Category / Personal

by Edward Champion

Note to the IQ Test Spammers

While I can pretty much ignore most of your ignoble cousins, it is you who, for whatever reason, seem to think I might be receptive to your pitches. Understand that I was tested many years ago. I didn’t believe the results back then and I certainly don’t believe them now, even though certain adults bragged about what I apparently scored and it allowed me to get into some dubious program called “GATE.”

I imagined a drawbridge or a moat, but there were, I assure you, no gates to speak of. And in fact the program was quite slipshod in encouraging my supposed “gifted and talented” abilities, bussing me to a school on the other side of town and having adults, all of them speaking in soft and sensitive timbres reminiscent of Alan Alda and Phil Donahue (my only real reference point, seeing as how the television was an unfortunately prominent fixture growing up), letting me “do whatever I wanted.” So I was able to wile away the time quite egregiously, knowing very little of the art, the books, the science and the PET computer that was “accessible” to me, but never tossed my way. In short, I learned nothing and had no idea how to go about “doing whatever I wanted.” I was nine years old for crying out loud. Of course, had the soft-spoken teachers thought to demand something of me, I might have picked up a thing or two.

But I do remember a very cute girl (an older woman in fifth grade) named Kirstin, who was tall and blonde and a bit prematurely developed, if you know what I mean, and who I was relentlessly attracted to and who I longed to kiss at the age of nine and who I tried to impress with stunts on the ratty BMX bike I had and who I cried about on the phone to one of the men my mother was dating. Because I didn’t understand these profound feelings that crippled my solar plexus. Because I was confused that I could feel so much over one of those girls, who were declared “disgusting” and “icky” and other verboeten adjectives in the elementary school vernacular of that time. Fortunately, this guy was nice enough to encourage my mother to buy a box of After Eight mints, no small task given that we weren’t exactly living in style, which I then wrapped up with a bit of leftover Christmas ribbon in an inept way and which I then presented to her on the school bus, knees knocking together, nervousness and shyness spilling over the edge, and my face redder than a family dinner at the Red Lobster.

To my great shock, Kirstin received the mints with equanimity and proceeded to give me a hug and then further proceeded to smack me one on the cheek, leaving me utterly speechless and baffled and delighted. Kirstin and I gabbed to no end for the rest of that year. And that very day, during recess, we wandered off to the other edge of the school lawn and, neither of us knowing the protocol, proceeded to kiss each other deeply, outside the view of the supervising faculty members. She introduced to me this fabulous thing called the French kiss, which single-handedly sealed my heretofore unabated love for women, and older women in particular. And of course I cannot ever hate any woman named Kirstin. (Perhaps this might be one slight though subconscious reason why I voted Kirstin Allio’s Garner a 10? Or why I have had an inexplicable interest in Kirsten Dunst, who is much too young for me and not, from what I can tell, all that smart?)

Anyway, as you can see, none of this has anything to do with IQ tests. Nor is the consequential behavior that I have presented to you any indication of my intelligence. Nor are tests really the way in which one’s strengths and weaknesses come to occur. For I know very well that I’m not a genius and actually quite a fool, particularly with regard to the women I have dated and fallen in love with.

I have no idea if you obtained my address because I apparently maintain a literary blog or a “smart blog.” Or because perhaps in giving my email address to someone. Or maybe it’s the few Mensa members I’ve talked with having a laugh on me. I have long maintained that I am a few points short of this “genius” label and certainly a few beers short of an emotional genius’s six pack.

by Edward Champion

Los Angeles Review

The good folks at Red Hen Press have just put out the latest issue (#2 — 2005) of The Los Angeles Review, where a review of Kevin Starr’s Coast of Dreams can be found, penned by yours truly. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Kevin Starr is a one-man juggernaut, as if he decided early in life to take on Hubert Howe Bancroft’s “history factory” approach single-handedly. In his chronicles of the politicos, burgeoning movements, ethnic struggles and artistic trends of the Golden State, he’s taken special care to unearth both the obvious and the obscure figures that make up California’s unique cultural identity. We revel in Starr’s obsessive grasp of the past, only imagining how ebullient the man might be on a caffeine bender.

You’ll also find my thoughts on Starr’s out-of-print novel Land’s End and some speculation on Starr’s move to Random House. I can’t possibly fathom the idea of an Ed Champion completist out there in the crowd, so I should also note that there are contributions by my esteemed colleagues Mark Sarvas and Laila Lalami, as well as a remarkable array of fiction and poetry. All for fourteen bucks. Cheaper than a night out for drinks and you won’t lose any brain cells or wake up the next morning with an unfortunate surprise lying next to you. Do check it out.

by Edward Champion

In Which Your Narrator Falls for the $48.50 Ruse

Snce it was indeed St. Patrick’s Day, and since there were friends who had requested his presence, your humble narrator decided to partake of these dubious festivities with trusted parties. Never mind that your narrator wasn’t Irish, but that his heritage constituted the dubious combination of Dutch and German, which likely led to his strange temperament and fey physical appearance (consider, for example, your narrator’s family’s long line of bulbous heads). Never mind that your narrator’s hair color had transmuted over the past year and a half into a much darker shade of the reddish brown hue that had once made him the darling of family photographs, now with slight flecks of grey that only your narrator might notice, altogether a rather undistinctive shade for what little hair your narrator had left. The point was that this was St. Paddy’s Day — a time for drinking, a time for carousing, and a time for talking with rather curvaceous gals. In short, the holiday had justified nearly every act of minor debauchery called for.

