by Edward Champion

Samantha Power to “Give the People What They Want”

Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell and Chasing the Flame, has announced that she will turn her attentions to “more entertaining, less challenging” books in the wake of recent developments. Expressing dismay that her thoughts on weighty matters were overlooked by off-the-record remarks, and that she was now being relegated to the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times, Power pledged that she would now “give the people what they want.” And if that meant abandoning important probings into American foreign policy that the people needed to know about, this was simply how the cookie crumbled.

Power also showed less reticence to more base endeavors.

“I’m 37,” said Power in a telephone interview. “I still go to the gym. I still have a body. And if the American people prefer my body to my mind, then who am I to argue? I’d rather just move forward and put the Obama incident behind me.”

Power reported that her third book would be a meticulously researched biography on Beyoncé, with the working title, Dreamgirl: A Woman’s Only Choice in America.

“I’ve already talked to hundreds of people close to Beyoncé. Only a handful grew uncomfortable at the mention of Raphael Lemkin.”

Expressing approval for these unexpected developments, Larry Flynt offered Power $500,000 to pose naked in a future edition of Hustler. “That’s the great thing about America,” said Flynt. “Even when a woman’s as sharp as Samantha, she still has anatomy.”

Power did not offer an answer as to whether she would take this offer. But she did say that it was good to have some insurance “if the Beyoncé book tanked.”

by Edward Champion

New Podcasts

Apologies for the slack content here. It’s been busy. But things should be more or less back to regular prolificity tomorrow. Four more podcasts have been released at The Bat Segundo Show, including a return appearance by LBC-nominated author Jeffrey Ford that pertains to his latest book, The Shadow Year. Three more podcasts are forthcoming in a few days, all of them return appearances — including two authors who were nominated by the LBC. As time permits, I’m hoping to check in with many of the authors who the LBC once championed as they put out more books and come through New York, while also keeping the floodgates open for emerging and overlooked literary talents.

There are also some lengthy FH pieces coming from other authors. Keep watching the skies.

by Edward Champion

Meta Meta Meta

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

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

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

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

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

by Edward Champion

The Early Films of Jim Henson

Before the days of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson was an independent filmmaker in New York, making experimental films between commercial gigs. It was the mid-sixties. According to John Bell’s Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History, Henson was sharing a workshop space for a few months in the basement of a New York City library with a German sculptor and choreographer named Peter Schumann. Schumann specialized in avant-garde performances, entertaining crowds with masks, puppets, and postmodern dance, often employing these for political demonstrations.

In watching 1965’s “Time Piece,” seen above and recently unearthed by Metafilter, it’s difficult to consider it without Schumann in mind. The film played in New York theaters on a double bill with Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman and concerns itself with a man (played by Henson) being examined in a hospital. As the clock ticks away, a grand surrealistic array of experiential memories overtakes his existence. Gorillas bounce on pogo sticks. There is the quiet Kermit-like plea of “Help!” Chickens emerge in strip clubs. And all this is intercut with optically printed pixellated squares.

The film is set to a intermittent drum rhythm that echoes the heartbeat of time. What’s particularly intriguing is that, according to David P. Campbell’s The Complete Inklings, “Time Piece” so captured Campbell’s imagination that the film was shown at an a seminar at the Minnesota Statewide Testing Program annual conference, with Henson’s film projected on one screen and the test results of a random individual projected on another. The idea was to show Henson’s film, with Campbell announcing to the students, “We should always remember that there is a person behind each of these test scores; to make that point dramatically, here is one person’s test scores and here is a product of his considerable imagination.”This permissive cultural climate permitted Henson to make “The Cube” in 1969, a teleplay that independent filmmaker Vincenzo Natali appears to have handily pilfered from.

A protagonist, known only as “The Man in the Cube,” is trapped inside a cube of white rectangular panels, with strange individuals who enter and exit through other doors. This premise gave Henson the opportunity to explore a wide variety of topics: racism, sexism, the realm between reality and fantasy. There is even reference to the fourth wall. At one point, a professor addresses the man, pointing out that he is in a television play.

Believe it or not, “The Cube” was commissioned for a television series called Experiment in Television, a now forgotten program that aired on NBC between 1968 and 1971. This series came about because NBC needed filler material to provide late Sunday afternoon programming when the football season had ended. And they decided, quite amazingly, to provide a venue without commercials for documentaries and experimental films.

In the end, it was public television that secured Henson’s rise to fame. But today, unless you’re as squeaky-clean as Ken Burns, your prospects for national exposure are slim. Now that the first season of Sesame Street has been issued on DVD, it’s been issued with a parental advisory reading, “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” The idea of children running around an inner city, looking to learning as a way out, is apparently too threatening a concept.

