“Where Are the Litblog Groupies?”

The last time I went to the bookstore, I produced my business card to the sexy and bespectacled young lady behind the counter shortly after informing her that she had the most beautiful tits that I had ever seen. I was, of course, tactful about this. I did not, for example, use the word “beautiful.”

I told her that I was Edward Champion and that I ran one of the greatest literary blogs the Internet had ever seen since September 30, 2005. She asked me what century I thought I was in. I answered, “The 21st.” She then told me that I was a hundred years behind the times, knocked the wind out of me with a hard and painful chop to the jaw, and had several impecunious teenagers (scrawny young men whom she referred to as “co-workers”) using their diminuitive muscles to throw me out of the bookstore. There were five attempts to push me through the door, but all tries proved useless until the last one, when these two gaunt co-workers threw me onto the sidewalk without losing their breath. One whapped me with the latest issue of Marie Claire the entire time to keep me appropriately stunned. His ruse worked. I was then photographed by the young lady and added to a “Megan’s Law”-style database of men who hit upon attractive bookstore clerks.

As any of my readers know, I got into the litblog business for the chicks. My love of literature, if any, was tertiary at best. Like other people, I expected this young lady to allow me to feel her up or offer a Linda Lovelace impression simply because I was entitled to it. Was this really a mistake? I was a litblogger, dammit! Where other people earned their way into bed through an osciallating combination of charisma, caring and alcohol, was not I, as a litblogger, deservedly on the fast track system by default?

Didn’t my obsession with literature entitle to me to complimentary rolls in the hay? Women I didn’t have to pay for? At the very least, she might sell her story to The Sun and find out if litbloggers were, as the rumors suggested, worse in the sack than some of our most shameless septuagenarian whoremongers, who also doubled as men of letters and were eventually published by the Library of America shortly after their penises dessicated into an unusable state and they eventually met their maker.

Say what you like about being a litblogger and a cad, it leads to a wide spectrum of silly things to write about. Now, whenever I write a blog post, however much I might be looking forward to exposing some literary news development, once I see the “Publish” button in my blog software template, all I can think about is the one time I sat at my computer and jerked myself off silly, simply because I was bored and had run out of books to read.

I had apparently spent the night alone: I had apparently stripped down to my socks and sprayed aerosol cheese over the whole of my body. I then called a friend and asked if he knew anyone could lick the cheese off, ideally wearing a Wonder Woman costume. The friend then told me that I was a sick reprobate and refused to speak with me again — even after I sent him complimentary tickets to a ball game, as well as a 312-page letter of apology.

Maybe in America, the litbloggers with sexier names than mine, Gwenda Bond, Mark Sarvas, Maud Newton, are rock’n’ roll enough to spend better evenings than this. They are probably more focused and they have probably never touched aerosol cheese in their lives.

Have I gone too far?

The Continued Collapse of Edward Champion, Part Two

Today, I obtained a Xanax subscription. If the Xanax fails, then I’ll try Trazodone. If the Trazodone fails, I’ll have to resort to stuffing sizable amounts of powdered sugar down my throat.

The question now is one of functionality. If there are drugs to help alleviate this premature midlife crisis, rest assured that the doctors will prescribe them. The doctors have been commissioned to keep me in the locked room away from the laptop, reminding me not to refer to myself in third person or use the first person plural. They will indeed prescribe any and all capsules that they feel will increase dopamine levels and transform me into a happy and functional person who won’t rock the boat and who will be able to work a drab day job without complaint. They say that I will eventually find either a wife or a heterosexual lifemate and that I will work with this new person to produce the 2.2 children that the United States of America demands me (a white guy) to sprout.

Here’s where I’m at on the writing: This afternoon, I wrote three haikus. It’s not much. I’ve never been much of a poet. But I suppose this is better than nothing. The first haiku dealt with a very sexy traffic officer that gave me a nasty scowl when I waved hello to her out my barred window. It goes like this:

blue bottomed mama
will you take off your pants?
write me a ticket

The second haiku concerns a shooting pain that I had in my teeth when I was having my lunch. I had been served a hot dog and had asked for some sauerkraut. Sauerkraut was against regulations. So I settled for just ketchup and mustard. I was able to coax the man to sprinkle three microscopic bits of onions on the weenie. The hot dog man did, much to my surprise, have a beating heart like the rest of humanity. Who knew if it was in conflict with itself?

