RIP Paul Auster (1947-2024)

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)

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My Henry James Problem: Dinitia Smith and Susan Mizruchi (The Bat Segundo Show #553)

This Bat Segundo special chronicles Our Correspondent’s indefatigable and good faith efforts to find appreciation for an author he does not care for — namely, Henry James. Our Correspondent read numerous books for this particular episode and appealed to several James scholars and acolytes to help set him straight. Susan Mizruchi is most recently the author of Henry James: A Very Short Introduction. Dinitia Smith is most recently the author of The Prince.

Subjects Discussed: Dick Cavett, the Correspondent’s failure to love Henry James (particularly the late period), slow reading, how the pandemic stoked Henry James love, William Dean Howells, the initiated reader, James’s unruly prefaces, Lawrence Durrell, rereading The Golden Bowl, the description of afternoon tea in The Portrait of a Lady, Neal Stephenson, James’s characters, being married, Edith Wharton, Finnegans Wake, psychology, William James, Gore Vidal’s essay on The Golden Bowl, James’s “conversational style,” dialogue, Marlon Brando, the Correspondent’s Modern Library Reading Challenge, literary mansplaining, why Henry James film adaptations don’t help the Correspondent, Dark Shadows and The Turn of the Screw, Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, how James can inspire a novelist, transposing James to the 21st century, pastiches vs. homegrown style, James’s page-long sentences, the four characters at the center of The Golden Bowl, why the Assignhams are annoying, why James’s characters don’t seem to discuss anything other than the relationships that serve the storyline, creating grand houses, the urge to line-edit James’s very long sentences, pre-modern novelists, how The Ambassadors inspires nightmares, James’s class structure, robber barons, whether or not the descendants of rich people are friendly, how a cinematic sensibility meshes with James, taking The Golden Bowl apart, wealthy people and privacy, the Rockefellers, private islands, Andrew Carnegie, Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan, Frick and the Homestead Strike, Gardiners Island, the friendship between Edith Wharton and Henry James, The House of Mirth vs. The Golden Bowl, having a taste for James, the number of literary people who don’t like James, narrative deficiencies in postmodern novels, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala taking narrative liberties with Charlotte in her adaptation of The Golden Bowl, the tolerable qualities of dictators, vintage clothing and the rich, Rome as an inspirational force for literature, how cities change and how novelists adapt to those changes when writing about these cities, the Hudson Valley, transposing James’s London setting to New York, growing up in London, the dying Victorian echoes in British vernacular, how once dependable London tea spots have become gentrified, the UK aristocracy, passive-aggressive behavior in London, James’s life in England, British politeness and indirection, extramarital affairs, secrets that are buried in families, the secrets within James’s novels, Henry James vs. Lost, the insanity of rereading The Golden Bowl, Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Virginia Woolf and James, when critics praise novels that nobody really likes, Jonathan Franzen, overwritten sentences, hate reading and rage, Henry James’s overuse of “connexion” and his annoying Anglophilia, the fluctuating importance of James, James Joyce vs. Henry James, the lack of humor in James, debating the “poetic” elements of James, how James dictating his work created resentment more than a century later, carpal tunnel syndrome, James as a closeted gay man, the regrettable depiction of women in The Golden Bowl, Proust, how James’s style evolved in his later work, the Oscar Wilde trial, how James’s personal dealings with women may have affected his literary depiction of women, how the transformation of marriage in the 20th century has affected portrayals of women in literature, #metoo and Henry James, the many books on Henry James in 2004 (Coim Toibin, David Lodge, et al.), women and jobs, postwar novelists, Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, George Eliot and Dorothea in Middlemarch, economic developments in the 20th century, writing and children, Iris Murdoch, and feminism.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

CORRESPONDENT: Going back to the whole Henry James problem, here’s the thing. Right now, I’m actually going through all of Edith Wharton. And I love her. I love her. I have no such problems with her. She’s amazing. The House of Mirth. The Age of Innocence. All those ghost stories. She depicts class far more intelligently and far more subtly and with far greater nuance than Henry James. And not only that. I have to ding Henry James for taking ten years to befriend her after Edith Wharton was saying, “Hey, Henry! I love you!” And then he takes ten years and does that false modesty thing. Please give me a reason why I should give Henry James another shot. You talk about the mystery and the ambiguity. I look at his sentences and honestly I see something that is completely on the nose. I don’t see characters here who have the great vivacity of Lily Bart from The House of Mirth or any of these other great classics of that era. You know?

SMITH: Well, you know, I have to agree with you in some bizarre way. I love Edith Wharton. Of course they were friends. They became friends. He was kinda snotty about her first short story. But they became very close. She admired him so much. But I think you’re right in some way. With regard to The Golden Bowl, the only way to see it is as a mystery. But you have to go through these filaments of language and find the truth underneath it. And you have to have a taste for it. And I happen to like being surrounded by the miasma of Henry James, But Wharton is a great, great novelist. She tells you a story in plain English that you can lose yourself in. And I think human beings love stories. They tell stories every day. And my primary goal as a novelist is to tell a good story. So let’s just say that Henry James is a hobby of mine that not everyone shares.

CORRESPONDENT: I know. And look, I want to cultivate this taste, Dinitia, but I am having incredible difficulty with this late period — especially these last three novels. To me, Henry James is the most offensive mansplainer in all of American literature. Am I just missing some DNA that will allow me to appreciate Henry James? Come on! Stump for this guy for me!

SMITH: You make me laugh. I’ve learned as a novelist — and as a sort of literary person — just how many of my literary friends don’t like certain authors.

For example, I tend to not like a lot of contemporary novels, which are kind of postmodern, fragmentary, and usually about a woman with a husband betraying her. Or who doesn’t like her children. I think we can all be forgiven for not liking these novels, which are very, very successful right now.

But I think we all can be forgiven. I might discuss books with my friends and discover. There are certain authors that they just can’t abide by and they are very talented. I’ve learned to forgive myself when I find the authors that I don’t like. I suggest you forgive yourself and leave them alone and read Edith Wharton!

Music used in this show is licensed through Neosounds.

The Lies, Libel, and Deceit of Molly McArdle: Rebuttal to a Hatchet Job, a Personal Reckoning with What I Actually Did, and an Exposé of Literary McCarthyism

“In 1970 my mother said to me, ‘I would have been glad to testify to get back at those bastards for what they did…But I suspected, from my own experiences working within the Hollywood system, that people used the blacklist as a way of getting back at other people for things that had nothing to do with politics. And that’s not unique, because it happens in academe too. A lot of people who testified did so to get back at people who had gotten jobs away from them, who had won assignments. It was an opportune moment; in a very cynical way, it was a golden opportunity. This was the government who wanted your testimony. It was sanctioned.”

— Jacoba Atlas, interviewed in Victor Navasky’s Naming Names, an excellent volume on McCarthyism.

“Conformity is a way of guaranteeing and manifesting respectability among those who are not sure that they are respectable enough. The nonconformity of others appears to such persons as a frivolous challenge to the whole order of things they are trying hard to become part of. Naturally it is resented, and the demand for conformity in public becomes at once an expression of such resentment and a means of displaying one’s own soundness. This habit has a tendency to spread from politics into intellectual and social spheres, where it can be made to challenge almost anyone whose pattern of life is different and who is imagined to enjoy a superior social position — notably, as one agitator put it, those in the ‘parlors of the sophisticated, the intellectuals, the so-called academic minds.’”

— Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Caonservative Revolt –1954”

“Google is an instrument of humiliation. I google a rival to see if I can discover unflattering tidbits. And the very process of googling is humiliating to the rival (in magical form), but also humiliating to me. Any time I exercise the privilege of ‘googling for the hell of it’ I am humiliating myself.” — Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation

“I can’t beat it.” — Manchester by the Sea

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I slept for many weeks in a stale caged room, surrounded by fragile people who were just as broken and twice as devastated. I had no refuge. I had no family. They left me for dead and still want me vanished to this day. My partner wanted me invisible. I can’t say that I blame her. It seemed as if I didn’t have any friends, although I will always remember the rare ones who did not give up on me as I lived in this hopeless way station of ceaseless grief. Some part of me knew that I had to find a way to appreciate what I still had, which was a roof over my head and a psychiatrist meeting me for about ten minutes each week. It wasn’t much, but the room at the hospital was still more spacious and a bit more private than the cramped expanse I would later land at the homeless shelter. I lived with a friendly schizophrenic who talked in many voices, a shattered congenial man who came to New York to reclaim unspeakable loss from his past, along with several dozen troubled souls. After a few weeks, there were occasional escorted trips up the elevator to play basketball, where I practiced aloof moves on a rooftop asphalt slab that felt something like heaven. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to orderlies quietly sifting through my scant possessions, looking for contraband razors or anything else that I might use to kill myself. That was, after all, why I was there. It was what I had tried to do on the morning of September 26, 2014, after I cracked and did something terrible the night before, something that was fueled by alcohol and a mental breakdown.

