The Possibilities of Small
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on November 7, 2009
Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment
Ben Macintyre: The Latest Sourpuss to Run Away From Possibilities
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on November 5, 2009
Filed Under Reading | 4 Comments
The Times’s Ben Macintyre has mangled his mind in a senseless shower of his own hysteria. The Internet, he writes, is killing storytelling. I could respond to Mr. Macintyre’s foolish article with a vigorous list of items, pointing to such recent projects as Significant Objects, which has featured notable writers creating stories around eBay items, and Electric Literature, recently the subject of a New York Times article. But I think the more important question to ask is how such a yutz could write such an uninformed article.
Reading, last I heard, hadn’t changed much from its basic approach. While e-books continue their slow crawl into acceptance, a recent report from Bowker Publisher Services indicated that e-books accounted for only 0.6% of consumer book purchases in 2008 and 2.4% of purchases in the first quarter of 2009. Unable to extract or cite such basic data, Macintyre then makes a sweeping generalization that “we are in state of Continual Partial Attention.” And he even suggests that blog alerts hector and heckle readers. I’ve yet to see a blog alert confront a stand-up comedian, but I’m sure some giddy innovator will concoct a sentient one in this age of developing AI and emerging smartphones.
Let’s examine the data that Macintyre relies on. He cites a Microsoft research study — presumably the 2007 efforts of Shamsi T. Iqbal and Eric Horvitz (PDFs here and here) — claiming that it takes 24 minutes for a user to recover from an e-mail message alert. What Macintyre doesn’t tell you about the study is that these users were also engaged in answering email after the alerts interrupted them. Ten minutes were spent on task switches caused by the alerts, and anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes were spent returning to the disrupted task. But then, if you really needed to concentrate on an important task — particularly one as arduous as storytelling — you would be smart enough to close your email client. Iqbal and Horvitz’s findings are very helpful, and they split the task resumption time into intriguing stages. But the two researchers are investigating a multitasking environment, which isn’t always applicable to the manner in which people read and write online. What of the user who stubbornly adheres to one window or who shuts the email alerts off? Alas, that would get in the way of Macintyre’s silly generalizations, which don’t even cite the Microsoft Research findings correctly.
Having fumbled with computer science, Macintyre then relies on Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” to suggest an end to long-form reading, failing to comprehend that Carr’s article is a glorified opinion piece. Even Carr states in his article, “Anecdotes alone don’t prove much,” and later declares, “Maybe I’m just a worrywart,” which means that his article doesn’t really mean much beyond some of the quotes. But for Macintyre, Carr’s personal confession is the linchpin for “the narrative, the long-form story, the tale” as primary victim. Tell that to William T. Vollmann, who just published a 1,300 page book and has another one coming in a few months. (Indeed, later in his article, Macintyre confesses to “the astonishing range of biographical writing” in the Costa Award he is judging. But I thought the digital age was destroying all this?) Tell that to the seven women who marked up Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, who took a 500-page novel and spent several months providing interesting annotations. The annotators’ attention spans lasted over the course of three months. Here was radical change that was far from inhospitable.
Macintyre also claims that the Center for Future Storytelling was “aimed at protecting the traditional tale from oblivion.” But the CFS’s about page reveals no such eleventh-hour preservation. The CFS’s goal is to enhance the storytelling that already exists. And is it really so ludicrous to consider how emerging technologies can be used in relation to storytelling? David Lynch’s Interview Project has done just this, merging Studs Terkel-style interviews with the Web. The dude still has 68 interviews to post.
And there’s something inherently elitist about Macintyre claiming that “stories demand time and concentration,” while failing to point out that, if a story is good enough, a reader will demand time and concentration from the storyteller. If stories didn’t have that draw, then all the bars and restaurants in the world would go out of business. And with the Internet’s endless possibilities, there’s a storyteller for every reader and a reader for every storyteller. Barack Obama was indeed elected on the basis of his biography, but Macintyre has failed to observe that he was the first elected President to use online conduits to spread his origin story and raise money.
If you wish to soak up hefty tomes and you can’t understand how you can do this with the Internet, there’s this nifty thing on your computer called the ON/OFF button that you may wish to investigate. For the rest of us, there’s the endless material in Project Gutenberg and the recent partnership between the New York Public Library and Kirtas, which will make 500,000 public domain books available to anyone in the world.