Anyway, when I bit into the dog in question, I experienced something unexpected. Fortunately, this sort of life experience translates quite easily into art and I wrote this second haiku of the afternoon:

frozen weenie. ouch.
bleeding bicuspids aren’t nice
dentist trip likely

The third haiku, I’m afraid, is a bit too personal for me to share with you. But I will say that it got me in touch with a sensitive part of me that I had long forgotten about.

More later. It’s time to cross-stitch.

After Blog Life

1

Blog life changes fast.
Blog life changes more times than you can change your underwear.
You sit down to lunch and you know that there’s a blog awaiting you.
The question of pity parties.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. I had sent off yet another epistle to a media outlet. Mr. Tanenhaus’s assistant had personally telephoned me, telilng me that I was “chasing windmills” and that the New York Times office would no longer be accepting my brownie shipments. I can’t be sure about the dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Last-ditch olive branch letter to Sam Tanenhaus.doc,” I think it was called). I had long since deleted it and freed up that portion of my hard drive to download more porn. I sure as hell was’t Joan Didion, who clearly had more important things to say to the Gray Lady’s affluent and upper middle class demographic. I could sweat long and hard on a thoughtful essay about Gilbert Sorrentino or the interesting history of Soft Skull Press, but in the end if Didion wanted to write some 6,000 word essay on the sensation of putting two quarters into a soda machine, she’d have top priority and wouldn’t be edited at all. Never mind that I had suffered my own personal grief in 2005 and had used my sense of humor and perseverance to keep on writing.

For a long time I wrote haikus.

Blog life changes more times than you can change your underwear.

The ordinary underwear, not the expensive boxers I wear to give girlfriends smooth and easy access.

At some point, in the interest of remembering that letter, I decided not to allow myself to be crippled by morally complex decisions. Instead of laboring over a Word file, I wrote half a play, traded notes with a producer about a screenplay we were developing, banged out a lot of words on a novel-in-progress, began a literary podcast, and continued to blog profusely. All this with a full-time job. Like most writers, I didn’t have the luxury of a literary reputation to fall back on. I saw immediately that quibbling over the haikus was probably a bad idea, because, really, what good is there in laboring months over a sentence? I recognize now that there is nothing unusual in this, that most writers aren’t nearly high-profile enough to earn that particular advantage and that the Times was culpable in allowing a talented writer to take a colossal misstep, playing into the sympathies of a liberal elite that had very likely never known a day without a hot meal, much less stretched their hand across the class chasm to listen to and understand the very people they purported to support. Maybe back in 1966, when they were hungry and struggling and dealing with editors who would call them on their shit, these writers might be capable of stunning us with their amazing powers of observation; without exception, they had declined to do this for quite some time, never deigning to speak with the freaks and the bohemians and the dissidents and the crackheads and the troubled souls so regularly observed in my everyday life (but apparently not theirs) that the Sunday Times Magazine had so regularly ignored. Instead, they bankrolled top talent and suggested that they write about vacuity. They played into the whole essayist superstars mythos. And all this as the New York Times Company had laid off staff while silently pondering why the shares had dropped.

“And then — blogged.” In the midst of life we are surrounded by obsessions, and I had said this sentence one too many times. It had not been said by any philosopher of note. Later I realized that my rage at the newspapers, compounded by their deafness to my creative pitches, is what led me to become some febrile chronicler of literary motifs and happenings. Friends were kind enough to not tell me directly that I was chasing windmills, letting me find out for myself that such a regular plan was far from tenable. Never once did I exploit the intimate details of my personal life. All this without that bradykinetic yet pivotal period of thinking, of allowing dreams to unfold and wild ideas to transform into arguments and complex tales.

One thing’s for sure: there was never any hired help named Jose to pick up my mess. I cleaned my own toilet. I washed my own dishes. Every week, I picked up the detritus. And I never once asked my reading public to feel sorry for me through such a shameless publicity stunt: a desperate attempt to draw in more readers by headlining one individual’s personal misery.

2

August 23, 2005, a Tuesday.

I had ordered a large pizza.

I had seen the pizza advertised in a leaflet that had somehow been crammed into my mailbox and decided to give it a shot.

