I was twenty-one when I first put a cigarette to my lips. I was oh so stupid, swiftly addicted to the bursts of artificial dopamine that nicotine seemed to guarantee. Cigarettes fueled my writing, my conversational energy, and, pathetically, my reason to be alive. In my early twenties, three thousand crisp and witty words spilled out of me with libertine glee every Wednesday night, with a few late lead dispatches or an eleventh-hour interview transcript on a Thursday. I documented the week’s film releases with verve and eclat and I would chain smoke as I happily banged all this madness out of me, operating in some fumy fugue state.

I would pore proudly over the remains of fifteen to twenty cigarettes in my ashtray as my 56k modem emitted that telltale screech of an Internet handshake. And when I connected, I would send a triumphant email gravid with Word attachments to my editor. I delivered such clean copy that there usually wasn’t much of a punch up.

We’ll never see the likes of those days again, now that writing long and lavish thoughts about books and film seems to have fallen by the wayside with eight-track tape, zines assembled with scissors and Sellotape, and video store clerks who memorized the Leonard Maltin movie guide with Talmudic resolve. Years later, I would learn how much my weird knack for accessible intellectualism aggravated and angered my colleagues. The more envious and invidious practitioners often read through my work for gaffes so they could announce what a charlatan I was in the comments. It was truly amazing how many enemies you could make in the literary world by simply having a fun time or writing with genuine passion and exuberance. Hopeless and humorless hacks wasted astonishing amounts of their spare time shit-talking and spreading unsubstantiated falsehoods about me to anyone they deemed “important.” Had they possessed any true idea of how fragile and uncertain and self-hating I was at the time, they might have raised their sniper rifles and instantly murdered the maniac who wrote as rapidly as Lester Bangs, but who somehow did so without Darvon and Nyquil. But I did have the cigarettes. There was enough of a command in my writing voice for me to carry on. And for a long time, as recently as last August, cigarettes were so poisonously intertwined with my good faith efforts to deliver something original in words.

When the late great Roger Ebert was extraordinarily gracious and commended my writing in those puckish and punkish days, when writing online was akin to being some top-tier leper that no legacy media practitioner roosting in a high place wished to talk about, I didn’t believe him. I stupidly assumed he was praising the latest fresh hard pack of Lucky Strikes or Marlboro 100s I had tapped four or five times against the edge of my palm before ferociously ripping off the foil which protected my vile babies. I had precious little self-esteem in those days and I would learn decades later that I was carrying a remarkable amount of accumulated pain and trauma that contributed heavily to my many failings. This made me an easy mark for tobacco. And I told myself that it was the cigarettes, not me. It never occurred to me that I could write well or live better without cigarettes. When I met other writers who smoked, some of them believed the same thing.

The cancer sticks were there for every victory and every loss. Almost like a long lost uncle who would never leave you. Lovers bolted. Friendships dissolved. Prospects fizzled. But the cigarettes always stayed. And that security — the extremely lethal reliability measured out in lots of twenty — seemed to overshadow the yellow teeth and the bad breath and the nicotine stains on my fingers and the wretched odor that settled upon every article of clothing I donned and every piece of furniture I reclined on. Every time I fired up a gasper while shivering in the cold, puffing hard and greedy upon the five packed inches of deadly tobacco rapidly reduced by selfish sucks into soft sprinkles of ash, I would tell myself that I was warm and that this atoned for how winded I felt whenever I climbed multiple flights of stairs.

In my younger days, I was incredibly shy and awkward and sensitive. Still am today to some degree, though I am better at cloaking it when I am in the presence of the baleful and the obnoxious. Since cigarettes seemed to provide a solution to every problem, I deferred to their sham expertise. I could plant myself on a barstool, ask the barkeep for any drink I had the bread for, put one of those hideous sticks between my lips, light it up, and watch the blue smoke flutter in an upward whirl that reminded me of all the great noir films that I wolfed down like some starved animal eating Thai or Indian food for the first time in years. But my great hunger for cigarettes, all part of an insidious scam manufactured by malevolent bloodthirsty capitalists in the tobacco industry and their chemist accomplices, soon eclipsed that relatively harmless addiction.

The nicotine screamed within my bloodstream like some coddled toddler demanding candy packaged in seductive multihued paper. Cigarettes were my answer to those sweet goodies stacked right next to the supermarket checkout line as all the poor single people begrudgingly waited in line to buy their Saturday night pints of Haagen-Dazs or their bottles of merlot while suffering through the piercing tantrums of a child pointing at a brick of Kit-Kat waiting for an adult with a fat wallet. Oh yes. That was nicotine and me, except that I was a petulant addict without the parents to blackmail or the audience to terrorize.

You see, nicotine is one of the most addictive alkaloids ever created by mercantile men. And back when I first started smoking in the mid nineties, the cigarette companies began to increase nicotine levels through improved chemical technology. It was the worst time in American history to become ensorcelled by these dreaded coffin nails. The tobacco conglomerates added ammonia, sugars, additives, and other nasty chemicals to ensure that the nicotine was sent faster to my brain and that tobacco smoke settled more smoothly into my lungs.

The tobacco companies had this sinister idea of profiting by creating millions of lifelong addicts, who would become dedicated consumers until just before the tombstone, smoking their way into COPD, emphysema, heat disease, and lung cancer and hopefully passing on the addiction to their children. Even the Nazis, who actually had anti-smoking programs in place, didn’t go that far. (But let’s not pat those evil bastards on the back. Especially as we chillingly repeat history in this wildly awful immigrant-detaining and Iran-bombing age.) It became so difficult and unpleasant for smokers to quit that some drug addicts have described cigarettes as more addictive than heroin.

No matter how hard you tried, you’d eventually go back to smoking.

I first started smoking while walking the streets of San Francisco by myself. Scratch any addict and you’ll see that it starts as a temporary cure for loneliness or anxiety. I was hooked on the ironically pure-white scags within a week.

I started smoking in the twentieth century with a decidedly twentieth century brand: unfiltered Lucky Strikes. This was a partial nod to my father, who smoked Pall Malls. But Pall Malls weren’t easy to find in the nineties. Lucky Strikes were the closest thing.

My father had smoked more or less to the end of his life, dropping dead at the age of seventy-three during the pandemic. The probate attorney who informed me of his passing told me that the furniture around him had been pocked and riddled with careless and prolific burns. She told me over the phone that there came a point in which my father just didn’t have the will to live. He gave up, much as he had given up writing sometime in his forties, presumably having little more than smokes to soothe his paranoia and his bitterness. And this spooked me. I didn’t want to be a cynic. And I very much wanted to live. In large part because I needed to write. I wanted to live even as I was puffing away while the attorney squawked more details through the tinny Android speaker pressed to my ear. Here I was. Still slowly killing myself and not quite knowing what to feel about the man who had abused me for years, the man whom I had cut myself off from three decades before for my own protection.

After I said my goodbye to the attorney, I imagined a future twenty-five years from now in which I might suffer the same fate. That’s the irony of cigarette time. Backwards and forwards. Forwards and backwards. Sex or a meal punctuated by a rapaciously inhaled toby rib. The nicotine muddling your memory and sending you into a terrifying future. My dad. Me. Seventy-three. A face as dour and drained as Kerouac near the end, underappreciated at forty-seven after the booze finally got him. No reason to carry on. Puttering around. Becoming indifferent. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Dropping half-smoked cigarettes onto the floor with learned negligence. Burning holes in anything that had not fallen apart. Giving up. Did he finish his last pack before he passed? I suspect he did. He was always a committed smoker.

And then a bolt back to the past. The waft of tobacco that curled from the open gate of the pipe shop in the mall. Yes, believe it or not, they had pipe shops in malls near the end of the seventies. The days in which shady men hoped to hook kids on lung darts, paying off the Salkinds with forty grand to have Superman tossed by General Zod into a Marlboro truck. I recalled my father’s daily saunter into the convenience store, with me tagging alongside him as a scrawny kid. I remember the frightening roar of the fan, insecurely mounted just above the entrance. My father would buy beer and a pack of cigarettes, grunting and looking sour and never thanking the congenial Indian man behind the counter, who gave me the kindly smile that my father was supposed to tender to me. And I would look up at the fan, worried that it would fall down and chop my gaunt underfed little body into tiny bits. In a way, the fan did fall on me. Because two decades later, I would be the one repeating my father’s beer and cigarettes convenience store routine, though I would improve upon my father’s sullen demeanor by making small talk with the guy behind the counter, always thanking him for selling me highly addictive goods that were designed to kill me.

Cigarettes weren’t just an addiction with my dad. They were a weapon. He burned me with the bright red ends when he wasn’t filling the living room with blue smoke. Despite all this, I romanticized my father, preferring to remember his better moments to bury the pain he burned into me sometimes daily, which obviously extended beyond cigarettes. And when I took up cigarettes as an adult — or, more accurately, a foolish and desperate infant of an adult — they turned out to be a brilliant accessory at inhuming sizable portions of my humanity. I didn’t know that three decades ago, but I know that now — nearly two hundred days after puffing on my last cigarette.

Near the end of my deadly smoking run, which ended shortly after my fifty-first birthday, I was reduced to hideous but cheaper Newports picked up through the black market trade at my bodega. These tasted like filthy mint, with the smoke crackling like a crumbling pillar within my heavy lungs, slicing my alveoli like fine crystal daggers. I was just one of an estimated 28.8 million American smokers who did this to himself. Most of us want to stop. Most of us can’t.

I had always been contemptuous of cigarette regulation, in large part because the overly tanned and smugly speaking men who declared cigarettes evil really seemed to have no significant understanding of how viciously addictive cigarettes are. Instead of helping nicotine addicts by regulating cigarette production to reduce the addictive qualities (akin to the 3.2% beer during Prohibition) or offering free nicotine replacement therapy, local and state governments preferred to profit from gasping gasper junkies like me by raising cigarette taxes. It was a bit like Trump’s tariff scam. Pass on the costs of the grift onto the addicted consumer and have him feel the biggest pinch. Big Tobacco profited either way.

When I started smoking, a pack of cigarettes cost $1.50. At the end of my on again/off again smoking career (I have no exact number, but I’m pretty sure I “quit” smoking at least two hundred times), I was buying contraband smokes at eleven dollars a pack. Now if you didn’t know a guy who knew a guy (or knew a bodega who knew an illicit trader), you’d have to purchase cigarettes legally, which would set you back $18 to $20 here in New York City. And if you smoked one pack a day, that would add up to $600 a month: roughly the cost of a CUNFON RZ800 electric scooter. (By contrast, a pack of cigarettes cost twenty cents in 1940. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $4.65, a far more manageable luxury at $139/month.)

But it was especially difficult for me to quit because of the permanent nexus between smoking and writing. I’d usually scarf down a cigarette every two or three paragraphs. And if I was really hardcore, I’d chain smoke while slicing through my sentences with a pen. When I was a smoker, I could write a one thousand word essay in about two and a half hours.

But if you quit cold turkey — and I didn’t want to be a vampiric Maron hording nicotine lozenges — this godlike superpower slips away for many months. Because even when your physical cravings disappear, you’re still contending with the psychological attachment to cigarettes. You’re still dealing with a damaged brain in which the receptors, which not so long ago were pummeled relentlessly by the slings and arrows of outrageous nicotine, need time to heal. The scientists say that it takes three months of not smoking for your dopamine levels to return to normal. But the last time I quit before I finally stopped, it was more along the lines of four or five months before I felt that I could read and write like my former self. This is one of many reasons why it’s difficult for creative people, who often rely on dopamine, to quit smoking. When the great Lady Gaga became a smoking apostate, she claimed she saw Jesus for an entire week. I fully believe that she did.

Last summer, I had reached a point in which I needed to quit. I had quit before. And then I started right back up with the ciggies after a Polish woman gaslighted me and broke my heart. (She had two kids. So it was like breaking up with three people. I had given the trio every bit of my heart and I was damaged goods.) Then, when I was finishing up the editing of “Libromendel,” I started feeling a strange pain near my left lung. This was it, I thought. All those years of smoking were coming back to bite me in the ass. What hideous diagnosis could be awaiting me? Would there be a mask and an oxygen tank in my immediate future?

I had also seen Weird Al Yankovic perform live in Bethel and it was one of the best live shows I had ever seen. I had been utterly astonished at how spry and alive he was as a performer. The dude performed nonstop for three and a half hours, complete with costume changes, and never once sang a wrong note. And the man was sixty-five. Weird Al’s indefatigable energy was so deeply inspiring that it became an instrumental part in persuading me to quit. I wanted to be a goofy old dude with that level of energy.

So I stopped smoking. Not quit. Stopped. There’s a difference. And I saw many doctors and I got everything looked at. I found a primary care physician who was hilariously brutal with his data-driven analysis and who informed me that I had to take up a quasi-pescatarian diet. I responded by showing up to a followup appointment and saying, “Yo, doc, I ate a bacon egg and cheese before arriving here just to spite you.” He patiently repeated the data — his eyes rolling gloriously like those alphanumeric characters on an old Solari board — and said, “Do you want to live long?” And I conceded that he had a point. So I (mostly) went back to the diet, with occasional deviations. It turned out that the pain was a pulled muscle, not my lung. I didn’t have cancer. I had moved a 200 pound piece of furniture up four flights of stairs with a bit too much fervor. Sorry, I’m a man. And any honest man will tell you that he approaches his life with some stupid variation of stubborn male pride. At least I wasn’t one of those hopelessly hateful and ditch-dirt dumb and feebly aimless and lamentably illiterate Trump fuckheads claiming to be a phony victim of the mythical “male loneliness epidemic” because he doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up and listen to women.

I applied my deranged obudracy to staying off cigarettes. It helped that I was hell-bent on outliving my enemies. Yes, my mind was gone. I couldn’t write much else other than “Thank you for meeting for lunch” or “Say, that was a pretty good episode of Only Murders in the Building.” I was so profoundly idiotic that I felt very much like Dougie in Twin Peaks: The Return and even considered buying a lime green blazer that was several sizes too big on me.

After two months of functioning like a veritable vegetable (and failing to find a Dougie style blazer that matched the color of chayote sequash), I refused to smoke cigarettes, but I couldn’t take this new lifestyle in which my ability to write was so deracinated. I had to write not just from need, but out of spite. You see, I have sadly watched so many bright and burning lights decline and dim into zestless and soulless hacks as they made the shift from blogs and alt-weeklies to the more vanilla and unadventurous pastures of corporate media. But I have always loved writing. And I adamantly refuse to bore an audience or phone it in. I am Sammy Davis, Jr. singing a number from Golden Rainbow before the soft drink companies appropriated that marvelous ode to authenticity. When these same commercial outlets hired me to write pieces for them, I fought them with great feist or won them over with a barrage of jokes every time they tried to neuter my voice. Most of the writers I once knew became no different from corporate drones who saunter the earth with that dead “fuck my life” look in their eyes. The soulless husks you see on the subway who are about two bad days away from mimicking Hemingway’s final act with a twelve-gauge. This is a deliberate decision that happens around the age of forty. And I have always stubbornly resisted this. I’m the guy who defiantly wears floral and paisley shirts into an office, leaning with unpunctured felicity into some early form of my Mister Furley years. If you don’t rock it on the fashion front until your final day on this mortal coil, you’re doing life very wrong.

I didn’t smoke, but I had no mind. So I came up with a workaround. I began to ride my exercise bike every day to generate dopamine.

And it worked.

Twenty minutes at around 20 miles per hour generated around five hundred words that were close to my former smoking self.

So I rode and I wrote. And I rode and I wrote.

And now I don’t even have to ride the bike to write. The brain fog is gone. And most of this essay has been written, au natural, sans cigarettes. Eat the inner pieces within the deepest recess of my posterior, RJ Reynolds!

But there has been something else I’ve learned.

What nobody tells you about smoking is that, much like any drug, you learn just how much you’ve pushed down a lot of your emotions by cleaving to the stimulant. In the last few months, I’ve felt more. Happiness, sadness, anger, hypersensitivity, an evermore burgeoning worry about the future of my nation. I’ve cried a lot more in the last six months than I have in the last six years.

And then I met a woman near the end of last year. An amazing woman. Tall, gorgeous, beatific eyes gleaming with ambition and mischief, gloriously weird, delightfully quirky, tremendously kind, incredibly smart, hilariously intense at times, sweet in ways that demand me to be more emotionally present, adorably loud like yours truly.

Our first date was rocky. Our second date was better. By our third date, we started to have some inkling that we were meant for each other. And now? We are inseparable and we are forging mighty plans. Every night that she is not in my arms is deeply painful. But we love each other. What can I say? When you know, you know. And I know. And she knows. I have told her all the terrible things about me and she’s still around. How? I have no idea. The universe has been so relentlessly against me that I did not think I would ever catch one of the luckiest breaks of my life. But I have. And I also have to give myself a little credit.

If cigarettes remained a part of my life, she would not be here.

If cigarettes remained a part of my life, I would not have the courage to let her in.

I needed to quit smoking because there was so much of me buried under peat moss.

I needed to quit smoking so that the real man, the real writer trapped within me, could at long last reveal himself.

Thirty years with cigarettes (1995-2025) is a very long time. Longer than most marriages. But when you grow up with a toxic and abusive family, as I did, you develop a narcotic attraction to toxic elements. You may even give off some uncanny aura of toxicity when you’re holding the door open for a stranger or helping a mother carry her stroller up the subway steps. Because it takes such a long time for the contamination to clear. A contagion enters you and announces to surrounding parasites lurking about for a new host that this emotionally bruised dude is a ripe mark to maim.

There have been a number of bad actors, pathological liars, and outright prevaricators who have tried to destroy me with falsehoods. In their own way, they were just as poisonous as the cigarettes. They have spent an inordinate amount of time obsessed with me. I’m still fending off two stalkers, one of whom has created six dozen accounts to intimidate me on TikTok. A talentless lowlife who works at a Penske Media outlet spent a week on social media harassing and spreading lies about me last year. And in the last weekend, I was physically assaulted by someone who resented the happiness and purpose that I had finally found in middle age. But I refused to be a victim. I refused to strike back. After I was attacked, I dusted myself off and wrote this essay.

I am not afraid to lean into love and empathy and the far more meaningful realm of being sensitive and giving and vulnerable. The important people in my life know who I truly am. The rest is just noise. The haters latch onto me because they have no lives of their own, no ambition or beauty or purpose that they can summon. And I now realize they see something in me that they covet but will never find within themselves.

I can say all this now because I finally removed cigarettes from my life. I’m the real deal now more than I ever was before. I stopped being an addict and I raised the barrier for entry into my life. I finally became myself. Who knew that this was the real tough guy move?

© 2026, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post My Terrible Thirty Year Love Affair with Cigarettes first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

For a large chunk of Tuesday, just as the dust started to settle upon the tail of a particularly dystopian year, I kicked Jonathan V. Last in the balls. Repeatedly. Regrettably, this low-hanging flagellation (and Last’s responsive groans of pain) was confined strictly to my imagination. However, I found that the more that I fantasized about my steel-toe Doc Martens colliding into the scrotal region of one of America’s foremost political grifters, the more it became possible in the real world. Perhaps it had already happened? The thought had given me hope. A New Hope, as it were. (Stay tuned!)

If you consider this to be a strange pastime, well, it’s not altogether different from the remarkably predictable way that Jonathan V. Last has devised his half-baked and covertly fascist theses over the course of his checkered career (a small sample of Last’s pablum to neutralize any potential “Trust me, bro!” allegations leveled at yours truly: Maybe it’s just too much effort to protect immigrants from ICE! Mike Pence is a hero! Let Trump be Trump!). Except that my idea was more violent and thus decidedly more entertaining.

Before this remarkably vapid and autocracy-friendly douchebag fell upward to become editor-at-large at The Bulwark, Last was known for defending the Galactic Empire in Star Wars — quite literally the only self-identifying geek who has ever defended one of the most tyrannical fictitious institutions in cinematic history. I can legitimately imagine George Lucas reading Last’s piece and saying, “How did this ghettoass motherfucker come up with that takeaway?” But let us adopt a more pragmatic tenet from the Spielberg-Lucas oeuvre, shall we? It stands to reason that if it was okay for Indiana Jones to punch a Nazi, then the modern day parallel would involve kicking Nazi-friendly transphobic fuckheads like Jonathan V. Last repeatedly in the balls. He is, after all, a not very perspicacious scumbag who now spends many of his spare moments stroking his salami to Marjorie Taylor Greene. And, look, I don’t want to kink shame. But when an extremely stupid person’s kink begins to dwarf his understanding of basic democratic principles, there comes a time for violent fantasies and longass vitriolic essays to be directed against the dunderhead in question.

Let us state the truth plainly:

Jonathan V. Last is more equipped to pump gas during a particularly harsh New Jersey winter than write a regular political column.

Back to Mr. Last’s gonads.

Earlier this week, the general region down there, which was quite chapped and inflamed because of Last’s penchant for onanism (both as a sad sack conservative writer and as a sad sack human being), needed a little more variety (and perhaps a little more lube). Last’s hands had been down there far too frequently when writing his “thought pieces.” And if he was going to abuse himself (and damage his junk) in the privacy of his own home, why not replace the incessant and overly rigorous stroking with sharp painful kicks? Perhaps Last’s painful yelps in response to this well-earned testicular violence could be recorded with a quality Neumann microphone and become a new Wilhelm scream for the 21st century or, failing that, walla for some forthcoming episode of Pluribus. Last also required apposite payback for risibly claiming that MTG — one of America’s foremost fascists, a believer in Jewish space lasers, a 9/11 truther, a monster who suggested that Nancy Pelosi be executed for treason, a racist who had called whites “the most mistreated group” in America, an evil and illiterate grifter who knowingly denied that Biden had won the 2020 election and who was involved with the January 6th insurrection — was a champion of what Last called “liberal democracy.”

I kid you not. This is the remarkably gormless and highly gullible mouthbreather steering a sizable chunk of the “liberal” ship The Bulwark. He has, rather amazingly, not been given a banker’s box for his office possessions and a thorough ass-beating by a security guard. And the fool still holds onto his job. And on BlueSky, Last tried to have the last word by delivering this whopper:

Yes! By all means, give MTG a cookie for adopting such “policy preferences” (a phrase that sounds as ridiculously harmless as a health-conscious diner seeking the gluten-free options on a labyrinthine menu) as deliberatly misgendering a colleague’s daughter, banning the display of Pride flags, opposing the Equality Act, warning everyone about the Gazpacho Police (an apparent existential threat to all hot soup in America!), calling all Democrats “pedophiles,” calling anyone aiding the FBI “a traitor,” and many other gaffes and perversions of “liberal democracy” as we have known it in America for more than two centuries!

Of course, there have been many other reasons to kick Jonathan V. Last in the balls — repeatedly and with great accuracy so he can at long last understand that every opinion piece he has ever published is indistinguishable from five tons of shit burning in a dumpster. There’s the endorsement from imperious tadpole Chris Cilliza as “my favorite thinker and writer operating in the political space right now.” There’s Last’s superficial description of Trump’s dangerous policies as “a whole bunch of bad stuff that is coming,” which reads like something that the Pakleds on Star Trek might have written if they were hired as political pundits. There’s Last’s insufferable cleaving to the “JVL” moniker, as if he is some VIP regular at a five-star hotel or this acronym alone somehow absolves him of his limitless stupidity. The only rival to Last’s lock-in as a guy you want to repeatedly kick in the balls is probably Ezra Klein — another political “thinker” deserving of scabrous opprobrium whom I’ll have to take to the wood shed some other time.

As I imagined Last’s cadaverous lips careening upwards in agony as he keeled over with each and every cold swift kick to his balls, I began to wonder if kicking Last in the balls would be enough to get him to understand how useless his opinions were to the human race. I begin to wonder if I should keep a bottle of bubbly in the fridge in the event that Jonathan V. Last was stabbed. I began to adopt the position that inflicting pain upon a paleoconservative asshole like Jonathan V. Last, whether real or imaginary, represented the most common sense remedy against the present national epidemic of dumbass writers punching above their weight.

I was free to imagine and memorialize all of these condign responses because, unlike other writers, I have no interest in writing for The Bulwark and, as such, possess an ethical core that circumvents the possibility of being seduced by the devil. You see, that’s how a dope as unfathomably idiotic as Last has risen to the top. If you inure yourself to much-needed pushback from other writers by becoming someone who could theoretically assign another writer a freelancing piece, then your words, however stupid, will be taken as gospel by a certain trough-eating crowd. I mean, even the enjoyably ferocious writer Moira Donegan pulled her punches when Last was being rightfully dogpiled on BlueSky.

If I can offer one invaluable idea that we can carry into the new year — a year with very important midterm elections that will determine whether or not we still have a legitimate democracy — it’s this. Kick the grifters in the balls. Whether literally or with your imagination. People like Last have been allowed to bang out horseshit for years without consequences. Last has no real strategies, much less any real understanding of historical patterns or vital precedents. He is a parvenu and a grifter, a guy who should be 86ed from any bar with at least four regulars who are journos. He betrays the purpose of journalism with every piss-poor sentence he bangs out like some spastic monkey who just started a new antidepressant prescription. Kick the motherfucker in the balls. Starve him of oxygen. Block him. Do not link him. And pay attention to other grifters like Dave Wiegel, who — sure enough — stood up for Last in the manner of a sweaty and closeted linebacker snapping a tight end with a locker room towel right after the big game:

Access journalism has always been a line that I will never cross. I’ve done hundreds of interviews in my life and I’ve never agreed to prerigged questions. Normalizing fascists — in this case, following The New York Times’ greasy lead, is similarly a point on which I will never bend. (And I’ve turned down serious dinero that fuckheads like Last and Wiegel will lap up like demented six-year-olds scarfing candy down their corpulent gullets.) For Last and Wiegel, the betrayal of basic Fourth Estate principles represents a thrill that is as seminal as Laura Loomer dreaming about giving That Orange Sack of Shit a handjob under his desk as he is on the phone taking orders from Putin.

They are both enemies of the American people and enemies to journalism. And they both need to be kicked in the balls until they can summon a take that doesn’t answer the question “Do you spit or swallow?” If we want our nation to return to some semblance of how it was before Evil Motherfucking Trump, we have scrotums to kick and vital standards to uphold.

© 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Why Repeatedly Kicking Jonathan V. Last in the Balls Gives Me Hope first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Charlie Kirk was not a hero. He was little more than a dimebag demagogue who thought of nobody other than himself. He was a vile and meretricious purveyor of lies, conspiracy theories, Christian nationalism, bigotry, and white supremacy. He was an unremarkable mouthbreather who was about as intellectual as a nocturnal loris staying motionless in the trees to evade predators. Should he have been assassinated? Absolutely not. On the other hand, the world is a lot better without him. Much like Rush Limbaugh before him, there will come a time not long from now in which nobody will evoke his name.

To all the right-wing recidivist basement dwellers with prognathous jaws who will call my position here “disrespectful” and who spent much of last night hitting me with nine death threats on social media (“I will find out where you live and end you” read one such unsolicited DM sent to me), I feel compelled to remind you hopelessly feckless fuckheads that it was Charlie Kirk who, shortly after Paul Pelosi was attacked, spread baseless conspiracy theories that Pelosi was involved with a sex worker and who called for some “amazing patriot” to bail out Pelosi’s attacker. Thus, any sentiments I have to tender here are clearly mild by comparison.

Because Charlie Kirk was not a hero. He was a disgusting blot on the political landscape. And instead of responding to his assassination with peace, grace, and reflection, the alt-right chowderheads have instead brayed for leftist blood to flow in the streets. Even towards people like me who oppose violence and who have never fired a gun in their lives.

Charlie Kirk was a useless, baleful, and now quite dead alt-right gasbag who adopted the loris’s lazy and facile temperament as he publicly inveighed against trans people not long before his last ugly gasps. Yesterday, he permanently collapsed on a Utah Valley University stage, shot in the carotid by an expert marksman perched two hundred yards away who remained at large as of this morning.

And yet people, even those who claim to be on the left, have falsely declared that Charie Kirk was a hero, when he was certainly not. Noted antitrans and antithomeless neoliberal grifter Gavin Newsom performed an odious and obsequious rim job in the immediate wake that seemed unthinkable for any Democratic lawmaker only last year. And because Newsom’s agile felching of a prominent and extremely malevolent bigot has inexplicably become a form of “reaching across the aisle” for the dopiest of registered Democrats to celebrate, it has become necessary for me to reiterate quite strongly that Charlie Kirk was not a hero.

Charlie Kirk was not a hero because he died doing exactly what he loved: spreading hate, fear, and intolerance to a dull and unthinking audience of highly gullible hayseeds looking to blame and detest marginalized people because this hateful horde lacks the ability to take control or responsibility of their miserable lives.

In the end, Charlie Kirk’s hatemongering survival strategy didn’t work out for him or the wife and two children that he leaves behind. But don’t worry too much about his widow Erika Frantze. I am certain that the next guy she hitches her saddle with will be a far more “loving husband and father” than Charlie Kirk ever could be. After all, Kirk once asserted that women over thirty “aren’t attractive in the dating pool.” Kirk himself was not immune from the consequences of his hideous rhetoric. His stunningly sociopathic statement from April 3, 2025 had him declaring that “some gun deaths” were necessary to protect “God-given rights.” This is merely another case of Charlie Kirk inviting the myth of American exceptionalism to rear its ugly head.

Charlie Kirk’s hideous political positions made him the very embodiment of MAGA: a depraved and dangerous cult of selfish and illiterate sociopaths who have singlehandledly pooled their hateful resources to abdicate their humanity and deracinate the remaining dregs of American democracy. And none of this made him a hero. To declare Charlie Kirk a “hero” is akin to suggesting that Hitler’s lust for eugenics and genocide could be overlooked because he was fond of dogs. Heroes are the people who selflessly rush to the aid of others. A hero offers the shirt off his back to a starving man who has just lost everything and who does not seek public validation for being a decent human being. Heroes recognize others who are struggling and who are in need of dignity and they usually stop everything to ensure that the bedraggled have a little fortitude to fight another day.

Charlie Kirk never did anything like that. He was constitutionally incapable of kindness and he went out of his way to oppose basic human decency. On an October 22, 2022 episode of his show, he claimed that empathy was a “made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.” Never mind that the word “empathy” has its roots in the German word Einfühlung, which originated from the Greek word empatheia. It was an American psychologist by the name of Edward Bradford Titchener who first used “empathy” in English in 1908. (The term “New Age,” as we know it today, was popularized in the 1970s, although a case can be made that “New Age” originated with the journal edited by Alfred Orange and Holbrook Jackson. All this had nothing to do with Titchener.)

Kirk had neither intelligence nor compassion. He described universities hoping to bolster both noble qualities in young minds as “islands of totalitarianism.” He spread lies on social media about COVID vaccines and human trafficking, often inventing statistics from his diseased and ornery-fueled mind. He regularly demeaned and disrespected Black people, whether they were pilots with unimpeachable flight records or noble figures in history books. He falsely claimed that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and he went out of his way to bus more than 80 “patriots” into DC the day before the January 6, 2021 insurrection. So this made Charlie Kirk a seditionist and an antidemocratic traitor on top of his prolific track record as a detestable hate merchant.

All this is is the “work” that Gavin Newsom wants us to “continue” with. This is the “great man” being propped up by bloodthirsty conservatives all across the nation. Yes, political violence is abhorrent and Charlie Kirk should not have been assassinated. Yes, Charlie Kirk was protected by the First Amendment and had every right to blather these repugnant and inhuman sentiments to every atavistic and inbred rube crawling with venomous voracity from their squalid caves. But to lionize or to martyr Charlie Kirk in any way is to operate on the same obscene level as the sniper.

