Month / November 2007

by Edward Champion

Roundup

by Edward Champion

I’m Done With Progresso Soup

I would like to kick the ass of the son of a bitch at General Mills who came up with the unsuitable and deadly metal can top for their Progresso Soup line. Progresso Soup, presumably in an effort to compete with the Campbell’s Chunky Soup counterpart, has recently swapped their standard metal can — which was previously normal and easily opened with a commonplace can opener — with one that has a metal ring. Like Chunky Soup, the idea here is to lift the ring up and peel off the top of the can and provide convenience to consumers. The problem, however, is that the apparent R&D genius — clearly unaware of the forces of gravity and settling upon a thinner and presumably cheaper tab than Chunky Soup’s version — hasn’t considered that the fatter and shorter cylinder offered by Progresso is less conducive to this immediate can-opening strategy than the thinner and taller counterpart offered by Chunky Soup.

What resulted, as I attempted to make myself a modest lunch this afternoon, was me pulling up the tab, applying no more puissance than anyone else in tearing off the lid, with the jagged top jeering dramatically upwards with a force incommensurate to what I had effected with my thumb and forefinger. The deadly elliptical edge then made its way deeply into my right thumb — metal particulates embedding themselves, hitting nerves, causing all manner of “You Progresso motherfuckers!” to emerge from my lips, thus sullying the divine silence of my apartment, and a ruddy Peckinpah geyser of blood spawned from a vicious cut that took almost two hours to clot.

I would like to find the bastard who came up with this design, whose idea of lunch is a Robespierrean homage, and I want to watch this man open up one hundred cans of Progresso Soup and watch his own hands be sliced by his abominable creation. I am not normally a vengeful monkey, but, in this case, I want to see the bastard cry after opening up Can #89 and then have to carry on opening eleven more cans, all of them causing additional cuts.

I present this episode to warn any and all consumers of Progresso Soup that these new cans are deathtraps. And that the forty cent difference between Progresso and Chunky Soup really isn’t worth it. Particularly when you have a shitload of deadlines to meet.

(This is the reason why, by the way, I’m not answering email today.)

by Edward Champion

A YouTube Post for George Murray

By the way, here’s a partial list of the actors and models who appear in the morphing sequence: Cree Summer, Tyra Banks, Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter, Glen Chin, and Brandi Jackson (Michael’s niece). If anyone has a complete list, I’m strangely curious.

