Month / January 2006

by Edward Champion

Fuck the Bloggies

If you have written a post begging your readership to nominate you for the Bloggies, then please do us all a favor. Stop blogging. You’re part of the problem.

Because blogging isn’t a popularity contest. If you are not offending at least one reader or writing something that causes your readership to think, if you are not taking advantage of this alternative medium to do something worthwhile and different, the things that other mediums can’t do because they need advertising and readers, then I hope you’ll spend the rest of your days without an Internet connection working at a small-town newspaper banging out a weekly gardening column that offends no one.

I’ve been blogging in some form or another for the past seven years. Maybe more. So I’ve seen all five years of the Bloggies nonsense. Will someone please tell me just what exactly these awards have done to further humankind? Have they expanded blogging in any way? Have they provoked meaningful discussion? No. The Bloggies is nothing less than a big SXSW circlejerk, the online equivalent of a UHF fishing show that you’ve watched for the hundredth time. The same fishermen, growing older and specializing in catching the same fish, using the same techniques, saying the same things. Let’s look at the names. Jeffrey Zeldman. Evan Williams. Jason Kottke. Nothing against them, but yawn.

If you’re a person into blogging to win hits and influence people instead of saying no to constantly checking your Technorati rating or your stats, then I wonder how you can ever find pleasure in the form. Blogging as a stepping stone to a career? Helpful, yes, but hardly the cure-all answer. Why not just focus on realistic goals that lead you straight to the career instead of sneaking in posts during your day job? If you want to be a journalist, get a job on a paper. If you want a book deal, write a book and carefully market it. If you want to be a legitimate pundit, go to grad school and “publish or perish” in journals. But don’t automatically assume that your blog gives you immediate credentials. And don’t think that it entitles to anything. As we all learned back during the 2004 political convention coverage, it was the bloggers who proved to be the laziest reporters of the bunch, offering reports about as substantial as a Field & Stream cover story. Of course, if you do want to practice journalism through a blog, then stop railing against the mainstream media about how superior you are and do the fucking legwork. Back up your shit, yo. Make phone calls, talk to people, get multiple sides of the story. That’s what you can do in this medium that the big papers can’t.

For god’s sake, stop encouraging crap like the Bloggies, which is nothing less than a bunch of insular nonsense motivated by charisma rather than content. I should point out that the only person who had the balls to turn down a Bloggies award was Noah Grey. He recognized the hypocrisy and rejected it. (And long before those able pups Trotted into filthy lucre, Noah Grey laid down the framework for gradual evoloution of the software which guided this medium through Greymatter. The man understood community.)

So in conclusion: Fuck the Bloggies. Fuck it hard.

This has been a public service announcement.

by Edward Champion

Excerpt from Edward Champion’s “Blog Days”

The cat is out of the bag. This post marks the end of Return of the Reluctant.

If you’ve been paying attention to Publisher’s Lunch, I’m happy to report that I’ve received a $750,000 advance for my debut novel, Blog Days. Apparently, the name “Return of the Reluctant” now means something beyond the blogosphere. My name is being susurrated at cocktail parties. I’m getting more blowjob offers from random strangers than ever before. Hell, even Christopher Hitchens wants to blow me, but then he didn’t bother to check my political dossier and he’s in desperate need of attention. But it’s the thought that counts. And of course, a gentleman never kisses and tells. If I had been hired by Nick Denton right now, then I would definitely inform him to go summer where the sun don’t shine. (In fact, just for the hell of it, because financial emancipation unfurls the opportunity for a certain truth, I will. You heard me, Denton! Summer!)

Anyway, after the success of my groundbreaking essay “After Blog Life,” it has been decided by certain big names that what the world really needs is a salable and poorly plotted novel about a 31 year old prematurely balding, San Francisco-based litblogger trying to figure out what to do with his life, but finding a TV movie-friendly existential direction through the plot device of a man named Cat Stigmata and several podcasts produced for a better tomorrow. The marketing people have asked me to gain weight and develop perky man-boobs for my bookstore appearances, while also making tedious references to sodomy throughout the text. Because, you know, that’s the cute and hip thing to do. Normally, I wouldn’t do this. But hell why argue with hype when there’s so much cash on the table? The good news is that, despite my criticisms of Sam Tanenhaus, the New York Times has been effectively “bought.” They’ll be covering me with at least six articles during the week the novel comes out.

If you people hadn’t enjoyed my site so much, none of this would have happened. Of course, Return of the Reluctant will continue in another form. Two women, whom I understand are both Amish and nymphomaniacs, plan to take over the site while I spend my free time blowing spitballs at the people standing in the unemployment line. In fact, I may even take some of the $750,000 and form spitballs from these George Washingtons.

