Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

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

RIP Derek Weiler

weilerI was shocked to learn the terrible news that Derek Weiler, editor at Quill and Quire, has passed away at the ridiculously young age of 40. Derek and I had many heated arguments here in the comments and through email. (He once called me “pathological.”) But despite our feisty exchanges, Derek was a very fair-minded and reasonable man who deserved to live much longer. And I enjoyed our volleys. He had the balls to take me on, and the decency to understand positions that were contrary to his own, which I can’t say about a lot of editors. My profound condolences to Derek’s family and friends for this terrible loss.

by Edward Champion

Amazonfail: A Call to Boycott Amazon

It’s been called #amazonfail on Twitter, but it represents the greatest insult to consumers and the most severe commercial threat to free expression that we’re likely to see in some time. Amazon has decided to remove certain books that they deem “adult” from their ranking system. But the “adult” definitions include such books as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Amazon link) (screenshot), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (Amazon link) (screenshot), Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (Amazon link) (screenshot), John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (Amazon link) (screenshot), and numerous other titles. [NOTE: These titles have now been ranked again. But please see UPDATE 11 at the bottom of this post, which contains additional links and screenshots. Amazon is still deranking many titles, but only seems to be restoring the ones directly called out by multiple sources.] Books that, in some cases, have fought decades to gain literary respectability have become second-class overnight because of Amazon’s draconian deranking policy.

To add insult to injury, such anti-Semitic texts as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Amazon link) and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Amazon link) remain within the ranking system while the less offensive books named above are considered too “adult.” In other words, if you’re a writer who has written openly about sex, Amazon considers you worse than an anti-Semitic writer who helped initiate pogroms and concentration camps.

As Kassia Kroszer noted, this is an offensive and unacceptable gesture from Amazon to the many readers and writers who make the publishing industry what it is. This is retail maneuvering of the most spineless and despotic form. It amounts to a store treating adults, who are informed individuals who can make up their own minds about how “adult” something is, as if they are incapable of independent decision making. It is a betrayal of the community that keeps Amazon thriving with the customer reviews. It is an insult to any author or reader who has dared to take a chance.

This decision must be responded to by a complete and total boycott of Amazon’s services. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM AMAZON unless they restore the ranking system. Boycott Amazon and let them feel the sharp pincers of your wallet going somewhere else. Instead of supporting a corporate behemoth who wants to put up the equivalent of a beady curtain at a video store for many titles that don’t deserve it (including numerous GLBT and sex-positive books), go to an independent bookstore who will treat you with inclusive respect. Remove all links to Amazon from your websites. Let Amazon know precisely how you feel in these economically uncertain times, and then maybe they’ll think twice about treating you as if you are unthinking cattle.

We can make a difference in this. We made a difference back in February with the Facebook TOS snafu. We can make a difference with this needless and demeaning ranking system. Boycott Amazon. Because a retailer should never be in the position of determining what is “adult” or salable. As the old maxim says, the customer is always right.

UPDATE: See also thoughts from Mark Probst, a petition to protest the policy, and Google bomb efforts from Smart Bitches. Also, as many helpful people on Twitter have noted, the Amazon customer service line is 800-201-7575. Although we may want to see if we can track down the executives who enacted this ridiculous policy and hold them accountable instead.

UPDATE 2: Goddammit, that’s the last straw. Nobody deranks Jonathan Ames and gets away with it. Here are the numbers for the Amazon Board of Directors. Flood all these people with your complaints on Monday morning.

Thomas O. Ryder (914) 244-5782
William Gordon (650) 233-2750
Myrtle Potter (650) 225-1000
Alain Monie (206) 266-1000
L. John Doerr (650) 233-2750
Tom Alberg (206) 674-3000
Patricia Stonesifer (206) 709-3140

UPDATE 3: On Twitter, the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles reports that Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener has told him that there was recently a glitch in the sales rank feature and that he is working to correct the problem. I am likewise pursuing investigations to get Amazon’s side of the story.

UPDATE 4: Of course, if the glitch was only just “recently” discovered, the big question here is why Amazon told Mark Probst two days ago that the company was now in the practice of excluding “adult” material in some searches. For that matter, why did Amazon offer the same answer to author Craig Seymour? Something is fishy. I have left voicemails and emails for Amazon spokespersons. What they do not realize is that I am a rather tenacious fellow. If they do not answer me tonight, starting tomorrow, I will be contacting them once every hour until they offer a reasonable answer to these many questions.

UPDATE 5: An Amazon search for homosexuality revealing anti-homosexual books in the top results is more than a “glitch.” In the comments, it has been reported that if you search for Olympia Press and Cleis Press through Amazon, the results have been diminished with this “glitch.” Meanwhile, here is coverage from Foreign Policy, The National Post, and The Associated Press. Tiara Shafiq has called for Amazon alternatives. There will doubtless be more news as Amazon tries to mop up this morass on Monday. And it would very much be in Amazon’s interests to “comment further” on the “glitch” that has been in effect since February.

