Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

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

Amazon Presents The Great Gatsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind since. “Bounty! The quicker picker-upper.”

“Whenever you feel like criticising any one,” he also told me, “just remember a little dab’ll do ya and all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. Think different.”

He didn’t say any more, betcha can’t eat just one, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, please don’t squeeze the Charmin’, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. Make a run for the border. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, an army of one, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Screw yourself. IKEA. Most of the confidences were unsought — R-O-L-A-I-D-S spells relief — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that Ivory, it floats! An intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon — it’s not TV, it’s HBO — for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. American Airlines. You’re going to like us! Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I’d walk a mile for a Camel. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. Diet Pepsi. Same time tomorrow?

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Say it with flowers. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. You can be sure of Shell. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. All the news that’s fit to print. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. Reach out and touch someone. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. Fly the friendly skies. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament” — it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic
readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. It’s everywhere you want to be. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. Just do it.

(With thanks to Paul Constant for aiding and abetting. Related news here.)

by Edward Champion

New Review: I Am Not Sidney Poitier

In today’s Chicago Sun-Times, you can find my review of Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier. And it’s rather fitting that much of my review ended up as a list of rhetorical (and possibly unanswerable) questions.

everett2As it so happens, just after filing the review and being wowed by the book, I learned that Everett happened to be in New York. And I was able to set up a rare interview with him (which will be airing as the next episode of The Bat Segundo Show, to be released very soon). Everett, who has avoided nearly every form of marketing for his books*, and who declared to me that he had no interest in the business of publishing or catering to an audience, identified his book as a “novel of ideas.” But I Am Not Sidney Poitier is also steeped in an old-fashioned sense of humor. Here’s a brief excerpt from the forthcoming Segundo installment, in which Everett explains the relationship between these two concepts:

Everett: There are no rules. I don’t believe in any rules when it comes to fiction. If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game. Probably when I’m working, if I can make myself believe it, then it’s fair game. Because I don’t know what you’re going to believe. And it depends on the work. A novel like Not Sidney, where much of it is more a novel of ideas and the narrator is of a certain sort, can make bizarre perceptions or representations of the world and have the one-dimensional county of Peckerwood County. Whereas in other works, that simply wouldn’t work. So the work talks to me. The most important part of the story is the story. And I can’t impose my feelings or my desire to write a certain kind of thing that day on it.

Correspondent: But in identifying Not Sidney as a novel of ideas, I would argue — and this is where we get into needless taxonomy arguments. But I should point out that you are essentially saying, “Well, this is a novel of ideas.” And maybe the story itself will matter on some basic entertainment level.

Everett: Oh no. The story still matters.

Correspondent: Okay. But I’m curious how committed you are to this idea of the “novel of ideas.” If it’s entirely a construct, should we believe in it entirely or should we believe in the ideas?

Everett: Well, if I’ve done it right, you should believe in it entirely. And superimposed upon this is the narrator’s concept of this being a story of ideas. But you can’t have — and this is not a rule, but, for me, I cannot have a novel where the story is secondary to anything. The world has to exist. And so I have to make it. And I have to make it believable. How I do that can vary and come across in any different number of trajectories or strategies or whatever.

* — This may answer, in part, Gregory Leon Miller’s query this weekend on why Everett’s work hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Hal Niedzviecki II

Hal Niedzviecki most recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #294.

Hal Niedzviecki is most recently the author of The Peep Diaries. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #47.

segundo294

[PROGRAM NOTE: At the 24:03 mark, a woman with a laptop demanded that Our Correspondent talk with less vivacity, suggesting that Our Correspondent was talking in a “disturbing” manner. Never mind that people sitting closer to us did not complain and that someone even approached Mr. Niedzviecki after the interview, wishing to know what the book was all about. Never mind that, prior to Mr. Niedzviecki’s arrival at the cafe, Our Correspondent observed said woman needlessly chewing out a happy couple for daring to laugh at a joke. However, in the woman’s defense, it is true that Our Correspondent did become quite excited when talking with Mr. Niedzviecki and perhaps raised his voice just a smidgen and perhaps should be pilloried in some form for daring to express considerable enthusiasm about Niedzviecki’s book. We are very well aware that, due to the present economy, enthusiasm has worked against us when trying to persuade various editors to hire us. And if this strange prohibition keeps up like this, there won’t be any enthusiastic people left working in media. (Indeed, there are some telling signs that the enthusiastic who are gainfully employed are beginning to lose their enthusiasm, and this saddens us.) But we note this incident in the event that listeners are confused as to why Our Correspondent and Mr. Niedzviecki began to talk quieter during the latter half of this program.]

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Considering a few definitions of reality.