Given this drastic shift in priorities — the unusual idea of commissioning an experimental film for a testing conference, the now antediluvian notion of creating a space on national television where filmmakers can pursue alternative ideas, and the censure on anything slightly offensive to “suit the needs” of children — one is forced to contemplate the current media atmosphere. Certainly, there is YouTube and the Internet. But this online landscape increasingly values views — and thereby advertising revenue — over notions that are not popular or lucrative, and one wonders just how tomorrow’s Hensons will thrive. Of course, any artist who feels compelled to create will not let any obstacle stop him. But by hindering the spectrum of expression with our priorities (what sells, what’s safe, et al.), I’m wondering if we’re closing the floodgates to those who might have new and innovative ways to get a mass audience excited about the world around us.

by Edward Champion

David Kamp, Blog Snob

Ten years from now, we’ll all be inured to David Kamp. A whole generation will have grown up as his book, The United States of Arugula, has been long forgotten — the remaining copies pulped or perhaps used as oversized skeet shooting pellets, because they couldn’t even sell as remainders. For what imagination can one expect from a hack writer whose grand contributions to letters include The Food Snob’s Dictionary, The Film Snob’s Dictionary, The Rock Snob’s Dictionary, and The Wine Snob’s Dictionary? (One senses a trend. A writer so content to plant the word “snob” to his contributions in four different terrains, even satirically, must truly be an insufferable asshole.)

Right now, this great parvenu David Kamp has turned the prick of his pen to blogs. Using the finest epithets that 1999 had to offer, Kamp rails against the “untamed blogosphere” and the “Wild Web.” He displays his considerable ignorance in suggesting that the Smoking Gun is merely a place “best known for the documents it unearths via the Freedom of Information Act,” failing to understand that it was indeed the Smoking Gun that broke the James Frey scandal. This was the kind of lengthy investigative journalism that the New York Times once practiced, before it turned its resources to the women who New York governors were schtupping. (There’s also this neat little thing called the Internet Archive! Wow! That’s even better than the brand new 56k modem I bought last month from a guy on the street who said that it was “cutting edge.”)

He is content to cast aspersions about specific blogs based entirely on their titles (“cutesie-poo,” “mock-suave,” et al.), without bothering to cite any specific examples as to how the content lives up to these modifiers. (Look, I think the name “David Kamp” sounds like some cult member waiting for the big day when his shaky pyrotechnics knowledge will be enlisted in the jihad, or, failing that, the sad and klutzy moment when he accidentally blows off his hands and it’s all settled up as a dutiful sacrifice to The Leader. But you won’t see me belittling the man’s three syllables. Particularly when his piss-poor argument is so patently ridiculous.)

Indeed, Kamp appears so deaf to the idea of text that he compares Sarah Boxer’s post-excerpt pages to Johnny Carson. In this age of Quark and word processors, Kamp can’t seem to wrap his head around the concept of text being read on an LCD screen and later transposed to book form. It’s certainly bad enough that Kamp can’t even get his medium right. But in citing Johnny Carson, a dead talk show host who has been rotting under the earth quite well for three years and who hasn’t aired on a regular basis in sixteen years, Kamp demonstrates that he is as culturally au courant as a Deadhead who doesn’t quite understand that Jerry Garcia’s fat ass has been long chewed up by the maggots.

In Kamp’s view, a blogger cannot just have an “esoteric interest.” He feels compelled to add the word “obsessive,” as if those who compose their words for a screen are no different from Branch Davidians. He is quick to tell us that “[i]n the case of the blogger Benjamin Zimmer, a linguistic anthropologist, it’s language that turns him on.” That reminds me of the case of the quantum physicist who was turned on by quantum physics. Or David Kamp, the dumbass book critic who was turned on by dumbass observations.

Of course, reading sections of a 368 page book — composed of speedy prose, no less — was “a chore” for poor David Kamp. Kamp doesn’t report if he’s ever done a day of hard labor in his life, something like working on a farm or in a warehouse that might offer a sufficient comparative basis. (I’ll take a wild guess: no.) He doesn’t say what or why. That, of course, would involve actual thought. He merely says that what David Byrne does on his blog is a thousand times better than what Momus does on his. When Kamp resorts to ratios like this, he demonstrates that the true soporific wonkery on display here is not found within blogs, but in Kamp’s utter failure to provide any substantive analysis.

Leafing through much of David Kamp’s indolent and hastily assembled review — lightweight thought, lack of curiosity, comic misfires, recountings of personal travail (i.e., the “chore”) — I was reminded less of a book review than of a dreary speech delivered by a doddering conspiracy theorist for a Rotary International chapter. Sure, you want to encourage the man. But you would never expect his ramblings to be published in The New York Times Book Review. Not without a team of editors to rival a junta. And even then, there’s the old adage about cooks and broth.

And who is Kamp to speculate about Boxer’s vacillating motivations in writing the book? Can’t Boxer change her mind?

A thoughtful, and even critical, review of blog writing is by no means a dreadful idea for a newspaper piece. But this particular review goes well beyond a missed opportunity. If the NYTBR has any good sense, it will have a team of security guards punch David Kamp in the face if he ever tries to set up a lunch meeting with Sam Tanenhaus or Dwight Garner again.