I took showers in which I had to dry my naked vulnerable heartbroken body — always surveiled by the cameras — with paper towels. The woman I once loved, the woman who I personally pledged with every honorable bone to leave alone, had served court papers on me as I was trying to recover. I had received the cruel and unnecessary envelope just after finishing a relaxation session. I accepted the summons and burst into tears and fell shellshocked into a blanketless bed that was not mine for what seemed hours, wondering how much lower I’d plummet. She knew that I didn’t have the funds to defend myself, although I was appointed an attorney, arriving embarrassingly late to the first court appearance weeks later after I’d been rustled out of bed only hours before, moved to another shelter at four in the morning in a part of the city I did not know. I am never late. I pride myself with being on time. I am a man who, for better or worse, shows up. But I was late. I was also exhausted, disoriented, heartbroken, and humiliated. She knew that I was never violent towards her, much less any person (save for self-defense against a man who attacked me at Coney Island and, to be completely transparent, a thin young man I verbally confronted at the Franklin Avenue subway station, who repeatedly punched me as I handed him his dropped books and who I never once hit back), and that my father was a damaged man who burned me with cigarettes, who choked me, who abused me, who tried to suffocate me as my sister watched, who told me he loved me just before popping me in the jaw. I had worked very hard to escape this cycle of violence, quietly volunteering off and on over the years with domestic violence hotlines, often interceding whenever I saw a man threatening a woman, and disarming countless near-pugilistic situations with my wit. Now I was this deadly man by legal implication. It was just about the worst thing that she could have done to me. And I suspect she knew this. But then my mentally addled and drunken behavior on the night of September 25, 2014, which momentarily sullied her well-deserved reputation before she excelled quite well without me, was probably the worst thing I could have done to her. All acts of justice, large and small, come down to petty retribution in the end. But the question we’re too hopped up on hurt to answer is when it should stop.

She had visited me once. It wasn’t a long visit. There was upset and sadness in her hardened brown eyes. Warm orbs that once jittered with joy were now forever gone, reduced to a dimming memory of a shimmering figure now more mythical than real. I knew I’d never get back what I once had, that I’d somehow managed to lose it all, and this cold truth caused me to cry for months, even though I had to parcel out my tears because I rarely had space to myself and I couldn’t let the rough men I lived with see me weak. In our last meeting at the hospital, I saw her hands shake. Her voice quavered. Her curls, which once pulled towards me of their own accord, now retreated away with a natural instinct from the suicidal madman. I remember her being so afraid of me that she rattled upon the door, begging for someone to let her out, even though the door was open. I wasn’t in my right mind and had no defense. The nurses and the orderlies, who were all so terribly kind and who later told me how much they liked my writing and a few poetic songs I composed for others to sing, went out of their way to get me a pen and paper. They believed I could win her back. I knew they were wrong. I had little more than twenty minutes to write her a poem. I am sure that the incoherence I put down in words scared her too. For many months, I would have no private place to recover from my crackup and my heartbreak: the terrible, terrible pain of seeing someone who once looked at me with such love shudder and retaliate because she was afraid.

I watched minds break and I witnessed troubled men piss their pants. There was a brilliant Russian intellectual with an unruly shock of wild jet hair demanding his own room to escape the “peons.” There were many very smart people inside, but they were all fragile and broken and needed to get through their pain. At least two of my cellmates — one offering to pay me to house sit, later buying me an extravagant sushi dinner that felt beyond my wildest dreams after I lost thirty pounds on a benefits card diet of cheap sandwiches (always cold, never hot) — took their lives in the year that followed. I played chess with a man because he was lonely and nobody else wanted to push forward pawns with him and, well, I wasn’t going anywhere. And I won. It was a perfunctory victory, one arrived at in a heart-battered haze. Then he sought me out. Because I was the only one he couldn’t beat. And I let him win. Because he needed that and that seemed the decent thing to do. Like all of us, he needed a little hope. He needed just a little dignity, a little faith in himself. This was, after all, the only way to beat the shame and accept the truth of who you were and what you did. But when I left the hospital, reclaiming the confiscated phone that got me in trouble, I had no idea how much more public shaming awaited me online. Most of it involved actions that I never committed.

* * *

Jon Ronson has written about victims of public shaming sitting paralyzed at their kitchen table for nearly a year, frozen and broken by online impressions of what they are not tendered by people they have never met, debased in their efforts to rebuild their lives and to do the hard work of confronting and correcting the impulses that led to their transgressions in the first place. No amount of kindness or honorable action or good faith efforts at redemption will ever win over the crowd. The roots of this cultural disease reside in vengeance trumping compassion, of myths replacing facts, of false allegations begetting more false allegations, of the whole putrid and untrue stew being summoned whenever you say anything, no matter how kind and thoughtful. In an effort to keep up with the fickle jonesing from easily angered social media consumers, longform journalism, which was once committed to an airtight presentation of the facts, has aligned itself with the absolutism of public shaming. It has faltered from its original mission, with cynical editors crafting and encouraging outrage-inducing clickbait, often published at places like Slate and Salon, that have caused perfectly decent writers to debase themselves as they willfully traffic in half-truths for a paycheck.

When Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely began investigating an alleged rape gang operating at the University of Virginia in July 2014, she was driven by a passionate need to redress a great wrong. She became so consumed by a larger cultural malady, one that certainly requires a devoted army of journalists, essayists, poets, and fiction writers to keep in check, that the underlying facts, which disproved her thesis, no longer mattered. A real journalist might have clung to doubt and skepticism, or gone out of her way to paint the scene with a subtle and careful brush, but Erdely was determined to push forward even when the professed ringleader of the gang was never interviewed or found out. Erdely never bothered to interview key witnesses who offered differing accounts. She believed too easily in a story that kept changing, one that mimicked details from books and television shows. And because Erdely made several serious mistakes, she set back a vital discussion of an important issue plaguing our nation, one recently reopened with the many courageous women assaulted by Trump stepping forward.

On June 10, 2015, a little more than a week after I escaped my homelessness and moved into a very hard-won one bedroom apartment, the universe did not grant me the dignity to celebrate my near insurmountable triumph against incredibly bleak odds. That day, Brooklyn Magazine published a 9,000 word libelous diatribe written by a self-proclaimed “writer and editor” named Molly McArdle. The article was a nasty seven layer burrito stuffed with hearsay, uncorroborated rumors, conjecture, quote manipulation, speculation, outright lies, willful exclusion of key facts, and other spurious claims that were designed to falsely portray me as a monster with a pattern of abusive behavior that had been silently tolerated for many years by the publishing industry. It was quite uncanny that this reckless person’s name was so close to the infamous witchhunter Joseph McCarthy. For like McCarthy, McArdle had no intent whatsoever in pursuing the truth. “I am more scared of silence than false or petty speech,” declares the article in its final paragraph, meaning that falsehoods and invented grievances matter more to McArdle than the facts. She sought to destroy a man who had suffered a nervous breakdown and committed the worst mistake of his life: a man who lost his home, his partner, his shaky and far from lucrative stature, many friends, and likely the ability to publish anything, no matter how good, for the rest of his natural life. McArdle’s article was also anti-intellectual fundamentalism of the type that the historian Richard Hofstadter once called the one-hundred per cent mentality: “a mind totally committed to the full range of the dominant popular fatuities and determined that no one shall have the right to challenge them.” It was this one-hundred per cent mentality that a group of novelists, publishing insiders, and industry people chose to believe in, willing to promulgate any lie if it meant stubbing out the voice and ruining the life of of a vociferous critic. And if these smart people can willfully buy into such a deceiving and prejudicial account, one riddled with at least fifty-eight unsubstantiated statements and factual errors, then imagine the myths that will bamboozle Americans in our new era of fake news.

There was a time when irresponsible journalists who lied about and fabricated their stories were held more accountable by the public, when Janet Malcolm’s wisdom about impulsive subjectivity and character assassination was better heeded. But a compelling lie or the Liberty Valance idea of “printing the legend” — such as the false claim that Alexander Hamilton called the American people “a great beast,” first falsely promulgated as a fourth-hand rumor more than fifty years after Hamilton’s death — has an ability to latch itself onto a person for life like an unshakable leech, overriding considerable accomplishments and providing no possible allowance for reform. This tendency has become worse in our age of social media and outrage culture, where rapturous fury is rarely tempered with the clarity of thoughtful reflection or even a proper consideration of what actually happened. The experience is often as bad as a prison sentence or a financial setback or a bad breakup, causing pain not only for the wrongly accused party but for his friends and family.

Yet readers continue to have a great appetite for perceived monsters, with even the sharpest blades in the kitchen willing to believe in an untruth if it is juicy enough. Before Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass were discovered to be fabricators, Janet Cooke famously reported on a eight-year-old heroin addict who moved Washington Post readers (including then mayor Marion Barry) to track down this victim, who only existed in Cooke’s imagination. Cooke managed to fool many smart people and even won a Pulitzer Prize for her efforts.