But before I officially retire from blogging and become an overpaid hack (Tito Perez and Scott Esposito have accepted the positions of personal assistant and part-time pamperer, respectively), let me offer you an excerpt from one of the chapters, all in the interest of filling up the coffers:

Excerpt

Newtonette emailed me today. She said that she’d meet me in New York and discuss what percentages of the “litblogosphere” we owned. So that’s what all this “web log” business boiled down to! That’s why Mink Sorvo and Leela Lulumi were such good friends with her. In the end, it didn’t boil down to Technorati ratings or the emails you answered from attention-starved writers. It came down to brass balls and the deals brokered in Brooklyn dives.

I was new to this “web log” business. So I agreed to the terms. So long as I didn’t venture into New York, so long as I stayed on my side of the United States, Newtonette and I wouldn’t scuffle. There would be no Farrar, Strauss and Giroux building destroyed. There would be no Peck-Crouch style brawl captured by the New York Daily News. Newtonette injected a microscopic pellet into my neck and told me that the pellete would explode, releasing poison into my bloodstream if I didn’t leave New York within 24 hours. So I caught the next plane out of Kennedy and I fell asleep watching an in-flight movie of Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark.

I woke up when the plane landed in SFO and my mind was racing. I was still suspicius about Mink Sorvo. The man was everywhere, although I didn’t pay attention to what Steve Peanutsize and Justine Extra-Crispy said about him. What Newtonette didn’t know was tht I had formed a pact with Extra-Crispy: a complex agreement that made the Stalin-Hitler Pact look like an eight year old’s party invitation.

I caught on really quick. You betrayed your colleagues or you got yourself sodomized.

by Edward Champion

The Most Dangerous Idea

There’s been a lot of ballyhoo over this list. Many major minds, most of them apparently Caucasian and male, have been consulted for their “most dangerous ideas.” Presumably the whole exercise will facilitate great intellectual discussion, limitless coffers poured into research and development, and several Slashdot threads that will carry on well into 2012.

Of course, nobody bothered to consult me. And while I am quite Caucasian and quite male, I’m not a scientist and I’ve yet to publish a book. Let’s the face the facts: I’m just some half-baked literary blogger and I still, with great guilt, heat up a frozen chimichanga from time to time.

However, let us postulate a parallel universe (those who have watched a few episodes of Sliders will understand) where Jared Diamond is working a day job and blogging like a maniac and I, on the other hand, am a nonfiction author beloved and adored by millions for meticulously researched yet highly pessimistic fat books. Let us further suggest that “The World Question Center” (a name which sounds suspiciously close to “Customer Service Center”) deigned to ask me about my “most dangerous idea.”

It really needs to be said. So here goes:

Penises in mainstream film.

Western society has reached a point where premarital sex is the norm. We have penises in locker rooms. We have them in boudoirs (or what sometimes passes for boudoirs in cramped apartments inhabited by multiple homo sapiens). In the presence of a lady, men will sooner divest themselves of their boxers rather than their black socks. What exactly does that say? Well, speaking as someone who enjoys being naked (particularly with other people) and who is quite guilty of the black socks crime (there are reasons; please don’t ask), I submit to scholars and casual anthropologists of all stripes that your typical Western male has a closet hankering to let it hang loose. For let us be clear on this: micturating in the open air is a fantastic sensation.

In other words, the penis has reached a point where it is more prominent in our everyday culture than the films which allegedly reflect this culture. And if films are intended as a verisimilitudinous medium (again don’t laugh), Hollywood endings notwithstanding, we must address the reality of the penis. It exists. It is seen. And it is not a harmful organ. Contrary to contemporary forms of homophobic paralogia, it will not corrupt a male heterosexual’s mind. (Proof positive: I have lived in San Francisco for eleven years and, while I have become slightly more perverse, I have no sexual or romantic interest in men — all this despite the fact that I am more likely to see an accidental penis in this town on any given day.) A penis will harm nobody really. Yes, it is capable of penetrating orifices or being tainted with genital warts. But if we’re talking about your garden variety one-eyed snake here, on what level is it pernicious?

Let us consider the double standard, which has frankly gone on far enough. So it’s perfectly okay for women to disrobe completely in an R-rated film, stopping just short of the full open labial shot frequently found and fawned over in hardcore porn. It is perfectly okay for the camera to dwell upon a slow-motion shot of jiggling breasts. Where however are the penises? Sure, there’s the odd Ewan McGregor or Harvey Keitel determined to get their John Thomases displayed in nearly every movie they appear in. But a real “actor” would never sully his reputation by exposing nothing more than his ass and bare chest.

If the idea here is that testicles and a cock represent a sensitive area and thus should not be displayed, then obviously the men who offer this bullshit excuse have clearly overlooked the sensitivity of the female mammary gland (in particular, the nip).

I submit to the American public that there are far more disturbing things to witness than naked people (violence, for starters) and, in particular, penises. In fact, the human body, as has been noted on more than one occasion by sundry dabblers and scriveners, is quite beautiful. And the idea that this beauty can’t sit squarely within R-rated territory like its mammary and outside labial counterparts is a crime against gender equality. And it’s really not much fun to boot.