Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

2009 is Boring By Comparison

At the bash at Jimmy’s that Warner Brothers records gave for Alan Price (he wrote the score for “O Lucky Man!” and performs in the film), Malcolm McDowell’s cock was the center of attraction. The wife of a rock writer couldn’t take her eyes off of his pants and she said she’d give a year of her life to be with Malcolm — in them. Malcolm posed for photos with Alice Cooper. Alice wore teeny hot pants which showed his inverted belly-button and little else. He said the last film he saw was “Sleuth” and he had to take it easy because a fan got him in the head with a tequila bottle in Texas.

Ed McCormack of Rolling Stone sat on the floor and showed off his Russ Tamblyn haircut. Fran Lebowitz of Inter/view sat on a barstool and showed off her new figure. Alan Price sloshed up to Jude Jade O’Brien and tried to convince her that ignorant people will understand “O Lucky Man!” and Jude said that everyone in the world is ignorant and Alan called her a snob and Jude yawned in his face. Jude, earlier, asked Malcolm McDowell if his bedroom had a mirror on the ceiling. Lindsay Anderson looked uncomfortable. An r&r man vomited while talking to Alice Cooper and Alice said it was cool and they continued as if nothing had happened. A stench filled the corner of the room. Lisa Robinson left the party. Everybody left the party, except six people, who talked about the sweetness of Malcolm. The joints came out.

From “Hype! Hype! Hooray!” by Arthur Bell, The Village Voice, June 21, 1973, p. 12.

Yes, you can now find the Village Voice inside Google News Archive Search results. 3,000 word columns devoted to science fiction, Andrew Sarris reporting from Cannes, Jill Johnston’s feminist columns. It’s certainly a lot more exciting than anything published in newspapers today. Or even anything published in Salon or the Huffington Post. We’re all pussies by comparison. Yes, people were actually paid to write this stuff. And here’s the thing. They were encouraged to take chances. Do you want to save newspapers? Do you want to save culture? Do you want to save the publishing industry? Well, take a trip down Memory Lane and see what used to be done. It would certainly be a start. Also, grow some balls.

by Edward Champion

The Critics

thecriticThe critics fidgeted in their fat chairs, boasting of long lunches with publicists and grand gifts from studios, while waiting for the descent into darkness. They were all men – or, at least, the kind of inactive men who were becoming more commonly accepted in the early years of the twenty-first century. They couldn’t be bothererd to take a stand, unless you counted the pretentious essays they wrote for well-funded websites (and maybe one of those rare dead tree outlets) that only a handful of snobs regarded. They could talk for hours about the Italian Neorealists, but they would never dare fly to Italy unless someone else was footing the bill and their assistants had remembered to obtain passports.

The critics were truly amazing – not because of what they said or wrote about movies – but because they represented a sad and peculiar type of human specimen who remained almost completely out of touch on almost every important issue. You could call up these critics and ask them to rattle off Takuya Kimura’s last eight roles, but you couldn’t get them to say anything intelligent about the subprime crisis or the rising unemployment rate or Goldman Sachs. You couldn’t possibly get them to remark upon the warm smell of a Louisiana cypress or the first time they had truly loved a woman. But they could tell you of such moments that occurred within the woeful world of cinema. That tree’s slight sway in that one Tarkovsky shot. Was it intentional? It was at the 33:42 mark on the DVD, and it looked better in Blu-Ray than the torrent. And what had Kent Jones said about it at that panel that twenty-three civilized people had attended?

The critics would fight long and hard over whether Vertovian or Eisensteinian montage had made more of a cultural impact, but they would never stand up for the colleague who lost his job because he was considered too old and too wise. The critics would never look out for the young whipper-snapper who was lucky to have a job. The critics’s asses were relentlessly fixed to their chairs and it would be difficult to extract them. And, if one must delve down a sad opportunistic path, it might make a good reality TV show to see if these men could perform honest labor and demonstrate the extent of their bravado.

But there was a movie to write about. No notes required. The fastidious days of erudition were over. This would be a 300 word review. Oh Christ, longer than 90 minutes? Subtitles? Hope I don’t fall asleep. But there’s that junket tomorrow. Too bad I don’t have the balls to ask a real question.

The lights went down. The darkness might have cloaked the critics if the professional exercise had not been so transparent.

by Edward Champion

Roundtable Discussion Coming in September

knightsround

As any person keeping tabs on the publishing industry knows, there are so many high-profile books coming out this year that it’s difficult for some of the books that aren’t written by Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, and Nicholson Baker (as good as these authors are) to get the credit they deserve.