So what today of the self-styled reporter who invents lies about a real person and tarnishes that person’s reputation when the facts don’t line up? What of the journalist who wallows in malice and ice cream rewards like a spoiled adolescent when the lion’s share of her story cannot withstand an extremely rigorous challenge? What of the slipshod character assassin who goes out of her way to destroy the reputation of a man who made one deeply terrible mistake (and a few minor ones) that he has already suffered greatly for, that he continues to seek help and care for, and who must now expend precious time answering to potential employers and creative collaborators and lovers who cannot reconcile the kind, capable, and caring person before them with the alleged demon represented in a work of scabrous sensationalism? If “comment is free and facts are sacred,” as C.P. Scott has famously observed, should not the narrative uniting the twain be rooted in something more diligent than pumping out “the first draft of history”? Should not a journalist go out of her way to take up her allegations directly with the source or accurately set forth the facts to slam dunk her claims?

On September 26, 2014, I tried to take my life. And I want to be clear that what I did the night before was terribly wrong and over the line in every way. It was not, however, the final capstone in a sustained run as Edward Champion the literary terrorist. I tried to kill myself after I became massively drunk, suffered a nervous breakdown, committed a diabolical act on Twitter that involved threatening to publish the name of someone who had photographed novelist Porochista Khakpour in a compromising position, which I ended up tweeting and which my then partner deleted soon after. This came after Khakpour had spread poisonous lies about me and whipped up the fury of the literary community. I was broken and desperate and traumatized and had the kind of life-altering meltdown that no amount of regrets or remorse or apologies or setbacks or soul-searching can ever appear to atone for. I was besieged by hate from all corners and lost everything I had.

Many articles followed in the wake of these events when I was in the hospital trying to get well, my only refuge a homeless shelter on the outside where people shot up and smoked K2 (a cheap and deeply potent synthetic drug with a dreadfully lingering second-hand odor more industrial than any pesticide; it is one of the worst smells I have ever experienced) and shouted at all hours and contended with the indignities of a callous and corrupt and graft-happy and largely indifferent administration that was supposed to help them. It was there that I barely escaped very real threats from a psychopathic champion boxer who slept across from me, recently released from Rikers Island and not liked by anyone, who regularly rattled me when he wasn’t starting bloody fights and who sent several of my fellow residents to the hospital. But eight months after the furor had died down, McArdle felt the need to dig her self-righteous heel into what remained of the twitching corpse. No amount of punishment or humiliation was enough for her. If she could use prevarication and invention to bolster her case, she would. She was right about one thing. The “literary community,” as last year’s Charlie Hebdo PEN Gala protest revealed in abundance, is no longer tolerant of anyone who even remotely challenges its rightfully rocky hold on culture. Indeed, why face an opinion you despise, why argue smartly against it, when you can pretend it doesn’t exist or damn the odious orignator without knowing all the facts? The literary community was thus quite willing to believe McArdle’s fraudulent spin. It needed a bad guy, much as trolls need someone to crush. It failed to understand that writers are meant to be united rather than carving up solipsistic parcels of superficial territory that only a few dozen people care about at best.

McArdle created the mirage of journalism by talking to a lot of people, even though, as the evidence will soon abundantly demonstrate, when she wasn’t mangling her facts, she never bothered to perform due diligence to corroborate any of her claims. All she had to do was toss out a damning sentence that she could stitch to her Frankenstein monster of casual and reckless libel and wait for the greedy reward of ice cream after the article was published.

1

The irresponsible kernel was there from the beginning when, on June 29, 2014, McArdle announced her capitulation of objective bona-fides on Twitter, stating her intent to go after me, beginning with a prerigged thesis that I was someone who went out of his way to hurt and abuse people. McArdle started with an assumption of guilt and spent several months working on an article with the sole purpose of gainsaying more than a decade of honest journalism and positive contributions to the literary world, including 551 in-depth conversations with some of the finest minds on our planet. It was little more than a power grab, a temerarious hit job counting on the reliable monomania of mass rumor and cheap belief, designed to punch down an acerbic voice at the bottom of his game and the end of his rope. She never once called her assumptions into question or took up any of her points directly with me, save through a highly general email on May 7, 2015 that mentioned little more than writing a profile. Indeed, one of her most preposterous smoking guns on the charge that I am a misogynist, a misogynist so hopelessly set in his ways that thirty of the last fifty guests who appeared on Bat Segundo were women, was the apparent use of “cunnilingus” in a joking manner. By that measure, I suppose we should add The Awl‘s Alex Balk, Robin Williams, William Shakespeare (“tongue in your tail”), and Judd Apatow and James Franco onto the list of diabolical comedians hating and oppressing women through prolific usage of and reference to the C word. (See ¶103 below for statistics on how comparatively infrequent my usage was when stacked against other websites.)

When I telephoned a representative at Brooklyn Magazine asking for a retraction to McArdle’s piece and received no reply back, I decided to ignore the article and move on with my life. I truly did not fathom why anybody in the universe would be this obsessed with me. What I did not count on was that people were indeed more interested in me than I was. While I have lived a very happy and positive life, attempting to atone for my sins trying to be more peaceful and graceful after rebounding from a down-and-out existence where stabbings and drug use were regular occurrences, and while I have clawed my way up from an abyss of poverty, humiliations, and joblessness that I would not wish on my worst enemy, I have seen my personal and professional life severely damaged because of McArdle’s article. Where other writers, such as Elon Green, were sensible enough to confine their essays to opinion and speculation (comment is, after all, free), McArdle recklessly and irresponsibly presented her distorted and blinkered version as the truth. And there is simply no escaping what my name now represents.

carmodytweet

I have consulted with attorneys who have suggested that I have a case for defamation, largely because McArdle acted with “actual malice,” recklessly perpetuating a story that had been killed by The New Republic by occluding key details that, as the considerable evidence demonstrates, show that the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan standard does not apply. But in order to carry forward with a lawsuit, I have been informed that it would involve a retainer ranging somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. Aside from not being able to afford this staggering sum (along with any exorbitant costs beyond that), especially after a tough uphill climb from homelessness, a protracted legal battle for financial restitution doesn’t feel nearly as appropriate as factual challenge. And in our epoch of Peter Thiel-financed bullying, I truly don’t feel that stifling the free press is something I want to be part of. I only want journalists to be fair, accurate, and reasonable. Also, if I want to evolve and become a better person, it has to be based on the facts. It has to be based on who I really am and what I really did. This very long document isn’t merely a rebuttal. It’s a personal reckoning. It’s also an examination of how common we are in our perceived transgressions, for some of my accusers have committed far worse behavior than I am alleged to have done. But I am not trying to settle scores. I am trying to come to terms with the facts.

Another reason I didn’t want to respond was because this involved the moral dilemma of republishing emails, instant messages, and Twitter DMs from parties McArdle who interviewed for her piece. I am a big believer in the covenant of private communication, or whatever remains of it in our age of massive data breaches (Sony, Ashley Madison, Target, Anthem, eBay, Wikileaks, Russia’s claws slithering inside the Beltway) and NSA wiretapping. But if people are going to libel me without presenting the underlying facts of the actual correspondence, then I must reveal, with considerable reluctance, the misrepresentations and conduct of my accusers. I shall confine my citations only to those parties who spoke public untruths about me. And after this article is published, I shall maintain my long-held policy of keeping all correspondence sent to me in confidence.

Despite my progress, my life continues to be jarred because of this defamatory article. And I am fairly confident that McArdle still basks in her hatchet job, possessing no remorse or reflection for what she did to me. In a December 19, 2016 tweet, McArdle, who I have blocked on Twitter, intercepted a tense but conciliatory Twitter conversation I was having with Colin Dickey, where I pointed out to Dickey that only four of the article’s six dozen or so claims were valid. McArdle declared, “Which four claims were true? Read to find out!” Truth and journalistic integrity do not matter to her. And the Twitter crowd would rather pass the popcorn and delight in misfortune manifested by myth rather than conjure up some spell of compassion. There is no modern day Joseph Welch asking, “Have you no sense of decency?” Noblesse oblige died sometime in the 21st century, frogmarched and gassed in the same concentration camp that took out bipartisanship and forgiveness.

