Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

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

The Bat Segundo Show: Norah Vincent

Norah Vincent appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #258.

Norah Vincent is most recently the author of Voluntary Madness.

segundo258

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Challenging pseudonymous authorities about his voluntary commitment.

Author: Norah Vincent

Subjects Discussed: The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, homelessness and mental health care, the revolving door of mental institutions, Marvin Olasky and community responsibility, the bureaucratic process of mental health care, why Vincent didn’t break down the costs of staying in pseudonymous institutions, the unwillingness of Vincent’s health care provider to have Vincent pay for her stay in these institutions, experiential journalism vs. objective journalism, the trouble with corroborating stories within Vincent’s books, setting limits and journalistic ethics, quibbling with the term “diagnosis,” the distinction between psychotics and psychopathics, care for dangerous people, antipsychotic drugs, counseling vs. drugs, empirical solutions vs. medical expertise without arrogance, the moral question of whether or not doctors should inform psychopathics about the effects of drugs, the issue of consent in medicine and journalism, whether regular “reality checks” can help a psychotic improves her mental condition, and happiness vs. getting better.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

nvincentCorrespondent: You quibble with the term “diagnosis.” You write, “There are no diagnoses in psychiatry. Only umbrella terms for observed patterns of complaint, groupings of symptoms given names, and oversimplified, and assigned what are probably erroneous causes because these erroneous causes can be medicated. And then both the drug and the supposed disease are made legitimate, and thus the profession as well as the patient legitimized, too, by those magical words going hand in hand to the insurance company ‘Diagnosis’ and ‘It’s not your fault.’” But if there are no diagnoses in psychiatry, well, where is the starting point? I mean, obviously, you have to start somewhere and identify a particular problem — even on a simplistic level — in order to help another person. So what of this?

Vincent: Well, yeah, that’s the difficulty, I guess. Right now, we don’t have a test that can tell you, “You’ve got bipolar disorder” or you’ve got any number of all these so-called illnesses. Which I don’t doubt are real entities. Clearly, when you see enough of these patients, you see the patterns that they’re describing. And people who are schizophrenic tend to be paranoid. All these various things that — it’s not that the groupings are illegitimate in that way or the observations are wrong. It’s just that it does leave an enormous gray area. And it means that you can diagnose somebody as having this thing without any really concrete way of knowing that they do, in fact, have it. And I do think that can lead to a lot of problems. Such as, for example, people again have written a lot about the way that diagnoses of depression have, I don’t know, tripled in the last ten or fifteen years. And I think you have to ask yourself how many of those people have something that’s a pathological depression. Or is it a situational depression? Not being able to distinguish between those two things is, I think, problematic.

Correspondent: We’re talking then largely about the specific difference between someone who is psychotic, who is merely someone who cannot properly distinguish between their reality and their imagination and their dreams, and is not necessarily violent, versus someone who is psychopathic. Who is going to be prone to violent behavior and the like. Certainly there has to be some degree in which we have to prevent people from harming themselves or harming other particular people. I agree with you that “psychotic” does, in fact, get a bad rap. But nevertheless, there is this larger term of people who are, in fact, going to be committing violent behavior. So I’m wondering. Why quibble with the notion, as you do in one of the interim moments in the book, about this impression between so-called psychotics in movies and everything? When, in fact, there are dangerous people out there.

Vincent: Oh yeah. And there’s no question that, right now, medication and, in some cases, putting these people into an environment where they can’t hurt people is all that we have. It’s the best that we have right now. I would hope that someday we would have medications, for example, that can specifically address what’s going wrong in the brain of a schizophrenic person. And that’s just something we don’t have right now. We don’t know. We don’t understand the mechanisms of schizophrenia. Or what appears to be. There again is the question. Well, you may appear to be schizophrenic. But without a test that can tell us, we don’t actually know whether you are or not. Or whether you’re manifesting symptoms that may be entirely something else. An allergy. I mean, think about if you were to go to the hospital and say, “I’m having terrible chest pains.” And you were assuming you were having a heart attack. And there was no way to know whether it was that or indigestion. There are a lot of symptoms that can be caused by various different things. And I think that’s the part that’s missing for us right now.

