Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.

August 23, 2007August 23, 2007 by Edward Champion

Will Wright: A Danger to Creativity

1Up: “Spore is finished. That’s the first thing I learn as I head in to my play session at the Leipzig Games Convention. Obviously, the game isn’t finished finished (as in ready to ship), but in terms of its content offering, it’s all there — the game is complete. At this point, EA is spending the next several months paying attention to feedback from players to tweak and polish Spore for its release next Spring. But otherwise, it’s done.”

This is, of course, terrible news for those of us who do our damnedest to avoid such fascinating video games that threaten to do away with what little spare time we have. I’d just like to say that Will Wright is a mean man, an intellectual heroin dealer, for doing this and that I will do my best to avoid purchasing this game. Because should I get sucked into yet another Maxis trap, I will likely get nothing in the way of important work done. I’ve observed what went down with Iain Banks and Alex Garland, and I know damn well that it could happen to me if I’m not careful. I am weak and susceptible. If only I had been born ten years earlier. Should I purchase this game, I will become a sad thirtysomething man staring forever into my LCD, permanently tinkering with a horrendously fascinating experiment. Because Will Wright knows how to make games that are the cerebral version of a hard drug. That guy ripping out his video card from his motherboard in a few months to avoid getting hooked on the inevitable? That’s me. And many others. I will do everything in my power to avoid getting sucked in, but I fear the worst. Perhaps a support group is in order.

August 22, 2007August 22, 2007 by Edward Champion

Alistair Harper: Chickenhead of the Month

It’s been a long while since I awarded anyone the “Chickenhead of the Month” prize, but Alistair Harper comes to us from across the Atlantic with a stupidity that is simply too remarkable to let slip.

Alistair Harper knows nothing of the publishing industry. His whole thesis is wrong. How he got to be a Guardian blogger or paid to write is truly amazing. His charge — that “the chip on [Stephen] King’s shoulder as big as the vast American states that are usually his setting” — does not hold. I don’t believe that any author can truly control the nonsense that appears on book covers. Harper doesn’t seem to understand that once a manuscript is turned in, the author is often at the behest of marketing forces. Because the publishing industry is, you know, an industry. And an industry expects to sell products. Or does Harper honestly believe that the publishing industry is in this bookselling business for the philanthropy? If phrases like “words are his power” or “this book will cause you to sodomize a goat” will sell more units, then the publishers will put these words, however preposterous, on covers to sell books. And how is King being uncertain about the shelf life of his work egotistical? Newsflash to Harper: When it comes to nonfiction, King is often as subtle as a Bengal tiger running around Grand Central, and he would be the first to admit this. He is, as he mentioned in Danse Macabre, a self-described “burgers and fries of literature.” And had Harper even bothered to read the introduction to Blaze, for crying out loud a few pages he could have flipped through in a bookstore*, a book that this sad illiterate hasn’t even bothered to examine, he’d realize that King extensively rewrote the book. This hardly a case of a manuscript merely being “dusted off.” And how is it egotistical exactly to want to finish a series when a million readers — many of whom have written King letters and expressed hopes that he would finish, as indicated in the same introduction that Harper quotes from — clamor for it? Has it not occurred to Harper that King simply cannot stop writing? That isn’t egotistical. That’s the mark of a hypergraphic personality.

If Harper hates King, he should simply be honest and say so. But in hiding behind this “Stephen King has an ego” gambit, he attempts to pretend, like some bumbling teenager trying to figure out how to open up a golden Trojan package but too afraid to ask for help, that it’s about King the person and not King the writer. This is hubris of the first order. It’s the kind of thing you expect from 1600 Pennsylvania, not 119 Farringdon Road

* — The UK edition likewise possesses an introduction by King. If it is different from the US edition, please feel free to correct me.