While I have been fortunate enough to land a very hard-won job with serious responsibilities, I have been denied writing and editing gigs. I became a well-loved regular at a Village bar, where I befriended many of the staff and other customers. Until one night when I accidentally paid with my credit card instead of cash and the staff caught my last name and Googled me and became frosty towards me. And my refuge was taken away from me. My dating life is little more than a string of short-term affairs, each fizzling out the very minute I reveal my last name. I am nothing less than kind and courteous to a woman. She puts my full name into Google. And in most cases, it’s over. (To cite one of many all too common examples, I went on a date with a marvelous woman who I very much liked. She knocked over her beer, which I proceeded to mop up. I was polite and nothing less than a gentleman. This was easy. Because she was very nice, smart, and we hit it off. I wanted to know more about her. (I am sorry to be so general with my description, but I really don’t want to cause this woman any more grief.) This woman told me that she had been on far too many dates and said that I was the first man she had felt anything for in five years. I respected this, did not want to exploit this, and said that I would be happy to take it as slow as she needed. We both wanted to see each other again. She bragged to all her friends about this very nice and smart man that she had met. Unfortunately, one of her friends had been involved in the books world and I discovered, mere hours before the second date, that this friend had scared her off. And there was no appeal. I went to see the feminist hip-hop show I had bought two tickets for alone.) A few “journalists” went out of their way to shame me this year by outing my OKCupid profile. Some women have been kind enough to stay after I’ve told them what happened to me (and I have remained friends with many women I’ve dated), but this means I have to work ten times as hard to find a partner. The happy family I hope to make someday to replace the broken and hateful one I came from may never happen. I’ve taken improv classes at UCB in an attempt to find a new and healthier outlet for the performative streaks that landed me in trouble in the past and, despite being nothing less than affable to my classmates, I was ratted out to the registrar for “rejecting the UCB philosophy” after some student discovered the article. (The registrar, who was a good guy, and I patched it up by telephone.) And when I passed the class, I was quietly dropped from the improv practice sessions. My classmates ended up forming an improv team without me.

But what truly pained me, what caused me unspeakable sorrow, was when two podcast producers who I had never met used the article to lead a campaign to kick me out of the audio drama community. You see, I’ve been working on an audio drama project for a while. I’ve worked on it every day of 2016. It’s my attempt to do right as a person and as an artist. I’ve written some very visceral scripts and, after many years of hiding myself within the seductive certainty of clever writing, I reached a point where I could at long last be real and emotionally vulnerable in my work. As a temporary member of the audio drama community, I went out of my way to be kind, encouraging, professional, and constructive. I did not utter an unkind word about anyone. It was easy to be kind because these people were very kind. But my impeccable behavior, which flowed quite naturally from may largely sanguine disposition, was not enough to overturn the taint of the article. These two podcasters were so driven by malicious zeal that, on July 22, 2016, they even rejected my good faith efforts to meet up and buy them beers, include them in my thoughtful Audio Drama Sunday interview series, and support their project on Patreon, for which they refunded my donation within seven minutes. I took my leave. I didn’t want to cause anyone any undue upset. But I also took it very hard. For I had done nothing wrong other than to have a past that had been distorted into a largely untrue hatchet job.

So it’s become necessary to respond to the article. It’s hurting my life. It’s not going away from Google anytime soon. It’s not helping me come to terms with what I did. There’s also the worry that if McArdle plays this loose with the truth in describing me, she may very well do this to someone else.

I don’t wish to let myself off the hook here. Part of reckoning with your personal history, good and bad, is being completely up front about your flaws. Even before my nervous breakdown, there were a few instances in which my communications were over the top, many of which I have documented in full detail below. I’m not perfect. I don’t know who the hell is.

If McArdle had confined her article to the night of September 25, 2014, as others did, I wouldn’t have to respond with this lengthy rebuttal. McArdle is absolutely right to condemn my behavior triggered by a mental breakdown. And I can personally guarantee that no amount of hatred, scorn, relish in my continued suffering, or vengeance that McArdle or anyone else possesses for me can ever equal how terrible, contrite, and ashamed I feel about what happened. The question here is how much suffering is enough. I lost everything I had. I suffered a mental collapse. I was locked up in a hospital. I was harassed by my abusive mother calling me at all hours on the hallway pay phone as I was trying to get well. I was thoroughly humiliated and heartbroken. I spent months of my life homeless and jobless after being shunned by my family and by people who I thought were my friends. I lost the woman I loved. Is that enough? It is clearly not my question to answer. Some of you may undoubtedly feel that I have not received enough punishment, that I should continue to suffer for the rest of my life. Some of you may feel that I deserve no mercy, no compassion, no dignity, that I should neither have happiness nor offer happiness to others – despite making serious and good faith adjustments to my life with therapy and positivism.

Here is the truth: My transgressions were hardly the frequent and rampant run that McArdle has made them out to be, nor did they reflect an abusive pattern carried out over years. The article severely discounts the considerably more numerous cordial communications I had with writers, publicists, editors, and related parties for more than a decade. (See ¶¶60-61 below for examples of how I typically conducted myself.) Moreover, the many death threats and belligerent communications I received from writers (including a Pulitzer finalist and a National Book Award finalist) over who they believe me to be have suggested very strongly that my extreme behavior on one regrettable night isn’t nearly as uncommon as what goes on regularly among a savage and insular group masquerading as progressive-minded champions of literature.

Because this is a very long document with much evidential spillover, I have included two appendices for the sake of keeping this clear and organized. The first appendix outlines in complete detail how the Twitter exchange between Khakpour and I happened, how Khakpour willfully lied and distorted our communications, and how I, in turn, reacted with even more despicable desperation. The second appendix responds to Jessa Crispin’s defamatory claims by including the entirety of our correspondence. Crispin has been making libelous claims about me for many years and her false assertions helped persuade the literary world to howl for my blood, yet conveniently she has never produced any evidence. Unfortunately for her, I have copies of all of our exchanges. Her claims do not hold up. She is a liar and a libeler in the Goebbels tradition.

I have responded to each claim by paragraph number. I do not want to give Brooklyn Magazine any traffic, but the curious can download a copy of the article here.

I have done my best to be as complete as possible and have tried to mitigate against any subjective views by sticking with the facts. I have, however, offered a few personal asides in some cases, in an effort to point out how one’s own shame and guilt is often unseen as the crowd cries loud for retribution. Since I am defending myself, I am sure that my defense will be called into question anyway. And it should. The only way we learn anything in life is through constant challenge. But if there are any mistakes, I will correct this article and hold myself fully to the fire.

One further but very important note: This is a rebuttal grounded in facts, not an invitation for harassment in any form. I seek with this article to not only reveal the truth, but to consider, where I am able to, how my words may have caused the literary community to condemn me. (An interlude on satire and the thorny subject of violence expressed in words can be found sometime after ¶83 below.) I realize that my writing voice is loud, erudite, and often aggressive. But this confession is about how I have actually behaved. I am holding my own terrible deportment on one night up to even more exacting standards than McArdle’s “journalism.”

Claim, ¶2: “On September 26, 2014, Ed Champion stood again…”

FALSE. I made only one suicide attempt on the morning of September 26, 2014. (Reported by The Brooklyn Paper, September 26, 2014.) Why is such a detail important? Because a person who tries to kill himself always remembers the date. The date is a shameful shroud that slowly becomes invisible as the time passes, but it’s a permanent reminder burning into the deepest parts of your soul with the telltale message that you were once so hopeless that you wanted to end it all. Every day away from this diaphanous millstone is a painful baby step, an increment measured in tears that becomes easier as the weeks and the months and the years roll on. But when someone disrupts this melancholy marker by planting another one, it’s akin to smothering a toddler who is just learning to walk. For just as there’s no going back to your life if you do successfully kill yourself, there is also no returning to the person you were before. You must learn how to live again. It was for this reason that I returned to the Manhattan Bridge on September 26, 2015 and walked across it with a deep sense of joy. Finding the beauty and marvel in life is the only way you can beat the suffering. September 26, 2014 will be forever burned into my memory in the same way that others remember their wedding anniversaries or the birthdays of their children or a moment in which their career took off. Despite the dark context, it’s a date I must live with.

Claim, ¶2: “…had written a despairing note on Facebook the night before.”

TRUE on despairing note. FALSE on time. The Facebook post, since deleted, that McArdle incorrectly quotes (see brackets) from in ¶1 (“If I have any advice to young people, I urge you [to] never write or become part of the publishing industry.”) was actually posted on the morning of September 26, 2014 circa 7:00 AM. See below screenshot from Brandy Zadrozny (“38 minutes ago”). Time stamp for Twitter is Western time. Zadrozny’s tweet is 4:45 AM, or 7:45 AM Eastern time.

2

Claim, ¶4: “’Middling Millennials’ overflowed with grotesque descriptions of Gould’s body. She is ‘cold,’ ‘a minx’; she was ‘hatched’ rather than born; and Champion speculates about her ‘dewy newborn hands’ reaching ‘with hollow hunger’ for Twitter even before her umbilical cord is cut.” This is later used to buttress a claim in ¶5 that the essay is “starkly misogynistic.”

GROSSLY MISLEADING BUT SOMEWHAT TRUE. Some very respected writers informed me privately that my essay was not misogynistic. This was very kind, but I don’t entirely agree with them, yet I don’t believe that the 11,000 word piece that I wrote in protest of Emily Gould and superficial thinking was rooted in a desire to hate women, even though I now recognize how some of the language that I used could be perceived that way and am forced to conclude that the essay was partially misogynistic. The paragraph’s topic sentence suggests that the essay “overflow[s] with grotesque descriptions of Gould’s body,” but the examples cited are metaphorical, mostly aligned with a recurring motif of baptism and birth.