The pizza, with its pepperoni and mushrooms, would give me the strength to blog some more.

The pizza man arrived, I tipped him generously, I offered two slices to a friend and one to a homeless lady in my neighborhood.

All this, of course, is unimportant. But one must understand the exact contents in which the Tanenhaus letter was sent.

If the pizza could be said to have any feelings, I’m guessing it would have felt relieved yet somewhat homicidal as the pizza slicer partitioned it into eight pieces. If it could read, the pizza would probably be reading Sun Tze’s The Art of War, which is particularly sad, as the pizza itself was unarmed and had no appendages, much less a sentient mind, with which to attack its assailants.

The pizza was scarfed down by dawn.

Another one was ordered less than two weeks later. It was a pretty good idea, considering the untold burden of grief.

* * *

I used to have a large white dry erase board in my small rented room, for reasons having to do with a silly effort at appearing professional. Initially, I drew task lists for what I needed to do during any given week. But because the markers were colorful, I soon began drawing obscene pictures involving stick figures in flagrante delicto. I would invite friends to come by to play drunken games of Pictionary, carefully rationing the large bottle of Jim Beam that I had purchased on sale at a Safeway earlier in the year. I was using the dry erase board as a way to keep things going in light of the grief that threatened to destroy my routine.

I sobbed as I scrawled those naughty pictures of stick figures. At the time, I wasn’t getting any and I had resorted to relentless masturbation to maintain my sangfroid. So should we all.

There was still no hired man named Jose who would help me balance my checkbook. I couldn’t afford such a man. Like most people, I had to sort this all out by myself.

But the dry erase board helped, even if it proved the wrong conduit for me to organize my life.

3

I had to believe that the grief could die. I had to believe that learning to laugh at the crazy world around us, without resorting to a long-winded personal essay, was the right road out.

I did lots of laughing in the months that followed. I’ve always done a lot of laughing. I’ve been kicked out of funeral homes for laughing. The fault, I suppose, is mine.

Yet.

I didn’t own a car and I slept on a futon. What kind of conditions were these for a man in his early thirties? Would things eventually happen for me because I had a pretty strong work ethic and produced who knows how many thousands of words? If there were any deficiencies in the way that I was approaching this, it was perhaps the simple fact that the things that interested me were quirky and alternative and not always highbrow. I had actually enjoyed The 40 Year Old Virgin! What was wrong with me?

Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, points out that the essential characteristic of winning people over is to dun your nose as you listen to a person of influence. Certainly, people interested me and I fancied myself a halfass listener. But why should anyone have to suffer fools gladly when one exists in either an imagined or a palpable sense of grief? Why should anyone reveal so many pedantic details to move newspapers? Shouldn’t some things be kept close to one’s chest? Shouldn’t more substantial things be written about?

The smell of sweet bullshit.

That was one way I could come to terms with this ethical conundrum.

I did not anticipate a midlife crisis at the age of 31.

A Tour of “Cliterary” Blogs and Websites — XXXVIII

The other day, while bemoaning the fact that my tongue had not touched a clitoris in seventeen years and remembering that my life had become so vapid and meaningless that I had resorted to this ongoing “tour” of cliterary blogs in an effort to get linkage (4,300 visitors last week! Thank you, Terry Teachout!), I came across this letter in one of my scholarly periodicals:

Dear Penthouse Letters:

My wife and I were trying to spice up our sex life. One evening, she suggested that I dress up in a human-size cocker spaniel costume. I asked her why she wanted me to do this. And she confessed that she had been dissatisfied with me for some time. She had resorted to illicit relations with Pumpkin, our pet cocker spaniel. She had persauded Pumpkin by putting a Milkbone up her cunt, which Pumpkin proceeded to masticate upon. And then, attracted by my wife’s smell, Pumpkin proceeded to perform cunnilingus on my wife.

I must confess that after hearing this, I was torn as to whether I could even waggle my tongue within my wife’s inner recesses and, in particular, her clit. But once I had donned the dog suit, I became comfortable with performing cunnilingus — often with Pumpkin helping out whenever he craved a Milkbone.