Author: Hal Niedzviecki

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

Correspondent: But you’re assuming that the vulnerability is there because you are inadvertently transmitting information. What if you are cognizant of every single thing that you write? Every single tweet that you post? I mean, I don’t think you quite understood Twitter. I certainly don’t use Twitter in the way that you literally use it — in terms of answering the question, “What are you doing?” A lot of people use Twitter in different ways. I use it to exchange links and to brainstorm with other writers and other thinkers. “Oh, well that’s an interesting thought that you had on this!” And it’s a very valuable tool. In fact, I would say that Twitter is probably responsible for fifty 1,000-word pieces I’ve written in the last year. Or something like that. So I’m saying that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re assuming that everything you’re putting out there is personal. But if you’re careful about the personal, if you’re cognizant about the personal, this shouldn’t even be a problem.

Niedzviecki: Oh sure. Absolutely. That’s all well and good if you aren’t putting personal information online. The fact is that millions of people every day are putting personal information online. And that’s probably the #1 primary use of the Internet right now. So okay, your experience is slightly different.

Correspondent: But you’re saying that personal information is…

Niedzviecki: But that’s not really relevant to the question.

Correspondent: I think it is relevant. Is it perhaps a scenario in which you may be, or any of us may be, overstating the importance of our own personal information? Perhaps it really doesn’t matter. If I go ahead and type in “I had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch,” I don’t think that it’s a betrayal to the corporate empire. You know what I mean?

Niedzviecki: Well, I mean, it’s all gradations. I mean, again, this is a topic that I’m not even that excited about. I’m not incredibly hot under the collar. This is just one aspect of the whole phenomena of peep culture. Which is what I call being peeped by the other. We’re peeping ourselves. You know, we should just back up to the whole beginning of this thing, really. Can we do that?

Correspondent: Yeah.

Niedzviecki: Can we back up to this topic? Let’s do that.

Correspondent: Certainly. But if we want to go to the beginning, I mean, it’s not necessarily contingent on the Internet. People were exchanging information and humiliating before the Internet. As you even point out in the book, there was this notion of gossip. There was this notion of spreading rumors about people. We can even talk about the humiliation videos that you mention in this book. Like, for example, the Star Wars kid. Well, is it worse to have the so-called humiliation through a video as opposed to having somebody pilloried in the town square? “Hey, you’re an adulterer and you’re terrible!” And having people throw tomatoes at them? That, to me, seems worse. If you have to go ahead and do it, you may as well go ahead and do it in the form of a middleman here with the Internet.

Niedzviecki: Well, the Star Wars kid’s choice was not being put in stocks in the town square or being forced to wear the dunce cap around the village versus Internet humiliation. It’s not like there was a choice he had to make, right? He never had a choice one way or the other. The basic premise of the book is that pop culture is shifting to peep culture, and that peep culture is the process by which we garner entertainment through watching other people’s vibes. So in pop culture, we watch celebrities and professional entertainers. And now we have peep culture, where we kind of scroll through other people’s lives in the same way we would scroll through TV shows.

Correspondent: Everybody?

Niedzviecki: Not everybody. But a large majority of people. And we’re moving in, you know.

Correspondent: Well, a large majority. Are we talking 51% or 90%?

Niedzviecki: You know, I couldn’t tell you the exact percentage of people.

Correspondent: I think it’s important to have the exact percentage.

Niedzviecki: Well….

Correspondent: Just to get a sense of how much of an epidemic this is.

Niedzviecki: Uh, I’m not an alarmist. I’m not calling it an epidemic. It’s a cultural shift. What we’re doing is — okay, we want numbers. Then, we’ve got to look at reality television. That’s obviously a big part of this, let’s say. We know that ten million people watched the debut — the series debut — of Jon & Kate Plus 8 recently. Previous to that, there was a record five straight Us Weekly covers featuring their eight kids and their marital problems. Okay, that’s ten million people right there. You’ve got in America — you have another ten million people on Facebook. You’ve got your Twitter users. I don’t know how many of those there are. Of course, these categories naturally overlap. You’ve got your Flickr, your Twitter, your YouTube, your Google. I would say that that it’s hard to imagine too many people whose lives aren’t touched in some way by this move to peep culture. The number of people who are actively posting stuff online about their lives and that material is then being used by others for their amusement. It would be hard to give a precise number, but it is certainly — I’d have to say we’re looking at least half the American population who is involved in this.

Correspondent: Half the American population? ‘Cause you said ten million. And the American population is actually 300 million. So that is actually one…

Niedzviecki: I never said ten million.

Correspondent: You said ten million, for example, for this reality TV show.

Niedzviecki: I said ten million people watch that particular show.

Correspondent: Yeah. Ten million. 300 million people. What about the 290 million other people who…

Niedzviecki: But that’s just one show. Then there’s Facebook and Twitter and Google and blogging and every other thing I could think about.

Correspondent: We’re not even in double digits here percentage-wise.

BSS #294: Hal Niedzviecki II (Download MP3)

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