For Charlie Kirk was not a hero. He was a scumbag unfit to stand with the rest of us. He used every spare moment to summon the worst qualities out of people. He should not have been killed. On the other hand, I’ll sleep much better knowing that Kirk is no longer around to spew his ugly enmity to permanently empty vessels. It is indeed possible for two things to be true at once.

© 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Charlie Kirk Was Not a Hero first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

[Scroll to the bottom of this post to listen to “Libromendel,” which was officially released today.]

The Making of Libromendel

When Donald Trump was elected President for a second time, like many left-leaning Americans who believe in the more salubrious possibilities of our great democratic experiment, I entered a one week period of heavy depression. Our nation was finished. Trump was going to destroy most of the essential framework that had previously been considered sacrosanct. And he proceeded to do so not long after his chainsaw-happy billionaire handmaiden gave a Nazi salute at his inauguration. The terra firma beneath us had permanently shifted for the worse.

At some point in late November, I defiantly slapped myself out of my melancholic stupor. I concluded that it was far more important to live as a bold and fearless artist rather than “obeying in advance” (to use Timothy Snyder’s term of art). This need to fight back with all the creative ordnance I had in the depot became even more apparent after ABC’s egregious surrender to Trump and Paramount’s equally cowardly folding with the 60 Minutes settlement. Why was everyone caving? Outside of the South Park Season 27 premiere depicting Trump in coitus with Satan, why weren’t America’s truth tellers rising to the occasion? Were they too shellshocked? Too set on sustaining the Faustian bargain of a career in corporate media? (One prerelease listener of significant literary influence told me that, while he loved and admired “Libromendel,” he feared that publicly mentioning it would result in professional repercussions. The stolid climate of fear extends even to ostensibly “liberal-minded” thinkers. But I’m not sorry at all. We still have a duty to resist.)

I’ve always felt that one of art’s foremost duties is to stick up for the outliers and the underdogs. And the thirty radio plays I have written and produced so far certainly attest to this tenet. For these are the people who really hold American life together. Simply depicting the complexity of human lives, with all of the attendant quirks and messiness, generally does the trick in eluding any charges of didacticism.

In May, I was finishing up a 900 page multipart script. But the unsettling torrent of soul-destroying headlines presenting us with the end of American democracy in real time beckoned a great need to create something immediate. I was haunted and horrified by the disturbing images of innocent and hard-working brown-skinned people being plucked from American life, denied habeas corpus, and sent to El Salvador without a hearing. I have a few friends and ex-lovers who are Dreamers and green card holders. When the ICE raids started to become indistinguishable from the early tactics of the Gestapo, I took it upon myself to stay in touch with them, pledging to extend any time and resources that they needed. I feared that the people whom I adored with all my heart would be permanently lost to me because of the racist and dehumanizing cruelties of the current administration.

One of these friends reminded me that I was an audio dramatist and planted a seed. She told me that I had the obligation and the creative cojones to “do something” with my art. Protesting at No Kings rallies simply wasn’t enough. “Ed,” she said, “you have this great knack for revealing the hard truths of how people live in ways that are strangely entertaining. Even if you whipped up something half-assed, it would probably be amazing.”

Well, I never produce any audio drama that is “half-assed.” My friend knew exactly what she was doing. And I am exceedingly grateful to her.

That’s when I realized that Stefan Zweig’s great short story, “Buchmendel,” had entered the public domain back in January and was thus fair game for adaptation.

I’ve long been a Zweig fan — so much so that I once devoted two hour podcast to Zweig scholar George Prochnik and Zweig’s best translator, Anthea Bell. (Bell sadly passed away in 2018. But thankfully she was incredibly lively and happy to stump for Zweig on air.) “Buchmendel,” which deals with a Russian-Jewish immigrant falsely accused of being a traitor to Austria and ignobly sent to a concentration camp, where Mendel’s eccentric spirit is crushed by the false imprisonment and he perishes as a result.

With the detestable deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia hanging in the air, that’s when I asked myself the question, “What if Mendel was Venuezuelan? And what if his name was Jaime Abrego Mendel?”

That’s when I emailed my friend Jack Ward and asked him if there was an open slot in his annual Summerstock Playhouse series. He said that there was and excitedly asked me if I had something in the works.

“Give me two months,” I replied, “and I will.”

With two people kicking my ass in the best possible way, I knew what I had to do, even if I didn’t know entirely how to go about doing it.

The Writing and the Casting

I wrote the script in one week. It spilled out of me with an intense passion and need that I could not have anticipated. The humanist in me could not stop thinking about this story. I approached the Zweig story with a twofold approach. Yes, I would use as many of the existing elements and characters as I could. But this also a production that needed to reflect 2025 American life. Many of the supporting characters from “Buchmendel” — Florian Gunther, Sporschill, the narrator (switched to a young woman), and Standhartner — all made their way into the script. I did give Sporschill more agency and a more satisfying ending. (Zweig had written this story in 1929. And one of the story’s few flaws is the regrettably regressive depiction of women.) I made Standhartner a woman as well. The “adaptation process” involved reading the story twice and taking notes and then completely discarding the source material, never looking back as I allowed my imagination to run rampant. (The careful listener will spot callouts to other Zweig works such as The Royal Game and The World of Yesterday.)

I wanted to include as many of my regular actors as I could. So the story itself became extremely large. I needed to cast two dozen actors for this. And fast.

Much to my surprise, everyone I asked (with the exception of one actor who had retired from doing other projects) said yes. When the great Melissa Medina said yes to the character of ICE Officer Ramirez, I rewrote an intense six minute scene specifically for her sui generis talents. (I had originally imagined Ramirez as a Lt. Castillo-style character played by a young Edward James Olmos. But when Melissa expressed interest, I changed the role to a woman.)

The other major influence on the script was Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Just before writing the script, I saw a 4K restoration of this masterpiece at Film Forum and was extremely surprised when I found myself leaving the theatre in tears. I had seen the movie a good dozen times before, but it had never looked and felt as great as it did that afternoon. I printed out a picture of writers I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder and taped it to my wall, adding the caption, “We’re watching your ass, Ed!” My feeling was that, if I could come even half as close to The Apartment‘s impeccable narrative structure, then I’d get someplace solid.

The Music

When it comes to my creative work, I am not someone who does anything by halves. But I also feel that it’s important to keep growing and reaching as an artist. This time around, I somehow developed the chutzpah to think that I could score all the music for this particular play.

I have always been a secret musician. I love music. I have played in bands. I have busked the subways and, about a year ago, once earned a little under two hundred dollars in three hours performing a few of my silly songs. There is a secret bar I regularly go to in which I am karaoke royalty and find myself hit with free drinks and unanticipated attention from eyelash-batting beauties. I have composed a few podcast themes and a few other audio drama projects. But I had never fully scored any audio drama. And the time had come to level up.

I realized that it was logistically impossible for me to score all the jazz and rockabilly tracks playing in Cafe Gluck. So I licensed all those tracks. But that still left me with about fifteen music cues to score.

The full soundtrack poured out of me in a week and a half. I composed the last three music cues in a feverish sixteen hour period in which I forgot to eat. On the music front, I am extremely indebted to my buddy Russ Marshalek, who patiently listened to all the music cues (even the rejects) and knew exactly when to give me shit and when to encourage me. (I often find that my work becomes better when I have extremely tough customers willing to fillet and pillory me at the drafting phase.)

The Sound Design

For every audio drama I produce, I try to record as many original sound effects as I can. The considerable summer rains here in New York, which involved me sticking my boom mic out of my window and wandering around during any downpour to record anything that sounded interesting, gave me several hours of rain and splashing sounds to pull from. (Sadly, I was never able to get any decent thunder sound. So I had to resort to an FX library.)

Since Cafe Gluck is a particularly dominant part of the story, I went out of my way to create the thickest and densest and most realistic soundscape that I could. (“Libromendel” had 332 tracks, a new record for me.) The good folks at Penny House Cafe were kind enough to turn the radio and TV off and let me stick around for about twenty minutes recording various beverage sounds and thumps and grinds from coffeemakers. These sounds represented the close layer of the mix. (I always imagine the microphone as a kind of “camera for the ear” and “positioned” it close to the counter.) There was an additional background layer that was assembled from recordings I made at other cafes.

Putting It Together

I have long been frustrated by current sound mixing on film and television. In the quest to be “as loud as possible,” many sound mixers simply allow the music and the explosions to blow out the dialogue. And you cannot hear what the actors are saying. For “Libromendel,” I tried out a new aggressive top-down dialogue approach. I leveled the dialogue (preserving as much dynamic range as possible), placed it at the high points of the mix, and then use any open spectrum that was remaining for sound design and music. I was also far more meticulous about testing and tweaking the mix in as many monitoring environments as I could. The final day of mixing involved yours truly listening to the mix on three separate pairs of shitty earbuds and tweaking levels accordingly. And because the performances were far more sophisticated and layered this time around, the sound design essentially involved me serving as a bagman for what the actors brought. I also took greater liberties with the script than I had before, introducing two Tucker & Friends segments that were not in the script to provide a more seamless transition between scenes. I also listened far more carefully to my actors than I usually did. There is one seductive sound design move involving an analog telephone that was also not in the script, but that came because I discovered that Mendel and Standhartner were flirting with each other during the scene. (I had no idea that this was the case until we recorded!)

While the experience of making “Libromendel” exhausted me, I had a great deal of fun putting this together. And I am grateful beyond words to the thirty-five people (some of whom wish to remain anonymous) who were deeply instrumental to making this show happen.

“Libromendel” is the only production to my knowledge that has offered a direct response to the last six months of authoritarian terror. It is my great hope that it won’t be the last. You can listen to the show below.

The Show

Synopsis: During an unspecified “government transition” in the near future, the young scholar Alejandra Cortez (no relation to AOC) returns home from Rhinebeck on an extremely rainy night and stumbles into a West Village café where she was once a regular during the Second Trump Administration.  But aside from the rowdy RPG players, what happened to all the colorful eccentrics?  Why does nobody remember the history of Café Gluck aside from an overworked barista named Sporschill?  Who is the strange new owner claiming to be a “crypto king”?  And why doesn’t anybody remember the charming and eccentric old bookseller Jaime Abrego Mendel who set up shop in the adjacent card room every day?  This full-cast 332 track standalone epic examines the true human cost of removing vital figures from American life. (Running time: 54 minutes)

Written, produced, and directed by Edward Champion

Adapted from the short story “Buchmendel” by Stefan Zweig

Original music soundtrack by Edward Champion
(You can listen to the soundtrack on YouTube.  Subscribe to @finnegansache.)

CAST:

Alejandra:  Belgys Felix
Mendel: Wolf Reigns
Florian: Zack Glassman
Standhartner: Sally Maitland
Sporschill:  Julie Chapin
Ramirez:  Melissa Medina
Dirks: Luvelle Pierre
Tallis: Jack Ward
Becky: Emily Carding
ICE Officer: Will Billingsley
ICE Officer #2:  Frank Romeo
Felicia/The Radio: Samantha Jo
Clueless Customer: Glenn Kenny
The New Yorkers: Heath Martin and Pauly Sinatra
Boris: Pete Lutz
DM:  Dr. Implausible
The Staffers: Ella Gans and Jay Silver
Victim:  Zoraya Christian
Exuberant Customer: Lokia Rockwell
Café Patron: Laura Spear
and Edward Champion as The Assassin.

This is a co-production of The Sonic Society and The Gray Area.

Café songs licensed through Epidemic Audio

Editing, sound design, mixing, foley recording, engineering, and mastering courtesy of an eccentric bald man in Brooklyn who buys and reads far too many books

Special thanks to Jack Ward, Russ Marshalek, Laura Spear, Spacebar Recording, and Penny House Café for their incredible generosity and support during the making of this production.

This production is dedicated to the many innocent and hardworking immigrants in the United States who are presently facing some of the most disturbing authoritarianism in this nation’s history, as well as the late beloved bookseller Michael Seidenberg.

Libromendel (Download MP3)

© 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post “Libromendel” — A Modern Day Retelling of Stefan Zweig first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

(This is the forty-second entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Moviegoer.)

Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson — a wildly enjoyable and erudite sendup of romantic obsession that is astonishingly peerless and more than a little punk rock in its originality — was included on the Modern Library list, but this Beerbohm stumping was not without modest controversy. Judge William Styron — fulminating in the August 17, 1998 issue of The New Yorker — dismissed Zuleika (as well as The Magnificent Ambersons) as a “toothless pretender.” A novel in which nearly all of the characters commit mass suicide at the end is “toothless”? It does have me wondering if Styron ever dismissed Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre, and Martin Amis’s Money or what he would have made of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels or Alissa Nutting, Angela Carter, Anne Enright, or Mary Gaitskill at their fiercest. Styron was certainly right about Tarkington, who stands now with the sturdiness of a tray of blueberry muffins baked during the Obama Administration, left for decades on a kitchen island to attract generations of flies and rot into dowdy dust. Of Beerbohm, however, one can only conclude by this ridiculous and unwarranted dismissal that Styron was having a drunken or depressive episode.

As Beerbohm biographer N. John Hall has pointed out, this mustached satirist — who was friendly with Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Edmund Gosse — was brilliant enough to attract the attention of William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson singled out this passage:

Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid’s bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson’s cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of.

Of the “trifle,” Empson commended the ambiguity of not knowing whether to be charmed or appalled by the detail. Of the “No apple-tree” and “no wall of peaches” (and even, I append to Empson’s consideration, Beerbohm’s “not discreditable bow”), he praised Beerbohm’s negatives for casting doubt upon the lush imagery. Of “imitation-marble,” he rightfully asked whether Zuleika’s neck was imitating marble or imitating imitation marble. And he likewise called Zuleika’s professed beauty into question, pondering whether it was unique or conventional. Zuleika’s comely qualities are certainly impressionable enough to drive numerous Oxford students mad, leading many to commit suicide. Empson concludes his analysis by writing, “I hope I need not apologize, after this example, for including Mr. Beerbohm among the poets.”

Empson is recused. There are layers within layers here. And Zuleika Dobson is the rare satirical novel of this type that beckons you to read it again, if only to sort the real from the zany. Beeerbohm was a poet of the dandy comic strain — in addition to being a meticulously devilish satirist (“The Mote in the Middle Distance” is unsurpassed as the definitive sendup of Henry James’s hideously bloviated late career style), a formidable caricaturist, and an unexpected radio star in his later years. The language itself, with its recondite words (“chevelure” and “gallimufry”) and its potent phrases guaranteeing rich dopamine hits to anyone with true literary taste (“a dark upland of misrule,” “an anarchy of small curls”), surely reaches the heights of poetry. T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden were just two prominent poets who sang bountiful praises to this “prince of minor writers.”

Even so, Max Beerbohm’s legacy in 2025 is quite possibly in shakier eminence than the underappreciated and veritable genius Henry Green. If Green was a “writer’s writer’s writer,” then surely Beerbohm is a “writer’s writer’s writer’s writer,” enjoyed only by those of us who still schlep dogeared paperbacks of John Barth and Robert Coover and who revere perverse and playful postmodernism even as we feel the hairs bristle on the backs of our necks as some doltish Goodreads sniper targets anyone with bold and subversive taste within their hopelessly unadventurous crosshairs. Even so, Beerbohm is still nestled enough in the canon to have inspired a high schooler to opine last month that she found the narration shift near the novel’s end to be “excitingly strange.” Let us not forget that great literature, even works published more than a century ago, can often be potent enough to stir vital and newfound passion within the young. And in our presently bleak epoch, we need all the good faith exuberance we can get.

That sudden transition to first-person after so many close third-person passages is indeed a thrill. I would likewise contend that the men who get so worked up over Zuleika — to the point of coveting a desire to unalive themselves over her — are still reflected today within the mythical “male loneliness epidemic” served up by wildly obnoxious MAGA incel types as the casus belli for their failure to find any woman who will endure their incessant mansplaining and their monstrous entitlement. Zuleika is rightfully bored by these hopped up doofuses and Beerbohm serves up some dependable zingers over how graphene-thin their souls are (intriguingly, the emphatic allcaps is in the original):

And oh, the tea with them! What have YOU been doing all the afternoon? Oh John, after THEM, I could almost love you again. Why can’t one fall in love with a man’s clothes? To think that all those splendid things you have on are going to be spoilt–all for me. Nominally for me, that is.

And unlike prolix and condescending nitwits like Arnold Bennett (his reputation rightfully destroyed by Virginia Woolf, with only imperious Tory scumbags like Philip Hensher eager to embrace this ancient sexist fiction better used for lining the bottoms of birdcages), Beerbohm is also surprisingly forward-thinking in 1911 when it comes to Zuleika seeing no difference between older men and youth who “fatuously prostrate to her,” inuring her of any deference she could possibly feel for them. At the end of the day, Zuleika, like so many of us, just wants someone to love. And when she does go gaga over the Duke, Beerbohm describes her soul “as a flower in its opetide.” Yet this is a “love” rooted on the Duke’s physical appearance. She is more transfixed by the “glint cast by the candles upon his shirt-front.” And Beerbohm doesn’t stop there. He compare the two pearl buttons on the Duke’s shirt to “two moons: cold, remote, radiant.”

It’s tempting to rope in Zuleika Dobson with Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. While the two novels are entirely different in tone and sprang from the two writers observing wildly contrasting social milieus, they are both strangely mesmerizing about that one singular feeling that hasn’t yet been hammered out of the human race, even as our dating app age appears primed to reach a natural close: the mad claptrap rush of superficial attraction followed by an obligation to care for an increasingly wilting flower perceived to have lost its bloom. If anything, the 21st century has revealed that all of the social media layers intended for “connection” only buttress the primal superficiality that lurks beneath us all when it comes to matters of the heart and loins. It is the failure to consider some lover or this week’s main character as a palpable human being. True love — predicated on a physical, emotional, and intellectual connection of substance and depth — cannot hope to push past the solipsistic D.H. Lawrence nonsense that remains in place among many Feeld and Fetlife users today. Zuleika Dobson reminds us of the vital need for coruscating wordsmiths to send up this selfish stupidity from time to time, if only to preserve some hope for those who remain committed to the attenuating possibilities of real and enduring romance and the fulsome belonging that naturally emerges from it.

Next Up: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence!

© 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Zuleika Dobson (Modern Library #59) first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

On Sunday night, TikTok user @theshannonduke0 noticed something strange when she tried to stream Ridley Scott’s 2010 cinematic version of Robin Hood on Amazon Prime. The prologue text was removed for this particular streaming version. The text reads as follows:

In times of tyranny and injustice when law oppresses the people, the outlaw takes his place in history.

On Monday morning, I confirmed on two separate devices that Amazon had indeed removed this text from the American streaming version of Robin Hood. I then rented the movie on Apple TV and noticed that the text had not been elided over there.

I have also learned from a TikTok user in Ireland that the “seditious” text appears there on Amazon without any problem. He sent me this screenshot:

Additionally, this Reddit user reports that the the text is available on Amazon Prime in the UK.

We have thus have established that the only place where this text is not available is on the American streaming version available at Amazon.

I have left phone calls and emails to Universal (the film’s distributor), Amazon, and Scott Free Productions. As of 11:00 AM Eastern time, I have not received a reply. Should I receive any comment from any party, I will update this story.

This support thread likewise contains numerous users reporting that they are not able to see the text on any device, which rules out any “technical issue” on Amazon’s end. The version of Robin Hood that Amazon is streaming in America has quite possibly been censored.

This strange and inexplicable move, for which Amazon has yet to issue a statement, is suspiciously timed, shortly after Trump announced a 100% tariff on non-American movies. (The Hollywood Reporter has noted that this idea was instigated by Jon Voight.)

If Amazon is censoring Robin Hood, are they censoring other movies that contain “anti-tyranny” text? Did Universal or director Ridley Scott authorize this? Others have speculated that this could be a technical glitch from Amazon. Until we have a solid statement from Universal, Scott Free, or Amazon, the question of the missing text remains a mystery.

DEVELOPING.

5/5/25 5:30 PM UPDATE: I was able to get in touch with Ridley Scott’s people at CAA. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said an assistant, who promptly hung up on me. As of this writing, I have not yet heard back from Universal, Scott Free, or Amazon.

© 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Is Amazon Censoring 2010’s ROBIN HOOD in the United States? first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

On the evening of March 28, 2025, at approximately 7:30 PM, comedian Jonathan Randall was standing in shock outside the Fear City Comedy Club, a relatively new venue on Essex Street owned and established by 56-year-old Swedish emigre Johan “Jonezy” Ankarcrona. Jonezy, as he likes to be called, had racked up living time in Durango and San Francisco. He has been in America for twenty-three years. He ran into a bit of inheritance money and set up the comedy club. Randall, who is Jewish but who respectfully declined to divulge his age, had been excited to headline his own show. He had spent somewhere between ten to twenty hours that week promoting the gig — with no help from Jonezy, who had also capped the available tickets on Eventbrite at ten seats. (The venue holds sixty.)

Randall had declined a more lucrative gig that night to honor his friend’s nascent venture. He had been in comedy for twenty years and, after co-hosting a podcast called American Jew, he had discovered a way to criticize Israel through comedy. He always got laughs for these topical barbs. His vibe, as he told me, was “freedom and equality for all and spreading love.” He believed that comedy could be used to spread awareness about the Israel-Palestine situation. And even though an attempt by another New York comedy club to meld mirth with mindfulness had been canceled back in December, the laughs — as they say in the comedy business — are the true metric of success. And Randall felt he had a duty to bring comedic truth to an unsettling genocide.

But Randall wouldn’t be performing that night. This mild-mannered comedian, who was soft-spoken and very polite and a bit rattled with me over the phone and who had no history of being assaulted or being unruly in any way, was stunned when he had received a series of texts from Jonezy just ninety minutes before the show. Ninety minutes before start time.

“Just jokes tonight man,” texted Jonezy. “No political grandstanding or activism talk.”

Political grandstanding is typically reserved for austere rallies, not for a comedy show propelled by laughs. Randall politely informed Jonezy that he would do the same jokes about Palestine that he had done the week before. The jokes had killed, after all. There was no reason to believe that they wouldn’t kill again. And Randall had a fan base. Some audience members had rolled in from the deepest parts of Jersey, many of them paying $25 in parking and tolls on top of the nonrefundable ticket price.

But Jonezy, described by other people in the standup community who spoke to me on background as “not funny,” “fuckhead,” “loser,” and “a bit creepy and I knew it before this went down,” decided to cancel the show.

Randall, who lives in the area, raced to the club to reason with Jonezy. This eleventh hour fifty-ninth minute cancellation made no sense. He had done five shows at Fear City before this one and he had also produced the venue’s first ticketed event.

“All I wanted to do was help this guy,” said Randall. “I wanted to help him grow his club. I wanted to help him make his club a success.”

And these two men had been friends. They had hung out with each other. They had been close enough for Randall to do many favors for Jonezy, both in relation to the club and Jonezy’s personal life. Sure, Jonezy was what they call a “character” in any cultural scene. The kind of guy who rubs some people the wrong way. But what creative world wasn’t without its weirdos and eccentrics?

And now Randall was standing in the very club that had ignobly spurned him, in front of the very man whom he had considered a friend, beseeching Jonezy to go through with the show. Even if it meant ending the friendship and never talking with him again. But Jonezy’s “No political stuff tonight, bro” text had taken a far more minatory turn.

Jonezy then physically removed Randall from the club. And that’s when Randall decided to make a video about what transpired, apologizing to the audience members who weren’t able to see him. Only seventeen seconds into this video, Jonezy — who is the only employee of Fear City — emerged from the club with fury and proceeded to assault him, seething, “Are you still fucking here?”

“The guy was accosting me,” continued Randall, not being physical towards Jonezy in any way.

“Get the fuck out of here,” belted Jonezy, who then proceeded to shove Randall several times and push him along the sidewalk.

What has not been known until now and what is not so evident in the video is the degree to which Randall was manhandled by Jonezy. He was picked up by Jonezy with enough force that a witness, leaning out of a window six buildings away and a few floors up, was able to clearly see the assault. The witness I spoke with bolsters the case against Jonezy. Randall received numerous bruises from Jonezy’s assault and corroborated his injuries by email with a photo. The witness did not know Randall at all and she had no idea what the clamor had been all about until the following happened:

Randall uploaded his video of the incident to TikTok and Instagram. That video went viral on TikTok, accruing more than half a million views.

Randall has been at this for twenty years. And not only has he kept doing comedy, but it’s clear from the rising passion in his voice, as I listened to him while wearing an Angela Davis T-shirt, that he hasn’t burned out.

“I love comedy,” said Randall. “I love performing. I love making people laugh. I’ve always tried to provoke thought in people and with my acts. I don’t go up on stage when I’m doing comedy and yell, like, ‘Free Palestine!’ Some of my themes are about Palestinian human rights and denouncing anti-Semitism, doing this all as a Jewish person. It’s a fraction of my act, but it’s part of who I am. Being genuine and authentic and true to myself is very important.”

Jonezy had been at this comedy club business for around six months, according to local and state public records. He applied for a beer and wine license and was daunted by the relatively facile pro forma requirements. So he gave up.

I could tell you other things, but I pledged “off the record” to my sources. But let’s just say that this guy doesn’t know how to run a business. That should have been obvious from the little EventBrite ten ticket deal I can report on the record.

And now Jonezy has assaulted one of his talents, one of his ostensible allies, and that video has been seen by everybody in the comedy world and now comedians have canceled shows and Yelp — oh, vengeful Yelp! oh, where do you go if you want to squeeze the lifeblood of a small business that wronged you Yelp! — well, Yelp is veritably Yelping right now. Or was. Until Yelp put a stop to the Yelping. Any online junkie who has clocked in at least ten years weeping with laughter in front of screens on lonely weeknights knows Yelp Yelps high whenever people with a sense of social justice howl for a transgressor’s ruin. I mean, Jumping Jesus Jehovah, Yelp Yelps! It is a website long fueled by a spirit of condign retribution that flows like a somewhat deranged and unstoppable magma flow. Jesus Christ, Yelp Yelps. Boom! Up into the air and, gravity being what it is, well, you cannot jump like that and not leave a crater that is so gargantuan that you’ll never know if the gaping hole in your livelihood will ever close or heal. Yelp Yelps and, boy, does it Yelp! It Yelps and belches and burps and flatulates and sometimes even pees. And you cannot help but crane your neck out of a car and say to yourself, “Holy shit! Yelp is Yelping! Well, goddam, I gotta park this beast, grab one of them Millers from the back of the trunk, and get me that there lawn chair and place it out yonder. Yar! Over ther! And why the fuck am I talking like a Southern Belle?”

And, well…

See for yourself.

The owner, Johan Ankarcrona, is a big fan of Mussolini and fancies himself some mobster. He chokes his diminutive chicken to naked photos of Netanyahu three times a day and ensures that all of his staffers raise “Roman salutes” to Ernst Rohm before starting a shift. Fear City is a den of fascism, a completely worthless and unsavory part of the New York sewer system in which its mouthbreathing bouncers punch and push anyone, blaming total strangers for the failed trajectory of their empty lives. Avoid this place at all costs. It is little more than a circlejerk for MAGA CHUDs and bullies.

In other words, the sole and singular player on Team Jonezy doesn’t stand a shot at playing the Super Bowl anytime soon. He is toast. Finito. Out of the game. Fear City — not to be confused with the underrated Abel Ferrara flick or the excellent history book by Kim Phillips-Fein — is as toxic as Kevin Spacey, the Trump Administration, and Jordan Petersen combined!

And the fallout wouldn’t have to be this radioactive if Jonezy here had owned up or issued a public apology. Maybe even confess to the world that he needs help.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he closed off comments and deleted any remark that was rightly critical of his behavior. And he also dodged my considerable efforts to get him on the record.

Aside from the video evidence, the assault on Randall was witnessed by a woman who contacted me on TikTok and who goes by the name of @crickett (real name redacted, but she was very funny and nice and detailed in her responses: she’s a bona-fide two-phone gal who knows her stuff). She was in an adjacent building on Essex Street when the thrashing went down. She heard the noise of the assault and only discovered the full extent of what had transpired after Randall’s video was widely seen. I was able to corroborate that she was actually there. She was looking the right direction out of the window. The address she was staying at checks out. The geography and her description of where she was at also checks out.¹

What I have also been able to determine is that Jonezy does have a history of sketchy deportment.

I made numerous good faith attempts to get Jonezy on the record for this story. He declined to answer my emails. A phone number associated with him, found through a public records search, resulted in hiss and static upon pickup when I called using three different phone numbers. When I swung by the club three times on a night in which a show was scheduled, there was nobody there. During my third attempt, I saw an illuminated spotlight shining on two empty microphones through a locked door. There was nobody around. (Comedian Chanel Ali confirmed with me on Threads that the show in question was canceled. Other comedians have also canceled their shows after Randall’s video hit the rounds.)

Jonezy, in short, refuses to answer anything in relation to his flagrant assault captured indelibly on camera and backed up by a witness. Sources informed me that Jonezy is not a particularly political person. This would certainly align with one of the rules posted on the Fear City website:

There is Nothing to Fear: The show is for you but it is not about you. We all have triggers and we must all learn to emotionally regulate ourselves. It is not the responsibility of others to cater to delicate tender flowers. Words cannot hurt you. Everyone is safe here.

So what motivated Jonezy’s violent behavior? It is difficult to say. Sources who requested anonymity have informed me that Jonezy does have a pattern of toxic behavior, often in relation to much younger women. There has been something of a whisper network about Jonezy in the standup scene. But Jonezy’s behavior has been tolerated in large part because, well, his venue is new. And all comics are understandable champions of any place in New York City that will welcome their comedy.

But it was Jonezy who needed Randall more than Randall needed Jonezy.

“I was trying to help him with ideas for the club,” said Randall, “to get people there since he has no audience whatsoever. Different things like that. Then I came up with the idea of the showcases. Prop people up at some of the showcases. But he doesn’t have respect for an audience. He doesn’t have respect for comedians.”

Jonezy had made Randall’s sincere efforts to create a thriving showcase “extremely difficult.” Randall was a friend providing the succor that good friends tender. He wanted to build the club. Arguably with more effective strategies than anything Jonezy had brainstormed. And, for this, Jonezy assaulted him. Putting asses in seats. “Get the fuck out of here.” Building the rep of a fledgling club so that it could raise ticket prices and maybe break even and then some? “Are you still fucking here?”

Randall told me that he will never speak to Jonezy again.

It also reflects a terrible trend of violent assaults against comedians. Will Smith slapping Chris Rock across the face during the 2022 Oscars. Dave Chappelle tackled by a stranger months later when performing at the Hollywood Bowl. The Spanish comedian Jaime Caravaca hit in the head mid-show last year. Pranit Moore was assaulted and threatened in Solapur a little less than two months ago.

What is the common quality among the comedians who are attacked? Well, they are either not white or, in Randall’s case, making jokes from a place of empathy and commiseration for those who do not possess his privilege.

Troubled men like Jonezy, who run and book shows and thus hold all the power, have mimicked these violent cues instinctively. That’s just as alarming as an ICE agent “disappearing” someone who has every right to live a peaceful life. The pattern is learned, even when the political implications of casual thuggery are not fully comprehended by the transgressor. And goodhearted comics like Jonathan Randall, operating with integrity and wanting to give venues a chance, become unwanted recipients of men who are willing to torch their reputations simply because they didn’t have the grace or the humility to respect the talent.

