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by Edward Champion

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Darby Dixon points to a troubling new trend among today’s cultural tastemakers. Today, a professional writer can now be employed to write about reading about writing or reading about writing about reading, with several nots thrown in at random intervals, if we assume the writers to be keeping track. I must confess that all this gives me a headache. The silence is not pillowy exactly. But it is certainly quite silly and possibly Freudian.

I feel that I have contributed to this atmosphere with lengthy blog posts responding to reviews of books, and therefore exhort all to point to my culpability in the matter. In my defense, I should note that I never suggested to an editor that I should collect a check for writing such a piece. But now I am writing about writing about writing about reading, thereby adding a fourth layer of self-reference. And should you, dear readers, decide to comment upon this post, you will be writing about writing about writing about writing about reading. And how then can we live with ourselves?

All this sets a bad precedent for meta, dutifully putting the Quine in quinine. (Quite literally.) Or does it? Is there no limit to the onion?

Of the three paragraphs I have now written, I think the first one is probably the best, although I’ll probably change my mind when I approach this sentence’s period.

I am still unaware of how one “stabs over” to an online bookstore. This suggests that the online bookstore is a carapace to be pierced. And perhaps it is, assuming that it possesses the corporeal qualities of reference. Perhaps the preposition is the dagger I see before me or just a creepy beast caught in the morphological undertow. So I’ll see your self-reference and raise you with evidence to the contrary:

by Edward Champion

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

Nobody will replace Arthur C. Clarke. Not by a long shot. The inner cylindrical mysteries of Rama. The monolith concocted in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. The sad calculated way in which aliens conquered the human race in the unforgettable Childhood’s End.

He was one of the last of the Golden Age giants. Born close to the end of one world war and becoming a man in the middle of another war, where he served with the Royal Air Force, Clarke looked to the stars and to his imagination, creating a body of work that will live on for decades to come.

I was a scrawny and curious kid who found him on the rackety stacks of an underfunded public library. My mother had gone through her second divorce. There wasn’t a lot of food in the house. There were holes in my T-shirts, and no money. But then one Saturday afternoon in the library, I opened up a musty volume and discovered these amazing words:

The next time you see the full Moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the greatest walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium — the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

clarke.jpgThe story, of course, was “The Sentinel.” And I read it all in one gulp. I took to craning my head out the window late at night when nobody was looking, spying during hours when nobody knew I was awake. And I did catch a pockmarked indentation, wondering if this was indeed the Mare Crisium. (A later look at a picture book on the moon confirmed that this wasn’t quite the case. But I took to calling any detail I could see a Sea of Crises, for reasons that were comical to me.)

And I became indebted to Mr. Clarke for granting me a grand galaxy of awe, intrigue, and possibility. This was needed. Because at the time, my universe was quite limited.

So Clarke’s death came as a tremendous blow to me. I never got to meet him. Never got to thank him. Never got to tell him that he helped some kid get through a turbulent time.

And I really have nothing more to say.

Arthur C. Clarke, thanks for being there when I needed you.

by Edward Champion

Recovering

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I’m a bit wiped from last night’s interview with Marshall Klimasewiski, but thank you to all who came! I hope to offer content later. But in the meantime, recuperation is currently required.

I’m also pleased to announce that we’ve arranged for a number of people to discuss Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke and that, during the week of March 10, 2008, we’ll be offering a five-day discussion of this book, with a few unexpected cameo appearances. But in the meantime, don’t miss Baker’s “The Charms of Wikipedia,” in the latest New York Review of Books. This is a gloriously giddy essay that offers Baker’s first protracted perspective on the Internet and that, in light of Double Fold, you may be quite surprised by! (via Matt Cheney)