But if Macintyre’s getting paid to turn out such gormless articles (he confesses that his own ability to concentrate is dwindling), then maybe he really should worry about not grokking these developments. His vitiated cry in the Times, which reads like an abandoned boy braying for his lost balloon, foreshadows his inevitable obsolescence. Let’s hope he gets with the program. Still, if Ben Macintyre buckles over because of his reading deficiencies, then I know countless people who the Costa people can call to pick up the slack. Nearly all of them are online.
Untapped Currency
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on November 4, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Headspace hijacked by entirely unanticipated events. A slight reconfiguration of the brain, a sudden impulse to stop here and start there. Whittling down distractions. The very thing keeping so many others mired in pathetic fixations and unhealthy obsessions and desperate gropes at credibility as the whole operation burns into oblivion, with the remaining gaunt wolves sniping about at the remaining scraps. One need not be a depressive to survive, although miserable people sure do love their company. They are already starting to turn on each other, and it’s sad to watch. Particularly when one isn’t involved and one is powerless to intercede. One need not surrender to fear and complacency. It is reality which one must face. Not dwelling on a job you hate. Or the constant mining of personal experience and invading other people’s existences in lieu of therapy. Or the childish failure to be yourself. Or the reliance upon a fabricated identity you can’t believe in. Or the inability to be true.
No, I’m not writing about me. I’m writing to you. Not you, that guy who has his shit together. Yeah, keep it up and give me a high five. Let me buy you a beer when I have some money and you’re next in New York. And not you, the guy who gets what’s going on here. And not you, the dude who doesn’t quite grok, but isn’t afraid to flaunt it. Process of elimination. Yeah, that pack. See them? Yeah. They’re fucking terrified. I know. Man, I wish I had a job or some happiness to give them, but you know the old proverb about horses and water.
Well, where does that leave us, kiddo? I mean, we’re all busy fighting our own wars to stay alive. But can we spare a few minutes? We may not have dimes, brother, but when they take away your job, the new commodity is time. And that’s a unit you can budget. So how bout paying some of it forward? Nothing public, mind you. Off the radar. Collective savings. An invisible Federal Reserve trading in an untapped currency.
Reminder: Live Conversation with Sarah Hall on Tuesday!
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on November 2, 2009
Filed Under hall-sarah | Leave a Comment
This is a quick reminder that Sarah Hall and I will be in conversation tomorrow night (i.e., the evening of the week commonly referred to as Tuesday) at McNally Jackson at 7:00 PM. Since there is a good deal of weather within Hall’s most recent novel and weather forms the bedrock of all good small talk, it is very likely that we will be introducing meteorological patterns, either literally or figuratively, into the conversation at some point.
Hall’s fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, was the subject of a roundtable discussion on these pages. And I should point out that this conversation will not be recorded or released as a future Segundo show. This is a “one night only” performance.
For background information on Hall, you can listen to my previous conversation with her from last year. I also wrote about Sarah Hall’s first three novels for the Barnes & Noble Review.
Five Three Oh
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 30, 2009
Filed Under New York | 1 Comment
At 5:30 AM, you know who is truly fearless. Early birds shuffle into the guarded lobbies of fitness centers, jutting their chins and sticking their hands into hoodies not for warmth, but for protection against the unpredictable aperture between the end of night and the promising onset of the sun. A man rattles the locked door outside Starbucks, wanting his quick fix as the workers unpack big metal bins from the fridge and talk shop before putting on a customer-friendly face. A more subtle addict stands outside a diner with a Voice stuffed with bills and hands it over to his seller, who then hands a shopping bag filled with illegal merch, and proceeds to breakfast. Inside the diner, you can just grab the first batch of home fries and catch several snippets of the manager ordering this week’s supplies. The manager’s conversation is in Spanish and the numbers rattled into the phone reveal how his business is doing (not well). Delivery trucks rattle and stop, followed by taxi cabs, a few buses, and the odd automobile or two. Stacks of newspapers form outside newsstands and stores. Security guards are permitted to yawn. Mysterious vans pick up less secure workers at corners, where a few huddled souls begin a long day in Queens or Jersey with payments guaranteed out-of-pocket.