There’s also an infamous longer version of this video in which Jackson goes aggro at the end that can be found here. Hard to believe that so many people found it disturbing at the time.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • So this winter thing — my first here in Brooklyn — seems to be setting in with the dipping temperatures. And I have to say that it’s pretty fantastic! Much preferable to the hot and humid summer in which I was stopped in my slumber by the logy sweat that started to appear in places where I hadn’t sweated before just in walking from one corner of the room to the other. Although I may change my tune when the balls-shriveling lack of mercury kicks in. For now, the crisp brisk cold leaves untold promising days for hot chocolate and ice skating: the former secure, the latter of which I will have to attempt! Why the weather reports? Incredibly deranged dreams — no doubt incurred from the crazy books I’ve been reading of late or perhaps the general burden of an imaginative mind — have jolted me out of bed. The good: lots of solid, hard-core sleep that has kept me rested and peppy through the day. The bad: dreams so intense that it can take me as long as an hour to recalibrate my bearings. So if I’m clinging to a conversational topic that is a bit safer than my usual repertoire, I hope you will understand.
  • Terry Teachout has a thoughtful essay in Commentary reconsidering classical music Neville Cardus and asking the question of whether his disinclination to embrace modern offerings has caused him to be forgotten. (via Books, Inq.)
  • Joe Bob Briggs — and his more sober self John Bloom — can be found (among others) at The Wittenburg Door.
  • I’ve felt that because Richard Donner was only half-justifiably fellated with that Superman II — The Richard Donner Cut DVD (which revealed that the best version of Superman II is probably some bastard hybrid we’ll never see involving Donner’s technical chops and Richard Lester’s light comedy), the incredibly talented Lester has been left unduly in the lurch. But thankfully, Lester’s two great Beatles films have been put out and Keith Phipps has managed to track the director down.
  • And in additional defense of the inventive Lester, who nearly every Superman fan seems to have declared an untalented hack, here’s “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” (Part One and Part Two)
  • So will the WGA strike effect the literary world? A few agents now fear that many option deals may be quelled.
  • Margaret Atwood and husband Graeme Gibson brought their own dinner in a box to the Giller Prize reception to protest a Four Seasons development that threatens the endangered Grenada dove. They said they could not accept food and drink from the Four Seasons, although they seemed to have no problem occupying the premises. (Would it not have been more effective to simply not attend the ceremony, thereby protesting the Four Seasons and letting the Giller people know that there are consequences to scholarship? I can’t help but ponder whether this particular resistant approach is more of an upstaging of the nominees. Much like her LongPen solution, I simply don’t understand why Atwood would bother to participate in a process if it’s absolutely painful, unless there’s a self-serving satirical intent.)
  • Incidentally, it was Eliabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air that took the award.
  • It seems that Oprah isn’t a very careful reader. First James Frey, and now a book pulled from a reading list on her website: Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree. Carter, of course, was a speechwriter for George Wallace, giving us the mantra: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Okay, not the most ideal thing you want to hear from an author. But I’ve long wondered, like Sherman Alexie (quoted in the article), if Little Tree was — in some sense — an act of atonement and whether it is entirely fair to dismiss a good book simply because it’s written by a racist. It’s a tricky question, but I submit to you that we have no problem accepting D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will as significant parts of the film canon. I, for one, absolutely despise Griffith and Riefenstahl’s life choices, while also appreciating the technical components of these two films. It’s possible that Oprah and other detractors may be clinging to a set of politically correct assumptions just as vile as racism: the tendency to conflate an author’s work with an author’s life and the discounting of the former because there are extremely unpleasant aspects within the latter. If Oprah “couldn’t live with that,” as she claims, then how can she have any reasonably sophisticated take on our complicated world? The world is not always a place where artistic achievement is grounded on a rosy Runyonesque life. Art often emerges from an ugly and turbulent existence. Must we discount some works of art because we learn unpleasant things about the artist? Or can we be mature enough to judge art on its own merits?

[UPDATE: George has more thoughts on the Oprah snafu: “But, besides raising the question of how to view the merit of a work vs. the author’s bio, what this does illustrate is exactly how far removed this woman is from both her books and the everyday impact of her opinion on the army of mindless couch weights (like paper weights for furniture). Does she ever even get near this stuff anymore or does one of her handlers just draw up a list and sign her name at the bottom? Does she have any idea how her purported love of books is being used for corporate shilling, base taste-making, and political gain? Did she even notice this herself or was it another handler who noticed? When your whole life is outsourced like that, what can people trust you take seriously?”]

by Edward Champion

Duck Hunting on Capitol Hill

Now here’s some absolute strangeness. Kucinich’s bill to impeach Cheney still has a chance. There was an effort to table the bill, but the bill survived the tabling vote and is now headed again to the Judiciary Committee. Could it be that some Democratic Congress members are growing balls? Or is it more Republican shaming, as Paul Kane suggests? You know, November and the threat of re-election does funny things to politicians. Too bad Pelosi and Hoyer are more interesting in taking all the fun out of politics by sticking with their non-impeachment agenda. Which is a bit like a bunch of six-year-olds insisting on keeping the tea party going in the playground while the school bullies keep beating the tar out of all the good kids.

by Edward Champion

Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show

A few prefatory words about this excerpt: Will Self is a tall, thin, vaguely cadaverous-looking man, with a triangular head and enormous eyes that blink sparingly. He is also quiet, curious, and considerably punctilious. His command of the English language is as present in his speech as it is in his fiction. I talked with Self right after he had checked into his hotel — this after a walk from LaGuardia Airport. He carried no luggage. When I asked him where he stored his change of clothes, he then proceeded to reveal several carefully folded squares of clothing that he had kept upon his person. Self challenged me on my assumptions about the dérive, the psychogeographical term for a “drift.” When I suggested that such a linear walking narrative might reveal recurrent patches of drab land, he suggested that I had a perceptive anxiety. I said that I simply didn’t have the time, but he may have been right. The day after the interview, I found myself immersed on a long walk around the perimeter of Prospect Park where I drifted into surrounding blocks and contemplated the insanity of a twenty-five mile walk. Perhaps this was just the beginning.

