Year / 2005

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show #5

Approximate Date: A sunny afternoon in early August, 2005

Author: Paula Kamen

Condition of Mr. Segundo: More of a complainer than usual, but feeling either paternal or pathological.

Subjects Discussed: Balancing memoir and microhistory, Chronic Daily Headache (CDH) and its recent medical classification, newspaper articles that perpetuate an unlived life, writing a book while suffering from CDH, the specific denomination value of Ms. Kamen’s marble system, throwing drugs at the problem, doctors who prejudge women patients based on appearance, Freud’s unfortunate legacy of “hysteria,” covert examinations, clarifying the “Not tonight honey, I’ve got a headache” myth, Oliver Sacks’ failure to expand his migraine definition, comorbidities, mortality as a motivating factor for medical focus, working-class CDH sufferers, the difficulties of getting disability, chronicbabe.com, being denied a major television appearance because the incurability of CDH was “too depressing” for viewers, the stigma of memoirs, the difference between physical and psychosomatic pain.

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by Edward Champion

Esquire — Blowing the Same Old War Trumpet

The July 2005 issue of Esquire celebrated “10 Men” — presumably, ideal men that other men (read: that pivotal 18-34 male demographic) can look up to. What was perhaps most shocking about this dubious fete was Thomas P.M. Barnett’s masturbatory article, “Old Man in a Hurry,” a profile that set aside any and all criticisms of the Secretary of Defense for such passages as:

RUMSFELD POPS OUT of his chair with the speed of the weekly squash player he still is at age seventy-three and strides over to shake my hand with a big, welcoming smile on his face, employing the enthusiastic, familiar tone one associates with longtime acquaintances. “Hey, how are ya? Nice to see ya!” I’m surprised by how short he is, as I can look right over his head.

and

This is a room you smoke cigars in and decide the fate of the free world.

and, in describing a conversation with a general

Then the general clinches the deal. “So I’ve finally figured out why we get along so well,” he says. “We’ve both run with the bulls at Pamplona!” Rumsfeld shrieks in delight and then launches into a fifteen-minute reverie about the time he ran with the bulls. And for fifteen glorious minutes, he put away the goddamn wire brush.

This cuddly avuncular approach, which makes no reference to Abu Grhaib or Guantanmo Bay, is rather astonishing for a magazine that cut its teeth in the 1960s on hard-hitting journalism that dared to expose and penetrate. And I, for one, will soon be writing a letter canceling my subscription for such a disgraceful piece of journalism.

What’s particularly interesting is that the writer of this article, Thomas P.M. Barnett, has a blog. What’s interesting is that rather than atoning for his inability to throw a baseball faster than a amicable lob, Barnett (who, no surprise, has kids to feed, making dealing with the devil more justifiable) has written a post expressing surprise that his efforts would be greeted with such outrage. He concludes, “I wanted to write up Rumsfeld in the way I saw him in history for the transformation process he has unleashed, not simply replicate the hundreds of articles that blame him for Iraq. My choice? Yes. Don’t like it? Fine. But criticize the choice without implying that the only way the man can get a profile that doesn’t crucify him is for the journalist to be fooled.”

Fair enough. But as Norman Solomon has argued, the overall questions to Rumsfeld haven’t exactly been hardball. In fact, as FAIR reports, during a September 18, 2002 interview with Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Lehrer failed to call Rumsfeld on factually inaccurate statements. And as Salon reported last December, it took ordinary soldiers to ask the tough questions that journalists typically shied away from.

It would seem to me that Barnett, far from taking the hard alternative route, settled for the same old song. And if Barnett, with his continued fatherly references to “the old man,” genuinely believes that he wasn’t fooled, why the deliberate efforts to portray this seventy-three year old man as some virile squash player? Why the continued masculine assertions? Why nothing in the way of tough questions?

There’s an old Chinese proverb: “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”

by Edward Champion

The “We Battled Insomnia with Gin Last Night and the Gin Won, But Heaven Help the Fallout” Roundup