[4/3/25 4:00 PM UPDATE: In response to this story, Jonezy released a three part series of videos on Instagram, falsely claiming that the assault and the were was staged:

I should give some context. Some history. So it’s my friend Jonathan Randall and me and, uh, here’s the thing. We’ve known each other fourteen years. He’s been doing comedy for about twenty years. Living in New York for about twenty years. And we, uh, and we made this — well, we had a plan. What should we do? We, uh — Jonathan’s been doing comedy for twenty years. He’s, uh, he’s not getting the numbers and the followers that we think he deserves to get, right? So he’s — I’m not saying he’s transitioned, but he’s kind of made the move more into the sort of, uh, TikTok activist lane. And so we decided — about a week ago, we, we put on a show here for Jonathan called ‘Because’ and, uh, we didn’t do too much marketing for it. So we didn’t sell that many tickets. Which made it okay to cancel the show. Because, you know, it was only a handful of tickets. So, uh, but then we thought, well, how do we get — how do we get attention drawn to this? So we’re both crisis actors. Method actors, right? So I thought, well, let’s — let’s use our skills. My, my lines were pretty easy. All I had to say was get the fuck out of here. In different intonations. And he, he had a little bit more. Like “What the fuck is wrong with you? What are you doing? Why are you trying to shut me down? Why are you canceling me?” You know, those kind of things. He could get more creative. You know, he’s getting paid more. So I just, uh, had to act really angry and, uh, just, you know, be a psycho. Be an old, uh, curmudgeon. And, uh, I think — he used to have, before this video got 81,000 likes? Or 81,000 followers, say. Now I think he’s up to close to 83? Or something? So mission accomplished.

I spoke with Randall this morning and he reiterated that the assault was real and not staged. Jonezy has adamantly refused to speak with me for this story.

Jonezy’s response makes no sense. If the show was canceled, then why would you need to draw more attention to it after it was going to happen? If Randall has adamantly refused to have anything to do with Jonezy, then a calculated prank to draw more attention also makes no sense — seeing as how Randall has already declared that he has no intention of performing at Fear City ever again.

I have also received messages from local comedians concerning Jonezy’s toxic behavior. It is worth noting that in his three-part video, Jonezy proudly announced that he does not take antidepressants and made a homophobic “joke.”]

[4/15/25 12:30 AM UPDATE: On April 14, 2025, I received an unhinged and deeply angry message from Jonezy. Days before this, he had dictated to me a demand to meet in person at a specific time and place. But I had already closed the story. I politely responded that I would accept a written response that I would append to this piece. And I shall do my best to summarize the wildly incoherent email he sent me.

Jonezy claimed that it was Randall who suggested that the show be canceled. He also claimed that Randall refused to leave the premises of the Fear City Comedy Club. “Inside the club I had asked him a dozen times to leave. He refused. He asked if I was going to physically eject him from the club? I did. I was furious with Jonathan and I wanted him out”

Jonezy claimed that the comics that I had spoken with on background were “open mic’ers who have not performed at the club on shows,” but, on this point, he is mistaken. These comics spoke to me on condition of anonymity and I will honor their request. But let’s just say that they weren’t part of the open mic scene. Jonezy also claimed that I spoke with Taylor Drew. And Drew was a comic that I neither reached out to or spoke with.

Of his politics, Jonezy claimed, “I do not identify as a fascist nor do I have any affiliation with the nordic resistance movement. I have never heard of this organization. You know nothing about my political ideology, my character or personality. I am not in any way a supporter of Israel, nor am I a nazi, or an islamaphobe, or an antisemite. I am neither a genocide supporter nor anti Palestine.”

Concerning the Eventbrite issue, Jonezy claimed, “For every show at the club I sell tickets on the website and put up 10 discounted tickets at a time on Eventbrite (to give the illusion of scarcity). When those tickets sell out I add another 10 and so on…”

Jonezy offered a great deal of vitriol and character assassination of Randall that isn’t especially germane to the underlying facts. So I will elide this.

Of the assault, Jonezy says, “I can assure you that I did not pick Jonathan up at all, He’s two inches taller than I am. I dragged him out of the club by the lapels of his coat and shoved him down the street. I did not hit him in any way. There’s no way he sustained any bruising.”

Of the liquor license, Jonezy claims, “It costs thousands of dollars in fees for the liquor license attorney, state liquor license authority and additional fees. Tens of thousands of dollars to build a bar with three sinks, install plumbing from the back water mainline to the front of house, drilling down and installing a drain line to connect to the sewer line. Then building a food preparation area to serve five food menu items. The space is too small for all of this and it wasn’t in the budget. That’s why I sell non-alcoholic drinks from a refrigerator.”

Of the comedians who canceled their shows, “No comedians have cancelled their shows here. After meeting with me face-to-face they decided to postpone their shows until this controversy dies down.”

Jonezy also offered additional texts in the exchange between him and Randall. But these texts, in fact, buttress Randall’s narrative. At one point, Jonezy berates Randall for “not respecting his wishes.” And he then guilts Randall by saying, “I get so stressed out by you. I had to go to a doctor today for headaches.” At one point, however, Randall does text, “If you want to cancel the show and refund everyone go for it.”]

© 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Comedy Club Thuggery: Fear City, Johan Ankarcrona, and the Assault on Jonathan Randall first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

David Lynch has passed away. He was 78 years old. And he was a genius in every sense of the word.

If I had to name the artist who influenced me the most, then the name I would serve up – without a moment of hesitation — is David Lynch.

There was nobody else like David Lynch. Nobody. And there never will be again. He was an ambassador to the weird. A chronicler of the real America, particularly its dark and dreamy underside. He was a champion of outliers, misfits, and outcasts. A brilliant on-set improviser who would see someone interesting — such as stagehand Frank Silva, who played Bob in Twin Peaks and became part of the labyrinthine storyline simply because Lynch liked the way he was looking upwards while crouched — and work him into what he was making at the time. An indefatigable practitioner of the strange who spoke in a reedy high-pitched voice that not even the many cigarettes he smoked could seem to dull. (He employed his thespic talents as the hard-of-hearing and constantly shouting FBI Agent Gordon Cole and, to gut-bustingly comedic effect, for his final short film in 2017 — “What Would Jack Do?” — which featured Lynch with a talking monkey. You can also see him as John Ford in Spielberg’s incredibly underrated film, The Fabelmans. Of course, Lynch steals the movie.)

It is difficult to articulate just how important David Lynch was – not just to film, but to American culture. Because make no mistake: his loss leaves a continent-sized hole that will take hundreds of wild and unapologetically expressive artists to fill. Lynch had so many talents (he painted, he put out music, he wrote an incredibly entertaining memoir Room to Dream, and he even taught himself Macromedia Flash to create DumbLand – a willfully crude set of eight hilariously warped animated shorts), but perhaps his greatest gift was to introduce avant-garde to mainstream audiences and thus inspire shy kids like me to push the expressive envelope as far as we could and seek out many of the same bizarre influences.

In 1990 — an age long before viral videos, smartphones, and broadband Internet — David Lynch grabbed our collective lapels with Twin Peaks, perhaps the most revolutionary television series in American history. He served up sound, images, and characters that had never been seen before on the boob tube. The Log Lady. The Man from Another Place. Sound willingly reversed. The Black Lodge, with its red curtains and its zigzag carpet. All set to a seductive Angelo Badalamenti score that, for a brief time in the early nineties, seemed to be playing in every other cafe.

I think Twin Peaks became the cultural phenomenon that it did because we all had the underlying sense that something audacious and alive had been missing from television. Sure, the normies were scared away near the start of the second season, when it was perfectly clear that the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was not the actual reason behind the show. My parents initially loved it and then hated it. Me? I stuck with it the entire time and, as a teenager, I had to go to friends’ houses to see the new episodes, where I recall other kids making out on couches and one of us somehow procuring beer. We would talk about each episode for a long time after it aired, dissecting every strange image and symbol that had improbably been transmitted to a mass audience. I remember vivacious conversations with fellow all-black wearing theatre kids in high school about this brilliant, life-changing show.

What other crazy shit was out there? And why weren’t we allowed to see it? It is a question still germane to this very day as the American government has decided to ban TikTok — a sui generis platform for the wild and the weird — on Sunday. David Lynch somehow had the finesse to skate past the unspoken artistic prohibitions — whether corporate or governmental — and was nimble and charming enough to persuade big studios to finance his films. (The Straight Story, a deeply moving masterpiece of a dying and disabled man traveling by way of a John Deere lawnmower across America, has never failed to reduce me to tears and was, believe it or not, financed by Disney. You can still watch it on Disney’s streaming services. When the MPAA gave the film a G rating, David Lynch replied, “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to say that again. This is probably the only time I’ll ever hear this.”)

David Lynch inspired me not just on the film front, but on the sound front. (To this very day, as I’ve been working very hard on the new scripts for the third season of my audio drama — close to two thousand pages of creative labor so far — “Lynchian” has often been used as shorthand for sound cues.) During the third season of Twin Peaks, Lynch credited himself as sound designer as well as director. His extremely underrated television show, On the Air, was a love letter to old time radio. And so, for that matter, is Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, which is arguably the most deranged work of genius that anyone has ever produced for television. (All black and white. Footage of nuclear explosions. And who can forget the Fireman rasping, “Got a light?” I certainly didn’t when I lost my voice for a few weeks two years ago and impersonated the Fireman on the phone to amuse friends.) And if you were fortunate enough to see Wild at Heart on the big screen, you know very well that it was as much an accomplishment of sound design as well as cinematic achievement. I’ve frankly never seen another movie in which the strike of a match sounded so crisp and alive. (I also strongly recommend this podcast interview with Lynch sound collaborator Dean Hurley.)

But I have to thank Lynch in another sense. I didn’t truly understand I was a weirdo and I really didn’t start to embrace this side of myself until I was in my mid-twenties. I grew up in an abusive household in which one was expected to conform to the Great American Lie when it came to culture.

Read The New Yorker every week. Be serious. Vote Democrat. Pay your rent and your taxes on time. Only involve yourself in the legal drugs. Get involved in relationships that led to marriage and 2.2 children.

God, I wince remembering how much I tried to be a hopeless square back then when this obviously wasn’t who I was. But I would make up considerably for my diffident youth in later years.

It was extremely clear that what I was doing creatively and what I believed in stood in sharp contrast to what I thought being an American should be — or, more accurately, what was drilled into me. I was nearly arrested in film school for demanding to be enrolled in a cinematography class that would give me access to 16mm film equipment that would permit me to shoot and cut celluloid. (I will always remember the vile and heartless authoritarian Larry Clark at San Francisco State, who did not even permit me to stick around and watch and help out after I asked to. Word of my punkish exploits circulated across campus, with many other students commending me on the cojones I had displayed, and I was thankfully allowed into the cinematography class the next semester with Catilin Manning, who was a kinder and far better teacher. Although when our group decided to spend our spring break spending every waking moment shooting film, returning to class with far more reels than any of the other groups, our film footage was so warped and unapologetically original that Manning just sat in her seat confused while all of us laughed. Her only feedback: “too grainy.”)

Years later, I became a cultural journalist entirely by accident. And I somehow had enough sway at the time to land an in-person interview with The Man Himself. (You can listen to the show here.) I met David Lynch at the Prescott Hotel (now the Hotel Zeppelin) on his birthday — January 20, 2007. I told the publicists that, out of a sense of great deference to Lynch, I would need to hold onto our conversation for the 100th episode. And they were gracious enough to not have any problem with that. Because Lynch was that important. He needed that round number.

I showed up to the hotel with a birthday gift — Tyler Knox’s Kockroach, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” told in reverse, which was the weirdest new release I could find at City Lights. And I cannot even begin to convey how kind and generous David Lynch was to me. You know the old mantra “Don’t meet your heroes”? Well, it did not apply at all to David Lynch. It turned out that he was a gentleman as well as a genius. He liked me a lot, laughing at my jokes and taking particular interest in my microphones. (Of course.) He even offered me some technical suggestions. Because he completely understood what I was doing with The Bat Segundo Show. He also spoke with me well beyond our allotted time. (As much as David Lynch’s voice was spellbindingly warm and quirky in clips, it was evermore so in person.)

As a personal rule, it had never been my practice to take photos after the interviews. I did my best to operate by a code of conduct that honored conflict of interest . But this was David Fucking Lynch. So I asked Lynch if he could take a photo with me.

And do you know what David Lynch did? He spent five minutes pacing around the hotel. He wanted this photo to be shot absolutely right. We finally found a spacious room that Lynch insisted had the best colors.

Then Lynch spoke.

“Say, Ed, I want you to put your arm like so. And since you’re a little taller than me, I’ll put my hand on your left shoulder. And it will be a good picture!”

Holy shit. I was being directed by David Lynch. But the man saw artistic opportunities in everything.

The kind publicist shot the photo that you see above.

I then shook David Lynch’s hand, thanked him, and told him that his work meant so much to me.

“Ed, I don’t think you’re meant to just be an interviewer.”

“What?”

He smiled and said, “You’ll figure it out.”

And then Lynch, in his impeccable suit, walked off. And that was it.

Of course, David Lynch was absolutely right. I did figure it out. The audio drama I have produced has changed my life, my writing, and my art for the better. It has made me a better person. I’ve discovered ideas and feelings inside me that I didn’t even know I possessed and that the brilliant actors involved with my independent project have instinctively picked up on.

And that unfathomable kindness — that casual manner in which Lynch saw something in me — meant everything to me and still does to this very day.

And that is why I took David Lynch’s passing so hard yesterday and why I am misting up even now as I write this.

Never meet your heroes? Well, in most cases. Certainly there are authors I’ve met who I’ve admired but who proved to be unkind. But not David Lynch.

Rest in power, sir. And thank you. I will never forget you and your great work.

© 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post David Lynch: A Personal Tribute first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Jimmy Carter, who served as our 39th President and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 for his selfless work in stumping for human rights, passed away at his home this afternoon at the age of 100. He lived long enough to vote in the last election, but, perhaps mercifully, he didn’t subsist to see the potential destruction of democracy under the First American Fuhrer.

Carter was, for all of his flaws, a fundamentally decent man and, as one friend told me in tears on the phone, “the last selfless President.” And I think that’s a very good assessment. Carter certainly had an ego and was definitely well over his head when attempting to tame stagflation in tandem with the Fed. He also substantially underestimated the learning curve when shifting from Georgia politics to the more complicated brokering required in the Beltway. But better to have a pragmatic optimist like Carter in the White House — a man willing to try things, a man who actually cared about the American people, a man who did not require vast wealth and who even installed solar panels on the White House roof — to set an example for the nation. Better Carter than a megalomaniac like Trump or a duplicitous neoliberal huckster like Clinton.

While many have rightly pointed to Carter’s stunning feats as a diplomat and an indefatigable home builder long after he left Washington, his accomplishments as President, large and small, were considerable. He brokered a deal between Sadat and Rabin at Camp David to begin the first stages of peace in the Middle East. And every President who followed Carter failed to build from this significant negotiation, opting to cave to Israel rather than collect olive branches for international harmony.

Even after he lost the 1980 election, Carter still negotiated the Iran hostage crisis to the bitter end. He was so committed to humanism that he appointed more women, Blacks, and Hispanics to governmental positions than any previous President. And he also established the Department of Education, which liberated the vital need to educate our children from the overstuffed yoke of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This made education — and education alone — a Cabinet-level priority. By doing so, Carter made it possible for untold millions of teens to go to colleges by way of financial aid and he fought discrimination against minority children. (Naturally, the Orange Monster — with great calumny to Carter’s legacy — plans to eliminate this department altogether.)

The plentiful craft beers that you now enjoy at a bar would not have happened, had not Carter signed a bill that removed a fifty year prohibition against homebrewing. If Carter had not done this, there’s a good chance that all of us would still be enduring the hideous swill of Bud and Miller Lite as the only drafts on tap, as opposed to the limitless stouts, IPAs, and flavorful lagers that you can now find across the country. (I gleaned that last fact from Kai Bird’s The Outlier, an excellent book on Carter that I strongly recommend. The book truly helped to advance my thinking on the soft-spoken peanut farmer.)

President Carter was ridiculed for his July 15, 1979 “malaise” speech during an energy crisis, in which Carter urged our nation to curb its selfishness:

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

These were not words that Americans wanted to hear, but these were certainly words that they needed to hear. For here we are, forty-five years later, living in a nation in which many feel that their lives lack real direction. Fifty-four days ago, 77 million Americans voted to blow up the bridge for everyone, laying waste to great possibilities and selling this nation out to the plutocrats simply because they couldn’t be bothered to bust out their phones and Google “tariffs” to understand the cold and clinical financial impact of stone-cold sleazebags on their own lives. Carter saw the writing on the wall decades before anybody else did and tried to warn us. But America was too stubborn to change and evolve. So here we are now in a deeply uncertain and very despotic place.

Like John F. Kennedy, Carter was an idealist (as well as a hardcore reader) who believed in possibility, even when he didn’t always comprehend the abstruse scaffolding holding up the three branches of American government. He would often work late hours, valiantly rolling up his sleeves, so eager to know everything that he once read each and every volume of the tax code. Since Carter had been an engineer, he approached his job with a fierce systematic mind. And there was no President following Carter who was this hell-bent on knowing everything. Or trying to know everything. I’d like to think that Carter’s insatiable curiosity was one of the reasons he tried so damned hard to be the best humanist imaginable.

With Carter’s passing, so too passes a long moment in America. It remains uncertain if we can course-correct after the next four volatile and nightmarish years. But perhaps if we study Carter with humble and scrupulous eyes, we might reclaim the hope and the honesty that marked his four years in office.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post President Jimmy Carter Passes Away at 100 first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (aka HUD) released its Annual Homelessness Assessment Report and the data is extremely dispiriting and disturbing. Homelessness rose 18.1% over the course of 2024. And to give you an indication of just how dramatic this unfathomable rise truly is, by point of comparison, homelessness increased 19.2% from 2007 to 2024. In other words, in one year, homelessness increased at nearly the exact same rate that it had over the course of the previous seventeen years. As HUD was careful to note in its press release, this report was generated from data collected more than a year ago. Meaning that the tally of homeless Americans — which stood at 770,000 on a cold solitary night in January 2024 — is undoubtedly larger than this.

The culprits, of course, are the lack of affordable housing and wages not rising fast enough to accommodate this new influx of people who don’t make enough money at their jobs to pay their rent. The chart pictured above is taken from data pulled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows a dramatic upward curve — one that correlates with the sharp increase in homelessness during the last seventeen years — of the consumer price index for the average residential rent in America. 230,806 in January 2007 to 426,651 in November 2024. According to the NYU Furman Center, the median gross rent increased by 16.2% between 2011 and 2021. In Los Angeles County, the average rent increased 14.09% between 2023 and 2024. The average rent in Chicago went up $600/month in just under ten years.

There has not been a federal increase in minimum wage since 2009. A series of amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 2007 increased the minimum wage to $5.85/hour as of July 24, 2007, $6.55/hour as of July 24, 2008, and $7.25/hour as of July 24, 2009. In other words, during the same time window in which homelessness drastically increased, minimum wage — which was intended to offer the bare minimum to live in America — has not risen in direct proportion to these draconian costs.

In other words, the data couldn’t be any clearer. Even before Donald Trump has taken office, the United States is presently experiencing the worst homeless crisis seen since the Reagan years, in which homelessness doubled from 1984 to 1987. But in 1984, the number of homeless people was lower, estimated to be somewhere in the area of 200,000 to 500,000. Reagan famously cut vital social services that were designed to combat this grossly immoral and utterly cruel neglect of the most marginalized members in society.

This is only going to get worse.

Trump is prepared to go much further than Reagan with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (aka DOGE). Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are prepared to dismantle nearly anything that’s left to aid the vulnerable. Earlier this month, Elon Musk stated, “In most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie. It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness.” On July 25, 2023, when Ramaswamy was running for President, he published an op-ed in The New York Post in which he outrageously suggested that homeless people should stop receiving any financial assistance whatsoever and risibly concluded that a focus on “family, faith, and truth” would somehow serve in lieu of the vital cash needed to escape impoverishment. Last I heard, “family, faith, and truth” isn’t recognized as our national currency and it sure as hell isn’t going to buy you a sandwich at the bodega. “Family, faith, and truth” — particularly the truth twisted with coldblooded glee — won’t land you an apartment when the average rent continues to rise. It won’t build affordable housing units. It won’t, in short, solve the problem. But these two callous vultures are now eager to slice anything that remains of homeless aid.

And if you seriously believe that the Democrats are going to come to the rescue, think again. The duplicitous Bill Clinton set the cruel tenor when he signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, dismantling ADFC and replacing it with a forced labor requirement if you hoped to receive the penurious allotment to put food on your table or diapers for your children. The Welfare Reform Act was never intended to help the homeless. It was set up to create welfare companies that could profit from these new marks. In 2023, That Uncertain Hour‘s Krissy Clark conducted an investigation on this nefarious practice, which has been scantly reported on in by corporate media.

In 2014, Obama signed the Farm Bill, which made more than $8 billion in cuts to the food stamp program and increased the likelihood that someone teetering on the edge of homelessness would fall off the precipice. 89 Democrats voted for this vile bill in the House.

How much would it cost to cure poverty in America? The great Matthew Desmond has calculated the figure at $177 billion. That’s how much it would take annually to ensure that all Americans rise above the poverty line. He believes that if the richest 1% paid their fair share, this new safety net would eliminate homelessness and its attendant problems (crime, addiction, mental health).

But the prospect of any radical remedy to a very serious problem is nonexistent under Donald Trump and under a House and a Senate that is controlled by Republicans. These politicians have been purchased by the very millionaires and billionaires who don’t want to pay their fair share for American success.

Given all this overwhelming data, one must naturally ask what it will take for America to get serious about homelessness. How many people have to become homeless before the issue, which is already out of control, is properly addressed? Two million? Ten million? Fifty million?

Lawmakers and everyday Americans have grown accustomed to looking the other way when they see a homeless man begging for change on the streets. This is a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern that needs a significant 180. Because it’s very clear that government is not going to help us. But maybe if we get serious about pooling our resources through mutual aid, we can do what the government can’t.

What’s so astonishing is that it actually would not cost that much to fix poverty. If we take Desmond’s figure of $177 billion and divide it by the American population of 334 million, that works out to $526 each year that every American would have to pay. Five hundred dollars. That’s half the price of your annual cable bill. That’s five trips to the grocery store. Five nights out on the town. It really doesn’t cost that much. In fact, the annual tally would be considerable less for the working-class and the middle-class if those in the higher income brackets paid a greater proportion.

Financially speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever for the plutocrats to continue profiting on the underprivileged. If the homeless population continues to rise so rapidly, there won’t be a consumer class that can prop up the economy. Unless, of course, the idea here is to create a new form of slavery, whereby the hungry and the homeless are forced to toil for the most picayune remuneration imaginable while being deracinated of all opportunity and democratic agency. Given the sociopathic declarations from Elon and Vivek, it would appear that this is going to be the plan. Because why does anyone need a roof over his head when there’s “family, faith, and truth”?

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post The American Homelessness Crisis first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Jeff VanderMeer has had an incredibly toxic and unhealthy obsession with me for nearly twenty years. He has delighted in leading smear campaigns against me — without a shred of evidence — on his blog and on social media. The source of this monomaniacal animus goes back to the fall of 2009. You are about to learn exactly what kind of an abusive and insanely retaliatory maniac Jeff VanderMeer truly is. You are going to learn that, if you cross Jeff, he will declare you an enemy for life and that he will devote any and all resources to impugning you — until either you or him drop dead. And, call me crazy, that ain’t exactly the healthiest relationship you should have with an audience, to say the least. Jeff VanderMeer clearly doesn’t understand that no artist can ever please everyone. But if he shows you exactly how he deals with people who don’t genuflect every ounce of their free will to him, he will be more than happy to weaponize the Internet against them. This is what’s commonly referred to as megalomania. And I think it’s safe to say that Jeff VanderMeer is the Donald Trump of speculative fiction.

Four people have informed me that they have also been recipients of Jeff’s deranged zeal and his private backchannel gaslighting, but, as Jeff has had increased success as a writer (particularly after the Alex Garland film adaptation of Annihilation, which dramatically improved the clunky and poorly written novel), his toxic qualities have only grown worse. His hubris has burgeoned to staggering levels and his talent has atrophied. These four people have feared going on the public record and “crossing” him. And I will protect their privacy. Because I don’t want so see anyone harassed by a pathetic 56-year-old bully.

But I have no such qualms revealing my own dealings with the disordered basket case known as Jeff VanderMeer. (And, believe me, there are far more emails — worse emails — than what I’ve published below.)

I am sick and tired of Jeff VanderMeer constantly manufacturing artificial drama about me. Particularly when I have the receipts about what he did to damage our relationship. I have resisted publishing these emails until now. But I feel that I now have to. Because Jeff VanderMeer is a wanton thug and I don’t want other people to be hit with the same ridiculous abuse. And also because Jeff simply will not stop. And because he will not stop, he has forced my hand. You are going to read the messages of a man who lashed out at me when I was being kind, sensitive, and honest. You are going to see the only writer in 553 episodes who ever felt entitled to another interview on my old literary podcast, The Bat Segundo Show, and who falsely accused me of not being truthful, even though he did not arrange for his books to be sent to me with enough reading time and refused to respect my benevolent honesty.

(I did arrange for another interviewer to interview him. Because that’s the kind of guy I am. I also agreed to hang out with him in a diner when he rolled through New York. And we did — at the Westway Diner on November 21, 2009, according to my records — only for Jeff to spend a lot of his time huffing and puffing in his seat, his arms permanently crossed as if he were stopping himself from punching some perceived enemy, occasionally sneering at me, and interrogating me about my podcast.)

When I gently told him that I was overbooked and that I didn’t have the time to read his books (as I did with every author) and conduct a proper interview, particularly since I had not even been sent copies in time, he threw a stupendous temper tantrum by email and called me a liar. (I forwarded this exchange to a mutual contact, who informed me that Jeff was prone to this sort of volatile communication style. If only I had known earlier, I would never have booked him.) Jeff made a series of increasingly insane accusations against me. Throughout this entire volley, I did my best to play it cool. But Jeff was emailing me four emails for every one I sent, with some new emails contradicting the previous ones.

In January 2022, when I was unemployed and had only about fifty dollars to my name, I received a colossal tax bill that I had no way of paying and went on a binge drinking tear. I’m not proud of my slip. I completely lost my cool, to say the least. Jeff VanderMeer seized the moment and intercepted a draft blog post that I had accidentally published and swiftly deleted in my stupid inebriation to whip up a social media campaign against me. I ignored all the vitriol he had spawned and spent my time cleaning up my act. I spent 150 days sober (not so much as a drop of beer or wine), composed a Western soundtrack for a friend’s audio drama, managed to land a job (and some financial help from friends; everyone was paid back within months, including the tax man), and now only drink modestly on the weekends. My only slip from this quasi-sober regimen was shortly after the devastating election results back in November, in which I fell off the wagon and downed a great deal of Black Label. Again, I’m not proud of that. Fortunately, I swiftly course-corrected and was soon sober and writing again and rallying the troops against fascism. (Nobody’s perfect, although Jeff, who will never admit a mistake, will probably tell you that he’s the exception. This is, after all, the way that toxic narcissists roll.)

And these circumstances represented the “bullshit” that Jeff was to “call me out” on. Because he really wants everyone — including the barista who undertoasted his bagel; how dare she! — to worship his “genius.” An elitist sociopathic pig like Jeff couldn’t give two shits about anyone who makes under $50,000/year. He is, in short, one of the bad ones.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me what happened between Jeff VanderMeer and me. And I told him over the phone. The memories reminded me what an abusive asshole Jeff had been to me. And I read Absolution, Jeff’s latest book, on Friday out of morbid curiosity. I was completely stunned and taken aback by how poorly written it was — particularly the third part, in which every sentence contained a “fuck” or two — and it was completely unconvincing. So I wrote a satirical review in the same preposterous and badly written form. (Yes, I was egged on by a few people who thought the results were hilarious.)

Jeff, who doesn’t possess a sense of humor and who is used to people kissing his ass, obviously wasn’t pleased. On December 28, 2024, at 11:33 AM — a mere eight hours after the review had been published (do I live in his head rent-free or is he more interested in practicing a literary form of the autocratic gaslighting dominance described by Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her excellent book Strongmen?) — VanderMeer claimed — falsely, as it turns out — that he would not read what I had written. His aim, of course, was to whip up hatred and present himself as the aggrieved “victim.” Any normal author — hell, any well-adjusted human being — would have laughed it off. But, you see, Jeff has always lived for the attention. He loves being the leader in his own cult of acolytes who will never question his “genius.” Seeing that everybody had piled onto his BlueSky post, while I was out and about having a fun time, Jeff spent late Saturday night doubling down on this. Typical behavior. For a guy who doesn’t care about anything I have to say, he certainly seems to have a lot of spare time on his hands doing precisely that!

I was initially fond of Jeff. In the summer of 2006, he had sent me a package containing his Ambergris stories. His writing voice back then was quirky, endearing, and filled with a sense of humanism. This was obviously a wacky original who wasn’t getting mainstream press coverage. So, of course, I happily set up a Bat Segundo interview, which aired on August 28, 2006.

We proceeded to correspond every so often with each other. I’d often receive a tortured message from him over some bad review. I have literally never known any author who cared so much about his press more than Jeff VanderMeer. And I replied, as I would (and have) to any writer, gently telling him to ignore the bastards. Then, on October 10, 2009, Jeff told me that he was going to be in town and that he wanted to either get together with a small group or do a “no holds barred” Bat Segundo interview. It was an extremely weird email that made me feel uncomfortable. At the time, I had already booked too many author interviews and was considering ending the show because I was burned out. And I politely informed him that I couldn’t do the second option, but that I was amenable to the first. I never wanted any guest to feel cheated. I gave my A game to everyone.

This meetup was the Westway Diner meeting I have already mentioned.

But sometime in December 2009 — in a post that Jeff has conveniently deleted and that cannot be found through the Wayback Machine — Jeff posted an unsettling post on “leverage” dripping with unbridled resentment for anyone who had spurned him. I had reason to be concerned. For Jeff had written about me in Booklife, viewing me in crassly mercantile terms that made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Thus began a correspondence in which Jeff lost his mind, which can be read in full below. Pay attention to the unhinged accusations that come out of nowhere and Jeff constantly monitoring my Twitter feed for any perceived sleight. (There was none.) Pay further attention to the extremely demented way in which Jeff demands fealty and puts forth conditional terms and the way he sees “threats” when none are there. This man was not well then, by any means. And I don’t think he’s improved in the intervening years. And also observe how understanding I was as Jeff was losing his shit and going well out of his way to find any new means of insulting me. Then again, for all I know, he was feigning an act of madness to manipulate me. That would certainly be on brand. Nobody, after all, ever questions the mad “genius.”

Date: December 29, 2009 5:49 PM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

Jeff:

While I can certainly see where you are coming from, there are significant problems with your approach to leverage, displayed in your post and (to some degree) in Booklife. While I didn’t find your stance as creepy as Jessa Crispin did, what I read is this: You are essentially viewing readers, advocates, and fellow people in the community as Bernaysian tools, completely ignoring the fact that they have inner souls. Yes, people can be advocates for your work. But they are often MORE than advocates. Discounting the rabid fanboys who wish to take up every spare whit of your time, well-adjusted people have thoughts and feelings and may not always be in the position to give you what you hope for. Their perceived failure may not necessarily be miserly and, as you point out in the comments, it may not simply be part of their personalities. But connections among people shouldn’t involve some permanent ledger in which you are constantly keeping a tally, which is how it’s coming across to me in your post. That’s just not a healthy way to carry on with people, either personally or professionally. I’m sure you know that, but I bring this up because it simply isn’t reflected in your blog post. If someone decides not to give you the press or the attention that you feel you deserve, there may be other extenuating circumstances existing outside the ones you’re speculating upon. Most of the time, simply ASKING the other person what’s up will clarify things. Direct communication, as we all know, is far healthier than idle speculation about a person’s motives. That way lies paranoia and crazy one million word diaries.