willself.jpg

Correspondent: I wanted to actually ask you about your observation in “Madame Jacquard,” about giving up cigarettes, and how cigarettes form this necessary unit to get from one place to another and how it’s part of this linear narrative “translated into a series of perplexing jump-cuts.” You’re down to three [a day] now. So I’m wondering if, speaking now, you have any kind of linear narrative now with these three or…?

Self: Three is not enough for a narrative. Then, it would be concision. It would be like haikus.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Self: And that’s just not enough cigarettes to provide a narrative anymore. You need the constant ebb and flow of nicotine in your system to provide that. It’s not working for me anymore. I’ve lost the cigarette narrative.

Correspondent: Yeah. Well, you have, basically, the walking narrative, I suppose.

Self: Yeah, maybe the walking narrative is there more strongly as a result. I’ve had some absolutely splendid walks during this trip. It’s been very exciting for me. The airport walks have been great. But perhaps the best walk was — I walked in from Pearson to Toronto. I walked in from Sea-Tac to Seattle. Big walks. Sixteen, seventeen mile walks. I had a good long walk in San Francisco out from Castro to Sausalito over the Golden Gate Bridge. I had a beautiful walk where I arrived at O’Hare and then kind of got off the subway the first stop — I think it’s called Rosemont. Within twenty minutes of leaving the aircraft, I was face-to-face with a deer in a wood by a river in this totally underimagined place. It’s a classic interzone — classic liminal place — and then found myself walking through the wood directly under the flagpole.

So I had this kind of juxtaposition — what I think of as the modern sublime. Jet travel is the strangest, fascinating, most awe-inspiring physical experience that most of us will have in our lifetime. It’s mediated by human society in that way. And yet everything about international air travel is arranged to make it dull and vacuous and boring. And yet the airport walk recovers the sublime aspect of air travel in that way. And then yesterday in Chicago, I walked to Wal-Mart, which was another kind of walk. Another sort of biopsy of the urban environment.

I mean, I think, in the way I do differ from [Guy] Debord is that, of course, I don’t believe in the act of the dérive. I don’t know what the L.A. Times critic thinks about it, but on the Debordian premise, a dérive should destroy the society and the spectacle.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Self: When Debord was writing, the Marxists still spoke quite fervidly about late capitalism. But how late it is. (laughs) And it’s later and stronger than ever!

Correspondent: (laughs)

Self: So I don’t have that kind of — and indeed I think that the kind of Marxian conception of what these sort of ants might be involved in is ridiculous and moonshine. But I do think there’s a different kind of insurgency involved in long-distance walking in this way.

by Edward Champion

The Radiohead Experiment

If you’re wondering what Radiohead’s total haul was, it was possibly about $2.7 million from downloads. Which has to scare the shit out of the music industry and present a considerable wakeup call for recording artists. Because Radiohead collected every penny here. And given that Radiohead’s last album, Hail to the Thief, sold an initial 300,000 (and apparently went platinum), let’s be generous and say that Radiohead collected 35% of the revenue — or $350,000 of the one million+ copies sold for Thief. That’s a considerable difference that not only demonstrates the possibilities of what artists can collect, but clearly shows that the middle-men are about to cast asunder from the vicious cycle. (And you may recall how Courtney Love computed that a band member gets $45,000 to live on, because royalties are often offset by recoupable expenses, even if a record goes platinum.)