5:30 AM unleashes strange truths. A Duane Reade manager — a middle-aged man with an untrimmed moustache — shouts loudly about how much he enjoys hurting people just after welcoming you through the doors. It’s all about Modern Warfare 2, the latest twitch game making the rounds. He smiles as he talks of gunning down civilians and using bounce grenades to kill a crowd. Urination is more publicly practiced, but the rats are too tired to gnaw on the trash. Temporal minority groups welcome each other. The lonely chat with strangers: some demanding a response to “Good morning” and some looking for a two-minute friend. Social cues are more awkward at this hour. The lonely feel compelled to force intimate questions upon strangers in less than a minute. Requests for change carry a slight delay. No one quite knows the timing because you can’t always tell if someone’s just risen out of bed or about to head to dreamland. You can’t sit on a stoop, but you can bunch your frame near a door. In fact, it’s better that you do. The last thing you need is a property manager jostled before his alarm.
A man sans yarmulke sways in the wayward wind, singing a Jewish hymn. The smell of fresh bread careens from bakeries. The hardcore dog walking crowd, friendlier than the vigilant fitness freaks, conclude their constitutionals. A man takes his shirt off and hangs it over his head just because he can. And the normal sounds are preternaturally minimalist. Thin metal struts squeak in the breeze. The bright bus shelter signs are most visible at this hour. The signs advertise ghastly financial products and mirthless talk show hosts with rum, oversize jaws, but the messages won’t reach the people stirred up at this golden hour. Because this is the time when things are real. At no other time is the city so half-awake yet alive.
The Bat Segundo Show: Marjorie Rosen
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 28, 2009
Filed Under Bat Segundo | Leave a Comment
Marjorie Rosen recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #311.
Marjorie Rosen is most recently the author of Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All-American Town Into an International Community.
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Kicked out of bed.
Author: Marjorie Rosen
Subjects Discussed: The white and non-Hispanic white majority in Bentonville, Arkansas, numerous houses of worship, multiculturalism, the largest population of Marshall Island immigrants in the United States, work for unskilled laborers, exploitation at Tyson and Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart’s $319 billion annual profit and its failure to offer proper healthcare, sentiments from former Bentonville mayor Terry Black Coberly, whether or not Wal-Mart is good for Bentonville, The Whistler Group, Wal-Mart, Christian-based merchandise, and staying in denial about being a “Christian company,” mandatory Saturday morning meetings, “diversity groups,” the conflict between Saturday morning meetings and shabbat, St. Paul Wal-Mart worker Abdi Abdi fired for praying on work breaks, the difficulties of integrating with a white community, trying to get Wal-Mart middle managers to disclose salaries, relative salaries and Bentonville’s relative economy, Bentonville housing, the abuses of the Bentonville and the Rogers Police Departments, the culture of fear spawned by Section 287(g), Rogers Mayor Steve Womack’s racist sentiments, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and white privilege, and the reasonable unification of culture.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: Ajaydev Naliur said to you that the most difficult part of integrating into the larger white community was “not being able to socialize with them like we do with the Indian families. The people at work never say, ‘A.J., come to my house for dinner, come to my home.’” Now if Naliur has only a professional relationship with the Americans and he fears bringing Indian food even to the Walmart food day potlucks, then surely there’s a multiculturalism problem here. And I’m curious about why there’s this lack of integration.
Rosen: No, it’s interesting that you choose A.J. I think it was his problem.
Correspondent: Yeah?
Rosen: Yeah. Because he was so timid about everything. About sharing Indian food. You know, there are Mexican restaurants. There are Chinese restaurants. There are all sorts of restaurants in the area now. Not an Indian restaurant yet. But he was so timid about it. And yet there were other Indian families. Like the Kulkarnis, who were not at all. Who said to me, “Many American friends, we invite them to dinner.” And I kept wishing they’d invite me for dinner. You know, because I love Indian food.
Correspondent: Yeah.
Rosen: But when push came to shove, A.J. said that he was hesitant to embrace American values. Mostly because of his daughters. He has two teenage daughters. And he was very, very afraid that they would become too Americanized. And then he would lose control of them, in terms of boyfriends and in terms of setting up arranged marriages. And it’s definitely in the picture for him. And he wants to keep his girls under his wing.