Uses of “cold”:

“One clearly sees that, even before she poured the Internet’s water over her naked confessional form in an oddly bathetic baptism, Gould’s relationship with other people was predicated upon diminishing their perspectives and rigging the narrative so that she emerged as the coldblooded white bread winner.” The use of “naked confessional form” here is clearly metaphorical. “Cold” is used in reference to her temperament.

“Did Gould have any sympathy, any sense of the impact of her actions, or any understanding about the way the book business worked (even after her Hyperion stint)? Not at all. She was colder than the mist on a chilled champagne glass.” No reference to the corporeal.

Use of “minx”:

“But when a minx’s head is so deeply deposited up her own slimy passage, it’s often hard to see the sunshine.”

McArdle’s case against me is far from airtight, but in the interest of entertaining her interpretation and trying to grow as a person, I would say that, if the essay is in any way “starkly misogynistic,” it’s probably with this line. This essay was written from a place of welled up anger that had been boiling for years. I am deeply ashamed that it exploded in this feral form with this line, which I should never have included. It was clearly an elegant variation on Gould having her head up her own ass. Many readers interpreted an altogether different cavity from the one I described. It never occurred to me that I was objectifying Gould at the time that I wrote it. And I have in the intervening years reached out to feminist thinkers and worked with therapists in an effort to deracinate this impulse. (As ¶¶99-100 reveal below, while I’d hardly call myself a monk, I rarely sexualized women in my writing.) Two people (both women) reviewed this paragraph before it was published and did not say anything. I made the mistake of not running the essay by someone who was more sensitive to language. And I definitely made the mistake of letting anger overcome my otherwise progressive-minded views on gender inequality, which I am firmly against.

“Minx” is typically a ”a young, pert, wanton girl” or a woman who is daring. This was not intended as a misogynist term, but to reference the image that Gould promoted of herself in both her New York Times Magazine cover story (“‘I’m bad at describing sex, or maybe everyone is,’ I wrote at one point, but I didn’t let that stop me from trying!”) and her memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever. Nevertheless, the word’s etymology goes back to the Low German minsk, which is a vulgar term for “wench, hussy, slut.” And I now comprehend that it’s pretty commonly understood that “minx” is misogynist. Needless to say, I won’t be using this word ever again in describing anyone.

Use of “hatched”:

“Emily Gould was hatched in Silver Spring, Maryland on October 13, 1981: the bouncing daughter of a public relations man and a self-employed lawyer and mediator.” This sentence does not refer to Gould’s body in any way.

Use of “dewy newborn hands,” et al.:

“Had social media and smartphones been around more than three decades ago, it is almost certain that her dewy newborn hands would have stretched out with hollow hunger to replace the default egg avatar on her Twitter account not long after overworked doctors snipped her umbilical cord.” Again, this is a reference to baptism and birth.

Claim, ¶7: “Minutes later he tweeted a picture of a bridge walkway.”

FALSE. I never tweeted an image of a bridge walkway on June 26th, 2014. This suggestion of intent is recycled from an erroneous article published by an equally irresponsible writer named Miles Klee at The Daily Dot on June 27th, 2014, which took a tweet that I published on June 20, 2014 (and later deleted), claiming that this was evidence that I was going to kill myself. I had no suicidal thoughts when I took this picture, but very much enjoyed the view. I am sure you would too, if you ever have the honor or the good fortune to walk across the Triborough Bridge. And if you examine the tweet timestamp, you will find that the time I tweeted the picture was June 20, 2014, at 8:10 PM

4

Claim, ¶10: “Millions writer Maureen Murphy offered up a screenshot of a comment Champion had directed towards her: ‘Learn how to think or you’ll end up dead and useless.’”

MISLEADING. The claim here is used to suggest that I threatened Maureen Murphy with this line, but within the context of what Murphy quoted, I clearly proffered a philosophical question, whereby one is alive and thinking or dead and not thinking. This is no different from Max Müller’s sentiment in Science of Language: “Words without thoughts are dead sounds.” Or Samuel Johnson’s idea of existence without thought: “He that lives in that torpid insensibility, wants nothing of a carcase but putrefaction.” Murphy never claimed that I threatened her. This observation is used by McArdle to buttress Maud Newton’s unsubstantiated claim in the same paragraph: “The venom is so widespread and continuous few people keep up with the extent of it.” Here is a link to Murphy’s tweet and to the Millions comment in question.

5

Claim, ¶11: “’Middling Millennials,’ the collective voice of my Twitter feed suggested, did not come out of left field. How long had this been going on? I wondered. Why hadn’t anything been done about it? What could be done now? And who would be the person, or people, to do it?”

followed by ¶12:

“When he very publicly disparaged another woman online in September, it looked to me not like a duplicate of what had happened in June but like the prolonged conclusion of what June had begun: an individual and an industry coming to grips with a pattern of abuse that stretched back over a decade.”

FALSE PROPOSITION. McArdle’s willingness to play armchair shrink with someone she has never met or spoken with belies her baleful intent. The suggestion here is that my Emily Gould essay was the peremptory cri de coeur of an abusive and threatening man who terrorized the literary world for more than ten years. McArdle suggests that there is a “pattern of abuse,” yet the examples that she serves up throughout the essay are easily debunked by her specious evidential support and the actual correspondence I had with the interviewed parties.

Claim, ¶14: “The catalyst, according to Khakpour, was a comment Champion had written on her Facebook page that disparaged Slate senior editor Dan Kois, a man on his lengthy list of personae non gratae. Khakpour deleted it, perhaps signaling to Champion that she had finally sided with his many censors—had, in fact, become one herself.”

FALSE. Aside from the preposterous suggestion that I maintained a Nixon-style “Enemies List,” the argument against this claim could very well be that McArdle was not entitled to conduct due diligence. But this is nevertheless a one-sided account that fails to tell the full truth. The catalyst for what set me over the edge was the combination of alcohol, mental health issues, and Porochista Khakpour calling me “shockingly nasty” and then railing against me as “cruel and abusive,” suggesting that I was a stalker, when in fact this was not the case. (See Appendix A: The Porochista Chronicles, which documents the entirety of what actually happened. I am ashamed of my reaction.)

Claim, ¶18: “Every agent in the world was rejecting him…That’s why his final tweets where he’s outing me, being really nasty to me, what he’s really saying is fuck you publishing. I’m just a weird symbolic sacrifice.”

FALSE. Aside from the astonishing narcissism driving the “symbolic sacrifice” claim, I establish in Appendix A that Khakpour’s venomous and frenetic communications helped inspire me to crack and do something stupid and horrific. (Again, this reaction was my fault, my gormless and insensate alcohol-fueled decision, my crackup.) Moreover, I only submitted my novel, They Came for Blood, to ten agents, many of whom requested the full manuscript. This is a comparatively small number of agents to query and a decent conversion rate. This unsubstantiated line is adopted by McArdle to paint me as a failed writer.

Claim, ¶22: “’It’s hard to overstate what a positive, moderating force she’s been for him,’ said blogger Eric Rosenfield. Weinman ‘practically defines the term ‘long-suffering.’”

FALSE AND MISLEADING. In my modest friendship with Eric Rosenfeld, he was consistently rude, antisocial, and outright clueless, even though I fondly remember a few times where we sang Bowie songs in his apartment. I introduced him to one of my well-loved, longtime friends who moved out here from California and we all spent time together. There was one time, when we went out to eat in Chinatown, where Rosenfield harassed an overworked restaurant worker who was on his break and demanded to eat his soup. It was some of the most heartless and debasing behavior I have ever seen imparted to an underpaid blue-collar worker from someone I knew. And as someone who grew up relatively poor, this outrageous conduct pretty much signaled to me that I could not have this man in my life. Furthermore, when Rosenfield and I hosted the short-lived Wold Newton reading series at Word Brooklyn, Rosenfield made several science fiction/fantasy writers feel uncomfortable. I did my best to smooth things over with publicists and authors alike. I quietly extricated myself from my involvement with the reading series, but fulfilled my responsibilities. If he considered Weinman “a positive, moderating force,” it was only because I vocalized our collective horror and she didn’t.

Claim, ¶28: “This seemed to go well for a while, but the stream of work trickled to a stop ‘as he began progressively alienating the people who he needed to get freelance work from’ around 2011.”

MISLEADING, UNSUBSTANTIATED. Eric Rosenfield was not privy to my relationships with editors. Thus, he is not a reliable source. McArdle did not appear to contact any of the editors I worked with for this piece. This is, in short, sloppy and unfounded journalism. I had cordial relations with most of the editors I worked with (but with full candor, I will report that there was one unnamed editor, who I became angry with after he did something especially cruel to my former partner: a case where I was very unprofessional), but book review sections were being ruthlessly cut around the same time period, with freelancers among the first to get the axe.