UPDATE 6: Dear Author has dug up metadata that would suggest not so much a “glitch,” but a conscious effort on Amazon’s part to exclude books.

UPDATE 7: As of Monday afternoon, I have left eight voicemails for various contacts at Amazon and they will not return my calls. Also, the main Amazon corporate number — 206-622-2325 — appears to have been disconnected. We still have nothing from Amazon elaborating on the “glitch” that they are working on.

UPDATE 8: I have sent numerous emails and left repeated voicemails to Patty Smith (Director of Corporate Communications), Drew Herdener (Senior Public Relations Manager), and Dean Falvy (Amazon’s legal representative). These are all people who should really be going on the record and answering very specific questions about the “glitch.” But these spokespersons have refused to return my calls. And I have learned that they are not returning calls from other journalists.

UPDATE 9: Still no response from Amazon in my ongoing voicemail efforts. Some speculation that this was a hack has been debunked. Meanwhile, Mike Daisey claims inside info to The Stranger.

UPDATE 10: The metadata theory promulgated by Dear Author seems to me the most reasonable explanation (and Jane now has spreadsheets up of the books with metadata categories). See also Scrivener’s Error and this theory from an inside coder.

UPDATE 11: Amazon is now pretending as if the “glitch” appears has been rectified as of 5:30 PM EST. But here’s what’s interesting. The specific titles that I linked to offered direct links to have been ranked again. But many other books are still deranked, including such as Andrew Sean Greer’s The Story of a Marriage (Amazon link) (screenshot), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (Amazon link) (screenshot), and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (Amazon link) (screenshot). So is Amazon only ranking those titles that people are singling out? In other words, if the “glitch” is being fixed, then why does it only apply to the titles specifically linked to on other sites, rather than an across-the-board metadata value?

UPDATE 12: Patty Smith responds to some of my inquiries.

UPDATE 13: Andrew Sean Greer writes in the comments: “Well all I know is the paperback of The Story of a Marriage came out last week but you can only see it by searching directly, not by looking at sales lists of literary fiction, etc. The equivalent of having it for sale only by asking the bookseller for something behind the counter. *sigh* Glitch, hacker, cataloging error, it still hits a writer where it hurts. Nobody likes their new book to be invisible except if you know where to look. Isn’t book buying all about browsing for unexpected treasures?”

UPDATE 14: James Marcus, author of Amazonia, offers a lengthy response at Propeller. Meanwhile, Sara Nelson offers a contrarian take, suggesting that Amazon has every right to determine what it wants to sell.

UPDATE 15: The New York Times‘s Motoko Rich investigates. Shockingly, I actually agree with the smug Daniel Mendelsohn for once. But more interesting than this is that all the publishers who Rich contacted failed to comment on the record. In other words, we should be reminded by this setback that Amazon holds a needless vise-like grip on the publishing industry. But are we willing to accept such a hold when Amazon’s data can be so easily manipulated or modified?

by Edward Champion

Review: Observe and Report (2009)

observeandreport

Observe and Report‘s most memorable moment involves the appropriately named Randy Gambill’s penis, which flaps in slow motion beneath Gambill’s developing pot belly as Seth Rogen chases him in a mall. Gambill, who the IMDB reports is making his big screen debut with this scrotal ballet, is not an actor of much range. His character has spent a good portion of the film flashing people. And now he has flashed us. I was neither shocked nor offended by Gambill’s flaccid member, but I must commend Gambill and writer-director Jody Hill for going out of their way to give us a flapping penis in a mainstream comedy. Alas, the moment is neither funny nor amusing. Indeed, the penis here is quite gratuitous. It simply just is. Beyond pushing the penis camera time beyond Graham Chapman’s famous flash in Life of Brian, the penis remind us that we’re watching a film that may have been cooked up in a locker room. (To give you a sense of the stillborn thrust here, let’s dispense with Gambill’s penis and observe how disarming it is to see a grown and limited man like Gambill act like a predictable teenager.) The penis bouncing up and down in this mall scene is not really a revolutionary act, but it does tell us that the moment in which dicks are afforded the same cinematic exposure as breasts is inevitable. Cocks are coming to middle America whether the red states like it or not.

I just wish that the occasion for the third leg peek was more momentous. This movie isn’t an outright travesty. I’ve seen many films that are worse. Whoever cast this movie was smart enough to give Collette Wolfe a thankless role as a handicapped employee who gives Seth Rogen his free daily coffee. But Wolfe is good enough to transcend the material with her eyes and her winning solicitude, even if her doting over a jerk is sexist and stereotypical. I am, however, losing patience with Anna Faris’s overacting, particularly with the eye-bulging and chronic face-expanding that is less about making the other actors look good, and more about hijacking a scene for attention. Faris appears destined to play Scary Movie-like bimbos for the rest of her career and she makes Drew Barrymore’s occasional hysterics look like Meryl Streep’s subtle craftsmanship. I’ve set down my issues with Ray Liotta’s acting before. The man once again keeps his mouth hanging open through most of the movie, and the audience feels compelled to bolt Liotta’s mandible in place. Nevertheless, before Liotta explodes on Rogen, he’s actually somewhat interesting as a contained cop trying to stay professional.