It has therefore become necessary to unleash yet another roundtable discussion for a particularly exciting title sometime during September. For those readers who have enjoyed our previous roundtable discussions of Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, Eric Kraft’s Flying, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap, and various other books, this September symposium will operate along similar lines.

I cannot reveal the book at this time. But I can tell you that the book is a highly ambitious novel. I can also tell you that there are eight vowels in the book’s title and three counts of one letter in the author’s name.

I should have more details about the book in question when we get closer to pub date. And we’ll reveal the book early enough so that those wishing to follow along can do so.

by Edward Champion

An End to Permanence?

WordPress informs me that 2,831 posted entries on this blog are presently “Uncategorized.” If I possessed some tremendous treasure trove of expendable income — for time, as we all know, is the only commodity presently tradeable among regular people — I might very well sort through these entries and eventually finish the long duty of corralling these stray textual swine to their taxonomic holding pens. But, even assuming that these entries were feral animals deserving of such virtual domestication, a position that is highly questionable, the journey wouldn’t end there. One sifts through these past posts knowing that the links are, in most cases, invalid and therefore useless to anyone hoping to follow a thread or pursue a path to knowledge. The Wayback Machine only takes us so far. It was fond of taking snippets of websites every six weeks or so in the early noughts. There are, for example, eight snapshots of this website as it existed in 2001. And I don’t know what’s more embarrassing: (1) the needless braying of a young man in his mid-twenties confessing his failings with women and his predictable liberal leanings or (2) the fact that the “archived” site didn’t correctly extract the code, causing one 2001 “snapshot” of this website to crash within Firefox’s most recent iteration.

Such past peregrinations perhaps place an undue importance on what I wrote at a particular time. I read my own thoughts and feelings and wonder who the hell this guy is and why so many people believed in my bullshit at the time. There is a temptation to kill the early entries that are even now still publicly available on this domain. (Indeed, when Return of the Reluctant — as this site was then called — “returned” in December 2003, it did so with the proviso that everything written before that time never happened. The impulse to destroy one’s own work is so casually cavalier!) Some of those entries are locatable on my hard drives, but I wasn’t nearly as precise with my archiving and backups as I might have been. So how many thousands of words have been lost forever? Half a decade later, I’m not sure that I would approve of my extirpating twentysomething self. And there are likewise entries written by me even three years ago which I presently do not approve of. But I now find myself required to preserve everything — the posts, the comments (even the nasty ones), et al. But let’s say that I were to be killed by a car tomorrow. Would anybody even bother to preserve this website? Would any of this website be preserved? Would it even be worth preserving? Maybe I will indeed puff up and die, as The Anthologist‘s Paul Chowder suggests.

Even some of the data recorded on third-party sites and featured on these pages, such as the now-defunct AudBlog, is not recoverable. While I became better at using common data formats and hosting the content on these pages over the years, I have proven, like many people creating things on the Internet, exceptionally optimistic that many websites will stick around. If YouTube were to somehow fold tomorrow, then numerous embedded videos — a number of which reflect my own creative efforts — would be as useless as the few 5 1/4″ diskettes I still have in a file cabinet containing thoughts, essays, and writings from twenty years ago. It’s probably all juvenalia. But maybe there’s some vital thought or feeling in there that I wasn’t quite ready to take on.

William T. Vollmann has amusingly styled websites as “a particularly hated category” in his endnotes for Imperial. I believe his enmity to originate largely from the lack of permanence, our common failure to note a set of thoughts and feelings expressed at a particular point in time. We’re not just talking about preserving words. There’s also a type of moderation that goes over the line. There are at least six websites that I have stopped visiting — a number of them that boast of being “civilized” places — because their immature proprietors saw fit to delete my critical but by no means trollish comments. Some thoughts are better left unspoken or censored. How many uncomfortable truths are lost to tomorrow’s historians because of these knee-jerk impulses?

