by Edward Champion

BEA 2010: An Impromptu Conversation with Gary Shteyngart

The following is a transcript from an impromptu conversation with Gary Shteyngart at BookExpo America. Due to inexplicable file degradation, the color within the video is not what it was in reality. Mr. Shteyngart’s skin proved so stunning that it caused at least 300 heads to turn during the course of the interview. And we only talked for two minutes! 300 heads in two minutes isn’t a statistic to easily discount. We regret to report that the video degraded, thus sullying Mr. Shteyngart’s charismatic complexion. There were several attempts at color correction, but the technical team proved too lazy (and too deadline-challenged with paying work) to do anything about it. So we present the results from the decent elements we could cobble together. You can listen to the conversational madness by playing the file at the bottom of this post. This Shteyngart guy, who is apparently under forty and designated as “hot” by The New Yorker, has some novel coming out called Super Sad True Love Story, which we hope to read more closely. We were unable to perform the appropriate tests to confirm Mr. Shtyengart’s “hotness,” but we hope that some scientific authority will gauge his body temperature in the immediate future and prove the inevitable.

Correspondent: Okay, so I’m here with Gary Shteyngart, who has a new book that’s apocalyptic. You’re apocalyptic-minded now!

Shteyngart: I’m apocalyptic-minded! (mimes plane crashing into an illusory horizon)

Correspondent: Yeah. Would BEA be the apocalypse?

Shteyngart: This is the end of all-known literature. After today, no more books.

Correspondent: Oh really?

Shteyngart: Yes.

Correspondent: Super Sad Love Story is your final book.

Shteyngart: Super Sad…True.

Correspondent: Yes, I know. It has too many modifiers.

Shteyngart: Oh my God! Modify this! This is definitely it. I’m hanging up my gloves and I’m becoming a duck farmer in Maine.

Correspondent: Okay. Duck farming is easier than writing novels?

Shteyngart: It’s what Henry Roth did. After he wrote Call It Sleep. he became a duck farmer. Every good Jewish boy becomes a duck farmer.

Correspondent: And there’s a new Henry Roth novel coming out from scraps! So you have a bunch of scraps you’re sitting upon while you’re writing. While you’re doing the duck farming.

Shteyngart: And plucking. And plucking the duck. Oh my God! It’s called dressing the duck.

Correspondent: Well, this is apocalyptic. There are credit poles involved. And there are numerous aspects. I’m curious. Was your checking balance poor these days? Or what happened?

Shteyngart: Well, you know, Ed, I grew up in one failing empire. And now I’m living in America. So I’m sick of doing Russia. I said, “Hey, why not try something new?” And this country is giving so much now. Everything’s falling apart! And I love it. So I really had a good time with it. When I started writing the book in 2006, I predicted stupid things like the collapse of the financial system. And then it actually started happening. So I had to make it worse and worse and worse. So in the end, everything gets bought by a huge Norwegian hedge fund.

Correspondent: So you contrived all these apocalyptic aspects years before they happened. And yet the novel takes two years to come out.

Shteyngart: That’s the thing! That’s the thing with goddam novels. You can’t keep up. That’s why my next book will be set thirty years in the future. We don’t live in the future anymore. We don’t live in the present anymore. There’s no present. It’s all the future now.

Correspondent: Really? So I’m not actually talking to you now. I’m talking to you in 2018.

Shteyngart: You’re talking to me in 2018!

Correspondent: You’ve aged very well.

Shteyngart: Thank you. You too!

Correspondent: Hey!

Shteyngart: Oh my God! We’re looking pretty good for our age.

Correspondent: I know.

Shteyngart: We’re what? Like 73 at this point, I am? Excellent.

Correspondent: I don’t know. You do the math.

Shteyngart: I can’t do math.

Correspondent: All right. You can write novels though.

Shteyngart: Yes, I’m trying. I’m trying so hard to write them. Oh, but this is the last one. From now on, duck farming.

Correspondent: Unless of course, you’ve already written three before this in the future.

Shteyngart: Yes! And somebody bought the options to the movies. Then we’re set.

BEA 2010: Gary Shteyngart (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Against the Status Galley

The so-called “status galley” — that is, a prepublication edition of a book, generally of massive size and/or literary challenge, possessed by an underpaid and often illiterate member of the publishing world who has no intention of reading beyond the first few chapters — is among the most vexing amalgams of materialism and literature that the 21st century has ever known. It is a relatively recent phenomenon, augmented by the Brobdignagian burst of journalists attending trade shows. The good ones are savvy enough to recognize a mini-Hubbert’s Peak among some publisher upon sight. I’m quibbling about those who take the galleys that they will never read or write about, who hector certain publicists and editors and peck away at the diminishing supply. This is admittedly a pedantic vexation, hardly commensurate with the junket whores in the film world or the predatory bastards who cripple working stiffs with a sneaky high-interest subprime loan that will cause them to toil unduly in their seventies, their eighties, and their nineties. But it bothers me nonetheless.

The status galley reduces a book not merely to a thing (let us accept that fetishism is ineluctable), but to a vapid item that is trotted around like a fashion accessory. And we’re talking about an item, often a work of art, isn’t even finished. If you have a status galley and boast about it, it is very likely that you have no particular interest in reading it. Nor are you courteous enough, like most avid literary people, to give it to someone who may be in need of it. You take a vital galley from the limited supply, horde some volume that has taken an author many years of hard labor and treat it like a bag of Doritos that you toss into the street.

This seems to me worse than the book pirate (largely mythical), who at least has some vested interest in reading a book or getting excited about an author. This seems to me worse than some guy at a book signing who asks an author the same question that she’s heard several hundred times. (At least, that hypothetical guy has enthusiasm.) Such actions may be executed through clumsiness or cluelessness, but they are at least sincere and enthusiastic in intent. However, to obtain a galley just so that you can have it is perhaps one of the most disrespectful acts you can perform. It does not come from a place of passion. It comes from a onyx sinkhole of consumerism. It comes from a place of needless competition, whereby you have the book that someone else does not. It works against the book’s undeniably communal nature. And it reveals you for the superficial con that you are.

Again, this is a highly pedantic concern. Probably nothing worth shooting up a post office over. But it bugs me.

by Edward Champion

An Early Finalist for the 2010 Bad Sex Award?

The following passage is from a forthcoming novel:

A navigational beacon in ___’s black Levi’s, a long-dormant transmitter buried by a more advanced civilization, was sparking back to life. Where he ought to have felt guilt, he instead was getting hard. Oh, the clairvoyance of the dick: it could see the future in a heartbeat, leaving the brain to play catch-up and find the necessary route from occluded present to preordained outcome.

Can you name the author?

by Edward Champion

The Saddest Hard Drive YouTube Video I’ve Ever Seen

The video’s title is “Hard Disc – NEED HELP – Can this be fixed?” Um, no buddy, I’m pretty sure it can’t.

[6/24/12 UPDATE: Here is a classic case of a ghost entry. The original video has been pulled from the Internet. It cannot be located. There is a little to do in this redesign but to note that this entry caused at least one person on Facebook some amusement, regret that all known context has disappeared, and move on — assuming, of course, that anyone even finds this entry.]