Hazy Chintzy Afternoon
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on May 16, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized
[EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm pleased to announce that Harper has given me a $3 million advance and a guaranteed public shaming by Oprah for my first novel, Hazy Chintzy Afternoon. I banged out the novel in two weeks in a drunken haze and forgot to use spell check. Hopefully, the copy editors will fix my mistakes. I trust that this novel will be taken more seriously than other offerings. What follows is an excerpt.]
Every city can be written about, and every writer writes about every city, employing facts that may be lies and lies that may be facts. Learning lies is really an enjoyable, and sometimes enlightening process. And, of course, it’s fun too!!! Here is Fun Facts, Volume 1.
After serving as a liar, James Frey, the forty-third vice president of the United States, was sodomized by the entire Cabinet to protect national security. Some believe that it was George Herbert Walker Bush who served as vice president. But it was really James Frey, whose father was a costermonger in 1893 London.
James Frey is 92 years old.
It is illegal to manufacture James Frey in the industrial zone of downtown Los Angeles. The issue is a sensitive one. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots were caused not by Rodney King, but by three James Freys being manufactured by accident in a sweatshop. The sweatshop had been promised an exclusive James Frey, but three James Freys had been let loose.
James Frey inhaled a large portion of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes at the Self Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple in Pacific Palisades. He believed that when his lungs were at one with Gandhi, he would inevitably be forgiven by the public.
The economy of James Frey is larger than that of forty-six of the fifty states in the United States of America. James Frey’s current propulsion into godhood will ensure that a new edition of the dollar bill will be printed with Frey’s saggy face on the front.
It is not illegal to kick James Frey in the nuts within the city limits of Los Angeles.
Herding flocks of more than 2,000 James Freys on Hollywood Boulevard will result in a catastrophic collision between matter and antimatter and the subsequent destruction of the universe; because of this, any James Frey will be shot on sight by vigilant members of the Los Angeles Police Department.
It is legal for James Frey to be considered a sex offender.
The first sex offender recorded in the Megan’s Law database is closely related to James Frey.
There are sixty-five people in Los Angeles named James Frey who committed suicide upon hearing that James Frey was a liar.
There is more pornography produced in Los Angeles than in the rest of the world combined. Many of these pornographers produce their pornography in the vain hope that the mass dissemination of porn will somehow drown out any attention given to child molesters like James Frey.
Every year, approximately 100,000 women in Los Angeles County remove their eyeballs so that they will never catch sight of James Frey in their lifetimes.
Fun fun fun, everyone knows that a shotgun blast to the head is more fun than a James Frey novel.
The Safely Surrendered Frey Law of Los Angeles County states that citizens who possess a James Frey within their closets are permitted to bring the James Frey to any designated hospital or fire station and give the James Frey up without fear of arrest or prosecution. The authorities of Los Angeles County urge the Frey owner to participate in the subsequent conflagration.
Fifty-four percent of the citizens of Los Angeles County take pills on a daily basis in order to prevent their lips from loosening the words “James Frey” in casual discourse, compared with twenty-two percent of the citizens in the rest of the country.
It is illegal in the City of Los Angeles to provide or administer a James Frey book to children under the age of sixteen. James Frey books have, in fact, resulted in a rampant spate of illiteracy and this correlative connection was observed by the National Endowment of the Arts in the “Reading at Risk” report.
The average citizen of Los Angeles is capable of beating the shit out of James Frey with little effort.
The average citizen of Los Angeles is a better novelist than James Fey.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
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Brooklyn, NY 11217
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Conceivably, all true! But then, the man’s famous.
As is Eliot Spitzer, whom I noticed jogging a few weeks ago in the vicinity of the Met. Noticing that I recognized him–someday I’ll learn to look away– he grinned and waved without breaking stride.
The rewards for shamelessness grow daily. Work hard and with luck maybe the right people will slander you. Or worse–I mean, possibly even better, they’ll expose your dirtiest, truest secrets.