Anyway, your narrator, rapt in a conversation concerning the Soviet conquest of Eastern European countries in the 1970s, was interrupted by a curvaceous and quite attractive thirtysomething (from the rather indistinctive territory of Walnut Creek, natch; he should have seen this coming) who was trying to attract the bartender’s attention. Said lady batted her eyelashes, rubbed her physical form against your narrator, and otherwise turned him into a lust-driven dumbass. What can the narrator say? He was single and susceptible.

Your narrator, of course, was a man of adventure, eager to ensure that an attractive woman could, in fact, order her drinks for her lovely coterie. He was prepared to stand on the bar, if necessary. Fortunately, matters being what they were, this was not necessary. And so, it was with this impulse that he flagged a rather industrious bartender’s attention, no small feat considering the prodigious inhabitants, all claiming to be Irish, who hoped to siphon the Guinness pipeline, securing the XX crowd’s drinks and winning them their trophy through some kind of unspoken nobelese oblige.

Anyway, the chief curvaceous lady, purportedly grateful for your narrator’s efforts, decided to reward him with a drink. But it was here that your narrator was an outright fool. The tab of the XX crowd’s drinks came to $48.50. They only had forty-seven bucks. And the lady, batting her eyelashes ever so fastidiously, called upon your narrator to put up the remaining capital, which of course included tips. Your narrator placed a Lincoln and all the George Washingtons he had in his wallet on the bar and completed the purchase, and was rewarded, if paying his own way can be called such, with a Guinness.

Thus, the $48.50 ruse. The idea here, no doubt contrived by these ladies, was to hit up a nice guy for these drinks, which your narrator foolishly did.

Granted, your narrator would have purchased another Guinness anyway. Not a colossal sum, mind you, but it was the principle of the matter which kept your narrator relatively lucid and a bit dismayed.

And so your narrator completed the purchase of drinks by his very presence, realizing that he is one of those fools who is commonly identified as “a nice guy” and realizing that, at the age of 31, he clearly has a lot more to learn about such chicanery in the universe. Not that it will hinder his kindness or generosity in the future. But the incident does remind him why nice guys finish last.

by Edward Champion

Recategorization

The word sounds vaguely Orwellian, reminiscent of a major shift in current events. But it is necessary, given that categorizing the content here is the only way that anyone, least of all myself, can make sense of it all.

As of today, I’ve written around 2,600 posts – 1,600 posts which remain uncategorized. For any other blogger, this may seem a ridiculous sum to collate into a taxonomy. But since I’m known to be somewhat zealous and anal about setting my ducks in a row, and since the categories offer a valuable method of tracking the development of my thoughts (such as they are) and associations, it has become essential for me to get them all set up once and for all during the first quarter of 2006. (I should note that this is part of a general self-imposed regimen to get my shit together. I still consider myself to be a very lazy man, but then the indolence standard I apply is comparable to 19th century labor.) It helps immensely that WordPress 2.0, with its DHTML “Add” box, has made it especially easy to categorize things. And 1,600 posts, at 20 posts to recategorize a day, is not as arduous a figure as one might expect.

My goal then is to provide a kind of uber-meta context for everything so that readers can participate more fully in the discussions and call me on my shit if I end up striking the same chord far too many times. A mini-Wikipedia with more ruthless standards, if you will. I’m hoping that some of the topics and obsessions here can flesh out into something more concrete, possibly becoming entirely new entities separate from this blog. And for the extremely bored reader determined to sift through the 2,600 or so posts (at an average of 500 words per post, that adds up to easily over a million words I’ve written here in the past two years, a tally that truly astonishes me), I’ve added little updates and annotations noting changes in information that seem pertinent or slightly entertaining.

All this probably means nothing to 99.99% of you. But I suppose what pushed me over the edge was some email correspondence with a few people about Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper project. Apparently, I’m the only Yank excited about it, much less aware of it, even if I can’t get my hands on any of the films in question. What I admire greatly about Greenaway’s project is the way that he has dared to throw information out there in an uncompromising way and that perhaps only he and a few people will understand it. Much like the novelist William T. Vollmann, Greenaway is one of the few prolific artistic visionaries out there producing a disparate body of work that grad students and artistic appreciators will spend years sifting through long after Greenaway’s death.

While I wouldn’t dare put myself or these efforts in the same pantheon as Vollmann or Greenaway, I am nevertheless hoping that this blog, which I apparently spend more time on than I realize, can serve a similar purpose. For the past two years, I have been working on various projects (limitless false starts and hundreds of pages of dialogue that have been painfully written and painfully thrown away), hoping that I can find a way of applying the brio that seems to come naturally here to that form. If experience serves as a guide, hard diligence and an open mind eventually leads me closer to the direction I need to be wandering in.

Recategorization then is partly a personal quest, to see exactly how frequently I am writing about certain topics and to drop kick the diffidence I apply to others and pursue them further. Only an information-obsessed geek will understand this impulse. But hopefully a few readers might find something of interest along the way.