. In the comments thread, Smith responded, “Like I don’t have enough people pissed off at me already? Why don’t YOU suggest some names that you think fit those shoes?”

Smith’s observations could have served as a launching point for a fascinating and provocative post, but Smith fails to cite examples of this “mean-spiritedness” and “self-righteous authorial stance” he identifies. I must therefore conclude from Smith’s post that Smith doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, because he offers no explicit frames of reference for his argument.

Smith’s approach assumes that one cannot broach certain subjects without immediately inflaming an author, a critic, or a literary enthusiast. But this assumes that the author or critic is not mature enough to respond in a thoughtful manner to the argument, or recognize the value of discourse that gets the blood pumping. I suspect this fear of offending people in the literary world is one of the reasons Dale Peck’s form of book reviewing rankled so many a few years ago. But what’s more offensive? Hiding personal enthusiasms that offer helpful frames of reference and staying as safe as a Pat Boone record or being the momentary asshole who spots the leak in the lifeboat? Sure, you’ll hate the asshole. But if it were me, I’d trust him over the diffident one.

by Edward Champion

An Open Source Experiment

In resuscitating my laptop, I’m trying out an experiment. The only applications that I have installed on this machine are open source. While this means keeping Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Illustrator and Sound Forge sequestered to my desktop, their open source counterparts OpenOffice, GIIMPShop, Inkscape, and Audacity (which I was already using to a large degree anyway, along with Firefox, VLC, and Thunderbird) will operate on the laptop.

The prospect of being rid of corporate software appeals greatly to me (which is not to suggest that the above programs, in their Windows incarnations, don’t come with their own EULA strings attached). The problem with the open source movement, however, is that it is populated by quacks who prescribe half-built programs as definitive alternatives to their robust counterparts. Nevertheless, if Firefox and Thunderbird are now bona-fide alternatives, what’s not to suggest that similar remedies might come with the open source responses to Adobe and Company? The big question I have is whether I can get by on the laptop with these programs and, if necessary, find workarounds to some of the things I can do with applications that sell for hundreds of dollars.

I figured if a guy like Mark Pilgrim can make the bold switch from Mac to Ubuntu, then at least I can try this half-assed approach on Windows. And who knows? Maybe I might end up going Ubuntu on the laptop.

For folks who are interested, this is a helpful beginning for open source Windows apps.