Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

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

Is Katie Roiphe Necessary?

Sixteen years ago — just a year before Kurt Cobain blew his brains out — Katie Roiphe wrote a book called The Morning After, in which she failed to grasp the basic moral concept that women who are date raped are indeed victims. Two years ago, when I interviewed this decidedly surly specimen, Roiphe still believed this. She had not altered her position one smidgen, and she seemed quite proud of this. It was as if she had gone to Princeton not to earn a Ph.D., but to pick up the complimentary barbeque set that a broken man hands you after you sit through his interminable sales pitch.

But two decades is a long time to coast. And the first question that any reasonable person should ask when reading Rophie’s latest nonsense is whether there even remains any practical use for Katie Roiphe. Why indeed is she even associated with a Web magazine that purports to be written by women for women? (Let’s answer that. Because Double X comprehends Third Wave developments about as well as J.J. Abrams. If you’re under 30 and you’re selfish in an anti-Bitch sort of way, then Double X is for you. The rest of the sad pack — meaning anyone who wears a rumpled suit, has dated hair, or has the effrontery to age — can be run down by the callous locomotive. Who is John Galt?)

This troubling idea that bell hooks and Maxine Hong Kingston don’t exist is reflected in Roiphe’s lede, which raids the three-year-old corpse of Betty Friedan for an argument about three-year-olds that Friedan never really made. Apparently, Facebook has brainwashed young mothers. These mothers have dared to put up profile pictures of their children in lieu of their own. And all this is “a potent symbol for the new century.” Never mind that Facebook, like all social networks, could be gone in about five years. Never mind that the privacy concerns fizzle somewhat with a website’s impermanence. And even if we can accept the viable notion that images of women do affect the cultural landscape, the Facebook mothers probably didn’t have Susan J. Douglas’s Where the Girls Are in mind.

Besides, this is small potatoes. We’re not talking about images on billboards or photos that saturate the mass media. We’re talking about thumbnails seen by strangers who are merely surfing around for friends. Roiphe doesn’t seem to understand that Facebook users can control whether or not other “friends” can see photos. She also doesn’t seem to understand that a substitute image for one’s self does not automatically mean that a Facebook user intends to project a persona. When I had a Facebook account, I once put up an image of Buster Keaton because I figured that it would make others smile. It wasn’t that I wanted to be Buster Keaton, although I admire Keaton very much. It simply projected the comic mood I was in at the time. Just as a parent’s kid’s photo projects that parent’s essence. And this really isn’t all too different from sharing a photo of someone special that you have in your wallet.

Roiphe doesn’t seem to ken that the private has morphed into the public. She also doesn’t seem to be aware that digital cameras have replaced the analog forefathers. The days where mothers would huddle around the table flipping through a photo album have been replaced by afternoons in which they can pass around an iPod Touch, or text these images to each other on their cells. Rather amazingly, it also hasn’t occurred to Roiphe that these mothers might wish to boast about their kids not out of hubris, but because it’s second-nature to who they are. Avoiding the camera may not even be a consideration.

And if these Facebook photos represent child exploitation, then I think the time has come to go after all those picture frame manufacturers who use children in the mockup photos you remove before you insert your own. Let’s make the bastards pay. And I’m wondering if a mother who shares a picture of her child on her laptop should likewise be pilloried because some stranger happens to observe the photo over her shoulder. After all, don’t the bitches have it coming? Much as those date rape victims do?

We tolerate another child’s squeaky sneakers because that’s what being an adult entails. It’s the same impulse that involves losing sleep during a kid’s early years. It’s looking at the world beyond yourself. Permitting children to grow and discover. Not letting your own hangups get in the way. And unless you’re a sad narcissist pining for another fifteen minutes, living is nothing to mourn over.

by Edward Champion

I Was Simply Told the Lines

She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men. But in real life, journalists are feeling the chill.

The stylish grandmother acted like a stammering child caught red-handed, refusing to admit any fault and pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism.

Have you thought about using even fewer than 140 characters? In a droll nod to shifting technology, there’s a British red telephone booth in the loftlike office that you are welcome to use but you’ll have to bring in your cellphone.

Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.

I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism. Newspapers are an “endangered species,” as John Kerry called us in a Senate hearing last week, just as the Vulcans are in the new prequel. He gave me that wry Spock look.

Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.

Newspapers no longer know how to live long and prosper. It’s enough to make a Vulcan weep.

The really complicated question is what she hopes to gain from this.

This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances.

How quaint.

I had dinner once with John and Elizabeth Edwards, when he first burst onto the national scene.

You could probably see your own name if you stayed long enough,

I heard about a woman who tweeted her father’s funeral. Whatever happened to private pain?

If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?

To save journalism, Google has to know my most intimate secrets?

I feel better for a minute, until I realize that the only reason he knew that I wasn’t so easily replaceable is that Google had been looking into how to replace me.

Class dismissed.

(Tip via Jason Boog)

by Edward Champion

Review: The Brandon Book Crisis

Brandon Scott Gorrell and Tao Lin’s The Brandon Book Crisis contains a considerable amount of white space, thereby reflecting the aesthetic of an Outlook email printout. One suspects that the people in publishing deal with such printouts on a regular basis, even as they tell each other not to print out emails. There is, after all, an environment to save. Do people print out emails anymore?