To present my own circumstances during your last tour: After doing anywhere from five to eight shows a month almost nonstop for four years, I was understandably burned out. There were many other contributing factors (being in a very shaky financial position, having a particularly humiliating stint with _______, and overcoming these considerable difficulties to continue work on the novel-in-progress, which has proven to be more fun and more challenging than I could have anticipated: thankfully, all this has been rectified in recent months). All this was going on in October (which was when you emailed me about it) and November. This is why I did not interview you for Segundo. I don’t wish to subject any author to a stale interlocutory approach or give any author a subpar experience because of any personal distractions. It isn’t fair to them. It isn’t fair to the listeners. (Segundo is now a weekly affair starting in 2010, which is one of my community services. I had to figure out a way to keep it going, because I know that it’s needed. Particularly since Silverblatt, despite remaining optimistic, has informed me that Bookworm is on thin ice.) The interview I told you about in person had actually been set up a few days before we met. Additionally, I would have gladly attended your New York appearance with Jeffrey Ford (for I dig both of you guys), had not __________, an individual who has gone out of his way to spread false and inaccurate information about me, been at the helm. Removing myself from the situation was a way for me to avoid any unpleasantness that might have infringed upon the undoubtedly pleasant proceedings, which were certainly not about me. I was also never sent copies of FINCH or BOOKLIFE, although I did manage to intercept the copy of FINCH that you sent Sarah. (KOSHER actually arrived a few days ago, and I look forward to reading this.) Given these multiple circumstances, there were understandable hiccups that had little to do with you. Best I could do was a friendly meetup. And, in fact, I canvassed Eric on interviewing you before he was in touch with Matt.

I drum all this up in the unlikely event that you may be obliquely corralling me within your category of miserly people, but also to inform you of the practicalities, limitations, and efforts of one person to deliver coverage to numerous people under dire conditions. When you make unspecified accusations (without citing a single example) about people being miserly with their leverage, I find this to be an inconsiderate position — possibly one that you didn’t intend. The fact that it is buttressed by the call for more people to take honest and controversial stands actually reinforces the very position that you are railing against. I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way.

I’m a no bullshit guy, Jeff, and, as you know, for any skirmishes, I’m happy to clarify or listen or atone. I’m not a big fan of passive aggression, although if someone doesn’t want to resolve something, I respect the time needed to come back to something. But you just can’t call everybody miserly like that. It may come across to some as selfish and ungrateful. I have to ask: In railing against the presumed misers, to what degree are you keeping quiet? To what degree are you truly to clear things up with the misers? These issues are nowhere in your post and that’s just as vital an aspect of relations as anything else.

Again, all this is a way of helping to flesh out an important issue to being a writing professional. If you don’t fully take into account these aspects, then you’re going to get more Jessa Crispins on your ass. And they’re not going to necessarily be direct about it.

In any event (and this may come across as an awkward segue), I sincerely hope that you and Ann had a grand holiday. Best wishes on all fronts and happy new year. And look forward to reading more of your material.

Thanks and all best,

Ed

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 6:14 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Dude, you are totally misreading the post.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 6:16 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Ed:

No it is not about you. It is not even about the subject you think it is about.

I tried to make it clear that I didn’t give a fuck whether you interviewed me or not.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 6:23 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

And I don’t give a flying fuck about you and _____________. He was perfect for the gig, I wanted to meet him. I wasn’t going to sit there and go “how will this affect Ed Champion.”

What I objected to at our meal was an apparent *lack of directness.* I didn’t care about the interview–i cared about you apparently *lying* to me. In other words, you idiot, I don’t need friends who lie to me. Geez.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 6:27 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

And as for booklife, you and Jessa form a small minority who’ve read the book that way. The vast majority have taken it as intended.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 9:57 PM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

So I come back and I get four apoplectic emails from you sent from the worst possible medium — the iPhone.

What in the hell are you talking about? How did I lie to you?

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 10:27 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

You said you weren’t doing interviews then went on about all the interviews you’d done. You looked distinctly caught out when I mentioned it. I could care less about the interview. But I do care bout truthfulness and I don’t care for people who make it all about them. That’s all. I thought your email to me was pompous and full of yourself and deliberately misunderstanding points in the book. You’re very high maintainance I am not in the mood today.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 11:14 PM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

Jeff:

For what it’s worth, I apologize for any verbal or non-verbal miscommunication. Clearly, some small unknowing gesture on my part upset you. But here’s where I’m coming from.

This is what I wrote to you on October 11th:

“I’m actually on hiatus from Segundo right now, and I’m doing my best to keep it this way. I got burned big time by an author who threw a temper tantrum after I had spent two weeks reading his books. And there have been numerous vocational setbacks that I won’t trouble you with. However, I would be happy to hang with you when you’re in town and just shoot the shit. I certainly look forward to reading FINCH.”

The interviews that I was talking about, as I recall, were a handful of people over a few weeks, which I had only scheduled a few days prior to meeting with you. I did not lie to you when I said (frazzled and burned out) that I was taking a hiatus from Segundo. This was true. At the time, I truly did not know if the show would continue. It took me weeks to figure out what I wanted to do, the circumstances of which I have already explained (not because I believed your post to be about me, but to give you an example of the internal complexities that you accuse so-called “miserly” types of). I then scheduled a small group of interviews (less than a handful) around that time. Largely to test the waters. I didn’t even have a fucking copy of FINCH until days before you came through New York, nor did I have a copy of BOOKLIFE until you handed me an extra one at the diner. So even if I wanted to, there was really no way I could schedule enough time to read your books and prepare for the interview. Unless it’s a film person, I need at least two weeks prep time for an author.

So, no, Jeff, I did not lie to you. There was no way I could have conducted the interview given the timetable.

At the time you brought up the Segundo thing, as I recall, you laughed the whole thing off. You never indicated that you were pissed off. And for all of your talk about truthfulness (or “truthiness,” which seems more applicable in this case), you never once leveled with me. So I’m baffled by your accusations of pomposity and deliberate misunderstanding of points in the book (in fact, I was more addressing your blog post rather than BOOKLIFE proper).

I’m going to chalk up your accusations here to being tired, exhausted, or some outside contributing factor beyond my ken. But I will say that calling people who have your fucking back “pompous,” “high maintenance,” and “apparently lying” is NOT cool, Jeff, and unacceptable. Particularly when none of these modifiers are applicable. For a guy who professes to value leverage, you’re doing a heck of a job chasing away your allies.

Sincerely,

Ed

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 11:48 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Whatever. I am happy to put it to miscommunication rather than a lie. But I did put it to you pointedly, whether with a laugh or not. You never said you didn’t have either book. I have never felt one way or the other that you had my back.

But I am telling you now that to misinterpret my post and my book, especially knowing me and my record, is pretty piss poor. And while I don’t think of you as miserly, you’re not on my top fifty most generous people out there, either.

I was delighted to have a chance to talk. I could care less about being interviewed. Is this clear? I almost feel like you’re upset you didn’t get review copies. I was fairly sure you had, but there must’ve been a glitch with the publisher.

I am not tired or particularly upset. I am mostly not interested in being called a soulless PR hack. Have you read my books, dude? They’re fucking strange. I have to work twice as hard as most people to find my audience. So I don’t appreciate it. I suppose by your measure of things I should sink back into the mire and be happy with an audience of 1k instead of 20k.

I wish you could walk in the shoes of a published novelist for a fucking year. You’d understand then just how complex all of these dynamics are.

But mostly…man, I say writers should use their political capital to do good works…and you twist that simple, decent message into something shitty. C’mon.

I am not interested in having you as an ally. You aren’t getting anything from me for review. I am never doing your show. Do you get it? You can be relieved you’re off the chessboard. Since that’s how you think I see things.

Jesus.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 29, 2009 11:58 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

I am happy to be your friend, but as I said I am taking ally off the table.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 12:04 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

And what was that stupid sophomoric twitter message conflating me and Lethem a little while back?

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 12:10 AM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

Don’t email me again. You’re way out of line. And unless you atone big time, you’re neither a friend nor an ally. I’m done with you. You fucked up big time.

I truly thought better of you.

Saddened and disappointed,

Ed

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 12:18 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Whatever. I am still your friend.

I have your back as your friend, but I am not interesting in dealing with you on a professional level. It’s too much work.

*You* don’t even have to apologize, although you should.

As for the fucked up big time–i am your friend, but if that’s a threat, it’d be best if you withdrew it immediately.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 12:28 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

And I am happy to apologize regardless, but only in the context of it being understood that I am not sending you review copies and I am not interested in ever being on your show. Otherwise, an apology seems like a way to gain an advantage.

Your email set me off because I do consider us friends and I expect you to give me the benefit of the doubt. I certainly have done the same for you re several of your blog posts in the past.

So, apologies. And thanks for calming me down when the Crispin thing happened.

And I know you have had some reversals of late, and I know it hasn’t been easy for you until recently.

PS clearly if I saw people as merely contacts none of this exchange would’ve occurred. I would’ve doffed my hat, said “yer right, guv’nor” and gone on with my life.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 12:35 AM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

You’re drunk. Get some sleep and contact me when you have a clear head.

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 12:37 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

I am not drunk. I am apologizing.

jeffrog the tarded

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 9:14 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Right. It is morning. I am sorry for the vitriol. I am firm on the friends and taking you off the reviewer list. I just don’t see any other way to proceed. I just think it simplifies things.

I see now that I think you were trying to extend an olive branch. But I hope you see my point, too.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 9:43 AM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

Jeff:

I don’t do conditional friendship. Your actions were way out of line. Get some help. I do wish you the best.

Sincerely,

Ed

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 9:49 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Wow. You really do see people as binaries. Amazing. So I take out the element that would *get in the way of friendship*, the part that would leave a suspicion of manipulation, and you can’t hack it. Amazing. After starting this with your amazingly self-absorbed email. Amazing.

Maybe you need a wake-up call. There is not one person I met in NYC who, when I mentioned your name, had anything good to say about you. I had to spend a good deal of time defending you. No more.

Well, have a nice life. If you ever come to your senses, email me.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 9:50 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Way out of line. You’re just too used to authors sucking up to you. You’re a total hypocrite on this issue of leverage.

Jeff, replying from his phone…

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 10:37 AM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

Jeff:

This exchange has clearly moved into the Twilight Zone.

So here’s the deal. If you want to resolve this, then we need to do this by phone. Call me at 718-XXX-XXXX. Because clearly there is something here you are not communicating to me or you are deliberately misreading my emails (or vice versa). The conversation must be relatively calm, honest, civil, and we must listen to each other.

Sincerely,

Ed

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 11:12 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Ed:

You need to actually read my emails. I hold no ill-will toward you, but you
are not following my train of thought here. I don’t think a phone call
solves anything. I think you and I should take a break from communicating
for a month or two and then talk. But I’m firm on this–I am not having
anything to do with your show or you as a reviewer. That is off the table,
and it’s not pejorative–I often, without saying it, don’t send stuff to a
reviewer or a podcaster if I become friends with them because I feel it
becomes a conflict of interest. It’s just overt here.

More importantly, I’m too busy to take a phone call. I’ve got 1,000,000
words of anthos to deliver by May 1st.

All apologies,

Jeff

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 11:12 AM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer
Subject: in any event, peace

Have a good New Year’s, man, and don’t let any of this worry you. Here’s to a good 2010.

Jeff

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 11:57 AM
To: Jeff VanderMeer
From: Edward Champion

You too. Let’s cool off and return to this in less frazzled and considerably calmer circumstances.

Thanks and all best,

Ed

* * *

Date: December 30, 2009 12:10 PM
To: Edward Champion
From: Jeff VanderMeer

Sure, no problem. And apologies for the vitriol. It is true I’m under tremendous pressure right now.

Have a good one.

jeff

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Jeff VanderMeer is a Toxic and Entitled Bully: The Receipts first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Kate Tuttle is an unremarkable corporate windup doll who writes about books much in the same way that moribund losers sign up for macramé classes to make friends: namely, deadening the room with dull and desiccated sentences, life-sucking generalizations, and all the lack of adventure that you see in some uptight and hopelessly white suburbanite who upturns her nose at any dinner entree with a touch of paprika. I’ve stayed silent about this toothless husk for many years. There was really no reason to care. Because I tend to ignore those who couldn’t write an original thought to salvage their sad and spent lives. Indeed, my only contact with this miserable batbrain over the great epoch of my Molotov-throwing existence was to ask her to pass along my thanks to her far more accomplished husband for mentioning me in his truly excellent book, Bunk. But that was only because I didn’t have the dude’s email. I don’t think that is the sign of an “asshole” — I’m sorry, “noted asshole,” to evoke Tuttle’s panache for unoriginal vitriol. Then again, the literary world is so dull and gutless, so casually resentful towards any talent who sticks out, that they feel an overwhelming and deranged need to summon me every so often — despite all the long debunked canards about me — into the role of the dependable heavy.

Well, now that Tuttle has called me a “noted asshole”– this when I tend to be kind and congenial if you meet me in the streets — I feel that I have a responsibility to live up to the ridiculous moniker by finally exposing this hideous charlatan, who is better suited to banging out press releases in between suicidal ideations. Largely because I very much subscribe to what Sean Connery once identified as “the Chicago Way” when it comes to settling scores with insignificant and unsmiling fuckwits who write with the absent gusto of someone who is permanently dead inside. If she had simply said nothing, the fireworks you are about to see would not have been written. Consider this a caveat to any other corporate media dullard who wants to start shit with me.

To get a sense for how this desperate gasbag pads out her “pieces,” one can look no further than her review of Abigail Thomas’s Still Life at Eighty:

She does worry about the state of her memory, as perhaps everyone her age does. “My memory is full of holes,” she notes, and later asks, “Does losing memories presage losing my mind?”

Yes, Tuttle really does thinks this little of her readership. Despite the cited quote already establishing that Thomas worries about her memory, Tuttle feels the need to spoon-feed this in the most insultingly condescending terms, even though anyone with a sixth grade level of education could decipher this obvious point on his own. And Tuttle is so artless a writer that the word “worry” appears seven times in an 800 word review.

Tuttle’s proclivity to repeat herself like someone suffering from palilalia is also prominently featured in this Mina Javaherbin profile:

Children’s book author Mina Javaherbin is an architect as well as a writer, and her latest book was largely inspired by the architecture of her father’s hometown, Isfahan, Iran.

Kate Tuttle is a critic who criticizes books in works of criticism! (Uses of “architect” or “architecture” appear five times here. And this senseless snippet is under 400 words.) Was there some internal memo within the Globe ordering its staffers to repeat words like this to court the departing eyeballs?

In fact, Tuttle is such a careless hack that she can’t even match proper tense in a lede: “but everywhere she turns there’s another obstacle — including some that might be deadly.” Boston Globe, this is the “editor” you’ve kept on board to run your books section? Indeed, Tuttle is such an incurious bean counter that a thoughtful dude like Alex Segura is reduced to spouting generalizations hammered in by media training: “It felt like an interesting challenge.” And in interviewing Jodi Picoult on the vital topic of book bans, Tuttle never once brokers anything other than general questions, which is a significant insult and a trivialization toward an author needlessly censored by fascist (and often sexist) zealots. In rightly commending Rebecca L. Davis’s fearless work, Tuttle describes her “well-turned and crystal clear explanations.” (Tuttle can’t seem to pick a lane when only one modifier offering the same meaning will do.)

And if you think that Kate Tuttle is a champion for women writers, consider the crass way in which she belittles Jami Attenberg for writing “a longer timespan than she’d used in previous novels.” Now I’m obviously no fan of Jami Attenberg. But I would never denigrate a writer like this. A writer who flexes her wings and attempts ambition shouldn’t be singled out like this. Would Tuttle have made the same pronouncement if Attenberg were a man? Perhaps this was an aloof attempt at gender parity. But three women who I read this passage to on the phone this afternoon (I did not tell them that a woman wrote this until after they answered) all told me that this came across as patronizing.

I may or may not be an asshole, “noted” or otherwise. But I can tell you this much. I actually write in a voice that you’ll fucking remember. Kate Tuttle will continue banging out these hopeless platitudes and lackadaisical gaffes, but she has failed to grasp that well-behaved women never make history.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Kate Tuttle: The Talentless Corporate Husk Who Bangs Out Hollow Platitudes About Books first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Hey, you fucking motherfuckers! I am Jeff Fucking VanderMeer, a certifiable fucking genius and fucking wildly arrogant fuckface who shits on anyone who doesn’t suck my fucking cock! Oh fucking yeah, you fucking bitches! In fucking fact, I’m such a fucking tough guy (or at least I fucking think I am in my fucking head; I’m a gym rat, you fucks!) that I fucking compensate for my fucking lack of fucking talent by fucking using the fucking word fuck a fucking lot in the third fucking part of my latest fucking book. Oh fucking yeah!

Fuck you if you fucking can’t fucking handle it!

I am Jeff Fucking Motherfucking Fuckerfucking VanderMeer, you fucking bitches! Lick my fucking asshole. I fucking know you fucking will. Because I’ve fucking gotten a fucking fuckadoodle fuck my giddy fucking aunt fair fucking pass for so fucking long. But fucking now, you’re finally starting to fucking grasp that I am the greatest fucking pain in the motherfucking ass to my motherfucking editors, who won’t fucking talk because I gamed social fucking media and created a fucking army of MAGA-like lemmings to fucking hang on to my every fucking word. And they fucking like it! Because I am fucking Jeff Fucking VanderMeer, Fucking Genius. Oh fucking shit! Am I a fucking failure because even the fucking Goodreads crowd constantly fucking rates my motherfucking books very fucking low? (3.38 for fucking Annihilation, which is supposed to be my fucking classic? 3.25 for Hummingbird Salamander, which nobody fucking read? 3.22 for A Peculiar Peril?) Oh my fucking god! My fucking non-Southern Fucking Reach novels ain’t fucking selling. Ain’t fucking rating! So I better fucking write a fucking new one and bamboozle the ever living fuck out of all these stupid fucks who I have fucking conned. Oh fucking yeah!

I was so fucking happy when Abigail Fucking Nussbaum rimmed my motherfucking ass in The Guardian. Oh fucking yeah! I mean, she fucking used the fucking word Nabokovian! When all I fucking did was randomly insert the fucking word “fuck” into the third fucking part. And well, you fucking know, it’s so fucking difficult for a Fucking Literary Genius like fucking me to fucking write in any vaguely fucking coherent way. But, hey, Fucking Abigail, I fucking appreciate the fawning ass munch!

I hope you won’t fucking mind if I fucking quote from my motherfucking novel, because I fucking am, at the end of the motherfucking day, a Fucking Literary Genius!

Shit. It smelled so good and nary a fucking small woodland creature he’d manage to bag, even since free of the Southern Reach’s fucked-up policy on the matter. A good broth on a winter’s day. The way the broth would bubble with those golden bubbles, each one on the surface breaking open to add to a salivating scent.

Did you fucking see what I fucking did there? You fucking see? I dropped a “nary” to make my fucking hackery sound a little fucking literary. And you all fucking bought it! And if I drop an “ever since free,” you’ll fucking believe that all of these fucking gratuitous fucks I fucking drop are actually fucking intentional. When, you fucking know, I’m just pulling all this out of my stinky nearing-IBS fucking asshole! And if I fucking repeat myself with the fucking “bubbles,” the greater solipsism and complete lack of fucking craft in my shit-flavored fucking prose won’t be fucking exposed, amirite?

But even fucking before all this “fuck” business, I was fucking conning you motherfuckers the entire fucking time!

It irked the locals who liked birding to be in pursuit of a rare vermillion flycatcher, only to gaze through binoculars … at what turned out to be a biologist wearing a red bandana, staring back through her own binoculars.

You see, I’ve edited so many fucking anthologies that I fucking know that if you drop a ten fucking cent word like “vermillion” (Gene Fucking Wolfe move, motherfuckers! but without the fucking craft!) and I fucking mindlessly repeat the fucking phrasing like fucking “binoculars” — well, fucking then, motherfucker, I’m certainly fucking going to continuing fucking conning you motherfuckers while fucking laughing my fucking way to the fucking midlist fucking bank!

In fucking fact, I am so fucking secure in my Motherfucking Literary Genius that I can fucking boast like a fucking teenybopper signing on for a fucking record label that my fucking willful catastrophe has gone into a third fucking printing.

In fucking short, I fucking cheated you. You probably didn’t fucking read my horseshit. But that’s fucking okay. Because I’m a Fucking Literary Genius who has gone into a third fucking printing, simply because I had the fucking wisdom to pad out the fucking word count of my fucking shitty novel with the word “fuck.”

Fuck me! You fucking books people are so fucking easy to fucking fool!

[12/28/24 UPDATE: A few readers who thought this little satirical piece was hilarious have pointed out that Jeff VanderMeer has won awards. And they are completely right. He did win the Nebula for Annihilation, proving that even a middling scumbag can win the rodeo if he angles his Stetson the right way. Thus, I have revised this slightly in the interest of accuracy.]

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post The Worst Book of 2024: Jeff VanderMeer’s ABSOLUTION first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

We’ll probably never have a completely accurate tally of how many MAGA Cultists have been cut off and left in the cold this Thanksgiving, but we do know that a vast throng of fascists — including the hubris-fueled, dumb-as-rocks propagandist Jesse Watters — has been disinvited and told in no uncertain terms not to come home this week. And now these hateful morons are starting to lose what little of their minds they still possess. Speaking for myself, I refused to attend the Thanksgiving dinner for which I had planned to cook many tasty and hearty side dishes (homemade sourdough stuffing, my four cheese mac and cheese, corn bread casserole, and numerous other delicacies that have made many guests ranging in age from six to sixty-six squeal with delight), once I had learned that a Trump voter had been invited. I was specifically trying to honor one of the sensitive guests — an extremely kind, endearing, and very shy seventeen-year-old (son of a friend) who asked me very politely to refrain from talking politics. Had the entire guest list been comprised of people who stand for democracy, this would have been effortless. It’s the MAGA fuckwads, after all, who want to keep dragging up politics and who hope to “own the libs” with their deranged fantasy football stylings. (Less easy for me is refraining from saying “fuck” for long periods of time. The longest I made it was three hours at a Xmas gathering before I slipped. And after my loose lips betrayed the blunt truth of my ship, my friend hugged me and said that she was very proud of me for managing to make it that long. What can I say? I’m a profane yet erudite motherfucker who tries to atone for his inveterate NC-17 vernacular by dropping as many arcane ten cent words into a colloquy as I can through blind instinct. But I digress.)

The upshot is that I am not going to walk on eggshells anymore. There has always been a line in the sand. I’ll never break bread with a fascist. I am simply not going to tolerate anyone who stands against women’s rights, for mass deportation, for unmitigated restrictions on marginalized groups, for the erosion of education funding, for tariffs and economic devastation that will hurt the most vulnerable members of our nation and line the coffers of the plutocrats, and for restrictions on free speech and the intimidation of alternative voices. No. Fuck off. I’ve urged people to cut the bastards off and I mean it. If you are a fascist, I will denounce you with the most devastating vitriol I can summon and ostracize you loudly.

I can name four friends who are in a similar boat. And we’re all regrouping, gathering for some quiet moments of camaraderie. A time of peace and good eating should not be sullied by these evil goons. If you stand for an ideology that wishes the people I love and me dead, then why on earth would you ever think I could be civil with you in any way? You stand against humanism. You are my sworn enemy.

One would think that the MAGA fuckwits would be happy about this state of affairs. But it’s clear by their vociferous pipsqueaking on my social media feeds and, closer to home, by their desperate attempts to get back into my good graces that they’re not. Now that they realize that the only company they will have for the holidays will entail hateful, humorless, miserable, and uneducated jackanapes, they’re starting to understand just what they’ve lost. Well, tough titty. Don’t look at me. I voted for the centrist democracy-friendly candidate, despite the fact that it involved a lot of compromise of my leftist principles. You voted for the authoritarian strongman and you won everything. Why aren’t you happy about that? Go and consort with your fellow white supremacists and fuck off until the end of time. I mean, come on, aren’t you living the dream?

Well, their “dream” involves us, whether we like it or not. They are so obdurately wretched that they are trying to follow us like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And they are surprised when their feeble minds and flaccid bodies collide into a glue trap. You see, it’s not enough for them to win. What they want is to make us their subservient little bitches. What they are interested in is establishing a new pecking order in which they are on top. They try to taunt us and “expose our hypocrisy” with such hacky zingers as “Another member of the tolerant left.” But as Andy Khori wisely pointed out, the “tolerant left” idea is an invented term of art by the right. It’s designed to inoculate these uncomprehending lemurs from criticism. They’ll never answer to their own complicity in supporting a deranged ideology in which more women die, more families are torn apart because some of them weren’t born on the mainland, and in which LGBTQIA people live in great fear for their future. But they will try to use “tolerant left” as a gotcha point when the truth of the matter is that every political ideology and every form of morality does possess a hard limit on what is considered acceptable.

And now that these dimwitted and entitled little dipshits are starting to learn that we do have boundaries, they’re stunned to learn that they can’t get away with their platitudes and their FOX News mimesis anymore. They’re learning very swiftly that we’ve always been intolerant of any baleful force or figure standing in the way of education, democratic possibility, and human rights. And they’re also learning that we can fight just as dirty as they can, starting with the punishment of social isolation and, if they get more hot and heavy, a peremptory declaration that they are no longer a part of our universe.

“Can’t we just agree to disagree?”

Nope. Talk to the hand. You were eager to usher in a world in which boys are now threatening girls with the phrase “Your body, my choice.” And, as far as I’m concerned, we now no longer have anything in common. For what is the point of a belief structure if we don’t turn our backs when those wildly arrogant Icaruses insist on flying too close to the sun?

But, oh, how they need us! Oh, how these idiots chirrup with half-baked incoherence and small dick energy in the replies! And they can’t own who they are and the disgusting values they represent. They know that they’re now going to have to consort among themselves, without our wit, bonhomie, and all-around decency (and, in my case, my kickass cooking). They know that the only company they will keep will be braindead red baseball cap-wearing zombies who are equally unpleasant.

So call me a proud member of the intolerant Left. If you’re a fascist, you won’t get an invite to my happy life. If you’re drowning in debt after the tariffs kick in, I’ll watch you suffer from afar and not lift a single finger to help you. Because you crossed the point of no return. These fools are now squirming within a nadir of cruelty and insensitivity for which there can be no Venn diagram. They are a hostile threat to all of the human values I hold dear. They have nothing but hate, intimidation, and threats. They have no original thoughts or real ideas. They are completely incapable of understanding historical patterns. And they know deep down that they lack resilience and resourcefulness, two vital qualities for surviving the upcoming dark age that we have and they don’t.

You can also call me an elitist. I don’t care. Although I should point out that the bar for entry into my world is astonishingly low and easy: if you don’t know something, ask a question. That’s it. I’m never going to call your question stupid, even if everyone else in the room knows the answer. You asked. And that counts for something in a world increasingly hostile to facts and checkered by anti-intellectualism. But the fascists cannot even summon the basic grace to do even that. They are incapable of respect, curiosity, humility, or broadening their minds or their empathy. They really believe that they can go about living in this nation, under this wildly dangerous and narcissistic authoritarian, without ever comprehending the impact of vital institutions, once untouchable, permanently dismantled by nihilistic fascists who hope to obliterate decades of progress.

I’m a member of the intolerant Left because I love what used to pass for my country. If we become two Americas because half the hateful rubes wanted to blow up the bridge, then so be it. My side is smarter, pluckier, and more inclined to survive, especially if we keep resisting hard. I have no qualms about transforming the stupidest and most callous members of our nation into braying pariahs. Much in the way that I show no remorse in cutting off a toxic “friend” from my life. The MAGA Cult are abusive addicts who have demonstrated that they fall below the baseline for decency. And now they’re going to learn about what the criminologist John Braithwaite called reintegrative shaming. In his studies, Braithwaite found that ostracized criminals showed a higher probability to fall into recidivism. And that’s what we’re seeing from these red state hayseeds: recidivism. Through death threats and calling me “soyboy” and attempting to belittle everything about life that is fun and joyful. It would be one thing if some members of the MAGA Cult were to prostrate themselves at our feet and beg for forgiveness and ask us for help so that they can better understand the impact of their uninformed vote, perhaps even joining us in the fight against despotism. But they have demonstrated no such inclinations. They would rather double down on their xenophobia and their belittling of anyone who isn’t white, male, hetero, and cis. That’s a line that I refuse to cross. And if it makes me “intolerant,” well calling me a member of the “tolerant Left” isn’t the flex you think it is.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post A Proud Member of the Intolerant Left first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Chuck Woolery is finally dead and I feel that I can walk into the wintry air with a modicum of relief and a new step in my stride. For Chuck Woolery was an unwanted infestation in American life who kept resurfacing on our television sets in the 1980s and the 1990s like a reptilian huckster kidnapping you, tying you up in his car, and then driving you out into the middle of nowhere to try and sell you on a timeshare. He was a worthless and hateful husk of a man, a slimy and fatuous fascist wind-up doll who couldn’t seem to wipe the solipsistic drool that dribbled down the corners of his Botoxed mouth at all times. He was incapable of curbing the pat aphorisms of intolerance that forever spewed from his asshole-scented mouth on social media. There was never a day in which this gauche gasbag failed to flatulate through his lips. He hated LGBTQIA people. He was unapologetically anti-Semitic. He demeaned liberal women because of the way they looked. And he was an early adopter of the bigotry and xenophobia that now passes for mainstream Republican talking points, announcing in 2012 that Blacks and gays did not require civil rights. Because that was literally all he had to hold onto when the producers eventually came to their senses and said, “Why the fuck did we hire that arrogant prick Woolery? Whose fucking idea was that?” (Sadly, the man who first hired Woolery could not be reached for comment. He has gone into hiding for his own safety and is believed to be living under the Witness Protection Program somewhere in Utah.) This made Woolery a little bit like Hitler — that is, if Hitler’s mediocre postcard painting skills were recognized by the likes of Merv Griffin and Mark Goodson after a high school guidance counselor had informed Adolf Woolery early in his life, “You know, game show host. That tracks.” That he said all these terrible things while resembling nothing less than a barely motile wax museum figure was the rare aesthetic touch proving to be accidentally apposite.

Some of the most honorable Americans I have ever known had always secretly hoped that Chuck Woolery would be beaten to death by a rare coalition of Quakers and Girl Scouts. They hoped that Chuck Woolery could run for his life in a jungle, pursued by hungry tigers who would instantly spot an unrepentant racist and devour him on a pay-per-view stream that all of us would happily pay for. But he was taken out for the good of America when the universe recognized, far later than everybody else had, that Chuck Woolery — who has been risibly described by some media figures as the king of smooth talk — did not have a heart. And so what passed for his heart — and the onyx malice that powered it was potent enough to keep this dubious fascist icon alive for eighty-three years — caved in on itself.

Chuck Woolery will leave no legacy other than “We’ll be back in two and two,” which he thundered at the cameras just before a commercial break in a matter that made William Shatner’s overacting look like light Method touches. And while many slow-minded reactionaries glommed onto this false temporal precision presaging a commercial break as some evidence that Woolery possessed wit and intellect, what they failed to understand was that these words represented a coded cry for help. With “two and two,” Woolery was announcing his IQ and his dick size.

