Month / March 2007

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Mike Ponder: “I’d say I am a businessman. A businessman who was lucky enough to have the talent to paint.” Ah, but what is talent when your true calling is generating money? It’s true that poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance man and it would be naive in the extreme to suggest that artists give up their day jobs and shirk their breadwinning duties. But does the true artist spend nearly moment possible producing art first and foremost, no matter what the circumstances? More advice from Ponder: “At the end of the day, if you are going to be successful as an artist you have to be successful as a businessman.” If this is true, then why doesn’t Thomas Pynchon taking meetings?
  • Jonathan Lethem talks with theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin. Video also available.
  • It seems that scrotum-shock isn’t confined to the States. The Hamas Education Ministry is removing Palestinian folk tales from school libraries because of “sexual innuendo.” Of course, an offhand reference to genitals is far less suggestive than a Mae West line and certainly less pernicious than a schoolyard taunt. But what’s even crazier is that Hamas has not only removed the book in question, but destroyed 1,500 copies.
  • Are Oscar Ameringer’s literary contributions being overlooked in Oklahoma because of his politics?
  • Nilanjana S Roy: “They have the air of seasoned explorers, emerging from the rain forest of literature with advice about how to avoid media pythons, the malarial interview (where you speak in a kind of delirium that lasts until you see what you’ve said the next morning in the paper) and other hazards of the festival life. The festival enthusiasts are the ones who’re comfortable leading the life of rockstars on a long world tour, sans the groupies and the psychedelic drugs.” I can report with some authority that authors are not immune to groupies and psychedelic drugs. And I’m certain that Alice Denham can agree.
  • Rose Wilder Lane, overlooked literary journalist?
  • Gwenda’s reports of bad AWP fashion have been memorialized by Carolyn Kellogg, although it would seem that Tayari Jones was the exception.
  • The horrors of 1980s stickers. (via Quiddity)
  • Seamus Kearney makes the case for epilogues.
  • 30 dead at a Baghdad book market.
  • Joshua Ferris observes that, of Granta’s recently announced Best Young American Novelists, 15 of 21 had MFAs. Maybe this was one of the reasons I wasn’t nearly as excited about Granta’s list as I wanted to be. In the end, isn’t good writing not about workshops, but about sitting on your ass and trying to write the best damn story you can? Personally, I find greater value showing my work to people I trust instead of sitting in front of a bunch of emaciated students who are more driven by uninformed envy than collective no-bullshit encouragement. An open environment in which you can count upon people to tell you the truth is far better than a stuffed classroom in which the same textbook tropes are encouraged. I feel the sorriest for bleary-eyed editors looking for something different.
by Edward Champion

Pardon the Shifting Design

In testing mode.

[UPDATE: Okay, I’m going to play with this design for a while, seeing as how there hasn’t been a drastic overhaul in more than a year. If you have any specific requests, please let me know and I’ll do my best to accommodate.]

[UPDATE 2: As an experiment, I have added BlogAds and a donations button to this site. This was not an easy decision for me to make, because, despite turning down many offers from advertisers over the years, I have tried to keep this site ad-free. But if even small literary quarterlies can ask for advertisers or donors, I have begun to wonder if my own diligent labors constitute a service.

I realize that some of you might view this as “selling out,” but I would rather be perfectly transparent with you. When I revived this website in December 2003 in an effort to track literary news, I had no idea then that, years later, it would transform into a second full-time job. I had no idea that I would be producing podcasts.

Now granted, I greatly enjoy doing all this. And I’m perfectly happy to carry on doing this, whether you contribute or not. But with newspaper book review sections dying and the media ecology changing, I figured that the time had come to take a chance. If the newspapers lack the resources to cover literature, then the burden shifts to us.

I’ve been footing the bill now for over three years, paying for extensive bandwidth so that people can listen to the many podcasts without interruption, spending at least twenty hours per podcast arranging interviews, carefully reading books, doing my best to ask the best questions I can under the circumstances, tweaking audio to the best of my ability, often staying up to an ungodly hour so that these podcasts are turned out on a weekly schedule.

If any of this has been of value to you, then feel free to donate or display your ad. If not, or you don’t have the cash, that’s okay too. The site, as it exists, will continue to operate for free. The only difference will be the advertisements in the top right corner.

I can assure you that any advertisements will not hinder my muckraking proclivities nor will they prevent me from pursuing tough questions. I can also assure you that, should this experiment prove somewhat successful, with even meager monies flowing in, I will work my hump off to give you additional content and track down unexpected individuals for future podcasts. If anything, my work ethic on this point is strong.

However you decide, I’d like to once again thank you for reading and listening.]

[UPDATE 3: Okay, I’ve discovered the culprit for IE users. I’ve temporarily disabled the top graphic, so that IE users can peruse this site with the content at the top of the screen. More enhancements to come. Thank you for your patience while I sort out the snags here!]