As for Seth Rogen, I should note that I’ve performed my constitutional duties. Without really trying, I have seen a good number of the films in which Rogen has played a prominent or supporting role. I have seen Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Pineapple Express, Knocked Up, Superbad, and The 40 Year Old Virgin. And I have liked the majority of these films. But the upshot is that Rogen does the same schtick every time: that chortle suggesting a cross between Beavis and Butt-Head and some avuncular fortysomething in the making watching the last of his twenties wash away and that deep voice sounding like a harmless Canadian stoner. In fact, it’s fairly effortless to impersonate Seth Rogen. I should report, in the interest of cultural journalism, that a friend and I recently had a twenty-minute conversation, both of us doing Rogen, one of us hungover. Scholars believe that just about any male living in North America can impersonate Rogen, rub his belly, walk, and chew bubble gum at the same time. I don’t really have too many problems with Rogen, but I have a feeling that if he doesn’t shake up his routine in the next few films, his audiences will lose patience with him. Needless to say, Observe and Report doesn’t really give Rogen much to do except, well, play a slightly more psychotic version of Seth Rogen. (The psychosis, of course, is underdeveloped and makes no sense. For example, Rogen effortlessly kils six criminals at one point, but he evades arrest? Rogen takes on the entire police department single-handedly, but he’s still allowed to walk the streets? I guess, if you’re a Seth Rogen character in a movie, you can rape some random stranger’s pet at a Starbucks and invite all surrounding children to join in a bestial gangbang. And you’d still be able to get away with it.)

So, yeah, the movie here is pretty bad. It has some promising ideas, such as Rogen cracking skateboarders over the head with their skateboards, but it has no clue about how to make these ideas funny. To offer one example, there’s a moment in which cop Ray Liotta and rent-a-cop Seth Rogen are talking with a Spanish-speaking employee, hoping to find out who is robbing the mall. Rogen is jealous of Liotta’s attention and gets more frenetic. He claims to know Spanish, but he doesn’t. Jody Hill could have had Liotta effortlessly speak Spanish to the employee and then escalate the conflict between the two characters. With one simple decision, we then would have zeroed in on the conflict. How does a screwup like Rogen operate in a world in which calm competence like Liotta’s is valued? (And had Liotta not freaked out, then Jody Hill would have reversed our expectations. For nearly everybody associates Liotta with his crazy or psychotic roles.) But Jody Hill doesn’t understand that Rogen’s appeal lies in the audience’s capacity to relate to him. Instead of giving the audience what it wants, he simply has Rogen go crazy (the violence described above) and it’s just not funny.

Having not seen Paul Blart: Mall Cop (I presume its success will unleash an endless spate of mall cop movies in the Police Academy vein), I cannot make any serious artistic comparisons between the two films. But Observe and Report has a flapping penis and Paul Blart doesn’t. Given this superficial criteria, I can probably make the wholly uninformed conclusion that Observe and Report may be a better film. The film has the courage to flap a penis, but it doesn’t have the courage to push Rogen beyond type.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Eric Kraft

One of the difficulties of managing so many projects is that I continue to forget that I am committing some of these conversations to video. So I must now atone for the slightly delayed missing component. If you missed out on the elaborate roundtable discussion for Flying, or you don’t have the 2+ hour investment to listen to the three-part podcast (Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three), or you just want to get a sense of how much remarkable vivacity Mr. Kraft has, then the above four-minute video excerpt should offer a dutiful encapsulation of what became, over the course of March, quite a momentous undertaking. And if you haven’t yet picked up Flying, and wish to plunge into some crazed postmodernist fun that may keep you occupied for some time, well, the bookstore still awaits.

(For those who tire of my continuous Kraft boosterism, don’t worry. This will likely be the last post related to Mr. Kraft for quite some time.)

by Edward Champion

IPG Keeping Authors in the Dark About Sales Figures?

I have learned from several sources that book distributor Independent Publishers Group is not permitting its authors to know the number of books that still sit in their warehouses. Authors hoping to call up the distributor and get that pivotal figure that just about any book distributor will give them — so, you know, they can plan to either buy the remainders or figure out new ways of marketing their books — are being told that sales figures are secret. And not even a friendly “Abracadabra” or “Open Sesame” will persuade IPG to be transparent.

You may recall last November’s brouhaha, in which IPG President Mark Suchomel boasted of “having a record sales year” on these pages, while simultaneously demanding that I retract a memo that had been sent to publishers from IPG alerting them to troubles with Borders. I just don’t understand. If Suchomel is “having a record sales year,” why not boast to his authors who are asking for accountability? Unless, of course, Suchomel’s “record sales year” is subject to an altogether different definition.

I’ve sent an email to Suchomel asking him to clarify why he’s not being transparent to the authors who, you know, are writing the books that he’s going to the trouble to distribute. If Suchomel doesn’t feel comfortable with email, he can always leave a comment here, demanding further “retractions” as his secretive policies are disclosed.