Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

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

Roy Den Hollander: A Man of Limitations, A Man of Principle

Several groups of men have, at long last, discovered the true evil that lurks beneath the nightlife underbelly and have initiated the appropriate legislation to exact justice for the greatest threat to equality since they bussed in those dark-skinned kids into schools some decades ago. It turns out that those goddam women, who continue to complain about the apparent injustice of a woman making two thirds the annual income that a man makes, have now spawned a grand plan in collusion with nightclub owners to disrupt the natural patriarchal order. Not only do these women have the temerity to order drinks at a price lesser than that of a man, but they often get into these nightclubs for free! FOR FREE! Doesn’t a woman know that her only role in life is to a man’s pliable arm candy? Doesn’t a woman know that she must abstain from pursuing a career and do nothing more in life than cook, clean and reproduce?

Thankfully, there are brave men like Roy Den Hollander, who has tired of “being treated as a second-class citizen.” It’s bad enough that Mr. Hollander’s penis size is smaller than the norm. To dwell upon this personal topic is to open up a healing wound. But now Mr. Hollander has to suffer the indignity of paying one or two more dollars for a drink than a woman! Well, enough is enough. If you ask me, the only real solution here is to castrate Mr. Hollander and begin the appropriate court-enforced pre-op transexual procedures. It’s the only way to be sure. As a woman, only then will Mr. Hollander understand the gender chasm. As a woman, only then will Mr. — make that Ms. Hollander know the meaning of “second-class citizen.”

(via Jason Pinter)

by Edward Champion

In Defense of Sitting in Bookstores

This Baltimore Sun item describes how the big box bookstores are no longer placing the nooks, crannies, and chairs that were once de rigueur a few decades ago. In the case of Borders, the chain has cut back their soft seating by 30%. The complaints are the usual ones: the homeless, necking lovers, people leaving trash behind, and other assorted riff-raff. (Of course, it’s not as if these prohibitive factors didn’t exist when the bookstores did provide more seating.)

Customers seem to be lounging in the bookstores anyway, sitting on the floor and sometimes not buying anything at all. But is this really so bad? One might argue that Starbucks’ tolerance for sitters who don’t purchase a cafe au lait, or anything at all really, may very well be one of the reasons why it’s impossible to wander around Manhattan without running into one of those monolithic green circles — sometimes with remarkable square footage. And there’s a considerable difference in profit margin between a $29.95 hardcover and a $2.95 cafe au lait. But you don’t see Starbucks cutting back on its soft seating.

All this reminds me of what Jane Jacobs had to say about people being naturally inclined to sit on steps and how these recurrent populist acts — wholly natural, of course — led to strange underclass labels. What’s to suggest that people naturally sitting in a bookstore won’t bring in long-term revenue over time? Can’t a bookstore learn a few things from coffeehouse culture and be a kind of community? If people are permitted to sit and congregate without being badgered by a humorless manager, they might meet a friend who, in turn, might purchase a few books. Further, book enthusiasts tend to be natural browsers, often pinpointing particular volumes for later purchase. Is not a certain amount of tolerance for the literary inclined a sound business proposition?

Sure, some of the sitters will be inveterate slobs. And you’ll need staff to clean up messes and restock books. But it’s a small price to pay for an amicable atmosphere. Maybe I simply have more faith in humankind than the iron-fisted Borders executives. But I’ve found that most people, barring a few assholes who try to make everyone’s lives miserable, are pretty polite and friendly. So why be discourteous and force them sit on the floor?

(via Galleycat)

[UPDATE: While I didn’t have the time to dig up my copy of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and a few other New Urbanist books to quote for this post, Charlottesville Words thankfully drew a few comparisons between this seating imbroglio and Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.]

by Edward Champion

BSS #123: Steven Hall

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Revisiting his flipbook-authoring hobby.

Author: Steven Hall

Subjects Discussed: The relationship between narrative and text design, textual malapropisms, speculating upon “wooden” dialogue, multiple Eric Sandersons and the Matrix trilogy, narrative onslaughts against institutions, on balancing postmodernism with an adventure story, B.S. Johnson, hooking up with David Mitchell and Scarlett Thomas, junk science, devising the QWERTY codes, first-person vs. omniscient narration, misleading toenail tattoos, and the many ways of reading the shark flipbook.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Hall: I started off as an artist. So I had been working with words and text for quite a while. And I think I was just interested in playing around with that sort of form. I also wanted to write a story that looked to identity and where identities comes from. And I had this idea for a species of animal — conceptual fish which swim in flows of conversation and streams of consciousness. And just playing those little word games really. And that came together with the idea of trying to write a story about what it means to be a person and where your self originates.

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by Edward Champion

BSS #122: Richard Flanagan

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Attempting to understand Tasmanians.

Author: Richard Flanagan

Subjects Discussed: The novel as a warning, interviews with overly serious journalists, the novel as a mirror to the world, the inspiration of Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the tradition of using other people’s plots, Jonathan Lethem’s essay on copyright, the obsession with intellectual property, heightened metaphors, people living without land and love, the remarkable disconnect between the author’s intentions and the reader’s perception, the amount of noise in the world, using brand names in language, plagiarizing from infotainment, not wanting to repeat Gould’s Book of Fish, on being innately semiotic, the Sydney Morning Herald, bourgeois broadsheets vs. yellow journalism, absolute vs. relative truth, on being savaged by the Tasmanian media, the despair of politics, the difficulties of the word “terrorist,” why books are a better conduit for truth than other mediums, the seduction of evil, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s comparison of Hemingway and Faulkner.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Flanagan: A book has many faces. I mean, in the end, a book isn’t what a writer thinks it is. A book is what a reader makes of it, when they lend the authority of their lives and their souls to it. But, for me, I was determined to try and escape politics with the book. I wanted to find a simple parable — that it would act like a mirror to what the world was now. I felt the least useful thing I had were my opinions, my attitudes, my politics. I wanted to abandon all that. I just wanted to try and live within the world the way it was, and have a story that spoke as accurately as possible to it, in a way that might lead me and hopefully the reader to some broader sense of what the world is now. But I didn’t know what the world was. And I don’t pretend to have any clue. I have even less clue actually. But it’s always in story that things are revealed. Not in the author’s attitudes.

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