Year / 2007

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.
by Edward Champion

Hobbits

I’ve wondered why hobbits always seem to be employed in the service sector. You never really hear of hobbit attorneys, hobbit investment bankers, hobbit doctors, hobbit teachers, or hobbit intellectuals. Really, a hobbit’s only apparent purpose is to run around like an asshole and accompany humans and elves on their quests. Which makes them sidekicks. Thus, hobbits are there to provide nothing more than comic relief. But life isn’t just about providing comic relief. Even in the role of servant, one must take some responsibility for one’s actions.

So what was the point of hobbits? Why for example didn’t they get it on with elves and have a half-elf, half-hobbit love child from time to time? Hell, why didn’t they have any sexual desires? I presume that hobbits were small yet integral in some way to Middle Earth’s economy, there to befriend non-hobbits like Aragorn and Gandalf and to remain more or less subservient the entire time, never expressing a singular self-interest. Thus, I have developed the theory that hobbits were the Burger King employees and janitors of Middle Earth, even though they seemed to possess a good deal of free time. Perhaps they didn’t need a service sector because nobody was ordering frappuccinos and everyone had settled upon drinking standard mead and blowing smoke rings.

But let us consider vocation: When wandering outside of the Shire, hobbits are not unlike antebellum slaves. Unchained, to be sure, but still the token inferiors. Even when the hobbits hit Bree in Fellowship of the Ring, they were largely ancillary figures, there to observe rather than participate. It was almost as if all the other characters put up with them because they were cute and subservient, as opposed to the intellectual and cultural equal to the men and elves. Why, for example, were there separate rooms for hobbits and men at the Inn of the Prancing Pony? Even accounting for the fact that hobbits are smaller, why not equip the rooms to serve both hobbits and men? Wouldn’t it be more cost effective, particularly at a highly frequented inn with limited vacancies, simply to have a few small roll-away beds for hobbits for the larger rooms? That such an expense would be actively carried out by the Inn of the Prancing Pony suggests a more ominous Jim Crow-like treatment between hobbits and everyone else. While hobbits do not have dark skin, they have hairy feet, as if to imply that they are a Morlock-like underground savage that has been skillfully domesticated to serve the master race of warriors and wizards.

If you ask me, Tolkien had Nietzsche very much on the brain.

This is probably why I don’t care much for Tolkien.

(Thanks to Tao Lin for inspiring these thoughts.)