BSS #258: Norah Vincent (Download MP3)

This text will be replaced

Listen: Play in new window | Download

by Edward Champion

Stacey’s Closes

Stacey’s, the dependable bookstore on Market Street that kept many Financial District serfs reading good books, is going to be closing in March, and I’m more than a little devastated. This was a bookstore that helped me in more than a few small ways to become who I am today. While working any number of dull and brainless jobs in my twenties, both temporary and permanent, in which I had to pretend to be an idiot for eight hours to pay the rent, I would often set off to Stacey’s during my lunch hour and discover some novel that I didn’t know anything about. It was at Stacey’s where I discovered William Gaddis, and where I purchased the dogeared copy of The Recognitions that still sits on my stacks. It was at Stacey’s where I first purchased books by Nicholson Baker and David Markson. It was at Stacey’s where I saw Douglas Adams read from Starship Titanic, among many other authors. My employers at the time paid close attention to the white Stacey’s bags that would proliferate underneath my desk in the late afternoon. There were four incidents when I was rudely asked, not more than twenty minutes into my lunch hour and before I had even grabbed something to eat, to come back to the office to work on some pressing and mundane task, because those who employed me knew that I could be found at Stacey’s, lost amidst all the great books. A few of them resented me for having the temerity to read or get excited about books (one even asking me, “Why are you wasting your time reading?”), but I regularly purchased books for those who didn’t. Because of Stacey’s, I managed to get two very wonderful Ukranian ladies hooked on Dickens and Updike, and even procured slang dictionaries to help them learn a number of key phrases that could help them out. (It occurs to me now that Stacey’s actually urged me to become an informal teacher and an under-the-radar encourager. Good Christ, how many others did the bookstore help to blossom?)

Sure, you could walk up Columbus and go to City Lights, which remains a wonderful bookstore. But with City Lights, you somehow felt that you were cheating. Because you were walking into a different neighborhood. Stacey’s was perhaps the only place within the Financial District that had quirky or experimental novels running deliberately at odds with the base capitalism still sprinkling throughout that area of San Francisco. Stacey’s opened their doors and somehow knew that you were still trying to figure out how to make that great artistic leap forward. They knew that you had a little bit of expendable income from your day job, but they regularly offered special sales to loyal customers and kept you coming back.

Stacey’s not only had a great fiction selection, but an ample nonfiction selection. I must have dropped thousands of dollars there over the years.

It was the oldest bookstore operating in San Francisco: older even than City Lights. And while City Lights could easily dwarf Stacey’s in terms of poetry selection, what was special about Stacey’s was that, if you were a geek, you could get any number of the thick and helpful computer handbooks upstairs. (Stacey’s was the kind of bookstore that convinced me that I could learn JavaScript. And while this proved to be something that I could not do, the fact that I went down that avenue is of great credit to Stacey’s.)

The hell of it is that, in all my years of being a Stacey’s customer, I never knew that Colleen worked there. That working at Stacey’s could lead you down some path as an adept book industry professional says much about the bookstore’s power and draw.

The closing of Stacey’s leaves a terrible cavity in a part of San Francisco that urgently needs knowledge and imagination to help members of the white-collar underclass to get by. Yes, we’ll always have City Lights. But jumping into a Trojan horse is more subversive and liberating.

by Edward Champion

Eat the Rich

One reads Laura Miller’s review of Mark Bittman’s Food Matters with unwavering chagrin. Here is a review of a clearly ideological book, a review written by a humorless bourgeois reviewer who boasts about cooking “the vast majority of my meals from scratch,” but who does not wish to dissipate from the self-righteous upper-class foodie twits who refuse to comprehend the ineluctable associations between food and class. In Miller’s view, cooking is considered by Americans either “an elite hobby” or “an esoteric mystery,” and Bittman’s book exists as some halfway house (or, perhaps more appropriately phrased, a luxury rehab clinic) transforming eating into a Pollan-inspired prescribed formula for “better living,” with cooking becoming something accomplished with little to no effort. The snarky “Yummers!” with which Miller attempts to level the ostensible country bumpkins could just as easily be applied to Miller’s unchecked conformism.