Correspondent: But A.J. likewise wants to hold onto his job. And maybe the timidity comes from the fact that if he brings in the Indian food, by his standpoint, he could risk raising ire and possibly having people make fun of him. Or, I suppose, putting a red flag on the cultural divide. So is it really fair point to A.J. and say, “Hey, it’s your problem.” Because he is, in fact, the guy who is bringing sodas and pretzels and potato chips and the like. Basically conforming to American society.
Rosen: He said it was his problem.
Correspondent: He said it was his problem?
Rosen: He said it was his problem when I spoke to him about it. I said, “Gosh, people love to share.” Especially in terms of food. People are very open to that kind of thing. He said it was his problem and his timidity. It’s funny. His wife, it’s been harder for her because it’s taken her a longer time to learn English. Now that she’s learning English, she works at a day care center. She’s having a great time going to weddings of friends without him. Because she’s much more willing to socialize with Americans somehow. Now that she’s learned English, it’s easier for her.
Correspondent: Well, if she’s the social butterfly, has she brought Americans to her place? Or anything like that?
Rosen: Not yet. She’s still fairly submissive. A fairly submissive wife. On and off for the first two years that I spoke with them, I would visit them when I’d come into town. And I’d ask what he thought about something. And then I’d ask what she thought. And she’d say, with no irony, “I think what he thinks.”
Correspondent: Interesting.
Rosen: But now that she’s learning English, and she’s more comfortable in her own community and basically in her own skin, I really have detected a change in her. It’s really lovely to see that.
Correspondent: By comfortable in her own skin, do you mean as she’s learned English? What do you mean by that?
Rosen: As she’s learned English. She’s been able to take a job and hold a job by herself. And I think that’s given her a little bit of freedom. Not, I would say, a lot. But a little bit of freedom.
Correspondent: Freedom to further integrate with American culture?
Rosen: Yes.
Correspondent: Or…because it seems to me that we’re getting a one way signal here. I mean, shouldn’t multiculturalism work where everybody integrates together? And everybody goes, “Hey, Indian food. Hey, American food,” and that kind of thing?
Rosen: Well, I think it’s nice that she has American friends from the day care center where she works who invite her to their wedding. Which entails a whole day of traveling and celebrating. I mean, to me, that’s a gesture in a community that maybe ten years ago would not have made that gesture. And she would have been too timid to go without him.
BSS #311: Marjorie Rosen (Download MP3)
When Parody Replaces Opportunity
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 27, 2009
Filed Under Parody, meyer-stephenie | 4 Comments
I don’t know if the world really needed a parody of the Twilight books. Stephenie Meyer’s acolytes, as cultural observers have opined, are quite fixed in their passions. I’ve always subscribed to the middle ground version of the “gateway drug” theory. You may not get the kids hooked on Ulysses or ensnare them within the apparent stomach-churning fallow of fan fiction. But you can listen to them instead of dismissing them, and, with enough patience, maybe get them started on Lovecraft or Poe.
The Harvard Lampoon’s Nightlight clearly doesn’t appreciate the source (the first rule of parody) and it reads like a funny idea best confined to a few thousand words. But the first chapter does offer some wonderfully awful sentences. “I had a dejected, brooding expression on my face, and I could tell from the reflection in the window that it was an intriguing expression,” declares Belle. Why are there two contradictory expressions in the same sentence? And why should any reader tolerate this? How can any serious writer forget about a pivotal detail established in an earlier clause?
Later, we get this exquisitely extraneous description: “So when I closed the door to my room, unpacked, cried uncontrollably, slammed the door, and threw my clothes around my room in a fit of dejected rage, he didn’t notice.” Aside from the discombobulated verb clauses, we have a door that is closed twice. (It’s also quite amusing that the mysterious Harvard Lampoon writer managed to slip “dejected” into these inconsistencies.)
Nightlight also declares war on silly similes. A finger is “squeezed through a diamond ring like a sausage through a slipknot.” We learn of a girl with “brown bushy hair in a ponytail that was more like a suirrel tail in the context of her beady squirrel eyes.” There’s even one sentence that reads: “He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms.”