Claim, ¶30: Jason Pinter’s claims. “I could hear Ed in the background screaming and ranting.” “He was completely unhinged.” McArdle sourced from three tweets below:

From September 30, 2014, 9:22 AM:

pinter1

From September 30, 2014, 9:24 AM:

pinter2

From September 30, 2014, 9:25 AM:

pinter3

A SUBJECTIVE MESS. PARTIALLY DISPUTED. I was certainly shouting that evening as the tweets came in. The only acts of violence I committed that night were punching a file cabinet and sliding my phone across a hardwood floor. I had no desire to be physically violent to anyone. This doesn’t excuse what I tweeted to Khakpour. At one point, Weinman called the police, but the police, seeing me sit quietly if sodden and near catatonic on the couch, told Weinman that they couldn’t do anything. So was I unhinged? Or was I in a state of shock? Does such a man deserve compassion or is he a monster who cannot possibly be forgiven? The atmosphere of the apartment was a bleak climate of fear, especially because the tweets from others were menacing. But what did Pinter actually hear? He wasn’t there. Was he permitting the impression generated by Twitter that evening to color and influence his viewpoint? More accurately, was he allowing his justifiable concern for a friend (Weinman, not me; despite the fact that I had nothing but positive things to say about him, Pinter viewed me as some stray diseased dog accompanying Weinman that he had to endure) to cause his own fears and perceptions to run wild? It seems very likely.

In an email exchange I had with Pinter on June 29, 2015, here is what he had to say:

It’s easy to splice and parse every moment of that night in hindsight. But you’re looking to make me the aggressor here, or blame me for not being able to talk you out of it, which is childish and cowardly bullshit. And that’s all this email chain is – you looking to deflect blame, to demonize people who criticize your appalling actions. If this ‘herd’ means not standing for sexual threats or bullying any longer, then fuck it, I’m in the herd. I don’t think you’re a monster. So blame me for whatever you want to blame me for if it helps you feel better about yourself, and so you can keep believing this false narrative that you’re this misunderstood man chased by angry villagers wielding pitchforks and torches. You brought every iota of this upon yourself. You did something unspeakably awful, and while I’m sure some of what was written about in all those articles was also or blown out of proportion, a lot of it was true. And I could write thousands of words trying to get you to see how misguided you are in, nine months later, reaching out solely for the purpose of blaming me for, what? I’m still not exactly sure. Defending your behavior? I’m not going to do that.

I never asked Pinter to defend my behavior. I wrote to him, “I am aware of my transgressions and am more punitive towards my own monstrous behavior than you ever can be.” He wrote, “You’re constructing a narrative to fit whatever story you’ve made up, that I’ve viewed you as a monster for years, or whatever else you need to view yourself as a victim here (you are not).” It never occurred to Pinter that I was drunk and having a nervous breakdown on that night, that I could be both a transgressor experiencing a crackup and a victim of vigilante justice erected by an online impression that was wrong, which I responded to with behavior that was also wrong. It never occurred to Pinter that asking him about the night in question might have been a way for me to come to terms with the full horror of what I did. It never occurred to Pinter that he and McArdle were also constructing a narrative, that all of us create narratives. Can you forgive a man who lost his marbles? Jason Pinter can’t. But Edward Champion sometimes can’t either. That’s why I’m writing this rebuttal, and I’m not liking what I see in myself. Or to quote Gandhi, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

What Pinter does do quite helpfully with his response is to demonstrate that there is no possible redemption for the transgressions of one night, that all perceived and invented transgressions outside that night are solely interpreted through that night, that any efforts to reckon with what I did represent a “false narrative,” and that the lies and conjectures promulgated by McArdle of a sustained performance of “sexual threats or bullying” are nevertheless “true.” Is this how we contend with troublemakers? Is this how we help people who we perceive as awful? Is this how “monsters”are “reformed” in the digital age? Do we not forgive people even when they’re actively working to change? Do we not listen to people? Or do we simply create largely mythical articles that nest like punitive parasites in the top Google search results?

Claim, ¶31: “Though the suicide attempt was reported in the Brooklyn Paper, few in publishing connected the Friday morning bridge closure with Champion.”

WILLFUL EFFORT TO EMBARRASS AND HUMILIATE. This is a deliberate effort to embarrass me. I do know that Laura Miller, who delighted in her blinkered and error-prone condemnation of me in Salon (“countless obsessive grudges,” unsubstantiated “horror stories”), was probably aware of my suicide attempt, as were others. But to their credit, they underplayed my suicide attempt. Because some part of them still believed in respect and noblesse oblige. McArdle, however, does not. It is humiliation to reinforce the image of suicide thirty paragraphs later. (She also repeats my Facebook note at ¶32.)

Claim, ¶43: “His first episode featured David Mitchell, who has since appeared on the show a total of four times.”

FALSE. Three times (one in two parts). She can’t count.

Claim, ¶46: “…but at the same time you could see his some of his personality flaws coming through. He could get self-aggrandizing with guests. Sometimes he asked questions that were challenging in the wrong ways, trying to make a point for himself.” Quote from Jacob Silverman.

SPECULATIVE, UNSUBSTANTIATED. Silverman has, in his quotes, largely confined his ideas about me to speculation. But he never cites a specific example of my “personality flaws,” how “self-aggrandizing” I was as an interviewer (and, hell, aren’t most interviewers self-aggrandizing in some way?), or how my questions were “challenging in the wrong ways.”

My interviews were certainly challenging and quite intellectual. It was likely my rigorous engagement, my efforts to conduct interviews that were unlike anything else and that didn’t fall into PR boilerplate, that caused people like Silverman, who frequently interpreted my work falsely, to be “challenging in the wrong ways.” But I think the late David Rakoff, a terribly kind man and a first-class wit, probably summed up why authors sometimes felt scared:

To: Edward Champion

From: David Rakoff

Date: 11/26/2007 11:39 AM

Subject: Re: Thanks!

Ed:

Many thanks right back to you. I’d say yours was among the smartest and most exhaustive (and therefore scary: my Helmut Newton hackdom still rings in my ears) interviews I’ve ever had/done.

Hope all the deadlines are being conquered.

david

Claim, ¶48: “She spoke of conflicts that took place on individual Facebook pages, in direct messages, through at-reply conversations on Twitter. ‘You might see parts of it but not the whole megillah.’”

FALSE, CIRCUMSTANTIAL, AND UNSUBSTANTIATED. There are no examples cited by Jennifer Weiner. What conflicts? As a former journalist, she should know better. But then this is the same writer who invents conspiracies playing out at The New York Times.

Claim, ¶49: “Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to twenty-four people by phone and nineteen more by email. Nearly every person I spoke to had a story about Champion: how he threatened them by phone and by email, on Twitter and in DMs, in comment sections and on his own blog; how he contacted their bosses and publishers and family members; how he created a reputation so toxic people—still—fear drawing his attention. Though his most public clashes have only occurred in the past year, Champion’s history of misbehavior stretches back to the early 2000s.”

MISLEADING, CIRCUMSTANTIAL, AND UNSUBSTANTIATED. This paragraph is used as the basis for the fabrications, conjectures, and rumors that follow. It attempts to establish:

1. Ed Champion threatens people by phone and by email.

2. Ed Champion threatens people on Twitter and in DMs.

3. Ed Champion threatens people in comment sections and on his own blog.

4. Ed Champion contacted bosses and publishers and family members.

5. Ed Champion created a toxic reputation.

6. Ed Champion has been misbehaving since the early 2000s.

This is where the claims start to go south in this deceitful piece, turning into an elaborate inductive fallacy that can be summed up as follows:

1. If Ed Champion had a breakdown and terrorized Porochista Khakpour on one night, then Champion must have done this to other people.

2. We have heard a few things about Champion and we really don’t need to corroborate.

3. Therefore, Champion terrorized nearly everyone he encountered for more than a decade.

McArdle has every right to comment upon the quality of my writing or to even report upon my despicable tweets to Khakpour or my suicide attempt. She does not have the right to stretch the facts so completely out of proportion so that my bad behavior, mostly confined to one night, is symbolic of an entire life. To parrot McArdle: Reader, this is defamation (although grounded on something more than a subjective opinion).

Claim, ¶50: “’We were friendly—and I think this is how a lot of these stories start—he and I were friendly,’ Jessa Crispin told me. ‘I had one of the first breaks with him in that community.’”

FALSE AND UNSUBSTANTIATED. As is clear from Appendix B: The Jessa Crispin-Edward Champion Correspondence, which contains the entirety of my emails with her, it was Jessa who often contacted me, expressing umbrage. I replied back with several kind and largely cordial messages. She undermined the blogging community, accused me of “talking shit,” and I responsibly corrected a blog entry when she brought an error to my attention. I also sent a condolence email when one of her family members died. I even lobbied for her inclusion in the Litblog Co-Op despite her vituperative emails and her dismissiveness of its members. Despite not contacting her at all for a seven year period, she continued to mention me.

Claim, ¶51: “’Ed sent this incredibly unhinged email to Steve,’ Crispin described, ‘and I thought it had to be a joke. Ed essentially threatened him because he wasn’t formatting his paragraphs properly on the blog. That was literally the complaint.’ (Almond has ‘a vague recollection’ of the incident.)”