Point being: The Internet, in one fell swoop, has changed the landscape with this experiment. And whether other arts — such as filmmaking or writing — can perform similarly is a question that any business-savvy artist should be seriously pondering right now. I wouldn’t dare suggest that the workers entirely control the means of production, but Radiohead’s experiment is an encouraging sign for any independent artist. Ignore the digital medium at your own peril.

by Edward Champion

Roundup — Slipshod Edition

  • In an effort to demonstrate just how lazy bloggers can be, I’m now typing these words from bed. This is because I had a frightening amount of coffee yesterday and I am trying to mostly abstain from caffeine today. Frankly, my imbibing on this front took me aback. But it was required yesterday, because I interviewed a super-smart author. Today, I will try to learn a few Esperanto words and shout these at the top of my lungs while conducting an impromptu one-person version of leapfrog — that is, if the neighbors end up screwing like dormice. There will be few jokes, unless something truly riles me up. For now, there’s linkage.
  • Revolting returns in new form, although it’s considerably slicker — and, dare I say it, not as promisingly revolting — than its previous incarnation.
  • A 1986 Mac Plus goes up against a 2007 AMD Dual Core. See who wins. It ain’t exactly John Henry, although one wonders why a test along those lines hasn’t been revisited. (There was, incidentally, a comparable showdown executed a few days ago between me, flipping through an unwieldy unabridged, and one Jackson West, consulting his laptop — both of us looking for a word definition. I lost. Within ten seconds. And it was Jackson who remarked upon the John Henry connection and made me laugh.) (via 2 Blowhards)
  • I am beginning to wonder if reading challenges are the litblogosphere’s answer to the reality TV show.
  • Here’s why you don’t want to devote your creative energies to something without crossing your tees. Some filmmakers spent four years planning a Warhammer 40,000 fan film. They sunk 10,000 euros, employed actors and extras, and put together a 110 minute extravaganza. Alas, they failed to get the appropriate sanction of Games Workshop — indeed GW refused it after lengthy negotiations — and the film can now never be shown in front of an audience. All that time. All that effort. Wasted. I find this story very sad. All this could have easily be avoided if the amateur production was permitted more exhibitionist leeway (after all, it seems quite clear that they didn’t intend to see a profit for this thing) or the filmmakers had bothered to perform the most basic of preparatory tasks: obtaining permission.
  • We’re only just in November, but PW appears to have the first Best Books of 2007 list I can find.
  • Steven Hall on the American book tour, which sounds like drug trafficking (at least the way he describes it): “It really is solitary. It depends how you do it. The one I did across America was really solitary. I met someone from my publishers in L.A., and they gave me an envelope full of money and a schedule and said, ‘We’ll see you in New York in three weeks.'”
  • Now this is fucking appalling. (And I’m surprised this didn’t happen in America first.) It’s bad enough that some books bother to have advertising inserts at all, but using advertising agencies to slip bullshit cards into books and pollute libraries with this junk (Will the advertising agencies be responsible for removing the inserts? I don’t think so!) is an absolute betrayal of the public trust. The cretins who authorized this ought to be ashamed of themselves for whoring out one of the few public spaces where one can escape from the cacophony of advertising.
  • “Take No Chances” Ciabattari is proudly featured over at “Take No Chances” Kottke. Two duller people couldn’t deserve each other any more.
by Edward Champion

The Omelette Report

Some culinary skills come late in life. But they do, in the end, arrive, if you are pigheaded enough. (Of course a desire to feed people is a great motivator too.)

omelet.jpgAs I reported rather discreetly back in September, I finally figured out how to make a pretty tasty omelette. Yes, I learned in my early thirties. But in my defense, I should note that on the breakfast front, I had the scrambled eggs, pancakes, and onion-potatoes thing down pretty well — in part because I worked as a short-order cook in my early twenties. (The manager, discovering my ineptitude, eventually stopped giving me morning shifts. Which was fine back in those days, seeing as how I was dilatory and frequently hungover just after sunrise back in those days. I’ve since taken to getting up very early in the morning to get a good start.)

But there were also ancillary factors. During my early twenties, as a last resort, I used my crude breakfast making skills as a desperate bargaining chip to get into bed with women. It worked twice, although in both cases the women in question were somewhat inebriated. Maybe they just felt sorry for me. This was one of the reasons I related to Pirate Prentice’s Banana Breakfast in the early pages of Gravity’s Rainbow. It seemed stemmed from the same hapless masculinity.

But the omelette thing befuddled me. Until recently, when I became determined to eat the majority of my meals in rather than out.

So that other anonymous souls suffering this same problem might be granted succor, here are some helpful hints.