  • The fantastic Carrie Frye points to the Word Nerds, a podcast devoted to “the effect of Internet communication” and various language-related issues. I’ll definitely be checking it out, as soon as I finally finish the next installment of my own damn podcast.
  • So according to the Associated Press, the book world “is still searching for this year’s great American novel,” eh? There are endless ways that I can answer this, but for now I’ll point again to Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever and Kirby Gann’s Our Napoleon in Rags as two books that I’ve enjoyed very much this year and, in my view, do indeed cut the mustard. Perhaps the key here is to stop thinking about the big boys and dare to delve into the little ones.
  • Dan Wickett doesn’t read Playboy for the pictures or the articles. No, sir, he’s reading it for the literature. I knew about the four-bunny system for books, because I actually had a Playboy subscription at the age of sixteen, in which I would secretly run to the mailbox and grab the latest issue covered in black plastic. (Remind me sometime to tell you the tale of what happened when I was finally caught and how I talked my way out of it.) The nice thing about this was that it allowed me to outgrow a reliance upon visual prurience and apply my perverted sentiments to everyday discourse without shame and of course evolve my unabated interest in breasts. But if the likes of Robert Coover can be found within Playboy‘s pages, then I may have to pick up a subscription. I have to wonder, however, if Mr. Wickett is secretly on Hefner’s payroll.
  • Dubya actually reads serious books? Apparently, some of the books that he’s taken on a five-week summer sojurn are Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History, Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar (which seems peculiarly apt) and John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza.
  • The Gothamist talks with Foop! author Chris Genoa.
  • Another celebrity reading slacker: Noel Gallagher, who only just started reading fiction with Angels and Demons (“my first ever book. Believe it or not, it is.”). In the same article, Hester Lacey suggests that to dismiss someone who hasn’t read “seems both sweeping and snobbish.” Oh come on, Hester. We’re talking Dan Brown here. If Victoria Beckham has not even read Green Eggs and Ham, should her raison d’etre not be suspect?
  • The new China Miéville short story collection, Looking for Jake, gets an early look at SFF World.
  • What the hell was I thinking with the gin? Head hurts. More later.
by Edward Champion

Sarah Boxer Must Be Replaced

Sarah Boxer: “But when it comes to the content of Web comics, Mr. Groth was right. The comics that use digital technology to break out of their frozen boxes are really more like animated cartoons. And those that don’t are just like the old, pre-digital ones, without the allure of the printed page and with a few added headaches for reader and creator alike.”

One can make the same case for Sarah Boxer’s columns. A healthy dose of skepticism is one thing. But Ms. Boxer’s columns are, for the most part, large dollops of bitter reactionary bullshit. She’s about as flexible to culture as hardened doss sticks. I’ve yet to see Ms. Boxer crack so much as a smile or let down her guard in any way. I suppose this is because, in the Boxer universe, all forms of DIY or independent culture are essentially bullshit. The people who try something different are no less than crazed dilletantes. Ideally, these upstarts should be mowed down by machine guns, lest they tango with the status quo or, even worse, disrupt Ms. Boxer from the west wing in her seculded estate. Damn these artists! They’ve deigned to force Ms. Boxer to actually think and write a column!

On the whole, Ms. Boxer’s snotty and inert columns are almost completely devoid of joy. One wonders why such a jaded glacier is on the Gray Lady’s payroll. After all, without going all Julavits here or condoning some phony 100% happy approach, if one is writing about culture, shouldn’t one actually enjoy the subject one is writing about?

Let’s take a look at a few choice examples from Ms. Boxer’s oeuvre.

July 11, 2005: “She is so bored by her job that she will even let you take control of one of the security cameras where she works. If this sounds intriguing, you might want to stop reading here and just go visit the site.”

Instead of trying to understand the approach, perhaps contextualizing the art with the heightened number of surveillance security cameras around us, what we have here is instant dismissal without thought.

June 28, 2005: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that kind of time. Which raises the question: what kind of art do you have time for?”

Never mind understanding the concept behind John Simon’s “Every Icon.” It’s either instant or it sucks!

May 12, 2005: “Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these. It just means that you’re not cool. And now that you’ve learned about them in the mainstream media (known as MSM on the Web), they’re not all that cool, either.”

Why is this paragraph even necessary? And why should hipness even matter in describing messages that disseminate across the Web?

* * *

What is the purpose of all this negativity? For the Times reader to pick up the Wednesday newspaper and feel superior to the disheveled upstarts? For a stockbroker to read the Times on the way to his miserable and artless job and say to himself, “Boy, I’m glad I chose the right path. Unlike these foolish urchins, I’m rolling in the dough. The never of these nincompoops!”

It seems to me that if a critic is writing about culture for a major newspaper, the effort expended should not be made mocking it, but analyzing it, using primary and secondary quotes, to put the cultural effort into perspective. While Ms. Boxer is certainly offering a “Critic’s Notebook,” one would hope that lead articles from the Arts & Cultural Desk would be composed of something more substantial and less half-baked.