August 22, 2007August 22, 2007 by Edward Champion

Roundup

So who was the real Agatha Christie? Because Christie wrote the lines, “You know, you’re the sort of woman who ought to be raped. It might do you good,” under a pseudonym, the Telegraph‘s Laura Thompson appears to be in a great uproar. I’m not sure whether these striking lines say anything in particular about Christie as a person. (It is a common fallacy to equate a writer’s personality with the dark and disturbing things a writer sets down to paper.) Personally, I won’t be impressed until someone reveals that Christie managed to schtup half the men in Berkshire and single-handedly stopping a seditious affront to Mother England during her mysterious disappearance.
~~Harpo~~ Harper Lee speaks!
It doesn’t surprise me too much that Anne Rice is a pro-lifer.
Jonathan Coe: not even a bridesmaid?
Garth on why Bolano matters.
Something for Mr. Asher to consider in his forthcoming symposium: “The Problem with Pricey Paperbacks.” (Of course, Levi was on this issue before Alex Remington. Another example of print cribbing from blogs? For a print-financed blog no less!) (via Orthofer)
And speaking of Levi, this consideration of Richard Bach is madness. I was there when the friend in question screamed in horror. Levi held the book. There was a strange Zen-like grimace on his face, as if Levi had just finished having tea with the Dalai Lama. I had been talking with someone and stood silent and slackjawed and horrified when Levi then declared to all of us that Jonathan Livingston Seagull “wasn’t so bad.” I was then forced to exorcise the book so that Levi would be protected from future influence. Things proceeded okay from there. Let this be a lesson. Richard Bach is a dangerous man. Pick up his work at your own peril.
Richard Nash on how Jamestown came to be. The summary: not an easy rollout by any measure.
Jenny D is quite right about Gibson. Gibson’s houses are built on firm foundations of language and rhythm, and I think it can be sufficiently argued that his conceptual associations are likewise rooted upon these preternatural cadences.
Rick Kleffel talks with Karen Joy Fowler, Gavin Grant, and Kelly Link in one sitting. And Mr. Kleffel, what the hell is wrong with epic interviews? This is what podcasting is all about, sir! Don’t hold back on us! (via Locus)
Mark Sarvas interviews David Leavitt.
Okay, Mr. VanderMeer, I will concede that The National’s Boxer does tread water somewhat. But you are dead wrong about the new Spoon album, sir!
Terry Teachout has been the victim of Wikipedia vandalizing.
Now that Brad Pitt has tsk-tsked folks for failing to rebuild fast enough after Katrina, I guess that means they’ll be reconstructing New Orleans faster. Next week, Brad Pitt will be using his Hollywood star power to scold the Third Law of Thermodynamics for the entropy resulting from this week’s statement.
Ah callow youth! Why are you so goddam non-rebellious when the world’s in the shitter? 64% of these little bastards “wake up happy?” Sixty-four percent? Christ, the generation after mine is disappointing the hell out of me. We were cynical as fuck and that was during the Clinton years! Maybe Charles Rangel is right. Maybe we should reinstate the draft just to give these smug little fucks a wakeup call. BLAM BLAM BLAM! What do you think of that, eh? If you want your nonfat hazelnut latte and your TiVo options, you’re going to have to march through the goddam DMZ to get them! HOW ABOUT THAT? Oh, what’s that? You need to go to the infirmary? Well, now that you’re in the middle of the GREAT CLUSTERFUCK YOU’VE BEEN GLEEFULLY IGNORING, that ought to put a damper on the whole “wake up happy” scenario, eh?

August 22, 2007August 25, 2007 by Edward Champion

BSS #131: Kate Christensen

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating his biographical legacy.

Author: Kate Christensen

Subjects Discussed: First-person vs. third-person narration, Hugo from The Epicure’s Lament vs. Oscar in The Great Man, dead men, dying women, being obsessed with death, the sex lives of older women, the difficulties of writing third-person without planning, stacked sentences, Richard Ford, over-the-top observations, MFK Fisher, what food says about people, kosher diets, whether or not an octogenarian can be spry, emasculated men, painting nudes, on being labeled a feminist writer, antipodean biographers, populating a novel with twins, poetry, the many ways of appreciating art, the difficulties of female writers being taken seriously, writing visceral messes, the origin of the fictitious New York Times articles, how unexpected character qualities are discovered, on making Oscar contemptible, and seducing your best friend’s wife.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Christensen: You can say he has certain things in common with Claudia in In the Drink and Hugo especially in The Epicure’s Lament, in that he can say whatever he wants and he’s sort of a loose cannon in a way. He has a lot of opinions and he’s a man of excess appetites, like all the earlier narrators. And he was successful and therefore not interesting to me as a first-person narrator. My first-person narrators tend to be losers. They’re the kind of people whose heads I like to get in and who I like to have take over my brain. That entertains me deeply.