This execrable slab of white male entitlement had one, and only one, skill. It was a completely unremarkable skill seen today in nearly all mediocre men and in nearly every finance bro: to boom and bristle with unfettered 20th century toxic masculinity. This was literally the only job requirement if you wanted to host a game show in the 1980s. There was never a moment on television in which Woolery believed in the great lie of his own importance. Woolery deployed this basic bitch quality to preside over some of the most manipulative game shows ever produced in America (specifically, Love Connection, which caused my mother to drink gallons of White Zinfandel every night when she was single). How much pain Woolery created for the American clime is difficult to calculate, but he almost certainly spawned suicidal ideations with his shotgun-to-mouth appeal in at least 62% of his audience. And it’s especially telling that many of these easily manipulated morons grew up and look back at the trauma of Woolery being on television every goddamned night of the week on some UHF station punching above its weight through the rose-tinted lens of childhood nostalgia.

It goes without saying that the world is better off without Chuck Woolery. Television has been drastically improved now that Chuck Woolery can no longer be tapped to tender us with his narcissistic belief that he was the center of the universe. And, perhaps most importantly, Woolery’s death ensures that he will not be appointed to a new Cabinet position for this monstrous incoming President. Then again, given the belief in conspiracy theories shared among the vast plurality of these nominated goons, I would not be surprised if Woolery’s stiff and desiccated body were to be exhumed only days after the funeral, deposited and propped up into a chair, Weekend at Bernie’s style, somewhere in the West Wing, and installed as the Secretary of Game Shows through a recess appointment. Woolery may be dead, but America may not be done with Woolery.

Rest in piss, Chuck Woolery. You were clearly one of the evil ones. You were such a hideous monster that the equally reactionary Pat Sajak somehow looks classy by comparison.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Chuck Woolery, the Worst Game Show Host of All Time, Has Finally Dropped Dead first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

After four days of being hit with death threats, pledges of violence directed towards me, one incident of doxxing, and outright hate from hundreds of MAGA cultists, I’ve noticed that they have started to make attempts to cozy up with me this weekend — as if telling me only a few days ago “Why don’t you kill yourself, you bald Commie?” (one of dozens of threats) never happened. These monsters are trying to squirm their way into our good graces and pretend as if everything is normal.

Well, I am here to say: FUCK NO.

We live in a new nation. A nation in which there is now a permanent divide between those who support democracy and those who want to kill off the rest of us.

Cut the bastards off.

Cut the bastards off. Even family and close friends who voted for Trump. Cut them off. All of these evil motherfuckers. Cut them off even if they share your blood. Do not go home for the holidays. That’s one thing you can do this month. Say no to Thanksgiving. Have a fun time with your true friends and family. (If you need Thanksgiving recipes, I’m happy to share. Email me.) Say no to FOX News-Watching Uncle Harry’s Turkey Day fiesta and Aunt Matilda’s covertly misogynistic Xmas party. Leave the fascists off your invite lists. Cut them out of your life. Tell them that they are not welcome because they do not stand for basic humanity. Cut them off because they stand for hate, violence, and intimidation.

Cut the bastards off.

Let them suffer the crippling loneliness of social isolation and of not having your majestic presence in their life. Because it will hurt them. It will hurt them when they are not invited to your wedding or your baby shower. It will hurt them when they fully understand that they are missing out on the most amazing moments of your life. They are not deserving of that. So cut the bastards off.

Cut the bastards off. Let them know that you fully understand that they do not love you. Because if they did love you, they would never have voted for a maniac who has made everything extremely unsafe for you and so many others. Let them understand that their vote had far more of a consequence than they understood.

This is one real act of protest you can do right now. The MAGA cultists may be full of bluster and arrogance as they take their weirdly spiteful victory lap, but they will feel pain if you ostracize and condemn them and you tell them that they are no longer a part of your life. I mean, remember the pain you felt when you came out to your right-wing parents and they told you that you were no longer welcome? Well, payback’s a bitch, isn’t it? Cut the bastards off. Because their only purpose in life is to cause pain and spawn hate. They literally have nothing else. So cut the bastards off.

Do not socialize with them. Do not be friends with them. If you have doubts, remember that they will soon sell you out to save their skin. So cut the bastards off.

Do not get into a relationship with them. Close your legs if they want to take you home. Before you go on a date with them, ask them who they voted for (along with some followup questions to determine if they are lying through their teeth) and if they say Trump, immediately block them and do not associate with them. Let them suffer in the same way that they are making us suffer. Cut them off and watch them from afar on social media as they are reduced to a puling and braying mess. In the same way that you are probably quietly feeling right now.

Cut the bastards off. These mouthbreathing motherfuckers are unworthy of you. You’re special. They’re not. They mindlessly bob their heads up and down and sputter a 24/7 froth of dehumanizing hate. So cut the bastards off.

A bartender cuts off a drunk who has one too many at a bar, right? Well, why should fascism any different? Cut the bastards off. They’ve had too much of Trump’s repugnant swill and I’m telling you that they are never ever coming back.

Cut these evil fuckwits off. Tell them that they no longer exist in your universe.

Cut the bastards off. Let them feel the wincing pain of standing on the side of hate. Let them know that they signed up for a new world in which high school boys are now telling high school girls, “Your body, my choice.” That’s unacceptable and unthinkable to anyone with a moral compass. So why would you want these sociopaths in your life? Cut the bastards off.

Let them know that suicide hotlines for LGBTQIA people have hit unprecedented levels and that they made this happen. And there is no coming back from that. It shows that your moral values and theirs do not align, even if they profess to be Christian.

Cut the bastards off. They stood against human rights. They signed up for unhinged harassment and violence, even after they won everything. Would we have done that? Fuck no. So cut the bastards off. Cut the bastards off because make no mistake: win or lose, the MAGA cult will always call for our dehumanization. So cut the bastards off.

Boycott their businesses. Why should they get to profit in any way when they have just ensured that prices next year will be higher than any inflation falsely ascribed to Biden? Cut them off before the tariffs and the boycotts from other nations kick in. Don’t buy any book written by a fascist. Do not support them. Do not show up to their events. Cancel your subscriptions to the Washington Post and The New York Times. Delete your X account. Cut the bastards off.

Cut the bastards off. By cutting them off, you will condemn them to a life in which they will only hear the tedious mantras of fascism and white supremacy. You will deny them the very civility that we believe in, but that is completely beyond them. And they will not have our humor, our kindness, our creativity, or our smarts. They will lose access to all of that and it will slowly destroy them. And they deserve it. So cut the bastards off. If they voted for Trump after being “on the fence,” they will swiftly understand that they are dead to us and that they are doomed and that they crossed a line which is unforgivable.

Cut the bastards off.

Unfortunately, you will have to consort with some of them. Particularly the fascists at your workplace. Well, give them nothing but the bare minimum. Cut the bastards off. Say nothing about your lives. Because they will use any and all details as weapons against you. But you can also cut them off without them actually knowing that you have cut them off by significantly reducing how much you are willing to share about yourself. Because they’re not very bright.

Cut the bastards off.

You do not need this drama in your life right now. You do not need additional people who will prevent you from being who you are. Because being authentic is going to be very difficult starting next year — especially when the arrests start. So why should they get even a second of what makes you special?

Cut the bastards off. I know it’s going to be difficult. I know you’re going to have to say no to a lot of people you presently love. But if you do this now, you’ll save yourself a lot of hurt in the long run when they start ratting you out. If you cut them off right now — while we have ten weeks until the Orange Monster becomes President — then you’ll get the pain out of the way now and save yourself a truly unsettling plot twist of Cousin Jim reporting you to the New Gestapo.

Cut the bastards off. Because we need you strong so that we can all fight and resist. We need you to be you. We need you to be authentic. And we will listen to you and provide a supportive ear. Because we’ve also cut the bastards off. It wasn’t easy for us either and we know how awful this is. But unfortunately this is what American life has come down to.

So cut the bastards off. Because we need you alive. And cutting them off will improve your probability of survival.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post The One Way to Hurt the MAGA Cult: Cut the Bastards Off first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

One of the truly unsettling paradigm shifts here in America is anticipating a diabolical world in which redress will be responded to with retaliation. Can you call the police if you know that your name will be added to a list if you aren’t white, male, and fascist? Can you settle a dispute with your neighbor if there is even the slightest possibility that the neighbor in question will rat you out to the New Gestapo? Can you legitimately defend yourself in court if all notions of jurisprudence have been permanently corrupted from the top down? If you are being exploited at your job, can you really do anything other than say yes to all overtime, throw all notions of an ideal work-life balance out the window, and not complain when you don’t get your annual raise? And if the fascists fritter away our social security or possibly seize our dutiful payments over the years to serve their own selfish ends, do you have a nest egg or a prodigious 401k to offset the robbery? (78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, according to a 2023 study. National credit card debt hit $1.14 trillion back in August. The obvious answer to this question is a heartbreaking no.)

The new way will involve looking the other way — even when horrors we cannot possibly imagine right now will happen just outside our doors. Screams in the street without a community coming together to help the victim. Based on what I have observed so far, I think the majority of Americans are going to suffer through this in silence and allow the vile tendrils of unfettered authoritarianism to wrap scaly ringlets around every facet of American life. I do hope that I’m wrong. Before all this, I often joked with friends about what it would take for Americans to drag the plutocrats out into the streets. The answer, of course, is nothing. Americans are ultimately quite conformist. They do not remember the Wobblies, Shays’ Rebellion, or even the Boston Tea Party. It started with the book bans, but the fascists truly want the American public to be stupid, illiterate, and not possess a basic understanding of history. We are essentially malleable livestock to them. And they are eager for women to pump out babies, whether they like it or not. The hell of it is that it’s all going to be a primitive mimicry of all that has happened before. Recall the Mother’s Cross that Hitler established on December 16, 1938 to encourage “pure” German women to reproduce. Remember that Hitler established Muttertag as a national holiday not long after he became Chancellor in 1933. We will see a similar motherhood cult here. And there will be no accountability.

The spirit of rebellion practiced by our ancestors has been whacked out of us over generations and replaced with a dutiful commitment to corrupt leaders in power. And, as we saw from the 53% of Gen Xers and the 57% of white women college graduates who voted for Trump, there are many obdurate authoritarians around us. Not only do we now live in a nation without checks and balances, but it is clear that the people would rather bob their heads up and down and accept the most callous policies of this new status quo, even as everything — particularly accountability — is taken away from them.

Our spirit of resistance has been crushed and I see no immediate signs that it will be revived. It is as if the great labor movements of the last few years — the longshoremen, UPS, the train workers, SAG-AFTRA, et al. — never happened. There really should be rebellion in every city over what is going on, but nothing has really been organized, save for the good people behind the Women’s March planning several events. (I note that they haven’t planned anything after January 20th. Possibly because nobody knows if Trump will weaponize the National Guard and other military branches to retaliate with mass arrests and bullets against those who peacefully protest — a legitimately horrifying possibility.)

Trump and his fascists won’t just go after the more vulnerable members of our society. They are actively working right now to make all of us more vulnerable. Some truly monstrous people are being considered for his new Cabinet, including Susan Wiles as his Chief of Staff, John Paulson and Larry Kudlow as Treasury Secretary, and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The common quality of all of these proposed candidates is that they are sycophants who will always say yes. They have all been quite nimble about retaliating against perceived enemies without saying anything publicly. They don’t need to say anything publicly. Because they have their MAGA Cult doing everything they can to flood our feeds with deranged counterfactuals and insane conspiracy theories. Just three days after the election results, there have been crude and unsettling efforts on TikTok by the fascists to paint me as an unhinged maniac.

Even those teetering within some precarious middle-class tax bracket are going to see their purchasing power erode and their options for any shred of upward mobility dry up. I have to laugh over vital battles for a living wage and affordable housing becoming nullified overnight. It strikes me as absurd that vital efforts to improve everyone’s lot in life will no longer be in play. It’s as if these discussions never happened. And as we regroup and try to fight another day for some shred of accountability, the question now is what topics will be allowed into the national dialogue within the next year. We are going to see a vast and burgeoning underclass and all this could very well outdo the suffering we experienced during the Great Depression. As climate change spawns more disasters, we could very well be living under a federal government that offers nothing to help its people. One of Trump’s ideological innovations was to falsely align FEMA aid with xenophobia. And the cowardly jackals who voted for him absolutely believe this.

And I see that Netanyahu has gleefully leaned into more genocidal efforts, knowing very well that he will continue to collect his paycheck from the States for more arms to massacre Palestinians and knowing that he can manipulate Trump with ease. No difference between the two candidates, my ass.

We really should have paid greater attention to the September polls showing us that the majority of Americans support mass deportation — including 25% of professed Democrats. Goddamn, that was a huge mistake. But, hey, there was a whole lot going on. (And what’s the Venn diagram like between this xenophobic bunch and the 16 million registered Democrats who stayed home on Tuesday? Christ, I know Republicans who voted for Kamala because they understood the dire threat better than these pusillanimous weasels.). Instead of actively organizing to fight the ruling class, most Americans are looking for a scapegoat and they are quite happy to buy into illusions. They would prefer to be victims rather than fighters and thinkers and decent people. They voted to obliterate this nation and take away security and possibility from everyone.

Senator Bernie Sanders was right to observe that the Democratic Party abandoned working class Americans, that “the American people are angry and want change.” And while it’s unsettling that a vote from an uneducated nihilistic chowderhead without empathy or commiseration was on the same level as anyone considering the long game, it cannot be gainsaid that the working-class was so angry and so impatient that they were willing to destroy accountability. The ruling class won this week. They pitted us all against each other and now there is no way back.

We have ten weeks to figure this out. Ten weeks before the Orange Menace becomes the 47th President. Ten weeks to figure out a strategy. Ten weeks to figure out who we can trust and how we can outwit the vast majority of Americans who smile at us in the hall just before they inform on us to the new authoritarians. I am starting to see neoliberals blame progressives for what went down on Tuesday, but honestly it’s these sanctimonious Karens I worry about the most. They will prove just as zealous in casually ruining lives as the MAGA Cult. Sure, “Susie from Accounting” smiles at you, asks how your day was, and comes into the office with a homemade fruitcake to share with everyone. But Susie from Accounting is also going to be the one reporting anyone who is “disloyal” or who sticks out. And Susie from Accounting will love this new power she has to rat anyone who she perceives as distasteful. Accountability, predicated on a fair and neutral weighing of the grievances, has been replaced by a new evil accounting culture that will outdo McCarthyism and the Christian zealots who accused women of being witches in 17th century Salem.

The fascists are already well ahead of us. We are going to have to act and think fast. Hopefully my William Shrirer-inspired “journal” here can be of some solace to those who are on the good side. Any ideas are welcome. Thank you for reading.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Journal: A Nation Without Accountability first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

It has been only two days since the horrific election results were announced and, even in a “safe” blue spot like New York City, I have noticed an increased conformity. Everyone is now on their best behavior. Which, of course, is exactly what the Republicans want. This is why Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg showed great pusillanimity in praising Donald Trump after his victory. They fear being punished by Trump’s new tariffs, which are estimated to remove $78 billion of spending power each year from Americans. I have already heard sussurations among international friends about boycotts being organized against America. There is talk of other countries punishing us much in the manner in which we froze assets in Russia. We are about to be dropped into the worst economic quagmire since the Great Depression. And frankly we deserve it. I’m deeply ashamed to be an American right now.

Out of morbid curiosity, I listened to Bill Burr’s podcast and he made no mention of Trump. He, like Bezos and Zuckerburg, knows where his bread is buttered. And he has become a gutless and timid shell of his former self. His jokes were remarkably inauthentic and he desperately tried to pad out his show with laughter. Presumably he — like many other prominent entertainers — has been informed by his manager to not talk politics. Only two days in and the more robust truth tellers are already turning into Trump sycophants. I’m sure we will see many more disappointments. My money is on Jon Stewart to be one of the first to sell out. He did, after all, defend that vile racist Tony Hinchcliffe.

Now I was already a polite fellow, but even I have found myself doubling and even tripling down on courtesy, adding a few more thank yous even when I have already effusively expressed gratitude. After all, we have no idea who will start ratting us out once Trump’s version of a Gestapo becomes a reality. People don’t really trust each other anymore and there is an increased nervous edge to people’s laughter. I have attempted to crack jokes, but my comedic instincts seem to have desiccated. Because the thought of what is about to come is just too chilling. The thought of having to tone down my exuberant loudmouth qualities for four years in order to increase my probability of not being shot under a fascist regime is a complete affront to who I am as a human being. I am also getting my passport renewed while it is still possible.

The streets have become lonelier and emptier. People are hiding in their apartments. The liquor store in my neighborhood seems the only place where you can listen to the ribald honesty and goodhearted camaraderie that flowed like limitless wine at the start of this week, but that is now as rare as plutonium deposits. The frightening thing is that we are all falling into these new routines with a distressing ease. It seems we’re fated to accept our new fascist world faster than the Germans did after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. In 2016, there were protests against Trump the next day. But not this time. Everyone walks with a forlorn face and an unshakable fear. Nobody is having a good time and you can feel a palpable anxiety exuding from nearly everyone. It’s much stronger than the dread I recall in November 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected.

I have to hand it to Donald Trump. He has destroyed the spirit of life in America overnight. He has turned us all into people trying to save their own skin. And his incorrigible cult has continued to lie and gaslight and fabricate reality in the comments on my TikTok posts — this even when I was reporting nothing but objective facts. I did make a good faith effort to try and get through to one such MAGA cultist today, only to be received by a corpulent and pustulant face of unrepentant rage, screaming at me for “fearmongering,” despite the fact that I had quoted from Project 2025 and directly from the Orange Menace himself.

I spent much of the last two days working the phones, calling two dozen friends to remind them that I love them and that I have their backs. A few were reluctant to talk altogether, but they did text me back. The bravest among my coterie broached the question of personal retaliation. Nobody’s ever going to say this on social media, but it seems to be on everyone’s minds. My friends all agreed with me that, if it comes to it, they would rather be shot in the head than capitulate to Trump and his fascism. That’s how I knew I could trust them. But then I’ve known all these amazing people a very long time.

I have found it impossible to read or write new pages of my audio drama. Yesterday, I slipped and succumbed to binge drinking for the first time in two and a half years. But I am now sober and thankfully my worst solecism was calling a friend and not remembering the conversation we had. She was extremely kind and understanding. Yeah, I need to stay off the sauce. But I am human and deeply worried and frightened about the future.

Living seemed so easy only a few days ago. I had a happy life and a creative routine in which I pumped out five good clean pages each day. But I have been plagued by the worst depression I have felt in ten years: in large part because I cannot determine how I can possibly be myself or be social with others in this hideous new order. I have no idea what “living” is going to be like once that monster takes office again. If I can’t be lively and outspoken, then how can I be me? Will I have to flee this country? Will I have to hide people in my apartment? How quickly will they detain me? Is there a single woman in Canada who can pluck me from this nightmare, whisk me away to Toronto, and marry me? I mean, the girl I was seeing just broke up with me: amicable, no hard feelings between us. So I’m now available again. Are these pragmatic considerations or paranoia?

It is a deeply soul-destroying time to be a thinker. I’ve never really considered myself an intellectual, but I feel that the very bedrock of ideas has been permanently sullied by a populace that would rather hear the sweet white supremacist lies that Donny whispers into their ears. I fear for the intelligentsia, the academics, the librarians, and all the other guardians of thought and knowledge. I can imagine books being burned. I can imagine professors being beaten to death by MAGA thugs in classrooms. This has all happened before. Just read any book about the Holocaust. What’s particularly sickening is that Trump has silenced nearly everyone and created a system where sycophancy is the only way to make it to tomorrow. The fascists have the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, and, unless there is a miracle, the House of Representatives. For the first time in a long time, I truly have no idea what our future will be. I am a solitary stranger in a nation that I once loved with all my heart. Contrary to President Biden’s speech today, I cannot see the great American experiment continuing. We are a nation lost, with a spirit that feels as if has been permanently asphyxiated.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Journal: Early Signs of Fascism in America first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

America, as we once knew it and as we once lived it, is now dead. The idiocratic will of a vastly illiterate and uneducated populace expressed itself yesterday at the ballot box. They opted to throw the great American experiment into the dustbin of history.

We had a good run.

Like many of you, I never thought I would see the day in which fascism would rear its ugly head in our once great democratic republic. And I am not going to sugar coat this. What we are about to experience will be more awful than even the most devoted cynic or the most prescient scholar can possibly imagine. There will be cruel and repugnant wars on people who are not white, male, hetero, cis, and wealthy. Women will become second-class citizens. We will see arrests and iniquities beyond our wildest imagination. We will see injustice and barbarism meted out on an unprecedented scale. And it will be ugly and callous and shocking.

We will see many people we love die and disappear. Some of us, including me, may not be here in five years. Because they are going to go after the most outspoken voices. Be prepared for many of the prominent figures you now trust to sell out to the new order. Because they will do everything they can to stub out the most vital lights. And they will succeed to a large degree.

All this is going to happen, whether we like it or not.

The vile chowderheads and uninformed fuckwits who decided to destroy the considerable promise that our nation once possessed will also feel the evil implications of their flippant choice. Even after it is too late, they will fail to understand how we got here. But make no mistake. They were the ones who got us here. They are the ones who are the true enemies within. They are the ones who cannot be trusted. It is now abundantly clear that there are two Americas. Those who are on the good side – and there are still many here — are now the minority.

Most people will keep their heads down. They will not be up to the new challenge. And they will come to accept the new state of affairs. Many of these self-serving cowards will casually report anyone who sticks out to the new authoritarian regime and it will be as natural as the manner in which they voted for this unhinged madman, who will likely die before his term is completed and who will be replaced by a younger and more dangerous bastard legitimized by the likes of Ron Howard and the mercantile opportunists at HarperCollins.

But we must not remain silent. Yes, the new American existence will be fraught with peril and danger and disaster. Prices will go up. MAGA brownshirts will roam the streets looking for enemies, even in blue territories. People will be detained. But we cannot remain silent. We must continue to fight and speak out, even if it means losing our lives.

Yeah, that’s the new American existence. I’m not happy about it either. But if the alternative is pledging fealty to a despotic felon and rapist who possesses no guardrails, then I can think of no other way to live. I would rather die than capitulate to the Evil Orange Menace. They can torture me and cut out my tongue. But they won’t take away my spirit. This is because I am a patriot. A patriot of the old America, which died on November 5, 2024. Don’t let them take away all that is good about you.

We must live to fight. I cannot possibly predict what the nature of this new fighting spirit will be. It could involve crossing into territory that was once unfathomable and distasteful. It could involve forging the unlikeliest alliances. But it is our duty to keep the memory of what we once had alive so that we can rebuild something beautiful after the chaos that is about to come. And that means being fiercer and more provocative in the name of good. It means sticking up for the weirdos and the outliers and the marginalized. It means supporting all the people who are telling us things that we do not want to hear. It may involve secretly hiding people in our homes.

But we must do all this.

History reminds us that fascism never lasts. Fascism is a repugnant ideology that is incompatible with all that is good about humankind. But while it exists – and it will thrive here in deeply unsettling ways for at least five years – we must do everything we can to support each other and to uphold the remaining virtues of the commonweal.

We must also be extremely careful and cautious about who we invite into our inner circles. There will be traitors eager to rat us out. There will be ravenous lowlifes quite happy to destroy our lives to save their own skin. And the people who betray us will include our families and our closest friends. Not all of us will make it. But most of us can stay alive, with our spirits intact, if we keep fighting.

Silence is not an option. This is precisely what the new order wants. They want you to feel helpless. They want you to feel fear. But you must not give it to them.

This will be the most difficult time that you and I have ever lived through. I am not being hyperbolic here. It’s all outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto. What I can say is that all the in-fighting on our side needs to stop. Because the only recourse we have is strength in numbers.

Do not let them destroy who you are. Do not let them stop you from living or being kind or cracking jokes. We are in for some deeply unpleasant times, but it will not last. It cannot last. It is very possible that the United States of America will fracture into territories. We will be tested in ways that we never imagined, but I can tell you this much. We are up to the challenge. We are stronger than we know. All who believe in basic decency and kindness and humanity must come together and be fearless in fighting these jackals. The bastards won the election and ended this nation, but I promise you that they will not win the long game if we fight indefatigably for the greater good.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post America is Dead, But We Are Not first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

In these years after my illness, when I can no longer speak and am set aside from the daily flow, I live more in my memory and discover that a great many things are safely stored away. It all seems to be in there somewhere. At our fiftieth high school reunion, Pegeen Linn remembered how self-conscious she was when she acted in a high school play and had to kiss a boy on the stage in front of the whole school. She smiled at me. “And that boy was you. You had this monologue and then I had to walk on and kiss you, with everybody watching.” I discovered that this monologue was still there in my memory, untouched. Do you ever have that happen? You find a moment from your past, undisturbed ever since, still vivid, surprising you. In high school I fell under the spell of Thomas Wolfe: “A stone, a leaf, a door. And all of the forgotten faces.” Now I feel all the faces returning to memory.

– Roger Ebert, Life Itself

Roger Ebert was 67 years old when he wrote these words. He was three years away from succumbing to the awful cancer that contorted his body and robbed him of his smart sonorous voice. But what’s so deeply touching about Ebert’s memoir is how you marvel over how the man was still committed to the life of the mind. Garth Greenwell is 46. He is incapable of such reflection or humility. And if his insufferably indulgent third novel, Small Rain, is any indication of his present intelligence and late life wisdom potential, I highly doubt that Greenwell will get anywhere close to Ebert’s poignant well-lived insight in twenty years. If anything, Greenwell seems to be on the Philip Hensher career track to becoming an insufferable Tory, a pretentious cynic whom nobody really likes. Like Hensher, Greenwell is tolerated simply because the son of a bitch has prattled banality for too many years and, instead of recognizing that he has nothing original or interesting or genuinely moving to say, he just doesn’t have the decency to shut the fuck up.

Reading Small Rain is like being trapped in an escape room in which all of the fun puzzles and quirky themes have been removed and you’re left staring at soulless cinderblock walls. You slam your fists against the concrete to the point of bleeding, only to hear Garth Greenwell’s faux patrician voice over the PA system. A copy of Small Rain spits out from a secret slit onto the floor. “We’ll let you out when you finish reading.” “I don’t want to read this shit. Let me out now!” “No, you fucking mook. I am Garth Greenwell, certified literary genius. You cannot leave until you get to the last page. You will genuflect to me and provide me with four pints of your blood and your social security number.” “What’s the alternative?” “You will die in this room.”

And because you value your own life, you slog your way through an interminable and truly awful novel set In Iowa City during the summer of 2020 in which an unnamed poet tears an aorta and ends up in the hospital. And stays in that hospital. With occasional visits from his partner L. And he stays in the hospital. And he stays in the hospital. And does nothing but stay in that hospital without really revealing all that much about himself other than that he is a precious prick who talks about his days teaching in Bulgaria (hey, just like Greenwell himself!) when he’s not mixing up foreign accents (the poet speaks fluent Spanish but he can’t recognize a Colombian accent?) or throwing fits before the nurses.

In fact, Greenwell is so superficial that we learn far more about the house that the poet and L. live in than we do about their relationship. There is a meet-cute flashback in an Iowa City joint, but the only thing we learn about this pair is that the two talked about poetry for two hours and that L. in the initial courtship days didn’t speak English very well (despite being a professor?). And they are big on “alternative nights,” which extends to cooking and speaking in different languages. In other words, we have nothing but vapid shorthand and very little reason to care about this couple because Greenwell serves up nothing but boilerplate. In fact, L. is so underwritten that he is almost as stereotypical as Manuel from Fawlty Towers. But Fawlty Towers, at least, had the benison of being hilarious on multiple viewings. It is believed that Garth Greenwell is so humorless that he has not laughed once since the Clinton Administration.

And the more you learn about the poet — and let’s be clear that there really isn’t all that much to know because Greenwell excels in graphene-flat characterizations, including the Lifetime movie formulaic desperation that kicks in halfway through the novel when we learn that his father abandoned him after learning that he was gay – you really want the fucker to shut up already and die. Greenwell is such a manipulative narcissist that he even throws in some body dysmorphia and sibling bullying near the end of his novel to try guilting us into sympathizing with his bland and unremarkable protagonist. Here is one such banal flashback:

I remembered my mother saying as we drove each weekend to my grandparents’ farm, at each sharp turn she would say it, this is a real death trap. It was part of her constant narration as she drove, as constant as the cassette tapes she pulled out to flip from one side to the other, Juice Newton and Kenny Rogers; still those songs can place me in the car, int eh backseat beside my brother, strapped in:I can conjure up the smell of my mother’s cigarettes, the cheap upholstery, the foam of the headrest my sister, in the front, leaned back against…

Blah blah blah. What on earth is the fucking point of this, Greenwell? Jesus Motherfucking Christ, you’re trolling us, ain’t you, ain’t you, you talentless repetitive mind-numbingly boring fuck?

(menacing crackle from the escape room’s PA system)

“MISTER CHAMPION, I TOLD YOU THAT IF YOU DON’T FINISH THE BOOK, YOU WILL DIE IN THIS ROOM!”

“Alright! Alright! I’m reading it, you sadistic asshole!”

And he stays in the hospital. And he whines. And he stays in the hospital. You read variations on the same tedious descriptions over and over again. You howl at the sick bastard behind the PA system, who responds with frequent laughter. Two gin-scented tears trick down the sides of your nose. But it’s alright, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. You will win the victory over yourself. You love Big Greenwell.

This is a roundabout way of reporting that Garth Greenwell has used his dubious talents to deliver one of the worst reading experiences I’ve had in the last three years. Garth Greenwell is not about life. He does not care about human beings and is thus, as far as I’m concerned, an enemy to true literature. He writes with the groan-inducing cadences of a long-winded septuagenarian about to show you his vacation slideshow in the basement. You will not find three-dimensional characters in his work. You will find plenty of gay sex (though not so much here) that isn’t nearly as bold or as vivacious or as honest as the carnality flowing throughout Alan Hollinghursts’s rich work. You will also find extremely generalized descriptive shorthand that reveals nothing, along the lines of:

the man, who was young and thin, in his twenties, a short beard visible around his surgical mask, took my arm to examine my IVs.

The man’s physical details, of course, tell us nothing about him and don’t really contribute to the atmosphere. If so, why even bring this up? And Greenwell does it again here:

He was in his midfifties, maybe around L’s age, a white guy, wiry, with a buzz cut under the red ballcap he always wore (a flag on that, too), his sunglasses perched atop the bill.

Not only is Greenwell so without imagination that he gives us a MAGA stereotype, but he even uses the same occluded hair trick for two separate walk-on characters. Or to put it another way, Garth Greenwell can be likened to a bumbling hit man showing up to a far-range job with a .22 Short instead of a sniper rifle.

And when he’s not giving us this woefully inept physicality, he resorts to the same repetitive vomiting:

He was my age, twenty-something, an actor performing in the Festival, not in any glamorous way; he was a local, an extra or maybe something more than an extra.

Garth Greenwell is around my age, actually a little younger but about my age, a writer performing in the Hot Fall Books Olympics with Small Rain, not in any glamorous way, although he does believe he is glamorous, or maybe he is both glamorous and not glamorous like Schrodinger’s cat; I sound so literary when I am pointlessly speculative; he was a yokel from Kentucky, a local from Kentucky, a huckster from Kentucky and now he hates Kentucky, a literary grifter or maybe something more than a literary grifter.

By way of contrast, here is a beautifully compact single-sentence description from Paul G. Tremblay’s excellent The Cabin at the End of the World:

Freckles dust across the bridge of a long nose that dives deeply beneath her large, egg-shaped brown eyes.

Boom! We’re in. We know so much about this woman in only a sentence and we want to know more! Greenwell is completely incapable of such economical descriptive depth.

