Month / June 2008

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Best headline of the week: Incest dungeon teen wants to see ocean. Sunday afternoon picnics and long walks in the park are swell too.
  • Amardeep Singh offers a report of Salman Rushdie at the New York Google audiences. Mr. Rushdie, who has refused interview requests for The Bat Segundo Show for his last two novels (no fault of the publicists here, I should note, but it’s safe to say that Mr. Rushdie will not be asked a third time; there are easily ten million more things that I would rather do than massage an author’s fragile ego), nevertheless believes in the Internet, which he used for his research. But he apparently doesn’t believe in the Internet enough to sign on for the Google Books project, which “could destroy the publishing industry.” Of course, he’s happy to sign on for Google Books if the authors are fairly compensated for their work. So the upshot is this: if the Internet (or anything for that matter) serves Mr. Rushdie’s purpose, well then it’s all fine and dandy for Mr. Rushdie! For in Mr. Rushdie’s head, it’s all about Mr. Rushdie all the time! (And has Rushdie ever spared a thought for Hitoshi Igarashi, who was knifed to death for translating The Satanic Verses? Or the British taxpayers who paid his £10 million tax bill to provide security for him?) Is there a single brain cell in Mr. Rushdie’s noggin devoted to another person in the universe? Is his talent worth enduring his solipsism? I think not. There are cutthroat lawyers I know with more empathy.
  • And speaking of the positive relationship between online access and book sales, what do we have here? (via Booksquare)
  • Edward Albee at 80: still full of piss and vinegar. (via Books, Inq.)
  • What the hell is going on at the Observer? It appears the paper has been filling up its pages with Livejournal entries written by cynical singles. What next? The print equivalent of live-blogging the season finale for some major television show? I’ve complained long and loud about the vapid articles within the New York Times Sunday Styles section, but the Observer now makes the Gray Lady look like a depository for Kenneth Tynan-style sophistication.
  • Jeff observes that the Atlantic is also going downhill.
  • Borges and Chesterton! A link to many other links, which will get you very pleasantly lost indeed.
  • Here’s a 6,500 word essay that can best be summarized as follows: Goddam you, Giller Awards! (via Quill & Quire)
  • Jamelah Earle offers an empirical reading survey, complete with hand-drawn graphs.
  • Catherine Breillat + Jules-Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly + Asia Argento. This could either be a really brilliant or a really terrible combination. And apparently, it was a troubled production.
  • As Orthofer points out, the IMPAC winner will be announced sometime today.
  • Benjamin Lytal on a BS Johnson reissue.
  • Finally, last but not least, Maud Newton’s award-winning Narrative essay is now up, and it’s a brave and unflinching essay that may be one of the best short pieces I’ve read this year.
by Edward Champion

Segundo Torrents

I’ve learned that a number of people have been trying to download the Bat Segundo torrent packs without success. My apologies for this. The original Segundo torrents bit the dust on an old hard drive partition that has, rather magically, been resuscitated. In an effort to offer a quick fix, I have attempted to reseed the existing files, but I have been informed that this process will take 28 days and 6 hours to effect. Because of this, I’ll be setting up repackaged torrent packs for all the shows in the next few weeks, apprising you all of the updated links, while also providing a few additional torrent packs that should get both torrent packs and existing shows caught up to Show #220. Bear with me. There’s a lot I’m juggling right now.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Like, oh my God! What the hell is going on? Chuck Palahniuk is writing books and I like totally can’t understand him! I mean, like, why is this Palahniuk guy writing about porn? Don’t you like automatically get VD if you have sex with more than one person at a time? Is there a position other than missionary? In Evanston, you get arrested if you even think of downloading porn. Or so my good mama told me. And she was always right! But thankfully I can take my decency to the NYTBR, a respectable publication terrified of printing the word “bulls__t.” God bless America! (via Syntax of Things)
  • John Updike lectures: what’s so American about American art? But the real curious thing about this speech is whether Updike dared to read out his footnotes in front of a crowd.
  • Publishers are often demanding their top-sellers to pump out a book a year, and the article has a quote from hack novelist Robert B. Parker that is truer than he realizes. (via Sarah)
  • There are some days in which you want to kick a spoiled fanboy in the teeth for his unwillingness to try out anything that even remotely strays from the beloved canon. And then there are other days when you just laugh your ass off over how petty they are.
  • The International Society for Humor Studies is the place where those who have not laughed in over a decade arrive when their services as human beings are no longer required. The rest of us go to an IHOP and cry when the blueberry syrup runs out. (via Bryan Appleyard)
  • Michael McClure on why we still need the spirit of the sixties. (via Booksurfer)
  • Amazon UK and Hachette Livre UK are duking it out over who gets the greater spoils. Amazon’s response? “As a company we do not comment on our relationships with publishers.” As concerned citizens, we do not comment on our relationships with avaricious asshats. (via Booksquare)
  • Colleen Mondor has quite rightfully taken an advertising blog tour concept to task. I had similar thoughts in 2005 when Kevin Smokler did something similar with his Virtual Book Tours. (Smokler, it should be pointed out, has abandoned this idea for this sounder idea that benefits everybody.)
  • The Internet is killing off porn theaters in Bogotá.
  • And if you need an audio alternative to yet another dismal and soporific installment of the Slate Audio Book Club — where you can hear Troy Patterson, who sounds as if he’s smoked a good deal of skank weed, flex his purported but nonexistent acumen with a CliffsNotes summary of Anna Karenina (I managed to get to the 4:22 mark before Alt-F4ing) (and fuck me, this is a longass sentence with too many asides) — this CBC podcast has Canadians getting into a tizzy (one getting a stomach ache!) over Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.