Month / March 2007

by Edward Champion

Permanent Age

“What’s your permanent age?” asks someone who I do not care to name, as located by Maxine.

Well, let me try to answer this question. This morning, when I woke up, I had a permanent age of six years old as I giggled over a few juvenile things. This escalated to a permanent age of 42, because I had to do actual work, and then dipped down to about 22 or so when I headed into work and finished a nonfiction book that was written at an undergraduate’s level, but that I nevertheless enjoyed. I suppose when I recognized the book as idealistic nonsense, my permanent age shifted up to 32, only to dip down to a permanent age of 30, and rise to the age of 41 during a morning moment in which I had to be adult. During the early afternoon, my permanent age was in the shitter again, and I became 21 for about twenty minutes. Then I had to conduct an interview, and my permanent age shifted to 36. Not bad, given that this is older than my real age. Now my permanent age is somewhere around 74. Because I’m feeling quite exhausted and I complained to someone about “kids, these days” and may have even said, “Back in my day!” When I get dinner, my permanent age will return to somewhere around 35. But I’m hoping to downshift again by watching a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica tonight, because I’m behind, which will cause my permanent age to drop to 16.

Since I failed to measure the precise times and durations of these permanent ages, I’m afraid I cannot offer a sufficient answer. But that’s okay. Personally, I don’t care to be permanent anything. Because being permanent means being inert and capitulating curiosity. But I suppose permanent anything works well if you’re a cartoonist offering mundane observations about office life under the guise of “humor” while failing to find laughs in its true horrors. When the cartoonist in question is quite happy to be a fatcat by his own admission, then I’m wondering if the question is not so much an interesting philosophical debate to be shared across the blogosphere, but a veiled call to conform.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • The New York Sun has more news on the forthcoming statue devoted to George Plimpton. As previously reported here, and, yes, this is actually serious, there’s been some controversy on whether to portray Plimpton atop a horse, with his bicycle, or carrying literature and boxing gloves. What the Sun uncovers is that a mere $4,000 of the required $200,000 cost has been raised. It’s clear that Toby Barlow, the man organizing this project, is going to have to do better. Maybe the only way to foot the bill is to have the National Boxing Association sponsor the statue, although I’d hate to see a placard cemented to Plimpton’s sculpted left buttock reading “SPONSORED BY THE NBA.”
  • Book review cliche of the week: “Michael Gruber does a bang-up job incorporating it into his breathlessly engaging novel, The Book of Air and Shadows.” Am I the only person who sees the words “bang-up job” and imagines an author participating in an orgy? I promise to all who enlist my services that I will never use the words “bang-up job,” unless it relates to a viable copulative practice, and I shall never use the words “breathlessly engaging,” because if one is denied of oxygen, whether literally or metaphorically, one is not actually engaging with the world. One is, by dint of suffocation, coming close to expiring.
  • In Malaysia, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak is calling for “a nation of readers.” I look to my own nation and ponder whether such noble words can come from any of the politicians who purport to represent my interests.
  • I forgot to mention this, although several readers have been kind to point it out to me: it’s Memoir Week at Slate. And you know what that means: apparently, Sean Wilsey getting lot of blow jobs.
  • I’m about to crack open A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’ Daughter, as I do with any A.M. Homes volume that finds its way into my hands. Maud offers a few early thoughts. The memoir is expanded from a New Yorker essay that appeared in January 2005.
  • If you’re interested in Bay Area literary journal smackdowns, Debbie Yee compares Howard Junker with Wendy Lesser.
  • Bella Stander offers a report on the VaBook Festival, short for the less polite VGiniaBook Festival.
  • Alas, it appears that an American Idol-style literary show is in the cards. (via Quill and Quire)
  • Hey, New Yorker! If you’re going to devote a paragraph to a book as compelling as Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, do you think you can offer more than a condescending series of rhetorical questions? You are a magazine of great style and distinction, but I read this paragraph and I wonder if you have Radar or Entertainment Weekly employees on staff. Surely, this was a novel to farm out to Updike, yes? Oh well, at least Updike’s making the rounds on Isaacson’s Einstein bio.
  • The staff of The Wire, perturbed by Zodiac‘s indiscretions on the preternatural tidiness of reporter’s desks, are taking photos of Baltimore Sun desks for accuracy. (via Frances Dinkelspiel)
  • Philly Inquirer: “For a paper book to work the same way as the Internet book, readers have to sit by their computers and, whenever they come across a bold-faced word or phrase, click over to Walterkirn.com and hit the corresponding link. It’s a disruptive process. If you’re buying a physical book, you’re probably not the kind of person who wants to read long passages of text while sitting at your desk. It would be much easier to read the novel as it was originally presented.”
  • Scott compares The Yiddish Policemen’s Union with Roth’s The Plot Against America and Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams. Scott has some interesting thoughts, but I must ask, without singling anybody out in particular, why so-called literary people fail to account for Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Harry Turtledove, or Philip Jose Farmer (to name only three authors) in their comparisons. The hard line seems to be that parallel universes all started with Roth and Chabon. But there were plenty of writers dabbling intelligently in parallel universes well before these two authors-come-lately.