The question isn’t why the Twihards are enraptured by vampires. That’s an understandable sentiment for any teenager seeking an engaging fantasy. The greater dilemma is why these fans continue to revere prose that’s written like a man with a high BAC level trying to ride a unicycle.
The fan base, however, isn’t without its skeptics. There was the campaign led by one fan to return Breaking Dawn for its inadequacies. Then there was the Midnight Sun leak, which was so riddled with gaffes that Meyer was forced to close up shop.
The discarded draft still exists (PDF) on Meyer’s site. And it turns out that the Harvard Lampoon wasn’t entirely off the mark. On page 9: “Her scent hit me like wrecking ball [sic], like a battering ram.” On page 15: “A spur of the forest reached out like a finger to touch the back corner of the parking lot.” On page 74, anger is “[l]ike a furious kitten, soft and harmless, and so unaware of her own vulnerability.” On page 109: “My body had turned into something more like rock than flesh, enduring and unchanging.” (Thanks for the specificity, Stephenie.) On page 145: “dark hair thick and wild and twisted like seaweed across the pillow.” (I guess some people slumber in morasses.)
I understand that young people are often drawn to associations, but how are any of the above similes worthwhile? Is there a way to get the Twilight fans more jazzed up about precision? I think so. One young fan named “Hot Diggity Dogs!,” responding to a review of Eclipse, wants to know:
what are some of the powerful similes that Stephenie Meyers uses in Eclipse? I can’t find that many, and i NEED some for school! please help, thanks!!
“Hot Diggity Dogs!” may be trying to cram a paper in at the last minute, but I’m wondering why she couldn’t ask this question of her teacher. Is it because the teacher condemns the main source of interest?
And there’s this Amazon discussion of Laurell K. Hamilton’s similes and metaphors in which several Hamilton fans try to come to terms with the clumsy language:
If she’d said “just before a devastating storm” it would make sense, but the sky doesn’t generally fall down. And it would be hard-pressed to destroy everything you own….I know what she’s trying to convey, but she really bites at these things. If she isn’t nonsensical, then she’s outright bizarre.
The takeaway here is that these books, whether authored by Meyer or Hamilton, clearly offer something compelling to these readers. And while those possessing literary standards can pooh-pooh “lesser” literature (as I have just done), I can remember when an English teacher ridiculed me in seventh grade for expressing enthusiasm about Stephen King. Now Stephen King may not be the greatest writer in the world, but he did manage to suck me in at an early age. And every now and then, he still does. But I certainly haven’t forgotten his role in leading me to a world of books. And I suspect that many Meyer fans will feel the same way in about a decade or two. While there’s certainly good cause to condemn Meyer, it’s something of an irony that King’s remarks about Meyer earlier this year initiated something of a jihad. But what the Twihards missed within King’s comments was his praise for Meyer’s compelling storytelling.
Nightlight might have functioned with this same duality in mind. But after the first chapter, the writers stopped mimicking Meyer’s faulty sentences and tried to sabotage the storytelling with lame jokes. I got bored, but the book was so short (and the subway ride so long) that I made it to the end. But what if the writers had designed the parody so that young readers could understand why adults sneered down at a “lower” art form? Not only might they have managed to get through to the Meyer fan base, but they might have kickstarted a internal debate about what was so troubling about the source. Some sensible advice about parody, which is particularly applicable to Nightlight’s shortcomings and Meyer’s fans, arrives from a gentleman going by the name of “La Touche Hancock” in 1920:
To the parodist, then, I say: Make your parody such that the poet himself will laugh over it, and wish to make your acquaintance. Finally, remember that humor of the truest quality rests on the foundation of belief in something better than it seems, and its laugh is a sad laugh at the awkward contrast between man as he is and man as he might be.