FALSE. Crispin can’t produce the email, but I never threatened Steve Almond. The “email” was public, part of my old blog, Plight of the Reluctant. The entry was circa mid-September 2003. Since this was more than thirteen years ago, I have been unable to locate it in my archives, but, without evidence, this is a patently false claim. It is interesting how she echoes Pinter’s “unhinged” for an invented transgression, almost as if the narrative established on Twitter is the only one that matters. Elizabeth Loftus’s Eyewitness Testimony is an excellent volume that documents in stunning detail how easily words and details can be implanted in a witness’s memory. The longer that the eyewitness moves away from the events, the more easily manipulated the testimony becomes. It is for this reason that, in reconstructing what I have actually done (and I am not entirely innocent, as can be seen with ¶55, ¶56, and ¶79), I have been very careful to stick with notes and emails that I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the events.

Claim, ¶52: “He sent one of these crazy emails saying ‘You will live to regret this’ and on and on and on. It was terrifying. I immediately deleted it. I didn’t go in the room for two days. It’s just words and he lives in another city, but there is something so violent and body-based about it. You feel so unsafe, like he is behind you with a knife.”

FALSE, MISLEADING, UNSUBSTANTIATED. As Appendix B demonstrates, I never used the word “regret” in any of my exchanges with her. Nor were my messages drenched in “violent and body-based” imagery. That McArdle uses this false and unsubstantiated claim with the “like he is behind you with a knife” claim to suggest that I am some homicidal maniac is outrageous, defamatory, irresponsible, and damaging.

Claim, ¶53: “I started noticing things.” Quote from Laila Lalami.

FALSE AND UNSUBSTANTIATED. What did she notice? No specific incident is mentioned.

Claim, ¶53: “E. Max Magee.”

FALSE. The editor’s name is C. Max Magee.

Claim, ¶54: “Over the years I heard the same story. The details might change and the people might change, but the story was always essentially the same. Somebody would say something that they thought was completely innocent or innocuous, then Ed would take great offense, and then would confront them and demand something, an apology or taking down a post or putting up a post, and if his demands weren’t met then he would become extremely angry. Frankly it was frightening.”

UNSUBSTANTIATED. Why isn’t there a specific incident cited? This is a speculative template. It is not concrete evidence. This is designed to create a myth, to get people believing in a phony pattern suggesting that this is the only way I communicate with people. Yes, I have confronted people when facts are wrong. But there is nothing cited here to buttress this “same story.”

Claim, ¶55: “He flew off the handle at me ages ago (don’t remember when) for a perceived slight,” book marketer Kalen Landow told me in email, “He had put together a list and I shared it on Facebook. For whatever reason he thought I’d stolen his content and I got a blistering series of DMs about it. I clarified with something like, ‘Uh, I posted a link.’ He apologized and that was the end of that. It was a red flag for me.”

FALSE, DEFAMATORY, AND GROSSLY MISLEADING. Here is the Twitter exchange with Kalen Landow. As you can see, the exchange was far from “a blistering series of DMs,” but a misinterpretation on my part which I calmly expressed when I was very tired:

kalen

kalen2

kalen3

Claim, ¶55: Elyssa East’s claims.

TRUE. What’s missing from this story, however, is the email I sent to Elyssa East on July 1, 2014 at 10:20 PM:

Elyssa:

Just so we’re clear, on November 1, 2012, I sent you two emails during the turmoil of Hurricane Sandy.  I was deeply impassioned, extremely worried about people I knew, and concerned about the plight of the poor and sent you a strongly worded email.  This was, by no means, intended an attack or threat upon you personally. Nevertheless, I apologize for my tone and language at the time.

Sincerely,

Edward Champion

I never contacted her again.

Claim, ¶56: Emily Mandel’s claims.

TRUE. The tweet in question was intended as satirical. Months later, in realizing how my satire was being misinterpreted, I made amends through this exchange:

To: Emily Mandel

From: Edward Champion
Date: 7/30/2014 3:47 PM
Subject: An apology

Emily:

My apologies if you receive this message twice. I don’t wish to pester you, but I do want to be sure that you get this important message.

On August 30, 2013, I tweeted the following: “Victory is not resorting to the subtweet. I don’t respect you either. Why don’t you go swallow a glass of cyanide?” The intent of the tweet was to present a physically impossible proposition in a satirical context. I never wished for your death nor did I intend to threaten you. I have been on the receiving end of several death threats in response to an essay I wrote, and now understand that my words, despite the jocular intent, were inappropriate. I have deleted the tweet and offer my sincere and heartfelt apologies for any distress that the tweet caused you.

Thanks and all best,

Ed

To: Edward Champion

From: Emily Mandel

Date: 7/30/2014 4:47 PM

Subject: Re: An apology

Thank you, apology received and accepted.

I never contacted her again.

Claim, ¶58: “I’m not saying that Champion could do a lot of damage, but the fear of damage he could do, even by manipulating Google searches, is real.” Quote from John Freeman.

FALSE, ASSUMPTIVE, AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL. John Freeman, one of the most imaginative and defamatory liars quoted in this piece, makes a lot of false assumptions and libelous claims about me. He contends that I could manipulate Google searches, but, if I knew how to do that (and I don’t), I wouldn’t be writing this rebuttal.

Claim, ¶59: “Fear of intimidation, physical safety, and career backlash kept people quiet.” Quote from Rebecca Schlinsky.

SPECULATIVE, ASSUMPTIVE, NO EXAMPLES CITED. The piece never establishes a convincing case for where I threatened anyone’s physical safety. The “intimidation” angle is repeated by Porochista Khakpour’s publicist two paragraphs later. This piece becomes less and less a work of journalism and more of an elaborate smear campaign as it continues.

Claim, ¶60-61: “Every publicist has been harassed by [Champion] at some point,” Summer Smith, associate director of publicity at Bloomsbury, also said on Twitter.” AND “He bullies & threatens, intimidates & insults, that is how he gets interviews.”

FALSE AND DEFAMATORY, PARTIAL EVIDENCE. No incident is cited. I was not in the habit of harassing publicists. Much to my amazement, some even reached out to me after the September incident. I landed interviews because I respected the work and the schedules of authors and publicists.

From a March 19, 2008 email to Summer Smith:

Thanks for getting back to me. Unfortunately, as much as I’ve enjoyed Meg’s work, this is one of those cases in which deadlines and other interviews have precluded me from committing the time, quality, and energy that I usually invest in these conversations. So I’m sorry that I have to pass this time. But I’m happy to touch base the next time around. And again, please feel free to let me know about other authors.

From a June 10, 2010 email to Summer Smith:

It was a pleasure to chat with you on the phone yesterday. This email confirms that Scarlett and I are set to talk on the 22nd at 3:00 PM. Location TBD. It just occurred to me that you’re probably now on summer hours. So what time would your office at Park Avenue South be closed on Friday in order for me to pick up the book?

From a November 11, 2010 email to Summer Smith:

Thanks so much for getting back to me. And I hope all is well! This would be like Scarlett. Around 45 minutes or so. Some public place that’s convenient for him. In person, anywhere in the five boroughs. So if there are a few good time windows and neighborhoods that you have in mind, that would be a good start! How long is Andrew in town for? And what times are looking good? Also, I should add the proviso that I’ll be doing a live interview with Paul Murray at Word Brooklyn on the 5th. So the 7th would probably have to be our earliest day for this.

From an April 18, 2011 email to Summer Smith:

I was wondering if you could direct me to the person handling Susan Freinkel’s PLASTIC: A TOXIC LOVE STORY. This very much sounds like a book that I could generate some coverage around. Additionally, are there plans for Susan to come to New York?

From a June 19, 2013 email to Summer Smith:

Apologies for being slightly late on the draw, but I’m writing to see if we can squeeze Anchee Min into the Bat Segundo lineup when she’s in NYC. My understanding is that she’s here on Monday. I have the book. But I’m also doing two other interviews on Monday without a lot of flexibility for a massive Follow Your Ears show. It is possible for me to meet up with Anchee between noon and 2PM, and even maybe right before her event at B&N. (But we would need a quiet room.) My instincts suggest that this would be an intriguing conversation. Let me know if we can swing this! If not, happy to work with you both on another author.

From an August 13, 2013 email to Summer Smith:

That sounds like a plan, Michelle. And, yeah, I figured Jesmyn’s schedule was tight. You know, we could do this at the Bloomsbury office to make things easier — perhaps scheduling this around signing stock. If we had an office that was quiet, that should work for radio. Let me know if that works and I will get back in touch with you in a few weeks!

I was certainly persistent in my efforts to get interviews, but I was not in the habit of bullying, threatening, intimidating, or insulting. Additionally, Smith has served as Porochista Khakpour’s publicist, a fact and a conflict of interest that goes unmentioned in McArdle’s piece. Moreover, Smith is the only publicist (outside of Shannon Browne in ¶111-115, who is used to impugn Weinman) directly quoted in this piece. I have also spoken with two other publicists to rebut the Joanna Rakoff claim at ¶62 and the Sloane Crosley quote manipulation at ¶160. It is clear that I was a journalist in good standing.