First off, you need to make sure that you have a good egg base. And this means having a good omelette pan. My sister, knowing of my ontological omelette imbroglio, was kind enough to give me a Calphalon 12-inch pan for my last birthday, and the slick non-stick surface, carefully buttered, makes whipping up and cooking an omelette easier than if you have a standard issue shitty frying pan. One other thing about the omelette pan. It’s great for a well-cooked four-egg omelette, which you can then slice delicately down the middle and serve for two. So if you’re serious about omelettes, get this pan. Plus, it has a thick oblong steel handle that makes you feel as if you’re driving a fucking sports car or something. And if you’re thinking that this is some kind of scam, it isn’t. You can use it for other things. It’s also great for chicken quesadillas.

Now you need to be absolutely scrupulous about cooking the egg. And you can do this quite fine with a fork. You bat down the light rising bubbles with the back of the fork, while gently scraping the cooked edge away from the side. When you see a well-cooked edge, be sure to tilt the pan so that the egg on top will flow just underneath the egg. The fork is handy because you’ll be able to lift the congealed egg and that’s where the magic happens!

Keep doing this for a while until 90% of the uncooked egg are underneath the edges. If you’re thorough like me, you’ll want to lift up the entire elliptical perimeter and make sure it’s all cooked. (Plus, this will help when you get to the tricky flip.)

You’re going to need a good deal of cheese to lay down. Ideally, if you shred some gouda or some feta, you’re in for a tasty breakfast! A smidgen of fresh, meticulously ground parsley goes with this well too, although you’ll probably want to mix this into the base. But be sure that you have enough cheese! Because this cheese is going to save your ass when you get to the inside of the omelette.

Now the tricky part. The filling. In my early omelette experiments, I was so eager to make a great omelette that I often employed too much zeal here, and I learned some harsh lessons in applying grand dollops down the middle. Be sparing here. Because if you have too much filling, then it’s going to be a pain in the ass when you flip the egg over. And not only that, but you’re really going to need to make sure the inside of the omelette is cooked, with the cheese melting into it magically.

You may need to make about two or three omelettes to get the filling-to-egg ratio right, but once you have this down, your omelette will rock.

Now flipping the egg over can be a bitch. You’re going to need the fork and you’re going to need a spatula. You’ll need the fork to lift up the edge, which you can then slide over very carefully with the spatula. And if you have your filling-to-egg ratio right, you shouldn’t have much of a problem if you use considerable solicitude on this front.

Then you’ll just want to keep the puppy cooking. But don’t leave it one place. You’re going to want to move the omelette around every minute for presentation purposes. After all, the last thing anyone wants when eating an omelette is a dun-colored bottom. But you will need to cook this thoroughly. When you see some thoroughly melted cheese emerging from the edge, chances are you’re done.

And voila! A grand omelette that should keep you going until the early afternoon at least!

The whole thing costs maybe $3 to make. A few bucks more if you want to get extravagant. Throw in some potatoes, some fruit, a toasted English muffin with grape jelly, and you’ll have yourself a grand breakfast. (And to think, they’re charging $10 for this racket at a diner!)

by Edward Champion

A Tumultuous Privacy of Storm

The Register: “This appears to be more than a mere argument in support of the constitutionality of a Congressional email privacy and access scheme. It represents what may be the fundamental governmental position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy – that there isn’t any. What is important in this case is not the ultimate resolution of that narrow issue, but the position that the United States government is taking on the entire issue of electronic privacy. That position, if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody’s email at any time without a warrant.”

by Edward Champion

Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show

Correspondent: I’m wondering, in your research, did you find a kind of Miles-like figure who was occupying the public sanatorium, as opposed to a private one? Were there many of these types of figures?

abarrett.jpgBarrett: There were a lot of wealthy people in cure cottages. I didn’t find someone like Miles. He’s really wholly invented. But the American Protective League is real. That institution that he belongs to was real and very powerful during the early part of World War I. So I really built him from my knowledge of people in cure cottages, which I had written about before in a story called “The Cure” in Servants of the Map. And then from what I found out about the American Protective League.

