Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

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

Alec Baldwin: Stylistic Innovator?

November 18, 2007: “I miss all of the 30 ROCK cast and crew, who I don’t see anymore because of this motherfucking, motherfucking, motherfucking strike.”

Well, you have to give the man points for the serial modifier. I certainly haven’t seen anything like it in print. (Conversation, on the other hand, is a different mother altogether.)

I put forth this query: Is there anybody in the history of letters who has banged that word out three times in a row? From Denis Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke: “Everything that’s got it’s shitty fingerprints which I can see smeared all over you and glowing like a motherfucking, Bozo-the-Clown goddam target.” Another close contender is Robert Bolano’s The Savage Detectives: “Motherfucking hemorrhoid-licking old bastard, I saw the distrust in his pale, bored little monkey eyes right from the start, and I said to myself this asshole will take every chance he gets to spit on me, the motherfucking son of a bitch.” That’s two, but they’re not close together and it certainly doesn’t equal Baldwin’s holy trinity. (There is, of course, Aimee Bender’s delightful story, but it doesn’t quite have this context.)

Is it possible that Baldwin is making new efforts at stylistic expression through his blog? Or does the motherfucker only have “motherfucking” on his mind? (I likewise wonder, given his fixation for mothers, how he would have responded to the Voight-Kampff test.)

by Edward Champion

Just Imagine If He Had Read Updike’s Last Novel

Independent: “Mr Chalk was reading The Unknown Terrorist, the latest novel by the Australian author, Richard Flanagan….Mr Chalk, a teacher who was in town for an education conference, had not even ordered a drink when a security officer asked him to leave. ‘He said several customers had complained about the literature I was reading and I’d have to move on,’ Mr Chalk told the Cairns Post.”

What’s hilarious is that Flanagan responded by saying, “Far from being far-fetched, my novel correctly predicted the future of Australia.” It seems these days that no matter how crazy or outlandish a comic novel, there is some ridiculous truth that comes to fruition. (via Quill & Quire)

by Edward Champion

Books for Me, Thanks

[For more on these Kindle investigations, see ten arguments against the Kindle, the initial query concerning blog content being redistributed without permission or compensation, the first wave of Kindle blogger responses, and the the second wave of Kindle blogger responses.]

Ten arguments against the Kindle (one against the promotional video):

1. A book does not require a battery. Let’s say you’re on the second to the last page and the battery goes out. Then you have to hunt around for the damn charger. But where did you put the charger? In the same time, you could have finished a compelling book.

2. If you lose the book, you can borrow it from a library or buy another copy or read it at a bookstore before they kick you out because you wore the wrong T-shirt or you slept with the wrong bookstore employee (but that’s a side issue). If you lose your Kindle, you have to pay $400. Oh sure, it’s always “backed up online.” But you’ll have to pay $400 to use it again. (I’m assuming likewise that the specific text use here is proprietary, meaning that you can’t view a Kindle text in another format on your computer. Hackers will almost certainly crack this and who knows? Maybe we’ll see a piracy problem for publishers.)

3. Thirty hours seems like a lot of battery life. (“You can read for days without having to plug in,” my ass. Thirty hours is thirty hours.) But let’s say you want to read Against the Day or The Recognitions in one long sitting. And what if you fall asleep reading? Will the Kindle stay on?

4. Can you really read with the Kindle in the bathtub? If you drop the Kindle into the tub, will it survive? Or will the LCD screen be toast? How durable is this little bastard anyway?

5. This whole business of flipping the page is rather arrogant of Amazon, isn’t it? In one fell swoop, Amazon wants to usurp the reading experience by having the page buttons on each side of the display. But what if you want to flip back? Well, that glorious sense of the index finger and thumb clutching the right corner of the page is now gone. You don’t feel that palpable sense of being one with a book. It’s more like a game of Bioshock.

6. What about those of us who enjoy looking up arcane words in the dictionary? Is the Kindle Dictionary an unabridged? Or is it one of those yuk-yuk high school dictionaries? OED plug-in? Can you highlight a specific phrase or just a line? (The video skips through the “highlighting” part quite rapidly, suggesting that we shouldn’t pay attention. But, dammit, it’s important.) How will this compare with highlighting or flagging a specific passage with a Post-It? All we get here is an option to dog-ear a corner. This is eminently unsuitable for reference. (I will say, however, that finding all citations of a word in a book is very helpful, although will this discourage people from memorizing poetry or specific passages?)

7. The font size option seems nice, but what of specific typesetting choices? How, for example, can a book like Only Revolutions or The Raw Shark Texts or even Alfred Bester’s enneagrams be enjoyed this way? And what of the juxtaposition of illustrations with text? There is sometimes a specific reason for why a photo or an illustration appears in relation to a particular page.

8. “The same wireless technology as advanced cell phones?” Great. Guess I’ll have to turn the Kindle off then during a transatlantic flight and waste twelve hours watching that shitty in-flight movie. Thanks, Amazon!

9. The ability to hold a mere 200 books for $400 (plus extra for books)? I can buy a 4 Gig Compact Flash card for $80.

10. This guy in the blue shirt looks like he sells insurance or some kind of corporate mercenary. I wouldn’t trust him to buy me a beer if I gave him the money. He’d pocket the Lincoln and then ask me for the five bucks I “didn’t give him.”

by Edward Champion

Another Roundup From the Past!

  • Why stop at one pre-rigged roundup? Here’s another one for Monday. I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire two posts or only three? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is WordPress 2.3, the most powerful web app in the world, and would blow a newspaper clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question. Do I feel lucky? Well, yes and no. In large part because I’m the punk and you’re not.
  • Except in this case, I’ve timed this second roundup to go up at sunrise in New York. Which makes you wonder when these roundups were written, or whether the first roundup is appreciably better than the second. One of many strange mysteries here at Reluctant.
  • Atwood revisits Brave New World (via Maud)
  • No, not the actress or the books editor. Is Elizabeth Taylor one of the most distinguished practitioners of the art of the short story from 1972? In other words, could this be a John P. Marquand figure that has been needlessly forgotten here?
  • “And always wet your hands before you handle a trout!”
  • Lindsey Gardner has been seeing her children’s books censored by publishers in some pretty odd ways. Sharp objects were removed in one book and another book banned youngsters from walking alone. If this keeps up, pretty soon any illustrated depiction of a human will be airbrushed out. Because really, you never know if their thoughts could be misinterpreted by a young reader! A little subconscious ambiguity here and a misperceived line there and eventually you’ll have yourself a corrupted young mind! Then again, to paraphrase Jack Burton, son of a bitch must pay!
  • From the lively link collector Michael Orthofer, who I presume isn’t prerigging his roundups, comes this profile of New York Review of Books curator Edwin Frank — another of the Literary Eds You Can Trust in New York. If Mr. Park is “The Other Ed,” then I suppose Mr. Frank will be referred to as either “The Third Ed” or “The Curating Ed” or possibly “The Win, Place or Show Ed.”
  • I’m with Gwenda on this. Why should fairy tales be confined to a specific century? Sounds to be like a temporal form of Jim Crow or apartheid, if you ask me.