At the risk of echoing bigoted reactionaries like Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel, and (soon) John Freeman, there remains a double-edged sword. How many of our immediate thoughts should be loosened from our minds? I must again applaud Twitter for ratcheting up the speed and limiting the number of characters, thereby solving several expressive problems. My stupid thoughts and immediate expressive impulses now have a home there, for better or worse. And these ostensible “blog entries” have transmuted from ephemeral roundups into lengthy essays. But who am I to judge the quality? Historically speaking, people have been less interested in what I often spend several hours writing and researching and have been decidedly more intrigued with something I’ve assembled in 20 minutes. (The problem, incidentally, isn’t limited to blogs. John Banville has recently raised his objections to such perceived apartheid.) Perhaps the “rushed” writing is better. (For any stopwatch enthusiasts in the peanut gallery, I have now spent about 75 minutes writing this post.) Or perhaps we can only make distinctions based on the temporal commodity observed at the onset of this essay.

Perhaps this is too much introspection. My own thoughts on these very important issues may not mean anything to you. But at least I have the solace of knowing precisely how I felt on the subject on August 3, 2009. It is very probable that I will feel differently in a few hours. The text here may not be permanent, but I am doing my best to pretend that I am throwing a packed bottle into a sea. Should I change my mind later in the week, I will certainly do my best to note it. Such “journalism” may be the only way to mimic textual permanence. But no matter what the form, it remains our duty to preserve. Human minds and hearts change, but if we hope to witness these magical developments, then we must do better.

by Edward Champion

Are Bookstores Being Too Censorious With Author Events?

Jennifer Weiner is a best-selling author. And while her latest novel, Best Friends Forever, proved popular enough to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, this didn’t stop a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Framingham, Massachusetts from raising a censorious eyebrow.

Some bookstores have begun instituting informal policies which preclude authors from using four-letter words during a public reading. And even dependable draws like Weiner are being asked to hold their tongues. These developments — reflected most recently in the Weiner case — raise new questions about just how much an author is allowed to get away with in the 21st century and whether bookstore policies that are understandably intended to protect children are going too far.

The trouble for Weiner began when she playfully announced the “potty-mouthed” nature of her Best Friends Forever book tour on Twitter. Shortly after her Philadelphia reading, Weiner later tweeted that she had received a warning:

weinertweet

Weiner carried on with the Framingham gig without setting off any F-bombs, and applied her saucy language instead to the inscriptions. (After tweeting about the Framingham event, the organizer of a subsequent off-site event in St. Louis encouraged Weiner to be extra raunchy.)

“I can’t imagine it’s a blanket B&N policy,” said Weiner. “I kicked off the Best Friends Forever tour at the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Triangle in New York City, and I said ‘cock’ like nine times and told a story about a Hitachi Magic Wand, and the manager seemed perfectly okay with it (my poor editor, who brought her parents to the reading, not so much). As much as I’d like to turn this into a ‘corporate stiffs censor freewheeling lady writer because the world hates it when a lady succeeds’ story, I honestly think it was just this one bookstore, that one afternoon, making a not-unreasonable request.”

A list of questions was sent to Mary Ellen Keating, Barnes and Noble’s senior vice president of corporate communication and public affairs. But there was no response. I was able to reach Margaret Moore, the community relations manager of the Framingham store, by phone. But she was extremely nervous, even when I assured her that I was merely determining questions of policy. I did receive a return phone call from Maddie Hjulstrom, a regional community relations manager at Barnes and Noble, who was gracious enough to talk with me.

Hjulstrom informed me that the email had been sent by Moore when Moore had “learned that Ms. Weiner’s language was colorful at her discussions.”

According to Weiner, the Framingham controversy arose out of concerns that the reading area was adjacent to the children’s section and that Weiner’s scheduled reading time — 3:00 PM — would be too early to account for the hallowed ears of tots.

“Because the event was on a Sunday afternoon,” said Weiner, “I think the bookstore managers reasonably expected that there would be kids there, and felt that they could reasonably ask me to tone down the cussing.”

This was confirmed by Hjulstrom, who told me that the objections had to do with the microphone’s close placement to the children’s department and the possibility that Weiner’s amplified words might drift like cigarette smoke into a 1980s restaurant’s nonsmoking section.

“We want to be respectful of young families and children,” said Hjulstrom. “We don’t regulate where children are in our store. At 3:00 PM, it might be a problem.”

Had Barnes & Noble ever received any customer complaints because of an author or a poet using salty language during a reading? Hjulstrom told me that she couldn’t give me an example of the Framingham store having received a single customer complaint, but that the region, as a whole, had received a few complaints.

The Barnes & Noble “no salty language” policy is, according to Hjulstrom, “not a written policy, just common courtesy.” It is something that is determined on a case-by-case basis.

“All we can do is ask,” said Hjulstrom. “We don’t enforce. We don’t kick them out of their store. We just ask them to respect the children who are in the stores.”