One is tempted to quote Lacan here. Or perhaps another French Situationist. Some writer who might prevent depression. The real is too depressing. Even if it’s only a recession. White space leaves most writers depressed. The after image of this white expanse on various pages: also depressing. Brandon Scott Gorrell and Tao Lin should not be faulted for failing to predict the reviewer’s mood. Reviewer has not yet had coffee and, only yesterday, entered into a controversial exchange on Twitter over Starbuck’s and non-Starbuck’s coffee that amused about four people. It is quite possible that The Brandon Book Crisis will amuse more than four people. I now have the PDF open at Page 17. I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry. But these two guys put out a book and I haven’t. It’s that white space again. They somehow knew. They are watching me. They are watching me attempt to negotiate a morning without coffee and, like the rest of the literary community, they are laughing at me. They will beat me down until I am reduced to one of Tao’s unpaid interns.

The book claims to have arranged its emails from Monday through Friday. This, as it turns out, is a lie. For shortly after reading Page 4, outlining the weekdays and the page numbers, we then must endure the shock of Page 5, which doesn’t have any text on it (unless one counts the page number in the lower left-hand corner). We then turn to Page 6 and we are greeted by the words, “THURSDAY APRIL 23.” Tao informs us in a chat transcript: “brandon book cover crisis in ‘full on’ mode.” Yes, this is a crisis. A crisis in design. A crisis in narrative. A crisis that will probably be ignored by Granta and Bookforum — but a crisis nonetheless. I am having a crisis just thinking about the crisis.

On Page 12, there is reference to the white space problem. These authors may know what they are doing

On Page 18, there is an email containing the phrase, “chat me, i can’t chat you, internet closed.” Is this an allusion to Brokeback Mountain? Often when I hit Alt-F4 on Thunderbird, I wonder if my relation to my inbox is sexual. I am tempted to tell Thunderbird, “I just can’t reply to all of you, baby.” And since this is close to a famous line in Brokeback Mountain, I get uncomfortable. Perhaps Tao Lin experiences the same level of discomfort. Kudos to him for popping that conceptual cherry.

I have not had any personal dealings with Thomson-Shore, Inc. But there is a minatory quality to the email exchanges.

The book has a helpful index explaining references to various media figures and companies. This will be a valuable handbook when the world has forgotten about us.

Perhaps this book is a way for a number of disenfranchised literary figures to find credibility. To defeat the monster of white space.

“Think I’m just going to copy/paste in word doc,” says me at 2:10 PM on Friday, April 24. A fast way to defeat white space. Now that I’m looking at all the time stamps, I’m realizing that these kids are up earlier than I am. It is quite possible that they are putting together a book without coffee. Maybe they are not afraid of the monster of white space. But if they are, then why do they put so much of it in this book?

Other quotes:

“If you email him cc me in the email.”

“We can convert the photo to grayscale and make it the Pantone Black.”

I’m wondering if this book is quietly urging me to apply for a job at Kinko’s. The authors could not know that I was having a nervous breakdown. But if you want to be reminded of a particular Outlook aesthetic and the monster of white space, you can read this book. It is too short for anyone to have a nervous breakdown. But the authors might. And that seems more than a bit needless.

by Edward Champion

Plans For My Literary Ego

I’ve been getting a number of emails about BEA. And by “number,” let’s just say that it’s not a big number. In fact, the number is so small that I have been spending hours trying to rebuild my dwindling ego and pretend that the number is actually greater than it really is. Keith Gessen probably gets more emails on the subject of BEA than I do. And he’s in Russia right now. And goddammit, that makes me so mad. Why should Keith Gessen get more emails than I do? I mean, I’m spending a good deal of my time burning pictures of Keith Gessen that I download on the Internet. Particularly the ones of him in which the top button or two of his shirt has been unbuttoned. He has replaced Steve Almond as my primary subject of hate. So fuck you, Keith Gessen. And fuck you, New York Post. (It seems to me that I should likewise throw a random newspaper into my sad mix of enmity and self-loathing. And, well, why not The New York Post? I will cut it out of my life from now on. It’s the only way to be sure.)

Before I tell you what my decision is about BEA, let’s talk about the world. After all, the world revolves around me — and by “world,” I’m talking about an extremely small part of the literary world, and by “literary world,” well, let’s just say that half of half of half of half of one percent of anybody who has had the good fortune to shake my hand in the past six hours really cares about any of this. But it is a world nonetheless. And it is an ego that must be groomed, trimmed, and otherwise packed into a precious valise.

But in thinking about the emails that are coming in and in thinking about how this relates to the solipsistic world I live in, it’s permitted me to think about the possibility of whether or not I might be attending BEA.

Let us establish my credentials: I have taken in every BEA that has ever happened like blow snorted off the top of a Hollywood hooker’s sternum. When it comes to BEA, there can be no better expert than me on how to attend, report, and take meetings. I am the BEA Master. There will be an area of the exhibition floor named after me. That is how much I matter.

But I am not so sure I can be coaxed to make a decision until BEA actually happens. Let’s just say that I welcome speculation on whether I will or will not be at BEA from anyone who cares to send speculations.

P.S. Please buy my paperback.

P.P.S. For something far less egotistical and commercial-oriented, consider the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Boys.

[UPDATE: In case you haven’t figured it out by now, the narcissism being satirized in this post belongs to Mark Sarvas, not me. But to set the matter straight, I have added a 2009 introduction to the 2005 post I wrote about Steve Almond. Other than this preface, I have not altered that post or the comments in any way. Unlike Mark, I actually maintain history and I own up. I have also emailed an apology to Steve Almond.

To read all the boring sordid details, you can go to that post. I’ve learned, without even going out of my way to do so, that Mark has been meaner and snobbier to far more people in the publishing world than I could ever possibly desire to be spiteful to. (And I fully admit that I’m not always the easiest guy.) But, boy, was I wrong about Mark big time.]