Month / January 2006

by Edward Champion

Literary Spam

The spam comments can’t get through (thank you, good folks at Word Press), but I think a case can be made that some of it can be construed as literary. I am not certain what automated algorithim is generating this very pleasant nonsense, but here are a few choice excerpts penned by such authors as “faxing loan no pay teletrack” and “pay day loan oregon.”

“since August 5th, the demon shadow in the mansion the once-a-month strain and disappointment, and the thing that availed at the hamlet in an October storm. ”

“in a life and death struggle with the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and observable dissolution from which there could be no return, paired out the cry that will ring eternally in my innumerable brain: gush!”

“In twenty-two this ineffective explorer had been placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.”

“Billion thing had uttered a intoxicating scream, another had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and reform amuck in a overt way before it could be placed behind asylum.”

It appears, however, that most of the text has been cobbled from H.P. Lovecraft’s “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (the “madhouse in Hudington” line gave it away). Alas, dear spammers, can you not tickle us pink with some originality?

by Edward Champion

King Koopa’s Revenge

It’s likely that I won’t be able to make this, but The Advantage, a Nevada City-based band that performs rocking covers of 8-bit Nintendo music, will be rolling into Bottom of the Hill this Thursday. If you have ever wondered what the Super Mario Brothers 2 theme sounds without keyboards or samples and you happen to be in the San Francisco area, you may want to check these guys out. They’re hitting a number of other places in California over the next few weeks.

by Edward Champion

75 Books, Books #2-3

I apologize for setting all of my ducks in a row. But if I hope to get 75 books under my belt, then this essentially means 6-7 books/month. As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of thickass and “difficult” books. But I’m also a fan of living. And if I hope to have any semblance of a life, then that means getting the hard tally out of the way as early as possible. Either that or giving up this blog and holing up in motel rooms with whores.

On the thickass book front, I’ve just started Elliott Perlman’s Seven Types of Amiguity (not to be confused with Empson’s) in an effort to see what all the fuss was about in Australia. But since we’re talking seven perspectives and a plot wound tigher than Alberto Gonzalez’s ass, I’m thinking this might take a good chunk of January. I’m also still reading David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and Megan and I have something special lined up for that. More details to come.

Here are the books I knocked off over the weekend:

Book #2 was Linda Greenlaw‘s The Lobster Chronicles. The book had been sitting for a while in my TBR pile. I had picked this book up because I am especially galvanized by self-sufficient women who know more about such esoteric topics as catching lobsters and living off the land than I do. After reading the David Foster Wallace collection, Consider the Lobster, part of me (that shameful carnivorous facet, I suppose) wanted to hear the other side of the story. And it was as good a time as any to pick up the Greenlaw book.

The verdict: Greenlaw is a good, if highly digressive storyteller, the kind of dependable person who will tell you a no-bullshit tale in a bar. I particularly enjoyed her depictions of the crazed inhabitants of the very small island she lived on and Greenlaw’s efforts (with her somewhat clueless dad in tow) to figure out lobster traps, attempting to turn a long-term offshore fishing career into a lobster-catching career, with the question of whether she should snag a man not unignored. As an urban dweller, it never hurts to be reminded that there are people out there who are busting their asses to catch the delicious seafood that we take for granted. Greenlaw doesn’t romanticize the industry in explicit terms, but she does give you a sense of what it’s like to be there. There were a few dry spots in which my urban-centric mind attempted to wrap itself around the nautical jargon. But I eventually caught the gist and, once I had, the book was over.

The consensus here is that I’m likely to check out Greenlaw’s other books, as well as anything else out there which might get me a sense of the sea. (I should note also that a few friends seem to think that I was a fisherman in a previous life. I have no idea why seafaring tales appeal to me so much, other than the fact that I am naturally drawn to the salty air, hard-working folks who don’t bullshit you, and what seems to me the miracle of staying alive, financially speaking, doing what you love in an industry in which you could easily go broke tomorrow.)

Book #3 was Phil Campbell‘s Zioncheck for President. Now before I offer my thoughts, allow me to declare any conflicts of interests right off the bat. I should point out that Mr. Campbell himself approached me at last year’s LBC Slipper Room party and asked me to read his book. Now I’m not about to say no to anyone with that kind of initiative (particularly because he was nice). But I’m not necessarily going to instantly love something that is written by someone who I know, even vaguely.

So it was something of a pleasant surprise that I enjoyed Campbell’s memoir. The book chronicles the failed campaign of one Grant Cogswell, running for City Council in Seattle just after the WTO riots. Campbell himself is involved as Cogswell’s campaign manager (along with attempting to manage an apartment building, which quickly falls by the wayside while the Cogswell campaign hits full gear as a crazed tenant named Doug takes over). Further, Campbell contrasts Cogswell’s campaign with one Marion Anthony Zioncheck, a 1930s idealist who served in Congress and eventually went insane. The Zioncheck-Cogswell comparisons didn’t hold all that much water for me, but Campbell’s sincere voice certainly did. How many political memoirs have you read where it’s all about some insider’s unquestioning endorsement, even after the fact? Well, in this case, Campbell’s just trying to get through the day. And it’s this approach that not only allows us an interesting glimpse of what Seattle’s local politics are about, but the unflinching problematics of championing an idealist.

by Edward Champion

James Frey: The Biggest Liar in Publishing?

It is generally concluded that writers are professional liars (and, in at least one case, overhyped dupes who manage to fool the literary world). However, when a writer pens a memoir, is there not a certain expectation of truth? Even if the details are fudged a bit here and there, or entirely fabricated, shouldn’t a memoir writer ground his story in some rudimentary reality?

The Smoking Gun launched a six-week investigation and found that James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, had fabricated many elements of his alleged criminal past. Frey, it seems, managed to fool Oprah (and, admittedly, this litblogger). What’s interesting is that instead of responding directly to the allegations, Frey remarked that this was the “latest attempt to discredit me….I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.”

According to TSG, Frey’s been dignifying it all in other ways. He had the court records pertaining to several incidents purged. There were no records from the prosecuting attorney, who kept a record “on any case that came in whether or not it resulted in felony charges.” Despite daily episodes of recurrent vomiting and bleeding and addiction, Frey somehow managed to graduate from Denison University in four years. But most interestingly, the alleged “cracked-out” incident that threw Frey into rehab simply involved Frey with an open bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. No billy cubs flung, no .29 blood-alcohol content, and certainly no crack.

When we consider that Frey originally tried to sell his memoir as a novel, one wonders precisely whether much of A Million Little Pieces was actually changed. Indeed, in hindsight, it’s quite interesting to see how trusting the literary world was of Frey’s astonishing memoir, which was billed as the tell-all memoir to end all tell-all memoirs. Has the publishing atmosphere proven so antiseptic in its subject matter that only a sensationalized memoir can polarize its attentions?

[UPDATE: Amazingly, this whole question of “the truth” has inspired Neal Pollack to serve up the funniest thing he’s written since he became a humorless family man and told people to shut up about a conflict that has been almost universally acknowledged as a bona-fide clusterfuck without reasonable justification. Perhaps there’s hope for Pollack yet!]