Oh, and before i am accused of hating literature (I obviously don’t!), let me serve up a counterpoint to further demonstrate Garth Greenwell’s dereliction of descriptive duty. Here’s an excerpt from John Langan’s criminally underrated The Fisherman (Word Horde, you’re doing the Lord’s work!) describing a man who has lost his family in a car accident:

Aside from the scar and the slightly longer hair, the only change I saw in Dan lay in his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil — he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant — under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.

Unlike Greenwell, one isn’t vexed by the “at least polite, frequently pleasant” aside because there is a natural descriptive escalation in the language. And every physical detail spells out exactly who this guy is. Greenwell can only repeat himself like a lonely parrot braying for a cracker.

In Small Rain, you will find plentiful prolix descriptions of stuff. Lots of stuff. Not such stuff as dreams are made on, but stuff you can find on any given Target receipt. A little life rounded with a sleep indeed.

But in the public areas there was art on the walls, bright geometric abstractions or gauzy photos of Iowa scenes: an old barn, the sun setting behind it, fields of corn. One showed a stretch of prairie in bloom, though there wasn’t a prairie anymore, not really.

John Cage once suggested that if something was boring for two minutes, then you should sit with it for four. If it was still boring after minutes, try it after eight. Keep multiplying until you get to thirty-two and you eventually discover that something is not boring at all. This hideously generic passage would suggest that Cage’s credo may be one secret ingredient in the Garth Greenwell Writing School. But I’m here to tell you that Greenwell has nothing to say. Zilch! Nada! Nichego! He pads out his endless paragraphs with this nonsense. And then he throws in a half-assed reference to Walter Benjamin after all this. (No, I’m not kidding.)

a shallow wide glass on a long stem that I lifted often in my boredom

Well, you certainly bored the fuck out of me because you couldn’t just write “coupe glass.” But good on you for padding out that word count!

She returned a few minutes later, her hands full of the plastic packaging all of the medical supplies came in, endless boxes and envelopes and bags; so much plastic, I thought, as she sorted them on the counter and began tearing them open, so much waste.

“So much waste.” A rare case of Greenwell having a moment of self-awareness? Somebody hide the lexical firehose from this puffed up practitioner!

The floor in my bedroom had been badly damaged, the beautiful old wooden floors we had salvaged everywhere in the house; here they were strained beyond saving, sanded too often to sand again.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the duds of his sentences. Why does this unintentionally hilarious stab at “poetry” through mindless repetition remind me of the “life unworthy of life” mantra used to justify the evil Aktion T-4 program? And why does every picture of Garth Greenwell instantly remind me of Reinhard Heydrich? It’s certainly true that I’ve read twenty-five books on the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany ever since Joe Biden choked in the presidential debate. Still, I can’t shake the obvious metaphor. Reading a Garth Greenwell novel is not unlike a German being forced to vote for Hitler while being observed by an SS officer.

And there’s also the redundant manner in which Greenwell describes the condition of all this stuff. Is he writing fiction or product entries for an L.L. Bean catalog? One reads a prolonged Greenwell sentence beginning with the phrase “But maybe a Snickers bar is a wonderful thing…” and one wonders if whipping up zippy slogans for Madison Avenue is more his speed. He is so condescending to his readership that he seems to believe, at times, that we cannot infer for ourselves whether a pen is uncapped or whether a remote control can turn on a television:

A television hung just to the left of the cabinets, more or less where my bed pointed; I could operate it with a control that hung from a cord attached to the bed.

There was a marker clipped at the top, which she pried loose and uncapped.

It would honestly be more interesting if the doctor aggressively loosened the cap from the clip while pulling it out. But Greenwell appears to have an allergy to active verbs.

Some of Greenwell’s descriptive redundancies are outright insulting, almost as if Greenwell believes his reader demographic is somewhere between five to eight years old. We are informed — as if we couldn’t figure out the facile arithmetic on our own — that a building that is a “1970s monstrosity” was erected “after the chaos of the sixties.” A building constructed from chaos! Poetry!

There are classist overtones, such as the poet being condescending when he is told that COVID would be “catastrophic” to his medical condition and when he admits that he is attracted to L because his Spanish is “not the language of the streets but a private language.” But it’s an unearned classism. Because Greenwell simply has no concept of how people live and spend money. We are asked to believe, with astonishing incredulity, that L. — a Portuguese professor who is probably making $135k/year tops (that’s what a Glassdoor search gives me) — and the poet narrator — who subsists in the far from lucrative field of freelance writing — can not only pay rent and a mortgage, but can also spend money on credit cards and significant home repairs. (Greenwell does try and cover his ass later by pointing out that the poet is slated to be teaching classes in the fall of 2020, but it’s still unconvincing.) Does the cost of the poet’s healthcare come into play in this novel? Of course not. Clearly, L. is the one pulling the financial weight in this relationship, but it never occurs to Greenwell to investigate how money (particularly when one partner earns much more than the other) can impact a relationship. Instead, L. and the poet simply scream at each other. He may as well be writing an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Because this loathsome bastard really does have this annoying tendency to fixate on a word and riff on it in a way that reads like some illiterate yokel trying to mimic Samuel Beckett after skimming the Molloy Trilogy CliffsNotes:

there was a tremendous smile, full voltage, an American smile, a smile of triumph, I thought, a smile of that Midwestern confidence and cheer I found so odious, a pernicious smile, privileged and coddled, a smile that had never known hardship or fear, a smile of utter complacent harmony with its world, a smile I had always hated.

I haven’t quoted the full passage because simply typing it reduces me to a small animal whimpering with hunger for a substantive meal. Greenwell actually believes that if he bombards you with banal repetitive bullshit like this, you will somehow come around and declare him a sui generis prodigy. And judging from the unquestioning reception that his hopelessly desiccated work has received, his marketing strategy seems to have worked.

I last took a principled swing at this grandiose gasbag back in 2020 — ironically, only weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic — the subject of Small Rain. I received a surprising uptick in emails from some hot literary names who thanked me for writing the piece, but who couldn’t go on the public record because, as one correspondent conveyed to me, “I’ll get into trouble if I cross Garth.” Well, I have no such qualms about getting into “trouble” — in large part because the higher calling of demanding literature that isn’t predicated upon overwrought and superficial bullshit is too vital. I also despise the backscratchers and hobnobbers of the so-called literary world with every fiber of my being. They invented a smorgasbord of untrue rumors about me many years ago after what I had to say about the joys of literature was listened to with more regularity than any of the ponderous logs they dropped into the minuscule ponds of literary rags that nobody reads. One of these opportunistic shit-talkers was, in fact, Garth Greenwell.

To this very day, I simply cannot believe that anybody takes Greenwell’s pompous and atrocious sentences so seriously. Even the grumpy Dwight Garner, who gave Small Rain a pan, professes to be a Greenwell stan. But Garth Greenwell’s “success” — and it is the type of succès fou that only fools in a small circle salivate over — has more to do with Greenwell being a nimble networker rather than a writer of any real talent. He has sycophantic and untrustworthy lapdogs like Matt Bell, Taffy Brodesser-Alzer, and Sam Adler-Bell in his corner to butter his day-old bread, revealing in their undiscerning monomania that propping up mainstream dullards in high places matters more than stumping for the truly original weirdos or having bona-fide principles. But now Garth, dear Garth, Garth is his name, Oh Fucking Humorless Gasbag Garth Please Stop Writing Your Dreadful Fiction, let me forge interminable Garth-like sentences with all the dubious grace of a wino downing five shots in one sitting at a bar because it’s oh so literary, has written a Novel for Our Times! A pandemic novel! The same form that “inspired” Gary Shteyngart to capitulate to egregious navel gazing of the affluent and write his worst novel, Our Country Friends. It is a template that recalls the embarrassing rash of extremely mediocre novels that followed 9/11 more than two decades ago — with only Ken Kalfus and Jess Walter emerging out of this topical Faustian bargain with anything truly original and groundbreaking. I think it says something about our declining literary standards that, outside of Katherine Anne Porter’s moving “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” you won’t find a lot of fiction about the 1918 Spanish flu that people remember. Previous literary practitioners understood that you could never escape the platitudes and generalizations that froth to the surface when you write about a cataclysmic catastrophe. Risk-averse critics have turned this pigshit into a silk purse because job security matters more than upholding literary standards. Presumably, they also do not want to “cross Garth.”

I have insisted that Garth Greenwell has a small brain and I would like to qualify this.

I am convinced that all the most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have been tormented by this search for a justification of their work and a criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted to solve the problem by some consciously-held idea of art; or in other words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.
– R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art

In Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals (of which I shall later deliver more fulsome thoughts as part of my ongoing Modern Library project), he rightly argues out that art’s purpose is to offer alternative ways of existing and negotiating the universe. Art is a corrective to the moral self-righteousness of religious fundamentalism, which regulates our bodies (and permanently aligns sex with procreation, as decreed by a dubious almighty authority) when it isn’t declaring that all subjects submit with abject fealty to a fictitious deity’s sovereignty. But as religious authority has rightly eroded in the last century, artists have become forced to survive by dint of crass mercantile methods, in which the quest for differing ways of existence is interrupted by the need to paint the wife of a millionaire. It is, of course, the duty of any genuine artist to carry on this vital mission. But Greenwell’s feeble output makes it perfectly clear that he would rather surrender to market forces rather than imbue his characters with anything close to a meaningful consideration of existence. He has successfully manipulated many well-meaning individuals into believing that his mission is that of the holy artist, in large part because he writes about LGBTQIA characters. But if his gay characters are not altogether different from the heinous stereotypes populating a potboiler, then what makes him any different from some garden-variety Brooklyn writer writing another pedestrian debut novel about some twentysomething cipher trying to land a media job or find love?

Greenwell’s small-minded “effort” then is not to burden or challenge us with vital meat-and-potatoes questions, but to force us to submit to badly written and falsely tender longueurs that represent a conformist betrayal of the artistic purpose — in short, a capitulation to capitalism. If Greenwell wanted to write a “topical” novel, why then does he lack the guts to confront the moral fundamentalism of Trumpism? (Since I’ve taken Greenwell to the woodshed, I think it’s only fair to praise him on one minor point. The only page of Small Rain that I appreciated was a moment in which the poet sees how his sister has been brainwashed by right-wing news and is taking the poet’s mother out to a populated restaurant. Had Greenwell written an entire novel with such relatable human stakes like this, I would have written an entirely different essay.) Why does he traffic in such obvious observations such as the way in which physical touch became a rare commodity during lockdown? Well, it’s because he’s little more than a literary hack sitting by the sidelines, a member of the uninvolved who will never take a real risk, an obnoxious milquetoast incapable of putting himself on the front lines.

In fact, the only true sentence in Small Rain — and this one is just as grotesquely belabored as all the others — comes about a third of the way through the book:

It was a mystery, everything around me was a mystery — which is always true, I don’t know how anything works: my computer or a light switch or an airplane or a car, how toilets flush, how electricity is generated or moves from one place to another, it might as well be magic; and now my life depended on it.

Or, to read this more accurately, Garth Greenwell knows fuck all about what it is to be alive. Or if he does know, he’s certainly quite hopeless in conveying this through language! He probably knows deep down — despite his tendency to quote the “germs” line from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure at nearly every opportunity (he does it again in Small Rain) — that he is a literary charlatan. But he must carry on bombarding us with his hideous prose as if his life depended on it.

In response to being reviewed (naturally, Greenwell the bitchy capitalist pig put his “essay” behind a Substack paywall), Greenwell recently had the wildly arrogant temerity to suggest that “there’s something a little degrading in evaluation.” Mr. Greenwell, the only person who has degraded himself is you. You are the chump who wrote the shitty book: a novel gravid with empty calories that is far from “nourishing” and this is not of any “help in living” whatsoever. Are you truly that delusional? Are you sure you don’t have a cult of acolytes wearing red baseball caps? (Make American Greenwell Again?) And take your lumps like a man. You’re an immensely privileged middle-aged white guy, not a teenager. The degrading thing here would be to accept you as a god who is above reproach. I have already established in two essays (and numerous examples) that you cannot write a smooth sentence even if a terrorist held a gun to your head. You literally have nothing to say about human existence that I haven’t seen more eloquently and originally expressed in the perhaps fifteen thousand books I’ve read over the course of my lifetime.

Of course, if Greenwell does learn how to write a sentence without shoving his Brobdingnagian head up his own asshole, then I will be the first to commend him. But it’s clear that such a day will never arrive. No argument that I promulgate will deter Farrar, Straus & Giroux from continuing to publish further drivel from this wildly arrogant impostor. And all of literature suffers when mediocrity is propped atop the dais.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Garth Greenwell’s Small Brain first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

They drop. One by one. Not like flies. No, these vital spirits soared so high above the earth that it is tragically inconceivable when you learn that they are gone. Permanently. And as they disappear, their flesh rotting ignobly inside the cinnabar chambers of the dead and the veracity of their former vivacity powering mighty metropolises you didn’t know they constructed inside your mind, you are reminded of how increasingly invisible and vulnerable you are. You are not dead like them. Not yet at least. But you will be dead sooner than you think. You are not quite forgotten although the texts and the calls and the emails and the social invites attenuate as you become a more exclusive and less desirable prospect with age. It is harder to plant new hitches with the other mischief-makers. You know the ebullient minds are out there, but they have become lost in the insufferable noise of who’s the best. It’s not who is the best. It’s who feels and thinks the most. It’s who has the stones to be completely truthful, though gently and lovingly so. It’s who does the most solids without consideration of reciprocity. And as your truth burgeons into one of complexity and nuance as you rack up more life experience than even the most exactingly tabulating mind can track, the quest for who remains among your ilk grows harder.

You feel more disposable somehow, but more giving. More loving. More present. And you wish that this feeling had been actualized much earlier in your life, even though it was always there and it only required the secret sad ingredient of loss to bake the ironclad bonds that endure.

You wished that you could have tamed whatever solipsistic beasts had roared before they buckled out of the gate. You’ve seen how others succumbed to late age narcissism you didn’t quite possess. And now you know, as the minutes become evermore precious, that they did so because they had no other way of coping or behaving. We all delude ourselves in one way or another. Most of the time, it’s that constant navelgazing, that incessant self-interrogation and self-immolation that backfires upon you years later like some aging car incapable of passing the yearly smog check.

But the self is overrated. Nobody cares about the preening anxieties and the careening fears that keep you stirring in a cold sweat beyond midnight. Even when you express these to others in the clearest and most vulnerable and most mindful terms, they simply won’t perceive it or practice it the way you do. But that also goes for loving and giving and being present. Nobody sees the world the way you do. Maybe centuries from now, some genius will crack the social code so that there isn’t so much of a divide. That is, if the robots, who are now honing martial arts skills, don’t destroy us first.

But sometimes you get lucky and you meet a soul of limitless depth who is on a similar journey. If you’re really lucky, they stick with you for life.

But what if they don’t make it while your engine still has a good deal of mileage? What if you’re minding your own business, dipping your morning spoon into a granola bed shrouded with yogurt, and you get the text that they passed? Then what? Well, unspeakable grief for a start. And the sense that your world is becoming much smaller soon after.

Before fifty, these alerts happened every once in a while and it made you sad. But what if two people you know drop dead on the same day? That had never happened to me until yesterday. And I was ill-equipped to contend with all the sorrow and the feelings of unbearable loss that mopped up every last ounce of my usually robust and exuberant energy and that caused me to sleep for an obscene number of hours. I put up a good front, as I always do, when I entered into the world. But, oh, I was crying behind closed doors. Remembering a wonderful evening with my now dead ex, one of the first women to call me sexy and truly mean it, as the two of us fooled around to She Wants Revenge’s first album playing on repeat and watched the sun rise and talked about how awesome Emma Goldman was. And I recalled how smart and witty and beautiful she was. I remembered her full punkish splendor. Perhaps that memory will die with me. That’s the other great tragedy. So much human experience lost to time.

What’s happened with me is that I have grown angrier and less tolerant of those who eschew compassion and empathy. Of those who are conveniently selective towards those outside their myopic sphere, almost always out of spite and bitterness and almost always functioning with that supercilious streak that often walks hand in hand with stupidity.

Technology has given us the power to connect with each other, to find our fellow weirdos, and yet I feel that most people understand each other with less acumen than they did before the invention of Netscape Navigator.

It’s strange to me that the most expensive human rituals are weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. What of everything in between? Life should be defined by more than coming of age, death, and who we decided to marry. This is stuff for the census takers, not for the celebration of life.

Human beings are more than mere insects. And the loss of someone you know is hardly on the level of a fly being swatted.

We only start to understand mortality when we’re in our last decades. Herman Melville once called mortal greatness a disease. And when even the great 19th century Bard of New York is uneasy about this state of affairs, you have to wonder on some level if you’re as crazy as Ahab to care and feel so much about the friends, family, and lovers you lose. Well, I’d rather be sick with sorrow than to feel nothing at all.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Thou Art Mortal first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

I went on vacation to New Orleans — an attempt to celebrate my fiftieth birthday that ended in the worst way imaginable. I was robbed of my phone and my wallet. As I joked later with a congenial neighbor who asked me how my vacation went, New Orleans is somehow more of a den of criminal mayhem than even the roughest parts of Brooklyn, where I once lived when I was homeless. I have never been robbed in my seventeen years of living in New York. By contrast, when I went to the New Orleans Police Department to file a report, the officer there pointed to a thick pile of pamphlets that were on the front desk. Indeed, the only literature that the police had on the high counter in the vestibule was information on what to do after getting fleeced. Such is the admittedly impressive ubiquity of thieves in New Orleans. Shortly after it happened, when I emerged from the Airbnb desperately trying to flag someone with a phone at four in the morning, the only person who would help me was — you guessed it — another poor bastard who had just been rumbled. Given what happened to me and the inherent cruelty that lurks beneath many of those sweet-sounding Southern voices, I do not plan on setting foot in the Big Easy again. It is a hopelessly seductive city, but it is also a dangerous one populated by a sizable contingency of deep-dish long game grifters. Sloppy thugs whose efforts are designed to make you think that they’ve taken everything, but who make a lot of mistakes along the way. (I’m still baffled as to why these unremarkable “high rollers” who blow so much stolen money choose to eat at such a shitty place as McDonald’s rather than a nice restaurant. But I suppose that if you become a criminal, you often do so because you have neither taste nor imagination.) And despite the fact that I stayed largely equanimous throughout all this, the first three days after the robbery have been among the most hellish of my life. Reporting and reclaiming everything without money, credit card, or a phone required a herculean focus and drive, which are qualities that I apparently have. But, hey, on the bright side, I rode a mechanical bull for the first time in my life — the video, of course, captured by one of the two criminals — and I was surprised by how long I was able to hang on. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there for how I handled what transpired soon after.

It is frankly a miracle that I made it back to Brooklyn alive. After I got rolled, I felt humility and gratitude far more than indignation, although I did feel deeply furious once I was safely ensconced in my Brooklyn apartment. And I did end up puking my guts out the morning after I returned. Such was my nausea and anxiety. Part of what helped me stay calm — indeed, so calm that a friend who knows me very well commended me on how well I was handling this nightmare — was writing a fictitious version of what happened to me on my laptop. Writing has always helped me grapple with the unsettling truths and the unshakable pains of existence. And this experience was no exception. It was a miracle that I somehow made it onto the flight back home without an ID and that I was resourceful enough to prove my identity in an indisputable manner. But then I did have the good fortune of being a highly memorable and eccentric fellow who is not easy to forget or impersonate. All that lexical wattage in my noggin that powers the way I speak and write turned out to keep me bright and cheerful at the darkest moments. And for what it’s worth, the TSA officials at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport were incredibly kind and professional and made the process smoother than I ever anticipated. (I cracked jokes to keep the process as stress-free as possible and, deploying wit as a method to stay calm and respectful, I somehow managed to crack up a stern tight-lipped TSA officer who looked as if he had not laughed in years.) In fact, the TSA part was the least of my worries. I had hoped to get back to Brooklyn as fast as possible and make more phone calls and lock as many accounts as I could. I had spent Sunday afternoon holed up in a cafe with a borrowed phone trying to cancel all the cards and report them as stolen. I had walked five miles in scorching Louisiana heat to the nearest official retailer for my cell phone provider to issue a replacement phone. There was very little I could do without my phone or my wallet. But by some miracle of foresight, I did have my laptop on me, on its last legs but an invaluable tool that allowed me to report the criminals to the authorities, contact the banks that didn’t have two-factor authentication (the criminals, of course, had changed all my passwords; I have changed each and every password with a new complex system that rivals a DNA structural chart), and abate a great deal of their avaricious rampage. They were still using one of my credit cards when I was on the phone with the bank, somehow racking up $500 charges at Target and lifting cash from any ATM that would still accept the card.

But I ended up spending twelve hours traveling home due to constant flight delays. And since I only had three dollars in my pocket (leftover from two extremely kind ladies who gave me bus fare to get to the airport), that meant that I wasn’t able to eat much during that time. An incredibly kind woman who worked at the airport gave me a big glass of water. When I asked the people at Delta if I could have a meal voucher given the delay and the fact that I had been fleeced and had nothing, this was denied. They rolled out some snack boxes to “apologize” for the delay to all passengers with a hideously and grimly hilarious corporate slogan on a placard: “Here’s a little something from us.” One of those slogans designed to reframe a colossal fuckup as a “little problem” for which they could provide “a little something” that was completely disproportionate to the wrong. You have to admire savvy marketing people for the way they manipulate our world. It truly takes a stone-cold disposition and an unwavering fealty to capitalism to lie through your teeth like that.

Given the way my stomach was rumbling and how hangry I was (but couldn’t dare express any anger, lest TSA eject me from my hard-won place in line at the airport), I asked if I could have a second box. A woman boomed, “One box for one customer! If we gave you a box, then we’d have to give everybody a box.” Under any other circumstance, I would have agreed with this. But this was hardly a level playing field. Everybody else had access to their phones and money. I didn’t. I watched all the people around me eating and drinking with an increasingly ravenous envy. I had made the mistake of believing that these people who toiled for Delta, often thanklessly, might show a sliver of compassion for a guy who had been robbed. But no. I whispered thank you, returned to my seat at the gate sullen and hungry and very much alone, with only a ragtag laptop with a twitchy display as my means of communicating with people in New York who were looking out for me and trying to work matters on their end. Shortly after observing this colloquy, an extremely kind Canadian bought me a chicken sandwich. And I’m telling you. It was the best fucking chicken sandwich I’ve ever had in my life. I remain a fervent champion of Canadian kindness. That dude did what no other American could do. (I made an effusive effort to get this guy’s name, email, and Instagram. But Canadians are often self-effacing and this very good fellow with the goofy baseball cap and that mellifluous Canadian “Eh?” abjured any effort on my end to recompense. In my case, the kind act provided a much needed salve that allowed me to stay calm for the remainder of my long journey home. I ended up reading 100 pages of a thick book about the Holocaust on the plane home. It seemed appropriate. Even in despair, I enrich myself, often with dollops of irony.)

And because I am still alive, I greatly count my blessings. Because it could have been so much worse. There was a point in which the two assailants, whom I stupidly and optimistically invited into the AirBNB that I was staying at and whom I should have sized up but somehow didn’t (even the smartest men can be easily fooled by the ribald flaunting of the feminine form), looked into a spare capacious closet. And I now understand with a certain chill in my spine that this was likely their backup plan: to bludgeon me if I discovered that they had pilfered my phone and wallet. The assailants were two women and, yes, they kept me distracted in ways I don’t feel comfortable sharing publicly, but that any man who is attracted to women is fully aware of. And that’s the truly shameful thing. Despite my theatrical presence and my boisterous writing style, I’m actually a quiet, peaceful, deeply mindful, and sensitive man, particularly when it comes to the ladies. Anyone who has dated me knows this. But of course they kept plying me with liquor, sizing up how much I was spending on everybody so that they would know if I was a dependable roll. And because I have significantly cut down on my drinking in recent years, it went straight to my head. By the time they had stolen everything off my back, except for my NYPL and BPL library cards, which they ignominiously tossed onto the floor under a towel in the living room — the final fuck you from two illiterate and ultimately undistinguished thugs — I was too incapacitated to do anything about it.

I decided to sleep it off, figuring that what I had experienced — which was something between Wild Things and Spring Breakers — had been some ridiculous nightmare that I had fantasized. But, no, I woke up sometime in the afternoon and realized that this was very fucking real. And that’s when I headed to a cafe with my laptop, where two incredibly kind young ladies gave me busfare and a cup of water, allowed me to borrow their phone, and let me set there for many hours to undo as much damage as I could.

I have managed to secure my online presence. I am who I say I am on Mastodon, YouTube, and Instagram. And even though the criminals changed the passwords on my two TikTok accounts (as well as the Gmail accounts that I had set up), I got those back too. That’s how thorough they were, although they weren’t nearly as thorough as they thought. My hope is to get back to my daily creative routine of writing five fresh new pages every day for my audio drama and performing TikTok ablutions in between all the feverish logging of all the funny characters chattering in my head. I’m nearly back to normal. But it wasn’t easy to get here. Because without a phone, you are essentially fucked in 2024. While I was awaiting the delivery of my replacement phone, the criminals still managed to rack up charges on one of my cards long after I had reported it stolen. It turns out that two-factor authentication, which is intended to “secure” us, is the very thing that allows all this criminal theft to flourish. The criminals didn’t find everything, although it angers me that they had access to so much of my personal information.

And while my spirits remain intact, I can’t gainsay that there wasn’t a little emotional damage. I am now reticent to go on vacation or to date and will probably not be doing any of those things for a good long goddamned while. While I have been humbled by the kindness of many strangers, I’m not so sure how much I can trust people right now. Although one of my dear friends picked me up at La Guardia with a gyro, a pack of cigarettes (yes, I’ve quit for long periods this year, but cut me some slack given the circumstances; I will get off these evil addictive sticks again) and beverages and she gave me a big smile and a hug. And I cried with great joy as I hugged her. I was so happy to be back in New York. I was so happy to see my dear friend. The other thing I have had to combat is certain obsessive enemies of mine who delighted in my misfortune and who sent me very cruel messages in which they rubbed it in. Which I would never send to my worst enemy. Additionally, the silence of certain “friends” in relation to this incident speaks volumes about how little they actually care for me. And I’m now going to significantly raise my standards on who I let into my life. I am such a loyal friend that, had the roles been reversed, I would have done what my dear friend did at La Guardia: offered the shirt off my back and served up a nonstop soiree of jokes as a reminder for why life is so beautiful.

The biggest horror I feel is having to reconcile my natural optimism and exuberance with a deeply unsettling takeaway that the world is far crueler than I’ve understood it to be. I really don’t want to transform into a cynic. A bleak-humored grump at times, sure, but not a cynic. But as someone who has historically had trust issues, well, this terrible incident has only exacerbated a feeling I don’t want to hold that you can’t really trust anyone. The one thing that prevents me from sliding into antisocial nihilism is knowing that these criminals have nothing but terror, rampant consumerism, bloodthirsty lucre, and the thrill of betrayal to offer the world. These criminals are vacuous shells: little more than empty-headed, unfeeling, and dishonorable fuckheads. And I know karma and the law will get them in the end. Because I am far more than they are or ever could be. I make. I create. I give. I live. I love. I write. I have my art and my wit and my lexical ninja moves and my audio chops. At fifty, my eyes still dance with endless felicity and limitless curiosity. And I’m strong enough now that nobody can break that. Not fascists. Not thieves. Not talentless assholes in the literary and tech worlds who have openly lied about me, spread false rumors, and created an image of me that fewer people believe these days. These assholes will never have any of that. Talent and commitment and creative drive cannot be stolen or bought. Being a kind and decent person has no cash value. If anything, being so thoroughly robbed like this has only redoubled my commitment to being kind and giving. So I’m out a few hundred dollars for the phone. Big deal. The life I live is eminently more richer and a lot more fun than that of a predictable thug. You can’t place a cash value on being sui generis, which, if you’ll allow me a modest flex of my ego, I certainly am. And they’ll never have that. That was evident in the melancholy look that one of the two women gave me when I asked her what her passions were. She had nothing. Zilch. Just a beady rapacious look that reminded me of the way that Dr. Sam Loomis described Michael Myers. She had nothing other than hurting other people even as she pretended that she was looking after them. Not unlike Annie Wilkes, Stephen King’s frighteningly memorable creation. And if you practice that level of deceit and dishonesty, well then your world is very small indeed. The two women thought I hadn’t seen what they did before. But I’ve been around the block. And I’ve seen their “performance” executed before with love and ardent passion and inclusion. You can’t be a truly free spirit if you don’t have those vital human qualities.

I am a cathedral built from robust alabaster and designed by an extremely quirky architect. These criminals are nothing more than ramshackle hovels easily blown over by a modest gust. Sure, I may have lost my phone and wallet. But these were easily replaceable: mere mechanisms to negotiate our world. But, for the criminal, there’s nothing else beyond thieving and ennui between jobs. That’s all the criminal understands. And when the two women who rolled me turn fifty, if they’re not in prison by then, then the void of their vapid lives will catch up to them and they’ll have nothing when they get to be my age. Sure, I made a huge mistake. But at the end of the day, they could not break me. The beauty of existence is learning how to grow with humility and wonder and grace, even when the worst thing happens to you. It’s a process that never stops. And if you’re doing life right, then you may just summon a few unexpected catches from the rough and tumble curveballs that the universe throws at you. And that’s when you give back. So others can thrive with the same fearless and indefatigable gusto. So that all of us can be here for each other in the best way possible.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post The Fleeting Horrors of Getting Robbed first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Of all the venal and easily purchased members of Congress who take AIPAC money in the manner of an eager head-bobbing whore pretzeling his position to show the money men just how limber and rentable he truly is (even at the expense of listening to constituents, a basic duty of any sitting Representative), Ritchie Torres is my personal favorite. He is such a preposterous cartoon of a man — a smug and treacherous scumbag who blocks anyone on X rightly calling him out on his bullshit — that you almost get the sense that he’s cozying up with the genocide-friendly financiers so that he can pluck some Zionist diplomatic position from the horrific jaws of a potential second Trump administration.

Ritchie Torres is a truly impressive specimen. Because just when you think Torres couldn’t become any more of a self-serving tosspot, he descends into self-parody, complete with anti-Semitic “Jewish mother” tropes that bristle with the telltale timbre of casual misogyny:

Yes, that’s right. This was how Torres was spending Juneteeneth on social media. And while Torres was happy to serve up predictable and phoned in platitudes about Juneteenth, Torres, living up to his present status among progressives as a corrupt and unprincipled coward without political credibility, remained silent about Mayor Eric Adams denying Black Lives Matters’s Hawk Newsome a permit (one that two city employees had promised Hawthorne would go through) to celebrate Juneteenth in the South Bronx on the corner of 163rd Street and Sheridan Avenue — not far from Torres’s own district (the 15th). Which is truly something. Ritchie Torres cares more about Israel than his own borough, much less his own congressional district, which is the poorest one in the United States.

But Torres’s remarkable hubris has only grown ever since cashing AIPAC checks and selling out at dimebag levels became part of his regular routine. As Marisa Kabas has cogently unpacked, Torres, who is not Jewish, is policing exactly what being a “good Jew” is:

Imagine having the gall to be a non-Jew and tell a Jewish organization that they are not worthy of representing Jewish interests. Imagine thinking that steadfastly supporting the state of Israel gives you authority over people who are part of the religion for which the state was founded. Imagine being a member of Congress and using your position to demean Jews in service of ousting your own Democratic colleague.

The Democratic colleague that Kabas is referring to is Representative Jamaal Bowman, who has continued to remain unequivocally against AIPAC and Israel’s policies, despite AIPAC putting up a colossal $2 million to attack Bowman and prop up a pro-Israel candidate that even the right-leaning Politico had to confess was “the Cher of Westchester County.”

