Month / September 2005

by Edward Champion

Prescient Remarks on the Swinging Pendulum

From a 1975 interview with William Tenn (aka Philip Klass): “I think we live in the freeest goddamn time in the history of Man. Insanely free time. There are freedoms now that I never thought would have been available. Just the kind of language I can use, and I wish — the things I could write about. And this — of all the criticisms of our society, so far as I’m concerned — is the ultimate freedom to date. We are the only society that is examining itself in an open way, that is constantly trying to improve itself. I feel very strongly about America, but the point I’m making does not relate directly to science fiction…but in a way it does. I think back to when Man developed such freedoms, and it seems he just can’t stand them, and they’ve got to be ditched. And they’ll probably be ditched in your lifetimes. I think the pendulum swings, and in very few and very short periods of history has Man been free….

“You find you get used to it, but what the hell do you think it was like when the Germans said ‘No more war?!’ Man has been through the first World War, and has built a social democratic republic. Those older people especially, to whom their children said in the 1930’s, ‘You’re so old fashioned, you don’t believe in war. War is the natural state of Man…’, to them their parents said, ‘You’ll get adjusted to it.’ And I don’t know how or exactly when, but you kids won’t spend the last part of your lives in as much freedom as you had, or have, right now.”

by Edward Champion

Set ‘Em Up

  • Over at Maud’s, Tayari Jones (of whom we approve) weighs in on the Jim Crow approach to literature seen in Barnes & Noble and other places. Ghettoization, it seems, is not limited to genres. And Ms. Jones’ response is quite interesting.
  • Robert “Is That a Tape Recorder in My Pocket?” Birnbaum talks with Paul Collins. Strangely, the recipe for a Tom Collins isn’t revealed during the course of the interview, leaving us with only one possible conclusion: Paul Collins is a bore at a cocktail party.
  • Mary Lee Settle, founder of PEN/Faulkner, has passed on. Considering her last name, let us hope that the copy editors aren’t cruel with their obit headlines.
  • Michael Crichton adds another role to his list of achievements. Doctor, hack novelist, cheeseball filmmaker, antienvironmentalist, and now…Senate witness. One only wonders if Mr. Crichton’s writing will improve or his ire might abate if he were to add the role of gigolo.
  • Is Joyce Carol Oates in the running for the Nobel? Or will it go to Milan Kundera or Adonis?
  • Charles Dickens + Roman Polanski. It’s time for the wild accusations to begin!
  • And the tireless Dan Wickett (or one of the seven Dan Wicketts I’m aware of) hosted a chat with first-time authors.
by Edward Champion

Harper’s and the Realities of the Internet

We’ve only just been released from the hospital and we’re spending a good deal of time adjusting to our unexpected euphoria. We have some things to say about Ben Marcus’s Harper’s essay on Jonathan Franzen and experimental novelists (which we read ourselves the other day) that we hope we’ll find time to get to, although, at the present juncture, it looks unlikely. We’re as surprised as anyone that, save Reader of Depressing Books, the litblog scene has been so silent on it. (You lapped up Dale Peck. You lapped up Heidi Julavits’ antisnark manifesto. And you mean to tell me that yet another polemical essay calling for a reevaluation of how we interpret the novel has evaded your attention? Fer shame!)

Perhaps the silence has much to do with the fact that Harper’s, like many other misguided American periodicals, has not produced the essay in question (with the exception of this excerpt) online. Which is a damn silly thing to do at this particular moment in the 21st century and a damn silly thing to publish today, at the end of the month of all things, when I myself just received the next issue of Harper’s in the mailbox.

So what is this, Lapham? A last-minute take to get nimble-minded literary enthusiasts and grad students to set down the baroque threads of their lives and race to their newsstands and bookstores and librarires before it is sold out or replaced by the next issue? All for you? All because the essay failed to strike the appropriate chord online because, after all, you failed to produce a substantial chunk of it online until the very last possible minute (“published Thursday, September 29, 2005”)?

Is it possible that even Harper’s still operates as if it’s 1995?

It don’t work that way, my ornery friend. If you want a public debate these days (and just to be clear on this, we’re talking the Year of Our Lust 2005, Anno Domini, Glorious Year of Tom DeLay Being Indicted, Britney Spears With Child and the Hopeful Declivity Ensnaring the Republican Menace), you do what the New Yorker, the New York Times, and any other functional magazine does (even The Believer does this to some degree!). You provide it for us online. And if you still insist on an excerpt to ward off the freeloaders, you provide a substantial chunk for all of us to peruse and respond to. That essay is long, man!

by Edward Champion

The Continued Collapse of Edward Champion, Part Six

The minute I heard the news that Tom DeLay had been indicted, I experienced a sudden burst of euphoria. I felt a wave of equanamity settle over my entire mind and body. I was good-natured and friendly. I didn’t mind if others won at the board games. Hell, I was feeling so good that I’d happily play the UnGame again.

The doctors took me into a room and gave me a checkup. Then Heidi (the doctor) took me aside and said, “I don’t believe this, kid, but not only will you not need any tricyclics again, but you won’t need yulthodranine. Why, you can walk right out that door if you wanted too!”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all, Ed. You see, you’ve just taken in what’s known in Washington as a muckup mirabillis. Your mind and body was so overjoyed to see some small moment of justice in a hopelessly corrupt system that it responded instantly with bonhomie and defeated your mental malady.”

“No stress?”

“None. You’re a veritable Tesla coil of calmness.”

“I can leave today?”

“The orderlies will help you pack your things.”

I looked at the orderly whose finger I had bitten. I asked this orderly if I could give him a hug. He complied. He squeezed me a bit too hard. Then he gave me a roast beef sandwich with raw roast beef. At least the guy had a sense of humor.

The other orderlies helped gather my stuff and pretty soon, I was out the building.

I was cured all right.