I asked Hjulstrom what might happen if an author used salty language, but did not receive a single customer complaint.

“I’m not comfortable going into what ifs,” replied Hjulstrom. “I just want to deal with the facts.”

But the prohibition causes one to wonder why bookstores — even with the possibility of a child lurking around a bookstore late at night — would be so offended by a monosyllabic exclamation that anyone who has ever stubbed a toe is quite familiar with. Were there efforts by Weiner and Barnes and Noble to broker a last-minute deal?

“We didn’t try to broker a compromise mostly because there wasn’t time,” explained Weiner. “The best solution would have been either to hold the event somewhere else, or after dark, and with just over twenty-four hours, on a weekend, to either reschedule or relocate, that just didn’t seem feasible. And again, once I got over my reflexive ‘the MAN is trying to SHUT ME UP’ paranoia, it didn’t seem like a crazy thing to ask. I’ve got little kids, and if I took them into a bookstore on a Sunday afternoon to pick up the latest Sandra Boynton or ‘Junie B. Jones,’ I probably wouldn’t be thrilled to find some lady standing behind a microphone talking, as I tend to, about ‘wall-to-wall cock.'”

Still, independent bookstores such as San Francisco’s The Booksmith have conducted numerous author events in its children’s section, closing the section off to make room for the audience to sit down. Booksmith co-owner Praveen Madan informed me that, while there are generally no kids around at the time of the event, his bookstore doesn’t make any concessions if an event takes place in the middle of the day.

“We take freedom of speech very seriously and even the suggestion of us laying down any kind of censoring guidelines for authors makes me cringe,” said Madan. “And the issue here is more than freedom of speech. We believe it’s important for authors to be authentic and credible, and sometimes being authentic requires saying things that might end up offending some people. I would rather shut down the bookstore and sell falafels than try to engineer an author’s talk to make the author more palatable for a certain audience. You should be clear about what business you are in. We are in the business of intellectual discourse and opening people’s minds to new ideas and possibilities. If you want to be in the business of reinforcing people’s existing belief systems, than you should run a religious institution or radio talk show, not a bookstore.”

It’s also worth observing that prohibitions on what an author can say at a reading can sometimes have unexpected side effects. As Tayari Jones observed on her blog recently, the author can feel oddly shamed when contending with a complaint.

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, formerly of McNally Jackson and now working hard to open the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene this autumn, says that there was never a policy prohibiting language or controversial topics at an author event when she worked at McNally. But she did mention that she hoped to be more sensitive to such matters at Greenlight.

“We don’t intend to set any blanket policy,” said Bagnulo. “I think for the most part we will trust our customers to know whether an author is going to be inappropriate for their children or potentially offensive to their own sensibilities. As long as we make clear from the outset what the event is likely to contain, we won’t try to restrict or prohibit authors from anything they’d like to say.”

Even if the event is scheduled in the middle of the day?

“Not unless it’s an event specifically geared toward kids,” replied Bagnulo. “For example, at McNally we held a Halloween event that had kids programming earlier in the day, and some adult authors reading later that had lots of graphic blood and gore.”

Before the Framingham incident, Weiner had never received any complaints from a bookstore for her act. But censorship issues aren’t limited to the big box stores. Weiner alluded to an incident that came from an ostensible independent:

“In 2001, when Good in Bed came out, I did hear from one independent bookstore somewhere in the Midwest that an older gentleman had objected to a cover featuring the book’s poster (naked legs and cheesecake) in the window. But that’s as close to censorship as I’ve come.”

For what it’s worth, Weiner did say that she would do an event at the Framingham bookstore again: “I’d just make sure it was an evening event, or that it was held somewhere far, far away from the innocent ears of children.”

“In general, we feel that authors these days have become rather conservative and risk averse because they are trying to become bestsellers and are afraid of stirring controversy,” said Madan. “I wish more authors would pick topics that might be controversial and not worry about offending people. There are important topics being ignored and we all tend to surround ourselves with people we agree with and we like.”

“I think that indie bookstores work to create an environment of mutual respect between authors and audiences,” said Bagnulo, “where what is controversial is taken in context as part of the conversation, and there’s enough transparency of intention that people are unlikely to be offended.

“It’s not a bad idea to mention ahead of time, ‘Hey, I work blue,'” said Weiner, “but it’s never been a problem in the past, and I don’t really expect it to be a problem going forward.”