Torres attacked The New Republic‘s Talia Jane for an October 7, 2023 tweet in which Jane, trying, like many of us, to wrap their head around the immediate aftermath of the October attacks, had posted, “State oppression vs rebellion against state repression,” and falsely insinuated that The New Republic had promulgated these views and put Jane’s reporter status in mock air quotes. But he didn’t stop there in his tone policing. Torres blasted the far left for “falsely accusing George Latimer [Bowman’s AIPAC-financed challenger] of racism.” Never mind that Politco — which is about as far from a fringe-left outlet as you can get — reported on how Bowman accused Latimer of sending mailers that had darkened Bowman’s skin. (Back in 2022, The New York Post — clearly a bastion for Marxism under News Corp — reported on similar racist efforts made by then Bowman challenger Vedat Gashi.)

When Netanyahu released a video attacking the Biden Administration, Torres suggested that anyone who criticized this tyrant was somehow emboldening Hamas. (Never mind that a Gallup poll last month pointed out that only 36% of Americans approved of Israel’s actions against Gaza. If we look through the ridiculous and disingenuous Overton window opened by Torres, we would have to risibly infer that a good 55% of Americans who oppose Israel’s actions are somehow stumping for Hamas.)

The convenient manner in which Torres twists the facts like this has caused many of his constituents to rightly call him out. Since they have been ignobly blocked by Torres on Twitter, many of Torres’s critics have attempted to call him out in person. Sometime in March, some enterprising people with a camera confronted Torres, asking, “As a citizen who pays my tax dollars, okay, I’m wondering why you are in favor of sending our tax dollars to starve children to death.”

“Well, that’s a lie,” responded Torres. (The liar here is Torres. Here’s a Human Rights Watch report documenting the starving children in Gaza.)

After the people behind the camera pointed out that this was not a lie, Torres responded, “If you have an issue with me, you should run against me.”

“How is it a lie?” asked the man behind the camera. “Are you saying there are no children starving in Gaza?”

Instead of answering this question, Torres said, “I think Hamas started the war, which led to starvation.”

When the man behind the camera calmly and reasonably tried to ask another question, Torres interrupted him and snarled, “That’s a terrorist organization that you support.”

The man said that he did not support Hamas. Then Torres accused the man of lobbying for them, which the man also denied. Then Torres said, “You’re a disgrace.”

And in these collective moments, we see the feeble and pathetic toolkit of a fact-denying attack dog who has seen his coffers fatten by way of AIPAC. If you are against Israel’s actions, you are somehow for Hamas. If you criticize Torres on facts, you are somehow lobbying for Hamas. And if you question Torres using objective examples obtained from reality, Torres resorts to insults and false accusations.

In short, this kind of contemptible behavior (which resembles any number of efforts by activists with cameras to confront Republicans) clearly evinces that Ritchie Torres is not a man who is fit to serve his constituents, much less the American people. He is more of a thin-skinned and not very bright AIPAC rentboy than a “Congressional Representative.”

[6/20/24 4:00 PM UPDATE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Ms. Jane’s pronouns. This has been corrected. I regret the error and offer my most fulsome apologies to Ms. Jane for my oversight.]

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Ritchie Torres, AIPAC’s Most Dutiful Rentboy first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

It is difficult to overstate just how much of an impact Roger Corman had on American culture. But he was a legend and an absolutely vital filmmaking figure. In addition to being a solid genre director (The Intruder, a trenchant examination of political demagoguery written by Charles Beaumont and starring William Shatner and the only movie he lost money on, remains his best film and still packs a wallop today), he had a remarkable knack for spotting talent. He gave James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Paul Bartel, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdonavich, and Francis Ford Coppola (and so many more) their first shots, often enlisting them to direct their feature film debut. But the deal was that you had to do this with a paucity of money. (In fact, Corman was so cheap that Joe Dante’s The Howling has a funny inside joke in which Corman plays a man in a phone booth scrounging around for change.) This became known as the “Roger Corman film school.” One can see his great influence today in A24 — the fearlessly indie studio that has offered similar opportunities for a new generation of filmmakers.

But Corman was also an instinctive rebel. Behind that irresistible smile and calm voice was a goofball and a natural provocateur. In 2011, much to my amazement, I somehow got the opportunity to speak with Corman in person. While I greatly admired and respected Corman, his eyes beamed with mischief and he made several attempts to stifle laughter as I started asking him provocative questions about certain controversies in his career. He answered all my questions with grace and wit and the two of us got along very well. Partly because he quickly sussed out that I was a fellow rabble-rouser. I’m still amazed at my chutzpah from thirteen years ago, but it did result in a fun and memorable conversation, which I have reposted below. Corman soon followed me on Twitter and he would send me a direct message every now and then, telling me that he had enjoyed an essay I had written. Which was incredibly humbling, surprising, and tremendously kind. Had I somehow passed the Corman test? I guess maybe I did. But I learned later that he did this with a lot of people: those quiet little messages of support. Keep going. Keep making stuff.

That was the way Corman rolled. If he spotted that you had something, he would keep tabs on you. He seemed to detect creative possibilities in the unlikeliest people. He believed so much in the late great character actor Dick Miller that he gave Miller the only lead role in his career with a greatly enjoyable send-up of Beat culture called A Bucket of Blood. In 1967, he leaned in hard on LSD and the hippie movement with The Trip.

You see, Corman had his finger firmly on the pulse of American culture right up until the end of his life. While corporate bean counters looked the other way, Corman leaned in. When I talked with him in 2011, he had not only gone to Zuccotti Park to listen to the brave kids who were camping out for weeks to fight corporate America, but he had also offered a generous donation.

Additionally, Corman set up distribution channels for art house and foreign films through New World Pictures in the 1970s. He would make money with the exploitation pictures and use the profits to ensure that world cinema got its proper due. If it had not been for Corman, Americans may not have been introduced to the likes of Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa’s wildest movies. (It was New World that got Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala into American theatres.)

Rest in power, Roger Corman. You were one of the great ones.

Roger Corman appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #416. In addition to directing some of the most memorable and entertaining drive-in movies of the 20th century (among many other accomplishments), he is most recently the subject of a new documentary called Corman’s World, which is now playing film festivals and is set for release on December 16.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Not of this earth.

Guest: Roger Corman

Subjects Discussed: Corman’s infamous cost-cutting measures, unusual marriage proposals, bloated corporations, Occupy Wall Street, comparisons between Zuccotti Park and 1960s protests, keeping tabs on pop culture, not giving stars and directors a few bucks to stay around, Easy Rider, the philosophy behind the Corman university, picking people on instinct and the qualities that Corman looks for in a potential talent, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, directors who move up the ladder, The Intruder, why Corman didn’t make explicit socially conscious films after 1962, financing pictures with your own money, the financial risks of being ahead of the curve, looking for subtext in the nurses movies, the sanctimony of Stanley Kramer, Peter Biskind’s “one for me, one for them” idea, simultaneous exploitation and empowerment, the minimum amount of intelligence that an exploitation film has to contain, throwing calculated failures into a production slate, distributing Bergman and Fellini through New World, why Corman believes it was impossible to produce and distribute independent art house movies in the United States in the 1960s and the 1970s, the importance of film subsidies, why Corman gave up directing, Von Richthofen and Brown, the allure of Galway Bay, getting bored while attempting to take time off, the beginnings of New World, the many breasts in Corman’s films, Annabelle Gurwitch’s “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Bimbo,” targeted incidental nudity opportunities, enforcing nudity clauses in contracts, questioning why actresses can’t be sexy without taking their tops off, Rosario Dawson, the undervalued nature of contemporary films, and Corman’s thoughts on how future filmmakers can be successful.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I have to get into your eccentric temperament right from the get-go. There is a moment in this documentary where your wife Julie confesses that you proposed to her. And she said yes. Then you disappeared for a week into the Philippines. And she tried to get in touch with you and finally did get in touch with you and asked, “Well, is the marriage still on?” And you said, “Oh yes, of course.” Your justification was, well, you didn’t want to pay the expense of long-distance telephone. I told this story to my partner and I thought it was amusing. But she was absolutely horrified by this. And this leads me to ask if the notorious reputation you have for aggressive cost-cutting, perhaps one of the finest cost-cutters in the history of cinema — well, how much does this lead into your personal life? And your private life? I mean, surely, when you’re talking about sweethearts and fiancées, you can afford to spend at least a buck or something. I mean, come on!

Corman: Well, that story is possibly true. But the fact of the matter is I’d been in the jungle. At that time, there were no phones. So that was the real reason for the call.

Correspondent: That was the real reason. But this does raise an interesting question. I mean, under what circumstances will you, in fact, pay the regrettable cost of maintaining a relationship like this? Whether it be professional or private.

Corman: Well, I would have to divide that into two answers. Privately, and particularly with my wife and children, I’m much more liberal in spending than I’d ever been on films. On films, I really watch every penny.

Correspondent: Yes. But are there any circumstances you’ve regretted? Either spending extra money or not spending the dollar? Or not spending the dime so to speak?

Corman: I don’t think I regret any overspending. I think, once or twice, I should have let pictures go a little longer and spent a little bit more. These were pictures that were coming in on budget and on schedule. I might have added a couple of extra days to the shooting schedule. But I felt this was a fifteen day schedule. This is the thirteenth day. I have to make a decision. We’re going to shoot it in fifteen days. In retrospect, had I gone to sixteen or seventeen, the additional quality — for lack of a better word — might have been greater than the expenditure.

Correspondent: Well, what’s the cost-benefit analysis for this quality to spending ratio that you’ve devised over the years? Is it largely instinctual? Is it largely looking aggressively at the books? What of this?

Corman: It’s a combination of all of the above, plus just the calculation. I’m always looking for the greatest quality. I’ve done pictures — The Little Shop of Horrors — in two and a half days. I did that with very little money. But I did the best possible job I could do with the amount of money. So I’m looking for the highest possible quality. But since I back my pictures with my own money, which is something you’re never supposed to do, I have to be certain — well, I shouldn’t say certain. I have to have a reasonable guess that I’m going to come out of this one okay.

Correspondent: Do you think that such brutal, Spartan-like tendencies might be applied to, oh say, balancing the federal budget? Or perhaps creating a more efficient Department of Defense? Do you have any ideas on this?

Corman: Well, I believe that it isn’t just the federal government. I believe large corporations or the Department of Defense, which of course is part of the federal budget — I think there’s a certain inherent waste in any large organization, whether it’s public or private. I think they all could be streamlined or — let me put it this way, I think they all should be streamlined. But I question whether it can be done. Because the bureaucracies are in place. And it’s very, very difficult to move.

Correspondent: It’s difficult, I suppose, not just in motion pictures, but for everybody right now. Do you have any thoughts on the present Occupy Wall Street movement that’s been going on in this city while you’ve been here?

Corman: Weirdly enough, I was at the Occupy Wall Street meeting — or sit-in. Whatever you want to call it.

Correspondent: You went to Zuccotti Park?

Corman: Yeah. Just about an hour ago.

Correspondent: Really?

Corman: I donated a little money and they had a couple of pictures taken of me there. Which they said they wanted to use in some way. And I told them I was totally in support of what they’re doing.

Correspondent: I’m surprised you weren’t down there with a movie camera getting master shots for a later production based on Zuccotti Park or something like this. There should be an Occupy Wall Street movie. Is there some possible narrative? Some bucks in this?

Corman: Well, it’s the kind of thing I did before in the 1960s, with the various protest meetings and anti-Vietnam demonstrations. I was there with cameras. And we did use the footage. And this one at the moment isn’t quite that big. If it grows, however, that will be a different thing.

Correspondent: Well, did you see it at Times Square on Saturday? It was actually 15,000 people. And it was pretty aggressive with the cops arresting people. 88 people that day too.

Corman: We came in on Saturday.

Correspondent: Oh, I see.

Corman: And actually I saw opposite ends of New York. I came in, went straight to the opera, went straight from the opera to Comic Con to sign autographs. So I figured if I went from New York to the opera to Comic Con, I saw various aspects of New York.

Correspondent: Well, this leads me to ask you about how you collect your ideas or how you maintain your attentions as to what’s going on in contemporary society. It seems to me that going down to Zuccotti Park, you’re still very much interested in finding out what the present concerns are. I mean, how often do you do this now in your daily life? Just to keep tabs. How do you know, for example, that Hell’s Angels or LSD or Zuccotti Park might be a salable idea?

Corman: These are just aspects of pop culture that come to the surface. And I’ve been involved in all the previous ones. Or most of them, one way or another. And the Occupy Wall Street movement is new. And I went just to see what it was like. And it was strange. There’s a real similarity to the 1960s here. And I don’t know if the young people of today know that what they’re doing, the signs they have, the music they had playing, the discussions — it brought me right back to 1968.

Correspondent: Do you see any differences by chance?

Corman: I saw very little differences. I did notice this. The police were not antagonistic. They were standing there. But I didn’t see any of them make any harmful moves. Where in the ’60s, I did see police make harmful moves. Maybe they’ve learned something over the years.

The Bat Segundo Show #416: Roger Corman (Download MP3)

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post RIP Roger Corman (1926-2024) first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Ryan Wild is a wildly arrogant and deeply manipulative despot who lives in Swindon — a town in England’s Wiltshire district. He operates out of the Highworth borough, which voted for Conservative Vijay Kumar Manro as Borough Councillor in the last election. Wild, who has the husky well-fed mien of a man who has never known a day without a hot meal, will turn twenty-six next month. Like any garden-variety huckster, Wild is an “entrepreneur” who wants you to buy into his dubious hosting services and support his Mastodon instance Universeodon or his other instance Mastodon App UK, which was home to British cultural treasure Stephen Fry until Fry stopped posting sometime last year. (For those not in the know, “instances” are servers that are interconnected with each other on Mastodon. When I was on Wild’s instance, I did chip into his Ko-fi account and had planned to chip in more. Because I’m always happy to pay the people who keep the lights on. This effectively placed me within only 2.7% of the active users on Universeodon.)

But don’t think for a second that Wild has your best interests at heart. He is fundamentally opposed to any creator — especially journalists — who point out the iniquities and injustice carried out by the ruling class. Particularly if you are critical of Israel or people in power. On October 11, 2021, when Google offered free security keys for elected officials and journalists (historically speaking, both of these classes have faced significant harassment and, with heightened extremism in the United States, this has only escalated) to provide better security to elected officials and journalists, Wild had zero sympathy and called such protection “a huge waste of money.” He is also an avowed Brexit supporter and has also claimed that Hitler “should have been in power” because he was “legally voted in,” a colossal misreading of history that came laced with Wild significantly understating Hitler’s evil by saying “what he did was wrong yes.” Which is a bit like suggesting that the flooding that ravaged China in July 1931 and killed four million people was “just a tiny little rainstorm.” (Never mind that Hitler was defeated by Paul von Hindenburg in the 1932 Weimar Republic presidential election and that, as any high school graduate should know, Hitler manipulated his way into the Chancellor seat, taking only a few months after that to suspend civil liberties for all Germans and become dictator.)

(Mr. Wild did not return multiple requests for comment on this story over the course of five days. I emailed him at every address that was publicly listed for him and his business ventures. Then he blocked my main email address when I sent him a followup message — this when I was nothing but polite and respectful in my correspondence. (An email sent from another account went through.) Just before the deadline I gave him to reply to my questions was about to pass (and I would have been happy to grant him an extension to answer if he had simply asked), Wild claimed that he was sick. If he is indeed sick, I truly do wish Mr. Wild a healthy recovery. This still doesn’t explain why he blocked my email address before he was sick. After this article was published, in a futile attempt to discredit my good faith efforts to get him on the record, Wild claimed that his Mastodon UK email was not working. But I also contacted Wild at the very Atlas Media Group email address he cites in his post.)

In short, this diminutive businessman — this bright vanilla chunk of ice cream scooped ignominiously onto a slice of pumpkin pie — has no problem covertly upholding right-wing sentiments and shutting down left-wing ones when he’s not preventing users from accessing vital news. He has blocked numerous journalists from being seen by users on his instance. And if, heaven forfend, you make a mocking post against the rich, as one trans woman did, Wild will close your account faster than Anthony Comstock opposing the suffragettes in the late nineteenth century.

Wild risibly and falsely claims on the Universeodon about page, “From exploring the universe, to exploring the world we all share – everyone is welcome here.”

This, of course, is a lie.

To a great degree, one can sympathize with Wild and any other instance admin on Mastodon. Admins are usually hosting servers on their own dime, often at a loss, and, as X (previously known as Twitter) increasingly hardens into a toxic wasteland under Elon Musk, these admins are being besieged by thousands of new users. If an instance does have a moderation team, it usually consists of unpaid volunteers, who may tender false flags at the end of a long and exhausting day. But as the Fedeiverse — the collective network of instances connected to each other — burgeons into what many declare to be a calmer and more viable open source alternative to BlueSky, Threads, and X, it’s important to consider how certain biases from admins are contributing to a form of fascism rather than democracy, where viewpoints from the marginalized or those who don’t fit so neatly into an affluent Caucasian neoliberal box often struggle to have their vital voices heard. And, in Wild’s case, his clearly tendentious biases and elastic approach to moderation has resulted in a form of odious muzzling that is no different from the way that the Nazis demonized Black music that had flourished so beautifully in Berlin before 1933 or the way that, more recently, the Taliban has silenced Afghan journalists. If one of the most awe-inspiring realizations of the Internet is being exposed to marginalized voices and realizing that we all have far more in common than we know, then Mastodon — at least under the sloppy and corrupt hands of admins like Ryan Wild — is far from the great ideal that its most prominent boosters insist that it is.

Not unlike Elon Musk suspending numerous journalist accounts in December 2022, Wild is so fundamentally opposed to the noble efforts of the Fourth Estate that he has invented reasons to block journalists on his instance. He has claimed, without a shred of evidence, that newsie.social — an instance in which journalists valiantly report from all corners of the globe — supports “transphobic content.” (In fact, the newsie.social rules make clear that transphobia is explicitly prohibited.) So this means that anyone with a Mastodon account on his instance cannot access invaluable posts from the likes of ProPublica, which rightfully won a Pulitzer Prize last week for its valiant coverage of the Supreme Court. As William Maggos noted in the same thread, this was clearly a pretext to silence “commentary against the Israel govt.” (Requests for comment from newsie.social were not returned.)

Back in February, Jeffrey Phillips Freeman — who runs an instance devoted to the Assn for Computing Machinery — complained to Wild that his instance was wrongly included on what he deemed a “notoriously abusive” block list. Even when pointing to examples of how he had blocked racists, Freeman was gaslighted without full context. (Freeman was kind enough to return my request for comment and informed me that the meetings he had with fellow Fediverse boosters were quiet but that “bad actors” were a problem. I pressed him on a hypothetical, asking him what he would do if, say, J.K. Rowling created a new account on his instance and started posting TERF content, but he did not reply.)

But bad actors — in addition to disrupting thoughtful and civil meetings hoping to actualize a tech utopia dream — do become instance admins. And bad actors very often recruit other bad actors, as Wild did when — as Alan Jenkins pointed out on November 16, 2022 — he recruited a moderator named @lyicx, who used words and terms associated with the alt-right. (When called out on this in a followup thread, @lycix hurled abuse at Jenkins.) Ryan Wild is almost certainly operating his instance with the intent of propping up voices he agrees with and gagging any rules-abiding user he personally disagrees with.

A detailed examination of Wild’s Twitter feed reveals Wild to be a shady right-winger who cloaks his Tory loyalism behind centrist “common sense” claptrap and who appears to be thoroughly opposed to the vital practice of critical thinking. In a January 21, 2017 tweet, Wild claimed that criticism of Trump and Brexit was invalid until the policies were enabled. In other words, Wild declared that policies enacted on xenophobia should not be questioned until they “actually [did] something worthy of critique.” Likewise, on January 21, 2017, he believed that Trump should not be judged as President until he had been office. Never mind that the perspicacious Naomi Klein has written an invaluable book, No is Not Enough, that offered smart reasons why Trump and his cronies should be judged before his disastrous administration had started. To offer some defense for Wild, on September 8, 2019, Wild expressed some mild concern for policies that are “treasonous” and once compared Conservatives to “petty little children who haven’t gotten [sic] their own way.” But he also once described the Labour Party as possessing “shite leadership.” Yet on March 14, 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Wild expressed far too much faith in Boris Johnson’s abilities to contend with it. The portrait that Wild has presented of himself is that of a company man who lacks the spine or the moral conviction to criticize governmental policies and who resents anyone who does.

Wild is able to get away with his censorship on the sly because, while he’s been ardently and rightly opposed to transphobia in other contexts, he has, like any spineless and well-trained neoliberal, learned to pay shrewd and performative lip service to humanism, even as he covertly suspends accounts that are critical of Israel — even when these accounts abide by his rules. It’s one thing to claim to be for LGBTQIA rights. It’s another thing altogether to muzzle the very LGBTQIA voices that you profess to be “for” — because you are fundamentally uncomfortable with the perspectives they have to offer. (This has also been a problem among Black users of Mastodon as well. Black users are theoretically “welcomed” by the largely white admins, only to have their accounts suspended without warning. Or, as the user Ra’il IK quipped on X last November, “Welcome to the ‘I am Black and suspended by Mastodon with no warning and no process’ club!!!!!!!”) Ryan Wild is, in short, the walking and talking embodiment of George Orwell’s “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” line. One can logically infer that, as far as Wild is concerned, criticizing the rich or those who launch unprovoked attacks into territory populated by marginalized starving people makes one a lesser “animal.” And, sure, Wild is all too happy to rightfully protest web hosts that claim perpetual commercial rights over all hosted content (well, not so much a protest, as an opportunity for him to pimp his far from “Superior” goods), while simultaneously succumbing to similar tyrannical proclivities himself. If you are a writer like me, it is an act of thuggish and shameful dehumanization to have one’s work deleted or “suspended” without warning. Especially since I would have been more than happy to address any concerns and strike a mutually agreeable resolution, had I been given the heads up.

I greatly enjoyed my time on Mastodon. Numerous journalists and writers became mutuals. Despite the fact that I am a pugnacious (and some would say obnoxious) middle-aged punk, I didn’t get into too many fights — in large part because the user base (including myself) wanted to create a more thoughtful alternative to the mephitic online hellscapes of X and BlueSky. And I learned so much from everyone. People helpfully offered corrections when I was conducting what used to be known as “live tweeting” on Mastodon in relation to unfolding events, which I was happy to amend. And you know what? The user who initially expressed umbrage with my minor mistake and I became mutuals. But because Ryan Wild is so fundamentally opposed to the democratic possibilities of the delightful discussions which spring from people with other viewpoints, this man suspended my account on Tuesday afternoon under flimsy pretext and without warning and has proven indifferent and unresponsive to my efforts to resolve what I had hoped was simply a colossal misunderstanding. With Wild’s inexplicable ban of my main email address, this now appears to be a deliberate effort to target and silence me because of my progressive politics and the fact that I am not shy about speaking out against bad actors in prominent positions of power. And if you’re setting up a new Mastodon account, I would highly advise you to not use Universeodon. If you’re on Universeodon right now, I strongly urge you to switch to another instance before Wild shuts you down too. (Here’s a helpful guide on how to switch Mastodon instances.)

Last year, I had selected Wild’s instance at random. George Takei — a man whom I have admired and respected since watching Star Trek reruns as a kid — was on Universeodon. (Years ago, I once received an incredibly kind email from him, to which I naturally shouted “Oh my!” with great enthusiasm. So Takei is forever brokered in as one of the Cool Cats.) I figured that any instance that was good enough for this national treasure was good enough for me.

But my random decision turned out to be a tremendous mistake.

On Tuesday afternoon, as I was trying to report on a Zionist extremist who drove his car into peaceful Columbia protesters, I was shocked to learn that my Universeodon account was suspended. Now I’m no stranger to this elastic approach to moderation. After I had reached more than 40,000 followers on TikTok for my mix of leftist politics and surreal comedy, the moderators there invented excuses to ban me, siding with the right-wingers who mass-reported me — much as Wild did to me on Universeodon. While I always abide by the rules of any social media platform I join and stand firmly against harassment, Wild had to go all the way back to January to invent an excuse to ban me. I had merely documented a vicious cyberbullying and harassing campaign against me on BlueSky (with screenshots and receipts). But Wild claimed that these posts, which were simply expressing disbelief that some unhinged tech person would libel me with lies for 96 posts within an eleven hour period — violated the rules on his instance and that I was the one somehow harassing people while documenting a very flagrant and coordinated harassment campaign against me that carried on long after I had deleted my BlueSky account. This was classic and predictable gaslighting against political opponents, in other words.

But if Wild is going to go back in time, then I suppose I should do the same with him. Nothing that I posted on his instance was even remotely close to the unhinged teenage angst he expressed on September 23, 2014: “You wounder why I get pissed off then you go ahead and act like a world class dickhead. Fuck you.”

My account — which was largely concerned with books, culture, politics, news, and reposts of goofy TikToks — remained fairly consistent throughout my run on Universeodon. The only thing that changed was that I was more vocal in my criticism of Israel in the last month. I challenged the propagandist Steve Herman (who, ironically, was one of the “journalists” banned by Musk on Twitter), who claimed that Columbia protesters were terrorizing Jewish students. But Herman is such a sloppy “journalist” that he refused to corroborate the provenance of the video he cited — even when he hadn’t been to Columbia (I had and reported on it via TikTok after talking with dozens of people (most declined to appear on camera, for understandable reasons), none of whom had seen any violent protesters). I directed Herman to the dubious source of said video and noted how nobody had looked into who was shouting and observed that the audio did not match the “transcript.” Unlike Herman, I did my best to ensure that the information I posted was correct.

Now I had contended with Wild’s love for defending authoritarian maniacs last September, when I posted a clearly satirical post against Elon Musk, protesting Musk’s anti-Semitism in particular and pointing out that Musk was so clumsy that there was a good chance that he could accidentally set himself on fire. But Wild, who has no sense of humor and who appears to have a dog whistle against anyone who protests racism or denigration of a particular group, fired a warning to me and refused to keep my post up. Fair enough. It’s his instance.

But he then claimed that details about George Mitchell that I posted — which were reported and sourced in Josh Ruebner’s excellent book Shattered Hopes — constituted “misinformation.” Regrettably, I cannot access my original post due to Wild’s gleeful zeal in scrubbing posts (with the additional advantage of removing evidence that makes him accountable), but I was able to find my response to him:

But by suspending my account and refusing to give me the benefit of the doubt, Wild was effectively deplatforming the modest but robust presence I had built on Mastodon.

In other words, Ryan Wild is very keen on cracking down on nearly anyone who conducts journalism and who points out social injustice. He is a Mastodon fascist. And I’d like to qualify that by citing Lawrence Britt’s 2003 article in Free Inquiry in which he identified up fourteen characteristics of fascism. Wild certainly seems keen on powerful and continuing nationalism with his low tolerance for anyone critical of the government and his apparent love for Brexit and Boris Johnson. In blocking journalists and those critical of Israel, he certainly has a disdain for the recognition of human rights. He’s certainly for a highly controlled instance and, much like Truth Social, he has recruited alt-right moderators to offer the illusion of free speech. And he obviously has a priapic zest for corporate power and the rich, as well as a disdain for journalists (and thus the intellectual pursuit of the real truth). And in my attempt to get answers from Wild, he has expressed a colossal arrogance towards me.

The upshot is that, if you’re going to choose a Mastodon instance, you now need to deeply research the admin and the moderators of that instance to ensure that they aren’t twisting the rules to silence your viewpoint — especially if you are not white and affluent.

Ryan Wild’s clear corruption betrays the utopian potential of the Fediverse, which is certainly not going to flourish very well with compromised moderation on Universeodon, Mastodon UK, and other instances that are covertly censoring certain political voices and perspectives.

5/11/24 4:00 PM UPDATE: Wild sent me an email after this article dropped. Unable to rebut any of the claims in this article, he has instead falsely claimed that I am doxxing him. All information about Wild in this article was pulled from public information that is easily Googleable within thirty seconds. To be clear, I am firmly against doxxing. I have never doxxed anyone. Mr. Wild is still invited to tender a response to this piece to correct any “misinformation,” but he seems more content to spread misinformation of his own:

5/12/24 2:00 AM UPDATE: I arrived home from a very fun Saturday night out to discover more gaslighting from Mr. Wild, including a libelous claim that I am a “stalker,” as seen below:

Mr. Wild was contacted in advance of this article at two email addresses (including his email at Atlas Media Group, which was not part of an “email system breaking’) with a request for comment. He chose not to reply. He was informed of many of the claims in this piece in advance of publication. He has yet to refute or rebut any of the allegations expressed in this story. And he continues to promulgate the outright lie that I have doxxed him.

To demonstrate that Wild’s location is public information, the Atlas Media Group website lists Ryan Wild as being in Swindon. His Keybase page lists him as living in Swindon. I have not doxxed him. Wild has been quite transparent about where he lives. I have included screenshots below:

Concerning Mr. Wild’s birthday, this too is public information. Like any human being, Mr. Wild has tweeted repeatedly that his birthday is June 6th. If Mr. Wild did not want anyone to know what his birthday is, then he should have said nothing. But given how much Mr. Wild has publicized his own birthday (indeed far more than I have), this cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be called doxxing.

Once again, if Mr. Wild would like to rebut the claims in this piece, then I will be more than happy to append his remarks to this article.

I have also updated the main article to include Wild’s claims that his email was not working. Again, Mr. Wild was contacted in advance of this story’s publication through the very same backup email address (i.e., the working email) he cites in his post.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Ryan Wild: Mastodon Fascist, Tendentious Universeodon Admin, and Enemy of the Fourth Estate first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Paul Auster, the ferociously ambitious writer behind such masterpieces as The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night, has passed away. He was 77 years old.

During the summer of 2008, on the occasion of Man in the Dark being published, I had the good fortune of interviewing Auster at his Park Slope home. He sized me up fairly fast with some off-tape banter concerning the most creative methods of scoring free and cheap drinks, which we both laughed about. And I think that’s why we probably had such a thoughtful conversation. I played my usual role of delivering questions for Auster to parry and punch through. That dynamic resulted in some revealing answers about his creative process, which was rightfully different from my speculations.

You can listen to the conversation by clicking on the Bat picture below.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Opening himself up to explanation.

Author: Paul Auster

Subjects Discussed: Starting a novel from a title, the advance titles contained within The Book of Illusions, the working title of The Music of Chance, Mr. Blank, the relationship between Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark, shorter baroque novels vs. longer naturalistic novels, the use and non-use of quotation marks within speech, the writing history of The Brooklyn Follies, the political nature of ending novels, the 2000 presidential election, parallel worlds, the death of Uri Grossman, didactic novels, the comfort of books, the Auster eye-popping moment, the party scene in The Book of Illusions, violence, reminding the reader that he is in a novel, emotional states revealed through imaginary material, Vermont’s frequent appearance in Auster’s novel, Virginia Blaine as the shared element between Brill and Brick in Man in the Dark, magic, The Invention of Solitude, memorializing memory, Rose Hawthorne, website archives, Auster’s relationship with the Internet, having an email surrogate, Auster’s concern for specific dollar amounts in Man in the Dark and Oracle Night, Hand to Mouth, Auster’s reading habits, the 8-10 contemporary novelists Auster follows closely, being distracted, the intrusive nature of the telephone, diner moments in Auster’s most recent novels, perception and stock situations, summaries of books and films within Auster’s books, and intimate moments in great movies.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about something that I’ve long been interested in your books, and that is your concern for specific dollar amounts. Again, it plays up here in the Pulaski Diner, where everything is five dollars. And I also think about the scenario with M.R. Chang in Oracle Night, in which there’s the whole situation between the ten dollar notebook and the ten thousand dollar notebook.