What has not occurred to Miller, who is here an eager and unquestioning acolyte of Bittman, is that cooking is not necessarily about subscribing to a handbook, but very much about the act of discovering tasty combinations in the process. (And incidentally, a Lancashire hotpot, contrary to Miller’s anti-casserole prejudices, ain’t necessarily a bad thing in a pinch and does get people excited at a potluck.) More important than any of this is that cooking is a practical act in which one must feed a family. When there’s less than $100 in the weekly food budget to feed a family of four, sacrifices become necessary. But here’s the good news: from limitations emerge spontaneity and innovation. The bad news is that the Bittmans and the Millers of our world see fit to capitalize on these underground innovations without acknowledgment and more than a little bit of douchery.

Let’s consider some examples.

Impoverished 18th century Italians began adding tomato to their flat bread, others perfected the formula, and pizza took off. And if you want to go back further in time to find the flat bread prototype, you can find this passage in Book VII of the Aeneid:

Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”

Sushi emerged as a method of preserving fish. In China, fermented rice was wrapped around a salted piece of fish. This was known as nare-sushi. And the original idea was that you would crack open the rice bubble and enjoy yourself a nice piece of preserved fish. Then some culinary innovators in Japan realized that you could enjoy eating the rice as well and came up with seisei-sushi.

John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, held his corpulent title on an innovation that emerged because Montagu was too much of a lazy bastard to leave the gaming table. The man aspired to chow down while playing cards. We’ll never know whether or not some hapless stiff in the kitchen was threatened with being sacked if he did not satisfy the Earl’s gustatory wishes. But one thing remains certain throughout history: behind every culinary decree and resultant innovation is the desperate eleventh-hour maneuvering of a terrified and often underpaid chef.

I am not against the pursuit of good food. Anyone can be a foodie if they apply some sensible chops to the task. I am on record singing the praises of MFK Fisher, whose excellent volume, How to Cook a Wolf, considered how to love food in dire times. (And let us likewise commend Jeffrey Steingarten for having the courage and curiosity to try just about everything.) But I am against the idea of being so blinded by your gourmet pursuits that you cannot possibly consider that there’s some good eating to be had with the common folk. Miller is notably bothered by the idea of balsamic vinegar being available at places like Applebee’s, and the way she marinates in her seeming “superiority” by eating in a fast food restaurant “once a year, and only when I’m ravenous and trapped with no other alternative” is disgraceful. More egregious is her failure to consider the above-mentioned hypothetical family of four. Why is the ubiquity of balsamic vinegar a bad thing if people enjoy it? Like anything along the wondrous trajectory of human development, food shifts from its origins, whether they be lower-class or upper-class. But why should we be discriminatory about it? If there is good food, should we not let other people know about it? Do such efforts not augment the taste buds of everyone? In fact, don’t we have a certain obligation to improve upon food as we cook if we can? (There’s that spontaneity in the kitchen again.)

It has also never occurred to the Bittmans and Millers of our world that there may indeed some virtue in vices, and that attempting to maintain a svelte physique merely through healthy eating is only half the problem. (There’s this little thing called exercise.)

But there’s also something more irksome here. If you’re calling for “responsible eating” and you’re not considering the origins, needs, spending patterns, and eating habits of everyday people, you’re a smug simpleton of the highest order if you think your casual condescension translates into revolution.

by Edward Champion

Interview with Dean Haspiel

For his most recent project, Jonathan Ames collaborated with friend and artist Dean Haspiel for The Alcoholic, a graphic novel in which a character named “Jonathan A.,” who bears more than a few physical and character similarities to Jonathan Ames, is depicted in various alcoholic, sexual, and relationship states. To clear up some of the many staggering questions which emerged during my reading of the graphic novel, I emailed Mr. Haspiel five unusual questions. Mr. Haspiel graciously consented to answer these queries. The results are posted here for the benefit of future scholars.

amesalc1Word on the street is that Mr. Ames wrote the bulk of his script at your place. To what degree did you indoctrinate Mr. Ames with comics? Did he come up with any of the paneling and art ideas (such as the frequent head splitting)? (I think of the mice snorting coke at the bar, which is something of a nod to Spiegelman.) Or, like your work with Harvey Pekar, did he defer most of this to you? Was Mr. Ames’s continued proximity to your drawing table of benefit to you in brainstorming ideas? Were there situations in which you would quickly sketch out an idea and Mr. Ames would run with it?