— A NEW KIND OF DOGGY STYLE, Fayetteville, NC

Allowing “A New Kind of Doggy Style” a little leeway, we can see that this isn’t a sad story at all. It seems to me that his wife has gusto and a creative solution to an ongoing problem. Cunnilingus has always struck me as a practice that is, quite frankly, too much effort for the typical male. Why should anyone be burdened by it? Further, why should anyone write about it when their critical skills are bankrupt? The short answer, I do believe, is that these cliterary bloggers are not critics. They are that rare species of thinker known as the enthusiast. And they should spend less time writing about the clit and more time licking it. One should grant these moonlighters scant stock, given that the real cliterary enthusiasts, however misguided, are hidden behind locked doors, evading strange and antediluvian North Carolina laws that are, rather inexplicably, still on the books.

In fact, it seems to me that some of these conditions are reflected in cliterary blogs such as John Bruce’s. I’ve already discussed Bruce’s failure to say anything positive about the clitoris. He writes like an embittered and impoverished muskrat who has not fondled a bare breast in some time or, failing that, a man who would need an instruction manual to discover the advantages and pleasures of his own cock. One can infer from Bruce’s writing that his penis is quite small and flaacid.

In fact, if you were to put an ice cream cone in Bruce’s hands, he would probably throw it instantly into the garbage can, declaring it a foolish distraction. So miserable a man is Bruce that one wonders why he expends endless pages saying nothing but negative things about the clitoris. Perhaps, if properly coaxed, Bruce might learn to lick and love the clit.

But then why should he? What are we likely to get from a man so hopeless in reasoning, so clueless in connecting, and so diffident about the clit? Why did you choose to write about the clit, John? If you don’t like clits, shouldn’t you consider the anatomy of another gender?

Further, there is the strange association of clits with some unspecified hillock known as Mt. Hollywood. While any competent scholar is well aware that much of the porn industry can be found in the Los Angeles area, why stand in the shadow of some dubious mountain? Is it possible that Bruce will never climb the mountain? Even a few steps up the incline? Even in a half-hearted way?

I’m still learning more about these cliterary bloggers, but I’m sure we can all agree that careless reading and an inflexible mindset is the ultimate justification for being an inveterate wanker.

The Christian Science Monitor: A History of E****** — First Draft

Some scholars have suggested that it all began with a 1749 novel written by John Cleland. The novel’s title was composed of two words: The first being a slightly naughty term for one’s, uh — how shall we put it? That thing you sit on. The second being more acceptable for the Christian ear: namely, “Hill.” However, this hill must be clearly distinguished from the immoral “thrills” one might find on another “Hill” immortalized in rock and roll music. Or perhaps not. It’s clear that the parallels here are inevitable. I must warn you, dear reader, that should you spend at least five minutes contemplating this issue, you may find yourself spending most of the weekend praying to God for forgiveness.

This book, written by Cleland when he was in debtor’s prison, was the first e***** novel. It depicts a certain young woman’s initiation into things we really can’t talk about in this publication. Let’s just say that Ms. Hill, the eponymous character, wasn’t exactly spending all of her spare time cross-stitching.

One might argue whether these unspeakable actions should even be put to pen. The risk of offending so many people clearly outweighs the value of rationally discussing what some have argued to be an everyday and harmless issue.

And yet, almost cavalierly, the writers couldn’t refrain from writing. There were volumes penned by Frank Harris in which this ineffable subject was broached. D.H. Lawrence, thought to be innocent enough with his classic story “The Rocking Horse Winner,” demonstrated his true colors and ineluctable perversion with “Lady Chatterley’s L****,” causing at least four septuagenarians to have cardiac arrests before they had finished reading the first chapter. And then there was that Henry Miller guy who wrote about what shall henceforth be referred to in this essay as It, banging out descriptive passage after descriptive passage of It It It with all the gusto of a man who hadn’t discovered the advantages of tight breeches…

[Whoops! Did I just write that? Editor, please strike.]

…with all the gusto of a man who hadn’t discovered the advantages of, uh, abstienence.

Soon, e****** became a cottage industry. Together with its less steamier cousin, the H******** romance, everyday readers became drawn to cheaply produced paperbacks that not only featured vivid descriptions of It, but dared to suggest It with muscular, long-haired hunks [Editor: Is that too much?] rescuing ripe beauties clad in diaphonous clothing [Oh come on, Editor, you asked me to write about it!].