Correspondent: Gotcha. The sessions that Miles conducts are rather interesting because we don’t actually know all the time what’s being reported in those sessions. You reproduce a rather bland page-long sentence of some of the things that are discussed, but I found that to be kind of an interesting decision in light of the first-person plural narration, which we haven’t even begun to discuss. I’m wondering why you kept that sort of disguise. Was it a way to foreshadow the inevitable revelation as to who this narrator is?

Barrett: This collective narrator — usually when we read something that starts off with a “we” voice, we’re waiting for it to separate out into an “I.” And that is the case for most stories. This doesn’t right through the very end, and there’s a reason for that. And partly the reason is that, as a group, those people do something — or, in some cases, fail to do something — about which they feel really guilty. So they’re not willing to separate out. The reason for reproducing what they’re talking about so literally is partly to give you a sense of the real texture of their lives and what they’re really learning. There was a tendency then — and there’s still a tendency now — to think that recent immigrants to this country, if they’re working in menial jobs, aren’t educated and don’t have complicated intellectual lives. And that’s just silly. It was silly then and it’s silly now. The workmen’s circles, which is what that discussion group is based on, was very common in New York. Especially on the Lower East Side. People talked about them in great depth and with great rigor after very long days working horrible jobs about the Yiddish theater, about French music, about painting, about all sorts of things. And I thought that just to describe those things, to tell about those things really briefly, would in a sense be unbelievable. That I needed to reproduce for you some of the texture of that. So that you could fully imagine what it was like to really have those discussions.

Correspondent: I think there’s also a mystery of not discussing the full minutes of the agenda. Were there two green volumes that you actually found during the course of your research?

Barrett: I have those two green volumes.

Correspondent: Really?

Barrett: Yeah. I have the books that Leo works from and I know them almost as well as Leo does at this point. I don’t actually know any chemistry. But I do know…

Correspondent: Come on! Cite something at the top of your head right now!

Barrett: I can’t. I just can’t. But I could when I was writing the book.

This conversation with Andrea Barrett will appear on a future installment of The Bat Segundo Show.

by Edward Champion

No Harm

As with any human brain, my own has glaring deficiencies. Whole cavities of knowledge that I hope to fill. Proper restitution of the immediate territories reveals still more estival pores occupied by pop music lyrics, needlessly pedantic refs to events from twenty years ago, and other lithe, trunk-clad, mnemonic divers hoping their swan dives mesh with the wintry waters. Which is to say that these four lobes cannot be duly mapped or mopped, tapped or topped, and I remain at the mercy of a fallible and fluctuating organ. In the end, none of us really know anything. And I quite like that. But there’s no harm in trying.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • I am now reading more books than you would believe one man could read. And I have only myself to blame. While things have not yet escalated to the point where exercising the espresso option on my coffeemaker becomes mandatory, they are certainly getting there. And if I start to cackle wildly in the forthcoming weeks or you see some balding man attempting to scale the side of the Grand Army Plaza arch in desperation, don’t say I didn’t warn you. In the meantime…
  • Sacha Arnold considers The Three Paradoxes.
  • Of all the astute pens for hire, why the hell did Tanenhaus opt for Rex Reed? But it is good to see Good Man Park make the cut.
  • 318 different covers of War of the Worlds. (via Paul Collins)
  • Edith Wharton in Esperanto.
  • Here’s the problem with current literary journalism: “I’ve since read the book–and liked it a lot, it’s one of my favorite books of the year–and I must say I’m completely flummoxed by the apparently controversy that’s surrounded the book.” What is the point of talking with an author if one has not read the book in question? An extended conversation along these lines is useless for both author and audience if the interlocutor has not bothered to read the book in full. That Nissley remains “completely flummoxed” because he has not bothered to use his deficient noodle is not much of a surprise. Nor is it particularly earth-shattering to discover that his questions are more generic than Akiva Goldman’s best attempts at narrative. Is this cheap blanket advocacy an effort by Tom Nissley to cope for his clear shortcomings? Or could it be that the Amazon blog is about as journalistic as a golden globular quid pro quo afforded to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? Here on the Internet, we have a great medium to deflect this sort of thing. And Nissley’s blown it because he prefers being a toothless tool.
  • Sarvas on Shalom. McLemee on Mailer.
  • If all goes according to plan, I hope to make my thoughts known about Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace in a rather unusual manner. But for the moment, check out Richard Rayner’s review in the LATBR.
  • Bob Hoover believes that “[s]uccess as a novelist is found between the pages, not the sheets.” But cannot success in the latter lead to success in the former? Or are stopperage-specific muses inherently worthless?
  • Anita Thompson ain’t a fan of the Jann Wenner HST oral history. Apparently, Wenner took her out of the book because “she has an exaggerated sense of who she was in terms of Hunter. She had another kind of role.” Which leads one to wonder what Wenner perceives that role to be. Handmaiden perhaps? (via Likely Stories)
by Edward Champion