The Benefits of Notebooks
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 22, 2009
Filed Under Paper, Preservation, Writing | 11 Comments
I used to write in longhand all the time, filling up five-subject notebooks with the predictable angst of a young man in his early twenties and several early starts on stories, plays, and screenplays that I would revise or abandon. Taking notes was once the thing to do. Back in the nineties, when I wrote film reviews, half the critics took notes. And I learned to write in the dark by taking up large sections of the paper, noting a sentence and then sliding my pen downward to another sector. I felt that it was important to be true and accurate to any crazed thoughts or feelings, even the half-assed ones that I could dredge up in a pinch. Today, thanks to reduced column inches (and reduced journalistic expectations), very few critics, aside from those still writing reviews longer than 600 words, take copious notes anymore, whereas I still obstinately scribble without looking down at the pen. I suppose it’s the writer’s equivalent of learning how to assemble a weapon while blindfolded.
The result of all this scribbling has involved quite a few notebooks, most of which I have kept in two file drawers. I’ve just pulled one out at random and I see a drawing of a floor plan for a San Francisco streetcar. Flipping the pages, I see lists of interesting words I’ve noted in novels, such as “contrapposto” and “ephemeron.” There’s an awkward poem that begins with the line “Pigeon pecking pieces from discarded pizza boxes / Whopper wrappers flayed upon a health nut in detox.” I see a hasty budget I’ve drafted for a film shoot, noting the costs of renting fresnels, Tota kits, flex-fills, and C stands. Another page offers this curious list:
- Party Animal
- Collector
- Amateur Sleuth (Sam)
- Femme Fatale
And I instantly recall the moment in Java Beach when I wrote this all down, along with the research I did for a short film I wrote, but never saw through to production, called “The Collector.” Then there is this section from an entry titled “Observations in the Mission”:
At Muddy Waters, two ladies talk. One is more short-haired than the other and is enamored with such words as “never,” “layoff,” and “responsibility.” She keeps her left hand locked on the table, perpendicular to the surface. Her thumb sticks up. There is almost a butterfly-like spread, ever so slight. Perhaps the modest gust from the door can be felt this way. Her companion listens. “You are a robot,” says the angry friend.
These are curious details to observe. And I chide my younger self for not being more careful to observe the specific hairstyles of the time, which would perhaps be of greater value to me in reconstructing the moment. I am also needlessly zealous about the hand gestures. But I do remember being particularly interested in body language. Still am.
But sometime around the year 2000, I cut down on notebooks. I figured that anything that I could observe would be permanently captured on my hard drive. But I’ve had a number of hard drives die on me and I haven’t always been able to revive the files. A friend of mine just lost her thesis this way. We get so caught up in the act of writing that we forget that our tools are sometimes more fickle. And even if we do manage to backup our data, there’s always the possibility that it might be accidentally deleted or lost within a baroque directory structure.
Not so with notebooks. Like analog books, one flips through any notebook and finds a diagram or an abandoned idea. This is rather similar to the unexpected book you find in a library or a bookstore that just happens to be situated close to where you’re standing. Many of the discoveries are useless, but some are surprising. Some fresh idea you think you possess now was actually in some primitive gestation a decade ago. Even some phrases are similar. Your voice is yours, even when you didn’t quite know how to express it in early days. Ten years from now, will we be able to do the same with our blog posts and tweets?
That picture above is from an apartment hunt. I can adduce from the squiggles the apartments that didn’t pan out. And I can track the specific order in which I located an apartment by looking at this page vertically. I have the price ranges of apartments in San Francisco at a specific time. I also see that with this particular quest, I had my eye on the Haight Ashbury neighborhood (which I didn’t end up moving to, but eventually did later).
Since I’ve been less prolific with notebooks in the past nine years, I wonder how many ideas or thoughts or unintentional chronicles (such as the above) that I’ve lost. Smartphones may permit us to text our friends or send an email on the fly, but don’t we have some obligation to preserve our online thoughts? We call an Apple laptop a “notebook,” but is it really a proper notebook’s equal? Our pens do not have delete keys. We cannot take back a written thought, except by scratching it out or burning it. I wrote about linkrot and the problems with online permanence back in August. And it occurs to me that we may be driven to confess our most private details to Facebook — little thinking of the manner in which the social network giant is profiting — because we perceive it to be the new notebook.
