Category / Roundup

by Edward Champion

The “We Battled Insomnia with Gin Last Night and the Gin Won, But Heaven Help the Fallout” Roundup

  • The fantastic Carrie Frye points to the Word Nerds, a podcast devoted to “the effect of Internet communication” and various language-related issues. I’ll definitely be checking it out, as soon as I finally finish the next installment of my own damn podcast.
  • So according to the Associated Press, the book world “is still searching for this year’s great American novel,” eh? There are endless ways that I can answer this, but for now I’ll point again to Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever and Kirby Gann’s Our Napoleon in Rags as two books that I’ve enjoyed very much this year and, in my view, do indeed cut the mustard. Perhaps the key here is to stop thinking about the big boys and dare to delve into the little ones.
  • Dan Wickett doesn’t read Playboy for the pictures or the articles. No, sir, he’s reading it for the literature. I knew about the four-bunny system for books, because I actually had a Playboy subscription at the age of sixteen, in which I would secretly run to the mailbox and grab the latest issue covered in black plastic. (Remind me sometime to tell you the tale of what happened when I was finally caught and how I talked my way out of it.) The nice thing about this was that it allowed me to outgrow a reliance upon visual prurience and apply my perverted sentiments to everyday discourse without shame and of course evolve my unabated interest in breasts. But if the likes of Robert Coover can be found within Playboy‘s pages, then I may have to pick up a subscription. I have to wonder, however, if Mr. Wickett is secretly on Hefner’s payroll.
  • Dubya actually reads serious books? Apparently, some of the books that he’s taken on a five-week summer sojurn are Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History, Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar (which seems peculiarly apt) and John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza.
  • The Gothamist talks with Foop! author Chris Genoa.
  • Another celebrity reading slacker: Noel Gallagher, who only just started reading fiction with Angels and Demons (“my first ever book. Believe it or not, it is.”). In the same article, Hester Lacey suggests that to dismiss someone who hasn’t read “seems both sweeping and snobbish.” Oh come on, Hester. We’re talking Dan Brown here. If Victoria Beckham has not even read Green Eggs and Ham, should her raison d’etre not be suspect?
  • The new China Miéville short story collection, Looking for Jake, gets an early look at SFF World.
  • What the hell was I thinking with the gin? Head hurts. More later.
by Edward Champion

Morning Roundup

by Edward Champion

Et Tu, Posh Spice!

It’s doubtful that any well-adjusted (one might argue: regular) person would expect either a meaty anecdote, much less a bon mot from one-time Spice Girl Victoria Beckham. But I happen to be one of those strange aging men who has retained a soft spot for the Spice Girls and kept the faith over the years . In fact, I’m not ashamed (nor should you be!) to confess that I not only forked out eight bucks for Spice World, but actually enjoyed it!

Throughout the past decade, when in the doldrums, I have turned on “Wannabe,” danced like an ungraceful Caucasian within the privacy of my own bedroom, and connected with the deceptively primitive cadences of “So tell me what you want, what you really really want, I wanna I wanna I wanna I wanna I wanna really, really, really wanna zigazig ha.”

All along, I’ve had faith that there was something more to these many “wannas.” Perhaps somewhere between the “I” and the “wanna,” the brief pause (as the Spice Girls recaptured their breath) suggested a secret existential void that imparted a certain fortune cookie wisdom from performer to listener. It was, one might argue, a fortune cookie of one’s own making, formed within that milisecond of pause and inhale.

So it disheartens me in the extreme to learn that, all along, the Spice Girls have lied to me and that I’ve been led astray. They are indeed authentically vapid.

Or at least one of them is.

The latest news from England is this: Victoria Beckham, the Spice Girl once known as Posh Spice, has, despite having authored a 528-page autobiography, never read a book in her life. “I prefer listening to music,” says Posh, “althogh I do love fashion magazines.”

Fashion magazines! No possibility of her whispering sweet Shakespearean sonnets into anyone’s ear (well, specifically, that caveman soccer star Beckham’s) anytime soon. Heaven help her children.

How did she get through school? Who sent the checks to the headmasters? Isn’t this attitude a bit like performing fellatio but not receiving cunnilingus in return? More importantly, what hope for Ms. Beckham’s autobiography if she ain’t read none of dem books?

Because of this, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to turn my back on the Spice Girls and sell all of my Spice Girls album to Ameoba, if they’ll take them. This was a tough decision. But I’m a man of honor. And frankly there is nothing that turns me off more than a lady who don’t read.

by Edward Champion

Where She Stops, Nobody Knows!

  • Video game developer Vivendi Universal, in search of a Tom Clancy-style name, has signed a deal to develop games based on Ludlum’s thrillers. Ludlum’s death in 2001 will no doubt ensure creative flexibility (or what’s known in the field as “pillaging in front of a gravestone”).
  • When you run out of television remakes to film, there’s always cheesy 1970s science fiction. The Cell director Tarsem Singh is on tap to remake Westworld. The Governator was originally on board to play the android played by Yul Brynner, but he’s a bit busy. A pity, given that he seems to play machines, whether cinematic or political, quite well.
  • Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder has been turned into theatre. Dominic Cavendish says there’s not much to chew on.
  • Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance gets a review in the Mercury News. Sorrentino is accused of being “more impressed with his own voice than the humanity of his characters.”
  • I report this only because Mr. Esposito tortured me by showing me his seven volume Rising Up set the other night. As noted last week by Bookdwarf, this weekend’s NYTBR featured an appearance by the Vollster. He takes on the new Nietzsche bio at length.
  • Newsday chronicles some of the ways that publishers are trying to generate new interest in titles. Many publishers are distributing the first two chapters of a novel. But one teacher by the name of Jackie Spitz remarks, “I only took it because I felt sorry for the people handing it out.” Our heart is all a-trembling over Ms. Spitz’s noble munificence. In fact, as I write these words, I am sobbing into an issue of FHM that I found in my next door neighbor’s trash, watching my tears stream down some beautiful lady bent into an unfortunate position that resembles modular furniture. But I’m also wondering why niche markets and such projects as Vidlit and the LBC aren’t mentioned in the article. When will publishers realize that randomly giving chapters away to ad hoc educators isn’t nearly as effective as targeting people who actually read?
  • Time asks Bret Easton Ellis how “true” Lunar Park is. Apparently, Jay McInerery wasn’t thrilled by his “cameo appearance” as a cokehead buddy.
  • A new book of criticism studying Irvine Welsh’s work is out. But the International Herald Tribune asks if Welsh deserves to be compared with other authors.
  • Is the great rock’n’roll novel at death’s door?
  • The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: an anti-Proust novel?
  • The Boston Globe examines literary hoaxing.
  • Riverhead editor Sean McDonald talks with Mr. Sarvas.
  • And E.L. Doctorow takes Bush to task, suggesting that Bush does not know what grieving is.
by Edward Champion

The “I’ve Got Tedious Meetings But Here’s a Quick” Roundup