New Disclaimer from Deborah Solomon

The Deborah Solomon interview, recently revealed to be more of an inept collage experiment in which the interviewer is a humorless and badgering solipsist rather than anything close to a respectable journalist, now carry this bold shibboleth:

“Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Deborah Solomon.”

And if that isn’t enough, Solomon, who appears not to be a fan of the Oxford comma, will also begin adopting the bold moniker “sprezzatura” to stave off any additional criticism that comes from the New York Press or the blogosphere.

Rest easy, America! The Times has rectified the Solomon disgrace with one single sentence! Clearly, standards have been corrected and we can count upon the Times to treat this middle-aged white woman with the same hard circumspection that was once meted out to a twentysomething African-American named Jayson Blair, who did more or less the same thing. Alas, Blair was shown the door before he could get in a recurrent disclaimer. A double standard? Well, they don’t call the Times the Gray Lady for nothing.

by Edward Champion

Ripped Off by Matthew Rose and the Wall Street Journal

Matthew Rose has seen fit to write an article containing certain similarities to my own experiences with Facebook and, in fact, using the same Jonathan Franzen angle that I used here on September 26, 2007.

My lede: “Jonathan Franzen does not want to be my friend.”

Rose’s lede: “Is Jonathan Franzen my friend?”

Could such a similarity have been avoided? Well, enter the search terms “Jonathan Franzen Facebook” into Google and you shall see what comes up first.

Of course, Matthew Rose will deny it. But my post was the subject of some discussion — both in the blogosphere and on Facebook. I was the first to publicly out Franzen’s existence on Facebook. A friend of mine insisted that I write a feature article about the experience, but I told her that I honestly didn’t see any reason why any serious newspaper would be interested in my technological navel-gazing.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Open note to the Wall Street Journal: I happen to be a writer myself. And unlike Mr. Rose, I can actually generate original ideas.

by Edward Champion

BSS #153: Ursula Hegi

segundo153.jpg

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating the worst thing he’s ever done.

Author: Ursula Hegi

Subjects Discussed: Collage artist protagonists and collage-inspired novels, stream of consciousness and italics, using specific fonts, Mason’s voice as a pulse, how Hegi communicated with typographers, the problems with emailing manuscripts, characters representing a contentious unified whole, subverting the nuclear family structure, the layers that come from writing 50+ drafts, gestures involving shoulder blades, why there are so many water environments in Hegi’s work, kayaks, William Faulkner’s building, on whether or not a novel is “absolutely right,” the origins of the name Mason, working on an intuitive level, planning through revision, ellipses and pauses, the introduction of a protester into the narrative, the Tribe of the Barefoot Women, nasty fortune cookies, the peace symbol and Mercedes-Benz, confusion in semiotics, Bush and Hitler comparisons, the curtailing of rights in contemporary America, how Hegi varies her stylistic vernaculars, being driven by writing, and being a “method writer.”

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Hegi: For example, to write from Annie’s point of view, I need to become Annie. To write from Opal’s point of view, I need to be nine years old. To write from Trudi Montag’s point of view in Stones from the River, I am her height. I feel her rage. I feel her bliss. I cannot write about feelings unless I go there with the characters. So sometimes I sit at my desk blushing, smiling, close to tears. But I do have to become each character. It’s like method acting.

Correspondent: Yeah. Interesting. Did you have any theatrical background?

Hegi: No. But I read about method acting when I was in my thirties. And I thought, “But that’s what I’ve been doing in my writing!”