Auster: Right.

Correspondent: And again it becomes completely, ridiculously violent. But there is something about the propinquity of the dollar amount that you keep coming back to in your work. What is it about money? And what is it about a specific figure like this?

Auster: It’s funny. I never, never thought about that. Wow. Well, listen, money’s important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don’t have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life. I wrote a whole book about that.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Auster: Hand to Mouth. And the only good thing about making money is that you don’t have to think about money. It’s the only value. Because if you don’t have it, you’re crushed. And for a long period in my life, I was crushed. And so maybe this is a reflection of those tough years. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Correspondent: Or maybe there is something absurd about a specific dollar amount or something. I mean, certainly, when I go to a store and I see that something is set at a particular dollar amount or it fluctuates, it becomes a rather ridiculous scenario. Because all you want to do is get that particular object.

Auster: Yes, yes, yes. But often in my books, people don’t have a lot of money in their pockets. So they have to budget themselves carefully.

Correspondent: Well, not always. You tend to have characters like, for example in The Brooklyn Follies, people who have a good windfall to fall back on and who also offer frequently to help pay for things, and their efforts are often rejected out of pride by your supporting characters. And so again, money is this interesting concern. But I’m wondering why you’ve held on to this notion. It’s now thirty years since the events depicted in Hand to Mouth. I mean, is this something you just haven’t forgotten about?

Auster: I guess I haven’t forgotten about it. (laughs)

Correspondent: Do you still pinch pennies to this day?

Auster: No, no, no. Not at all. No, I’m not a tightwad at all.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Auster: I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just — the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects. I don’t have a car. We don’t have a country house. We don’t have a boat. We don’t have anything that lots of people have. And I’m not interested. I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. I guess the only thing that I spend money on is cigars and food and alcohol. Those are the main expenses.

Correspondent: Not books?

Auster: No. Because our library in the house is so bursting, we have no more room. We have things on the floor. And books come into the house at the rate of — you see, three came today for example. I’m pointing to them on the table. So we’re just inundated with books.

Download BSS #231: Paul Auster (MP3)

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post RIP Paul Auster (1947-2024) first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Meet Steve Halloran, State Senator for the 33rd District of Nebraka. Objectively speaking, Halloran can be sufficiently described as a 75-year-old fossil, a misogynistic pettifogger, and a walking and talking colostomy bag who slips and saunters around Lincoln with the slimy telltale mien of an impotent man popping Cialis every hour in his futile attempt to revive his unresponsive and forever diminutive chorizo. When not introducing measures ensuring that hate groups drown out liberal voices or using “Nebraska nice” to defend fascism, this detestable autocrat can be seen in photographs smiling like a squealing pig while standing next to Nazis. He is so rigidly opposed to the rights of women that, in 2017, he was one of only three senators to vote against a measure that would have required schools to build accommodations that would help mothers breastfeed their children. And he is so hateful of working stiffs that, in March 2019, he opposed increasing the minimum wage for tipped workers.

Halloran’s hideous combination of misogyny and stupidity is so deeply ingrained into his evil reptilian core that he actually had the temerity to declare last year that rape did not induce pregnancy: “No one’s forcing anyone to be pregnant. Pregnancy’s a voluntary act between two consenting adults.”

Indeed, rape seems to be the only topic that fuels Halloran’s diseased and dimwitted imagination.

But on Monday morning, as the Nebraska State Senate was discussing Legislative Bill 441, this baleful man did the unthinkable. The bill in question targeted “obscenity and pornography” in K-12 schools. And Halloran, who possesses the crusty gusto of a crested gecko, read a passage from Alice Sebold’s Lucky that described a rape. And he inserted the name “Senator Cavanaugh” (likely, that of Senator Machaela Cavanaugh, who is a Democrat) into the excerpt. (The full video can be found here.) Halloran is not a very good reader, but that should not detract from the full scope of this bastard’s completely unacceptable rape fantasy. Here is the full transcript:

Something tore. I began to bleed there. I was wet now, Senator Cavanaugh. I’m excited. I made him excited. He was intrigued and worked his whole fist into my vagina and pumped it. And it went into….it went into my brain. Stop staring at it, he said. I’m sorry, I said. You’re strong. I tried. I liked it. He started pumping me, pumping me again, wildly. The base of my spine was crushed into the ground. Glass cut my back and behind. He kneeled back. Raise your legs, he said. Spread them. Give me a blowjob, he said. [At this point, Halloran emphasized “blow,” almost as if he was confessing a secret fantasy.] He was standing now. I was grounded on the ground, trying to search about, uh, the filth on my clothes. He kicked me and I crawled into a ball. I want a blowjob, Senator Cavanaugh. He held his dick in his hand. I don’t know how, I said. What do you mean you don’t know how? I’ve never done it before, I said. I’m a virgin. Put it in your mouth. I kneeled before him, Senator Cavanaugh.

There are exactly zero circumstances in which such a performance is acceptable in political life. While Halloran did apologize on Tuesday, the easy and eager lust with which this abhorrent windbag transposed Senator Cavanaugh’s name into this passage needs to be answered with considerably greater consequences. It is incumbent upon the good people of Nebraska to turn this man’s life into a miserable and neverending hell, to protest Halloran at every public appearance until this unqualified reprobate resigns from office.

At the very least, Halloran should know what it feels like to have one’s name inserted into literature like this. I’ve taken the liberty of working Halloran into a passage from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star — an iconic and pioneering work of gay fiction:

I fucked Steve Halloran across the armchair, his feet over his shoulders; I had to see Steve’s face and read what I was doing in his winces and gasps, his violent blush as I forced my cock in, the quick confusion of welcome and repulsion. I’d used up all the lube Cherif had left in the jar, but I saw tears slide from the corners of Steve’s eyes, his upper lip curled back in a gesture like anguish or goaded aggression.

If you’d like to tell Steve how you feel about his boorishness, his contact information is here. Take the most disturbing passages in fiction, pop Steve’s name in, and give his office a call! I’m sure it will liven up the days of his staffers and offer the proper context for Steve’s rock-soft ardor for literature.

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Steve Halloran: A Rape Fantasist and White Nationalist Unfit to Hold Political Office in Nebraska first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

(This is the twenty-eighth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: James Joyce.)

As I write these words — some eight months before a fateful presidential election threatens to steer my nation into a theocratic hellscape that will permanently erode many of the liberties and freedoms I have been humbled to partake in for cnearly fifty years — the tireless researchers at PRII inform me that Christian nationalism has substantive support in all fifty states (with the exception of California, New York, and Virginia — in which 75% remain skeptics or outright reject it), the Pew Research Center reports that 45% of Americans believe that our democratic republic should be “a Christian nation,” and 55% of Latino Protestants support Christian nationalism. Blind zealotry, even with white supremacy mixed into the sickening formula, comes in many colors.

Undoubtedly, many of these hayseed fanatics are easily manipulated and illiterate. They conveniently overlook the “love thy neighbor” ethos from Western civilization’s best known zombie in favor of a greater affinity for the limitless imbecility of zealous violence and tyranny, falsely believing themselves to be misunderstood rebels living in a new Roman Empire — this as the very institutional framework continues to uphold their right to yap and bellow in hateful and discriminatory terms as they line the pockets of wealthy telegenic carpetbaggers like Joel Osteen. They lead campaigns to ban books and to deracinate vital areas of knowledge from schools which offend their delicate and autocratically vanilla sensibilities. While the Book of Luke informs us that Christ asked us to “love and pray for our enemies,” you will find these unremarkable lemmings keeping their traps shut as trans kids commit suicide or another maniac massacres dozens in the week’s latest mass shooting. (Unable to summon true comity for anyone who deviates from their ugly and crudely formed politics, right-wing statesmen have substituted “love” for “thoughts,” presumably so they can show up to church on Sunday with a “clean” Christian conscience — even though they do nothing to curb this malignant cancer and care no more for these victims than any garden-variety sociopath.)

It has frequently been observed that atheists like myself know the Bible better than these monomoniacal morons. I have often been surprised by how easy it is to thoroughly rebut some born-again loser based on a singular reading of the King James more than twenty years ago and my apparent recall of specific passages that are well outside the soft and useless hippocampi of my hopelessly dim opponents. It never occurs to Christians to question their faith or even to comprehend (much less read) the very words they purport to uphold in their everyday living. And it certainly wouldn’t occur to them to consider that, much like any moment in history, the narrative and the very belief structure upholding this nonsense was written by the winners, by those who spent the majority of their lives silencing (and even murdering) anyone who offered perfectly reasonable questions about a man who rose from the dead.

Elaine Pagels’s excellent book, The Gnostic Gospels, is an equitable study of the many Gnostic sects that dared to question the Christian status quo. Indeed, had not the 52 treatises been discovered in Nag Hammadi in 1945, there is a good chance that many of us who tirelessly call out bullshit on all fronts would have lacked a far more seminal faith than one in Christ — namely, a boundless pride in our ancestors practicing the vital art of critical thinking.

The orthodox position of the Resurrection, as defined by Tertullian, is quite clear. Jesus Christ rose from the dead with full corporeal gusto. It was “this flesh, suffused with blood, built up with bones, interwoven with nerves, entwined with veins” (one might add “consummated with claptrap” and “molded with malarkey” to this laundry list). Tertullian further adds, “it must be believed, because it is absurd!” And, look, I’d like to believe in kaiju secretly emerging from the oceans to stomp on every megachurch from here to Alpharetta, Georgia, but I have confined my love for absurdity to my deviant imagination and my performative antics on TikTok.

What’s especially astonishing about Tertullian is how literal he is. The New Testament is ripe with stories in which Jesus’s disciples are invited to prod and touch the newly reanimated corpse. (There is curiously nothing in the Bible in which anyone asks Jesus about why he doesn’t carry the pungent smell of the dead or how the bearded wonder managed to rid himself of all the maggots gnawing at his decaying flesh.) And yet Pagels points out that not every story within the New Testament aligns with Tertullian’s “my way or the highway” interpretation of full-fledged concrete return. Acts 9:3-4 informs us that Christ’s Resurrection is merely “a light from heaven” with a voice. Acts 22:9 even points out that some observed the light, but ‘heard not the voice that spake to me.” And if that’s the case, would Tertullian have declared the Apostles heretics? In Acts, Christ’s “return” sounds very much like a low-rent Vegas act without a PA system.

And that’s just in the Bible, folks! I haven’t even snapped my fingers to summon the Gnostics on stage. Depending upon what part of the Bible you read, it is either Peter or Mary Magdalene who first sees Christ rise from the dead. Paul tells us that Christ said hello to five hundred people all at once. And if we take that literally, any of us could now do the same thing on social media. Pagels informs us that from the second century onward, “orthodox churches developed the view that only certain resurrection appearances actually conferred authority on those who received them.” And just like that, the manner in which you contend with Christ’s reappearance isn’t all that different from telling the right story to some bouncer on a Saturday night to slip past the velvet rope!

Believe in the power of this two-bit magician and the terms of the deal, as set up by Luke, are as follows: Christ returned from the dead, walked the earth for forty days, and then rose to the heavens in a bright coruscating light. This may not have the razzle-dazzle of Cirque du Soleil, but it is a belief that has nevertheless been swallowed whole and without question by generations of gullible rubes.

The Gnostics were the first to call this “the faith of fools.” In The Acts of John, one of the rare Gnostic texts that survived before Nag Hammadi in fragmented form, John offers the completely reasonable argument that, because Christ did not leave any footprints, he could not possibly be human, but spiritual. The Gnostics clearly had a more sophisticated interpretation of the Resurrection: it was not the literal observation of Christ’s Resurrection that counted, but the spiritual meaning behind it. But the underlying facts didn’t matter nearly as much as winning over the authorities who conferred you with a position of trust:

Consider the political implications of the Gospel of Mary: Peter and Andrew, here representing the leaders of the orthodox group, accuse Mary — the gnostic — of pretending to have seen the Lord in order to justify the strange ideas, fictions, and lies she invents and attributes to divine inspiration. Mary lacks the proper credentials for leadership, from the orthodox viewpoint: she is not one of the ‘twelve.’ But as Mary stands up to Peter, so the gnostics who take her as their prototype challenge the authority of those priests and bishops who claim to be Peter’s successors.

It thus became necessary for the Gnostics to expand authority to those who stood outside the Twelve. Some Gnostics were generous enough to ascribe VIP treatment to the Disciples, claiming that they had received the kind of custom vision that is a bit like the gift you receive nine months after you donate to a Kickstarter campaign. But as you can imagine, all this resulted in many elbowing their way into a vicious power grab over which interpretation of the Resurrection represented the “true” belief. And there was another important consideration. If Christ himself served as the truest source of spiritual authority, who then would be the authority in the years after his crucifixion and his “Hey there, baby!” sojurn from the great beyond?

The more bellicose strains of Christianity continue to endure in large part because a belief in Christ conveniently allows you to disguise your own sinister lunges for power. Enter Pope Clement I, who was arguably the first significantly ruthless monster who saw an opportunity. Clement insisted that, in the absence of his august presence, God delegates his authority to the “rulers and leaders on earth.” Naturally, these “rulers and leaders” were bishops, deacons, and priests. And if you didn’t bend at the knee to these sham practitioners, then Clement stated, with his great gift for speaking without nuance, that you would receive the death penalty.

Of course, this raises the question of whom you can trust within the church: an issue that has become evermore important given the decades of sexual abuse carried out by men of the cloth within the Catholic Church. A bloodthirsty fellow by the name of Irenaeus succeeded in widening the divide between orthodoxy and the Gnostics by suggesting that any interpretation existing outside Clement’s stern terms was not only heretical, but originated from Satan himself, thus paving the way for Christians to denounce any belief or behavior they disagreed with as “Satanic” over the next two thousand years. Over the years, they proceeded to execute innocent women in Salem and imagine Satanic messages in records.

These developments spelled trouble for the poor Gnostics. Within a few centuries, their texts were buried and destroyed. Their reasonable questions and liberal interpretations became casus belli to string them up. The Christians had the good sense to market themselves as victims persecuted by the Roman Empire and they began to realize sometime in the second century that pointing out how Christians suffered was a great draw for new acolytes. (Eighteen centuries later, Israel would employ the same tactic: use the suffering from the Holocaust to recruit Zionists, where they could then justify the seizure of Palestinian land and the mass-murdering of children on the Gaza Strip.) All this is a pity. Because the Gnostics were often far more interesting in their radicalism and their creative liturgical analysis than what we find in the so-called Holy Book. Consider The Gospel of Philip‘s inventive spin on the virgin birth. How can the Spirit be both Virgin and Mother? By a union between the Father of All and the Holy Spirit. And unlike the Christians, The Gospel of Peter ascribed a third quality to the Divine Mother (the first two being the Silence and the Holy Spirit): Wisdom, clearly delineated as a feminine power.

It is a testament to Christianity’s enduring evil that few people listen to the Gnostics in the twenty-first century. But if their reasonable transposition of literal interpretation to metaphor had become the more dominant text, it is quite possible that the millions of nonbelievers who died during the Crusades might have survived and that the present plague of Christian nationalism, which remains highly dangerous and ubiquitous in our dystopian epoch, might have nestled into the less injurious category of “optional only.”

{Next Up! William H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West!)

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post The Gnostic Gospels (Modern Library Nonfiction #72) first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

(This is the forty-first entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Death Comes for the Archbishop.)

There are many go-nowhere men like Walker Percy’s Jack “Binx” Bolling in American life: the type who creates nothing and who lives like some vaguely seedy salesman overly concerned with easy comities and sartorial aesthetics, the quasi-urbane man who, at his worst, is so terrified of even remotely staining his choppers that he slurps nothing but colorless sugar-free smoothies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I can’t say that I’ve wanted to spend a day (much less a life) like this. I am too much of a creative, feverishly curious, and pro-active man with a formidable work ethic and a great brio for life (and all of its attendant messes) to do so, but I do have my moments when I feel the draw to lie in bed for hours and listen to the beautiful rap of rain against my window pane, which is certainly a more human pastime than sucking on the cheap glass teats of television and being extremely online. Then I come to my senses and realize that I do need to make something that day, with the fulsome freedom of not needing approbation, so that I can sleep better at night and feel some self-respect — a drive for independence and authenticity that is decreasingly shared by my fellow Americans as the apocalyptic headlines lull many formidable workhorses into permanent or partial fatigue. I don’t blame anyone for slumming it. This is an exhausting asceticism for anyone to practice and the prolificity that results from my febrile commitment is probably one reason why some people fear me.

But poor Binx Bolling has nothing like that, which is why I find him so interesting and why I find Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer to be more weirdly meaningful with each fresh reeread. Absent of any real purpose, Bolling spends much of this plotless novel trying to shoehorn his rudderless life into something, particularly a “search,” which is not really a search for anything. He seems unwilling to ride or die with unconscious instinct, with the sheer enjoyment of being alive. (Typical of Bolling, he has no allegiance. At one point, he even declares himself “Jewish by instinct.”) He recognizes that instinct is something that people possess, but that doesn’t seem enough for him:

At the great moments of life — success, failure, marriage, death— our kind of folks have always possessed a native instinct for behavior, a natural piety or grace, I don’t mind calling it. Whatever else we did or failed to do, we always had that. I’ll make you a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they’re better than other people. You’re damn right we’re better. We’re better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity’s sake…Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal.

But is this really so “better”? This is fairly similar to Holden Caulfield’s insufferable kvetching, except that it is far more fascinating because Bolling, unlike Caulfield, is more actively self-aware and constantly observant of others. He chooses to think and feel this way. It is what I call the “fuck my life” look that you see on people’s faces after they have given up on any dreams after the age of forty.

While the Binx Bollings of our world are capable of a few spontaneous decisions and may possess some cultural tastes and perhaps a soupçon of passion, they differ from the “slacker” types that Richard Linklater rightfully celebrated in his wonderful 1991 film in that exuberance is often absent and there isn’t an unusual nobility or even an ethos to their indolence. (And I would contend that Bollling’s “novel ethos” is a false one. For he says this when he has nothing in particular he is striving for. And those who strive for something rarely have a mediocre ideal in mind.)

The Binx Bollings simply live and that’s about it. They are, in short, working stiffs and the burden of surviving is often too much to do much more than that. You’ll find them represented in varying shades within Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe books, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, John P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley, Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland, Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, and John Williams’s Stoner. And while I have no desire to leave out women in my literary consideration, yes, the fear of becoming “mediocre” or “detached” like this — the natural “evolution” of Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” or what Colin Wilson unpacked in The Outsider — does seem to be an overwhelmingly male concern. Contemporary novelists as brilliant as Adelle Waldman, Kate Christensen, and Lauren Groff (you should very much read their work too) have also tackled this to great effect, although they are usually more interested in effect rather than cause or state and the vicarious first-person experience is of less importance. Think of the way that the characters in Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch (all literary queens who I will enthuse about to my dying day!) are so much more alive than the Binx Bolling type. I also can’t help but think of the way Ross McElwee (also a man of the South) brilliantly and vulnerably put himself front and center in such a way with his fascinating series of personal documentaries. Updike, in particular, was one of the foremost literary Johns drawn to these men and he nimbly spoke to American readers who recognized the telltale cadences of Durkheimian anomie.

Which is not to negate the quotidian struggles of the Binx Bollings. The miracle of Percy’s novel is that we’re still with him on his journey despite all this. Still, it often never occurs to these types to pay attention to the “beloved father” or “husband of X” found so ubiquitously on tombstones, which matters so much more than the roll of a Taylorist scroll memorializing an endless concatenation of checked off tasks. The worst of these aimless men possess no sense of humor and somehow transform into a homely insectoid creature worse than anything that ever bolted upward from Kafka’s imagination, a listless monstrosity commonly referred to as a “critic.” The critic, who is often a cretin, is a pitiful and unsmiling quadraped incapable of expressing joy, much less stridulating his legs together to make a pleasant sound in springtime.

And while we’re on the subject of bugs, as it so happens, there is a cameo appearance from a coterie of creepy-crawlies in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer that saunter right past our malaise-fueled man Binx: “They dive and utter their thrumming skonk-skonk and go sculling up into the bright upper air.” Percy’s emphasis on sounds and gerunds here really says it all. That same whirlydirsh language is often beyond poor Binx.

The source for Boiling — as well as Williston Barrett, a Percy protagonist who would be explored in two stages of life (youthful folly and middle age) in, respectively, The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming) — was Percy’s essay “The Man on the Train” (collected in The Message in the Bottle) — in which Percy firmly established the type of protagonist he was interested in writing about:

There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reserved and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train….The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! that is how it is! — which is an aesthetic reversal of alienation.

In other words, Percy could not bring himself to write about a character in unbearable despair (it is not an artistic focus for the faint of heart) — largely because his natural writing voice is driven by a fine comedic impetus, with the Catholic novelist’s concern for philosophy planting one foot in the wings and the other on stage. (Look no further than Antonia White, Gene Wolfe, and Graham Greene for similarly intriguing juxtapositions.) Much like Richard Linklater’s “slacker” archetype, Percy seeks to pursue the bare minimum of alienation, although, as can be seen with Dr. Thomas More in Love in the Ruins, Percy’s characters are more eggs-in-one-basket types (in More’s case, the Ontological Lapsometer that he sees as a decaying society’s cure-all) and less committed to the free-floating spontaneity of hitching a ride with strangers, taking the entire day to assemble an elaborate rock structure to represent femininity, or being interviewed for a film student’s documentary.

At this point, the gusto-driven reader may rightfully ask, “So why read about this?” For the same reason that we read about any “unlikable” character. This is a form of living, albeit while clutching the bottom of one’s hemp, that is part of the human experience. The eccentric film journalist Jeffrey Wells has recently suggested that the criteria of art (specifically movies) involves being put into “a kind of alternate-reality mescaline dream state.” And while escapism is certainly a dopamine-fueled pastime practiced by a population increasingly hostile to pleasurable cerebration, requiring little of the mind but an uncritical blank slate and a sybarite’s zeal for incessant orgasm, what of the wisdom picked up from raw human experience? Art gives us the advantage of having access to the interior thoughts and feelings of those we may be disinclined to meet in the here and now. Wells’s limited definition therefore nullifies Jonathan Glazer’s excellent film adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel, The Zone of Interest, which is nothing less than a vital and deeply horrifying atmospheric experience warning us of the shockingly pedestrian character of fascism, which is dangerously close to permanently destroying the very fabric of this bountiful nation should the Orange Menace emerge victorious in November.

Likewise, Walker Percy’s masterpiece is a similar (if less baleful) cautionary tale of what it means to coast and how commitment to something (or, in Bolling’s case, someone) represents the inevitable reckoning that anyone is fated to face at one point or another. It is a sneaky warning to anyone with true fuck-it-all drive that even the dreamer faces the risk of slipping into adamantine complacency and is ill-equipped to gently pluck a rose from the carefully maintained bush planted atop a Sisyphean alp.

The New Yorker‘s Paul Elie has smartly observed that The Moviegoer is curiously ahistorical: less taken with unpacking the neverending residue of the Civil War, racial tension, or other hallmarks found prodigiously within typical Southern fiction. The novel is also, by its own prefatory admission, an inexact version of New Orleans: far from meticulously recreated like Joyce’s Dublin, though not entirely fabulist.

But I do think Elie is a tad too dismissive of Southern inventiveness to suggest that Percy mined exclusively from the European existentialists to summon his vision of the unlived and shakily examined life — even though the debt to Kierkegaard is obvious in The Moviegoer (and in “The Man on the Train”), not just because of the opening epigraph:

As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as opportunity presents itself – if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.

But what is this search? I strongly recommend Rose Engler’s smart unpacking, which eloquently outlines the religious component that was dear to Percy, but there is something intriguingly postmodern about it. One of Percy’s early reviewers — Edwin Kennebeck in Commonweal — believed that The Moviegoer entailed a search not merely for meaning, but for something beyond despair. And there is something to this, given how Bolling categorizes the search early on as “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” The movies that Bolling regularly watches do not present a true search. And, for Bolling, it can be argued that his search involves doing everything possible to avoid that search, even though he knows inherently that he must search. Denied definitive time and space by Percy, Bolling splits up his search into horizontal and vertical ones, framed without any proper construct from Eddington’s The Expanding Universe. He complains of his family not understanding his search. He searches for a starting point by scribbling in a notebook and, after all this “effort,” tells us, “The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly.”

Kenneback pinpointed, quite rightly, that Bolling’s decision to marry Kate represented “a search ended and an ordeal begun.” Belonging then, which most of us crave for and which Bolling is not especially good at, represents the cruel gauntlet thrown down by the universe. Bolling tells us, “Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I’ll show you two people existing in despair.” He believes that Kate sustains a look of being serious, “which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.”

Perhaps we’re all pretending in one way or another as we saunter about this mortal coil. But the tragedy of Binx Bolling is that, even with his apparent religious conversion, he cannot seem to accept life at face value. But he is not the only one suffering. Kate has this to say:

“Have you ever noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck — people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.”

If our presence here is indeed ephemeral, should this not provide greater motive to connect and to find joy? The Catholic mind, and thus the Catholic novel, is not without its involutions and contradictions.

Next Up: Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson!

© 2024 – 2025, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post The Moviegoer (Modern Library #60) first appeared on Reluctant Habits.

Nex Benedict was sixteen years old. Like many smart and ferociously curious kids, Nex enjoyed reading and drawing. They were into Minecraft and The Walking Dead. Nex was part Choctaw and had a loving cat named Zeus. They earned straight As.

In any sane and tolerant world, Nex would have blossomed into adulthood. In all likelihood, they would have lived a rich and meaningful life.

But that didn’t happen. Nex Benedict is now dead.

Nex Benedict is dead — needlessly dead, unpardonably dead, heartbreakingly dead — because they were nonbinary and lived in Ossawo, Oklahoma — a hotbed of hate and intolerance in which cruel, unrepentant, and opportunistic sociopaths like Ryan Walters (of which more anon) gleefully cranked up the temperature and brought out the most savage and hotheaded elements in its otherwise law-abiding population.

While the precise cause of death is still being investigated (according to a Facebook statement from the police department), what is indisputable is this: (1) There was a violent altercation in the Ossawo High School girl’s bathroom. (2) Nex Benedict suffered significant injuries from other girls as a result of this incident. (3) Despite Nex’s injuries, the school did not call an ambulance service for Nex. (4) It was recommended by the school nurse that Nex visit a medical facility. (5) The next day — February 8, 2024 — the Ossawo Fire Department were dispatched for a medical emergency, which resulted in Nex being conveyed to the St. Francis Pediatric emergency room, where Nex then died.

Ossawo, Oklahoma is a community of 38,732 people in which someone erected a “Let’s Go Brandon” billboard on US 169 near the 76th Street North exit and in which Alee McLain — a right-wing fanatic who is the admin of the Owasso Area Republican Women’s Club Facebook page — falsely accused Oklahoma Labor Commissioner Leslie Osborn of encouraging an environment in which children were sexually groomed. (Osborn is a Republican who had been on the board of directors of Honestly, which focused in part on “youth sexual health.” Like many histrionic Republicans fond of using their deranged imagination to invent mythical dens of iniquity from pizza parlors, McLain bought into a conspiracy conjured up by the Oklahoma City Republican Women’s Club without question. It didn’t take long for the hateful froth to foam from the dank corners of her mottled mouth on cue.)

Oklahoma is a state in which cruel, hateful, and unremarkable bigots like Ryan Walters inexplicably become the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and enact callous policies that create intolerant impressions that kids pick up on.

Adults — particularly those who are far enough removed from childhood to forget how impressionable they once were — often ignore the reality that kids (and these kids, much like McLain, can sometimes be as old as fifty-five years old) pay close attention to what they say.

Walters undoubtedly knew this when he fomented hate and transphobic sentiment in his capacity as a public official last year. On June 29, 2023, Walters released a bigoted video on the Oklahoma State Department of Education YouTube account in which he declared:

And there’s dangerous consequences [sic] when common sense is vacated. And we’ve seen, we see a district here in the state where a boy was allowed to go into the girl’s restroom and assaulted two young girls there.

There was just one problem. Aside from misgendering a girl with his insufferably pompous illiteracy, Walters got the facts wrong.

Walters was referring to an October 26, 2022 incident at Edmond Public Schools in which a trans girl got into a physical dispute with a cisgender girl in a girls bathroom. But, as Assigned Media has reported, the details from the two girls are contradictory and murky. The right-wing “news” outlets that covered this incident made no effort to get the details from the trans girl’s perspective. The most neutral news story that Assigned ferreted out was, improbably, the conservative Washington Examiner — where the injuries in question were reported as “minor.” (It is also important to note that Edmond Public Superintendent Angela Grunewald — targeted by Walters in his unhinged state-sanctioned hate speech — was careful to observe, “We don’t want a student hurt at all, whether minor or serious.”)

Unlike this embellished Edmond case, the Ossawo, Oklahoma bathroom incident involved a trans girl who was victimized for being gender-fluid and who is now dead. And because Ryan Walters cannot perceive any LGBTQIA person as a human being — whether adult or child — a glimpse at Ryan Walters’s X/Twitter account reveals no statement expressing even a pro forma “thoughts and prayers” for Nex’s death. In other words, Walters is such an indecent monster, one so riddled with fury and intolerance, that he cannot even engage in the standard cosplay concern one sees from indifferent right-wingers after the latest mass shooting. He has, however, offered more lies, including the risible suggestion that Edmond Public Schools “embraces porn” (the books in question were The Kite Runner and The Glass Castle, which are both no more pornographic than someone wearing shorts on a hot summer day, as well as a baffling intolerance for drag queens. (Here are some interesting statistics from the squeaky-clean data wranglers at Gitnux: There are an estimated 6,100 drag queens in the United States. Approximately 72% of drag queens encountered some form of prejudice or discrimination in 2019. Walters then is clearly more of a force promoting intolerance rather than fighting it.)

Walters was motivated in large part by noted gubernatorial hatemonger Kevin Stitt — a 51-year-old man whose pitch-black hair and permanent scowl bears an uncanny resemblance to the inert and incinerated cilia in a lifelong smoker’s lungs.

On May 25, 2022, Governor Stitt signed one of the most transphobic laws on the books, requiring students at schools to produce their birth certificates for inspection and use the gender listed on that as the basis for what restrooms and locker rooms to use. (This followed a move by Stitt to ban a nonbinary gender marker on all birth certificates issued in Oklahoma.)

Walters naturally followed in these baleful footsteps like an eager bottom.

And because of this, Nex Benedict — a promising student — is now dead.

In all likelihood, Nex would not be dead if Stitt had not signed this bill into law and if Walters had not published his vile video on YouTube. It is almost certain that if these bigots had not pushed so hard and callously with their demagoguery, the people of Oklahoma would have eventually learned greater LGBTQIA tolerance, perhaps codified by state law.

But it seems that Walters and Stitt are more interested in being on the wrong side of history, much as Tulsa was on the wrong side of history in 1921. Keep in mind that Oklahoma is a state in which, just last year, the Sheriff of McCurtain County and several officials expressed a desire to string up Blacks and murder journalists. And while hundred of valiant and principled Oklahomans protested outside the Sheriff’s Office, the racist Sheriff still kept his job.

Now that blood is on Ryan Walters’s hands, the question is whether Ryan Walters will keep his job. His term ends in 2027 and, with xenophobia happening so fast, that seems too far away. There is a movement to impeach him. There have been floods of comments. But Walters will still continue to spout forth piss like some Speer-inspired fountain installed in 1930s Berlin. How many kids have to be brutalized before the people of Oklahoma decide that there is no place in their state for hate and death?

© 2024, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.

The post Ryan Walters: Oklahoma Czar of Hate, Intolerance, and Transphobia first appeared on Reluctant Habits.