Year / 2005

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Voodoo Lounge author Christian Bauman has apparently promised to reveal some of his personal foibles or, minimally, to blog naked during his guest appearance today at the Elegant Variation. We understand that the man is hot. Smoking hot. So hot that he’ll be serving as a surrogate pair of mittens in December or devoting said thermal energy to more fantastic offerings. In any event, Joe Bob says check him out.
  • Frances Dinkelspiel offers a report on the film version of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Don’t let the Ohio reference fool you. This does involve a San Francisco local.
  • Recently, various personages gathered to pay tribute to Saul Bellow. Jeffrey Eugenides introduced himself as “the guy who never knew Saul Bellow.” The caterer then stepped forward and introduced himself as “the guy who didn’t even know who Saul Bellow was.” He then proceeded to inform Mr. Eugenides that the tapas and canapés were “to die for” and was swiftly removed from the premises shortly after another wave of sobbing emerged from the assembled crowd.
  • Edna O’Brien is returning to Bay Area theatre with Family Butchers. It’s a Magic Theatre production. A script excerpt and other goodies can be found here.
  • Chris Elliott, novelist?
  • A new study suggests that classical English literature is essential to the teaching of English. In other groundbreaking news, it is believed that the theory of relativity might just help you sort out electromagnetic waves. And maybe, just maybe, 3.141592675 might have something to do with circles.
  • Some scientists claim to have found Homer’s Ithaca.
  • The Sydney Morning Herald talks with Curtis Sittenfeld. Unfortunately, despite being of an age where she should have developed some speaking chops (Sittenfeld is 30), Sittenfeld, like, uses the word “like” in just about every answer to the intrepid Australian journalist. Like wow!
  • Does a bear shit in the words? Not always. But in Canada, polar bears go batshit crazy.
  • And if you’re aroused by birds, there’s a reason.
by Edward Champion

I Do Believe We Have Us Another Potential Watergate

First, DeLay gets indicted. And now Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, has been outed by Judith Miller. Corruption leading all the way up to Bush and Cheney? Why, say, it ain’t so! Not in America!

(And I should point out that given the dollops that anyone with progressive stripes has had to digest in the past four years, the lives lost, displaced and otherwise disrupted under the hands of the GOP goons, you are hereby granted permission by me to engage in as much schadenfreude as you need without guilt. Why, if this pace keeps up, I might very well renounce my atheism and believe in a higher deity after all!)

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.”