Jonathan has written screenplays and is familiar with writing for a visual medium and he wrote the entire script for The Alcoholic far away from my art table. The script he delivered had clear descriptions of what he wanted me to draw while allowing me the collaborative leeway to visually design and interpret portions of the story to befit my comic book sensibilities. To use your example, I designed the head splitting shots [a classic comix trope] while Jonathan wrote the snorting cocaine rats. Ultimately, The Alcoholic was a great collaboration between two like-minded auteurs who also happen to be great friends.

Jonathan A. shares striking physical similarities to Jonathan Ames. And this is also very evident in the artwork, where the parties and events you depict are 80-90% similar to their real-life counterparts. To what degree did you rely upon reference? And visually speaking, did you and Mr. Ames establish any specific ground rules on how this graphic novel blurred from the truth?

Cartooning is all about shortcuts and, like Dick Tracy’s Rogues Gallery where every villain looks like their name, it’s a cartoonists job to exaggerate features and with Jonathan, whom we based the protagonist’s likeness on, I was fortunate to have his aquiline nose and his receding hairline to define the characters “face.” And, since The Alcoholic spans the protagonists childhood to adulthood, I relied heavily on that nose. As for the rest of the supporting cast [except for Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky], I drew characters based on my studio mates and friends and/or actors that Jonathan suggested. Some of the sex scenes were fun to draw because I got my girlfriend to pose with me for the “sake of making art.”

There is one tragic moment on page 46, in which Jonathan A. falls asleep naked in a trash can. Did you persuade Mr. Ames to pose in any way for this? Or was it necessary to recruit another figure to recreate these sordid conditions? What lengths were you and Mr. Ames willing to go in the interests of verisimilitude?

I didn’t have the guts to ask Jonathan if this event actually happened to him and if he would pose for me. So, I asked my studio mate, Tim Hamilton, to pose for me and it was the best time he had in a garbage can in years. In general, I don’t use much photographic reference for the figures in my comix — I make most of it up. However, Jonathan furnished me with a bunch of photographs from his past to present and that helped me make iconic the lead character.

There are many instances in which the positioning of figures demonstrates developments over time. On Page 20, we see two panels: Jonathan A.’s girlfriend replaced by Jonathan A. himself, and young Jonathan replaced by the old woman. On Page 75, we see Jonathan A. in November 2000 and February 2001 waiting for San Francisco to call back. But not only has Jonathan A. sunken, but his drawer is slightly open, with socks and underwear sticking out. In changing the illustrative details ever so slightly, the panels are both static and slightly dynamic. Are slight changes along these lines what comics and graphic novels need to matter? To what extent was this a case of you wanting to shake things up so that you wouldn’t get bored drawing the same panels over and over?

Sometimes I draw action adventure [as seen in my Billy Dogma webcomix] and sometimes I draw semi-autobio situations [as seen in my Street Code webcomic and in my collaborations with Harvey Pekar]. Luckily, working with Jonathan, he made sure I would draw action to compliment the mundane. Because real-life yields less adventure than we’d probably like to admit, characters are often talking to each other in a room, on the street, and/or on the phone when they’re not escaping from horny geriatric dwarves or experiencing a diarrhea explosion in their pants on the streets of France. It’s the artists challenge to help contextualize action, no matter how mundane, and make it look damned interesting on the comic book page or the reader is left with a series of talking heads reacting to one another and that can get boring to look at.

On Page 120, there is a panel of Jonathan A. swimming that rather disturbingly resembles David Duchovny in Playing God. Mr. Duchovny, of course, is now known for his portrayal of a fucked up writer who drinks and sleeps with women on the Showtime television series, Californication. Rather interestingly, there are billboards now depicting Mr. Duchovny standing on the bottom of a swimming pool. And Mr. Ames has indeed worked with Showtime. I am now becoming slightly concerned that there is perhaps a conspiracy that currently involves Mr. Ames, Showtime, and Mr. Duchovny, and that you have perhaps unwittingly been ensnared within the plot. Are you aware of such a cabal? Did Mr. Ames brief you in any way about any connection? Did Showtime or Mr. Duchovny control your mind at any point?

Seriously?