Month / April 2007

by Edward Champion

Roundup and a Callout

  • Going Postal‘s Mark Ames offers words on Virginia Tech. (Thanks, Richard!)
  • Scott Esposito responds to Cynthia Ozick’s “Literary Entrails.”
  • My response to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur is now at 2,500 words, and I still have considerably more to address. Rest assured, it will be unleashed before the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
  • I’m very excited to be covering Alternative Press Expo tomorrow, where I will likely be spending far too much money. If you have comics, particularly strange or unusual ones, to talk about, look for the balding guy wandering the Concourse with the microphone. The results will appear, as last year, in a series of forthcoming Segundo podcasts.
  • The Sharp Side thinks Lionel Shriver is a crap writer. (via Mark Thwaite)
  • If you thought that Will Self’s New York Times walk-a-thon was strange, New York Magazine has upped the fey ante by following Marisha Pessl as she loads up on coffee and cupcakes. It’s good to know that when it comes to literary writers, today’s media will devote considerable column inches not to the books in question, but what they do with their bodies. What next? A 2,000 word article on Zadie Smith and Z.Z. Packer bicycling cross-country?
  • Will Peter Carey win another Miles Franklin?
  • The 10 greatest novels for children. Any list along these lines that includes Melvin Burgess’s Junk is interesting.
  • John Freeman writes: “How, after all, could one review ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ without commenting upon the novel’s deeply humanistic vision? How will critics talk about former NBCC winner Jim Crace’s upcoming apocalyptic novel ‘The Pesthouse’ (which is set in America) without engaging with the very real political undercurrents caused by his flip-flopping of our greatest migration myths (having people trying to leave the country, rather than enter it)? How does one review a book like William T. Vollmann’s ‘Poor People’ without pausing for more than an aside to marvel how infrequently this population winds up in a book at all?” Well, it’s very simple. In Vollmann’s case, you observe the level of scholarship and the degree to which the book succeeds or fails at personal journalism. In the case of the two novels, you remark upon how thematically effective the narrative is. This has very little to do with politics, although I can see how a politically conscious reader might pick up certain connections. China Miéville and I recently had an interesting conversation about how an author’s imagination does, in fact, dwell outside of his political sensibilities. In Miéville’s case, the monsters that Miéville creates have nothing to do with his Marxist leanings.
  • Accordingly, since John Freeman seems to see politics in everything, I hereby challenge Mr. Freeman to a public debate in New York on this very issue, where I will duly demonstrate to Mr. Freeman that an open-minded reader can, in fact, read, write, and assess literature irrespective of politics.
by Edward Champion

Remember the Ladies

A year after Marisha Pessl became the Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chick with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Galleycat reports that there’s a new Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chick in the making named Rivka Galchen, who has a book called Atmospheric Disturbances and Other Sad Meteorological Phenomena.

Call me crazy, but there’s a title trend here, which I suppose would make this blog post a “trend piece” or perhaps a “trend blog post.” Since I am a philanthropist and I greatly desire to see more women in literary fiction, I hope to help all future Hot Young and Overeducated Literary Chicks get their book deals. With this spirit in mind, I have assembled a helpful list of future titles that might be used to acquire additional book deals:

Naughty Novelties in Quantum Mechanics
Geophysical Undercurrents in Close Proximity
Seismic Shifts and Other Assorted Miracles on the San Andreas Fault
Astronomical Gastronomy and the Burden of Astral-Intestinal Alignments
Zoological Bliss in the Existential Biosphere
Newton’s Ventricles and Ancillary Universal Gravitations
Metaphysical Heartbeats and the Critique of Pure Reason

by Edward Champion

Small Circulation Magazines in Trouble Because of Postal Hikes

As if the Independent Press Association dissolution wasn’t bad enough for small magazines, it seems that the new postal rate increase is going to decimate small circulation magazines. A last minute 758-page plan submitted by Time Warner and approved by the US Postal Service Board of Governors has called for an increase in mailing costs between 18 and 30 percent. Meanwhile, the big boys — Time, Newsweek, the like — they get to see their postal rates go down.

Fortunately, the Board of Governors has opened up a small window of public comment over the course of eight days — set to expire on April 25.

This is a crushing blow to independent magazines, the dead tree equivalent to net neutrality.

Fortunately, a site exists in which you can sign against these inequitable developments. If you care about a democratic magazine landscape and keeping the playing field level, do your part.