But looking through even this one notebook, I can’t imagine a more foolproof technology. And I’m wondering if I should use notebooks more. Computers have produced interesting blogs, wondrous photos on Flickr, and a culture that is more documented than ever before (at least so long as the technology holds). But what about the subconscious buried within us? If we are prohibited from expressing unpopular or strange ideas on social networks because of what others might say or think, then is Twitter so reliable a tool? Could Kafka have written “The Metamorphosis” if commenters were constantly heckling him about his silly bug story? (Conversely, if Kafka couldn’t count on Max Brod to burn his papers, would he have succeeded in closing his online accounts? Or would the cache images live on forever?) If you’re at a party tweeting the names of people arriving into your BlackBerry, are you really being social?
I’m not against technology or e-books. The Internet has given us many great things. But I do feel it’s important to always contemplate the purpose and usage of any new development. If 90% of the reading public prefers analog books over digital, then now is not the time to declare a revolution or to suggest that the days of printed books are over. Moving forward and adopting tools is great, but maybe there’s more life in the dead tree technologies than some of us are willing to admit. Hell, maybe there’s even a good deal on an apartment vacant for years.
Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project #8
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 21, 2009
Filed Under Dramatic Readings, Hate Mail | 1 Comment
A few hours ago, I learned that a notable writer wrote into The New York Post to express his disguised hatred for his ex-girlfriend.
Therefore, my audio series — Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project — must continue.
The following clip represents my dramatic reading of the hate mail in question, read in the style of Jimmy Stewart.
I plan to continue reading more hate mail. Again, I will be happy to read any specific hate mail that you’ve received. (If you do send me hate mail for potential dramatic readings, I only ask that you redact the names of the individuals.)
Click any of the below links to listen.
Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project #8 (Download MP3)
Previous Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Installments:
#7 A hate mail read in the style of Glenn Beck
#6 A hate mail read in the style of a Miss Manners schoolmarmish tone
#5 A hate mail read in the style of Richard Milhous Nixon
#4: A hate mail read in the style of a drunken Irishman.
#3: A hate mail read in the style of a quiet sociopath
#2: A hate mail read in a muted Peter Lorre impression
#1: A hate mail read in a melodramatic, quasi-Shakespearean style
Slowdown
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 19, 2009
Filed Under Personal | Leave a Comment
“It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
That’s some sensible advice from my favorite First Lady. (Dolley Madison is a close second.) Her other spiffy idea, which is very wise, is that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.
I like First Ladies. They don’t get nearly enough credit. Abigail Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson, concerned about Shays’ Rebellion — that fantastic revolt that the unemployed and the working poor might want to take a few lessons from. And she got Jefferson to write one of his most anti-authoritarian sentiments, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.” And then there was Lady Bird Johnson, who not only planted millions of flowers around Washington DC, but also had to deal with her boorish husband on a regular basis. On the other hand, how many Great Society programs would have been denied were it not for Lady Bird’s efforts? We may never know for sure.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that Good Ol’ Eleanor comes along just as I’ve been rethinking what I do and revisiting places that I forgot were so wonderful.
And so due to unexpected bursts of inspiration (but, more importantly, perspiration) in other places, the results of which I will report if it amounts to anything, I’ve decided that this unforeseen self-discipline is more important than disciplined blogging. So I’ll be scaling down the posting frequency from five chunky posts a week to pretty much writing whenever I feel like it. Believe me, there are several strange and aborted posts in my drafts folder which I may or may not finish. But after a few nudges from friends (and some crafty withholding from parties known to feed me certain pieces of information which provoke 1,000 word essays), I’m now finding that my writing is leading me elsewhere.
This isn’t a full-blown hiatus, but it is a slowdown. The Internet, which is a mostly pleasant and valuable place, does not represent a tyranny, contrary to certain parties desperately in need of a chill pill, an ice cream cone, or a blowjob. But negotiating this terrain does involves a strange amalgam of inclusiveness and self-restraint. Or as Mark Twain once wrote, “Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Or send materials to:
315 Flatbush Avenue, #231
Brooklyn, NY 11217
- The Possibilities of Small
- Ben Macintyre: The Latest Sourpuss to Run Away From Possibilities
- Untapped Currency
- Reminder: Live Conversation with Sarah Hall on Tuesday!
- Five Three Oh
- The Bat Segundo Show: Marjorie Rosen
- When Parody Replaces Opportunity
- The Benefits of Notebooks
- Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project #8
- Slowdown