Claim, ¶62: “Elon Green, in his article on Champion for The Toast, reported that writer Joanna Rakoff appeared on The Bat Segundo Show unwillingly this past June. “I had a couple of awful incidents with him, and asked not to do his (awful) show this time around.” Her publicist said, “We don’t want to make him angry, as he might go crazy and smear you.”

FALSE, PARTIAL EVIDENCE. The only communications I had with Joanna Rakoff before she appeared on The Bat Segundo Show was for my Shteyngart Blurbs documentary in which she appeared. Everything went fine. She did ask me to clarify the nature of the documentary over the phone before talking with me and I did so in a courteous and respectful manner. Which was presumably why she agreed to do it. (In a telephone conversation with the publicist on the morning of July 26, 2016, I asked the publicist if she had said anything along the lines of “We don’t want to make him angry.” The publicist told me, “These are words that I would never speak.” The publicist said that Rakoff felt that I was being overly persistent in my efforts to schedule the interview, even though my requests were courteous. “[Rakoff] felt like she was being slightly harassed,” said the publicist. “She was feeling a little bit worried that there was an element of, I don’t know, contentiousness.” Of course, a book publicist’s job is to protect her author. The publicist, who is a highly accomplished veteran who I worked with many times, also told me that most authors feel skittish about interviews and insinuated that such trepidations were normal. She did feel that my persistence was aggressive, if only because there were two simultaneous email exchanges going on, one with her and the other directly with Rakoff, in an effort to schedule the interview. I apologized to the publicist if my persistence was interpreted that way, pointing out that I never intended to come across as aggressive and that journalists do have to be persistent if they want to land interviews.) Rakoff is also very good friends with the man I threatened to name on Twitter on the night of September 25, 2014. So her statement, delivered second-hand, is partial and tainted, even though her sentiments are completely understandable. I bear no bad feelings whatsoever towards anyone who was sticking up for a friend, much less an accomplished author dealing with the butterfly nerves of publication. But it’s clear that this never happened.

Claim, ¶65: “Levi Asher, who calls Champion his best friend…“

FALSE. I love the man formerly known as Levi Asher to death, but he’s not my best friend and, according to Asher, he never said this to McArdle.

Claim, ¶68: “Referring to a period of time in which Champion decided to award “brownie points” to the New York Times Book Review on an issue-by-issue basis and then mail their office actual brownies, Weiner said, “there is a universe in which it’s creepy,” but another “in which I could see myself doing it.” Why not, after all, bring pies representing VIDA’s gender-based pie charts to male-dominated publications?”

NOTABLE OMISSION, TENDENTIOUS: For three years, I conducted the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch on an intermittent basis, whereby each issue of the NYTBR was judged on three criteria: (a) the fiction to non-fiction ratio, (b) the quirky pair-up test, whereby I observed what interesting voices were assigned to reviews, and (c) years before VIDA, the ratio of male to female reviewers writing for the NYTBR. Why is (c) important? Because I was doing a version of McArdle’s “pie charts” as part of the Brownie watch more than a decade before. In other words, between the years 2004 and 2006, I was doing the VIDA count five years before anybody else was. If McArdle were a responsible journalist, she would have observed this, instead of suggesting with her elision that gender balance was never one of my considerations. But of course, this championing of women writers does not fit in with her false thesis that I am a repugnant and unrepentant misogynist going out of his way to attack women.

Claim, ¶70: “When Champion assumed the role in public, Johnson said, ‘it was a scary character. He had a booming voice, very loud, very abusive. He’d come up and say ‘I’m Bat Segundo, who are you, bitch?’”

batsegundoFALSE, DEFAMATORY: I only performed the role of Bat Segundo once in person (pictured) on the evening of May 15, 2006 at The Big Hunt in Washington, DC, accompanied by a reporter who now works for a major newspaper who was in on the joke. It’s true that he was a loud and annoying Tony Clifton-like character. But he was not abusive and, to the best of my knowledge, he never said, “I’m Bat Segundo, who are you, bitch?” (I reached out by email to a few people who attended the party to be absolutely clear on this point.)

Claim, ¶71-72: “He’s a big guy, a pretty stocky guy.” Johnson, who is 6’2”, described Champion as a few inches taller than himself. “He has this huge voice, and he would lean over these women and call them names. It was borderline violent.” At one BEA event, Johnson was asked by a few women “to get [Champion] out of there because he was terrifying people. I ended up escorting him out of the party.”

batsegundo2FALSE, DEFAMATORY: Not only is Dennis Johnson a liar inventing a story that suits McArdle’s phony narrative of me as a relentless misogynist, but he gets several key details wrong. Bat Segundo appeared at The Big Hunt, part of a Litblog Co-Op party. He did not lean over women and call them names. As can be seen from the photo, he was making people laugh. But perhaps Johnson is consulting the below photo of “Bat Segundo” smiling and talking with Weinman, in which I am seen talking with Weinman, leaning over and falling in love with her. It’s a rather terrible poetic irony, given that this was the evening that my flirtations with Weinman began. Which is why I remember the evening so well.

“Bat Segundo” must have captured Johnson’s imagination. Because my height is 6’2″, not “a few inches taller” than Johnson. Additionally, much as Johnson would like to cast himself as the maverick gunslinger hurling the bad dude at the bar into the dusty street, Johnson did not escort me out of the party. I was kicked out because I briefly left the establishment and, when I returned, I refused to show my ID to the bouncers. I figured this would be in character for Bat Segundo. I called them “blackguards” and, as I recall, my over-the-top performance had the bouncers cracking up. It was a comedy performance, not an opportunity to hurt or abuse people.

Claim, ¶73: “The book he is shopping around is very violent in nature,” Khakpour tweeted on September 26, 2014, “which normally I would never bring up, other than he wrote me many times saying that he was starting to become the main character, who I believe is a murderer.”

FALSE, SPECULATIVE, DEFAMATORY: Khakpour was only sent the first two chapters of They Came for Blood: the first on March 26, 2014 and the second on April 18, 2014. She knew only scant details about the full story, much less the actual character. In the chapters sent to Khakpour, the main character does not murder anyone. He is ruthlessly beaten to a pulp in a bar. He is confronted by the mother of his child. He informs a married woman he is having an affair with that her husband is dead after he sleeps with her. If you want to mine for autobiography in an author’s work – and you probably shouldn’t then this theme of self-loathing and the pain associated with being part of a broken family is probably a bit more accurate of where I was at mentally. I was in deep anguish dwelling on these issues. Much as an actor will use the Stanislavsky Method to summon emotional energy to inhabit a character, a writer will very often summon comparable energies. The suggestion here is that, in writing about violence, I was becoming more violent, when in fact I was never physically violent towards anyone — other than myself when I tried to take my own life.

I’ve reviewed my correspondence with Khakpour three times and I cannot find a single instance where I said that I was “becoming the character.” I did speak with Khakpour on the phone on the evening of January 27, 2014, in which I discussed the progress on my novel, but my notes don’t reveal anything about “becoming the character.” Weinman did once observe me speaking like the character while having quite a lot to drink and had the good sense and the effrontery to confront me during this unsettling episode. But that is the extent of “becoming the character” that I am aware of. The closest passage I can find is from this encouraging email I wrote to her on September 22, 2013, after she had emailed Weinman and me about “a strange group that has formed to hate me suddenly”:

It has been widely observed by several sharp blades that most writers are crazy. Most of the time, this is manageable and (in most cases) charming eccentricity. I mean, we all go into rooms and create weird worlds, right? That’s a really weird job description. But there are a handful of people in the literary world are craven, mean, attention-starved, and truly miserable. We’re not talking people who are in clear need of serious psychological help like Ayelet Waldman, but the slow leeches who project their moribund obsessions on people who are “successful” in some sense, who have little more than crass competition as their raison d’etre. In most cases, these types have lost the ability to marvel at language. In nearly all cases, these types are socially clueless. I’ve had more than a few encounters with these people. No matter HOW nice I am, they still view me as devil incarnate. It’s a no win proposition. So why bother?

The only thing you can do is ignore them. Or call for backup (Porochista, you DO understand that we’re on telephone standby for you, right?) if you feel any impulse to give them power by acknowledging their presence.

But there’s one other thing you can do that these people can’t.

They can’t do the work.

They can’t do the work even when natural forces try to stop them. They can’t do the work even when the world ignites in madness.

But YOU and I can. I wrote close to 500 words of fiction today in a very uncomfortable train, as my stomach quivered with mild motion sickness. And I know you’ve done the same. THAT’S how you win, Porochista. And the brilliant thing is that it’s a victory that is simultaneously constructive and something in which you don’t have to acknowledge the people who want to tear you down. Because they CAN’T take away that.

I want to be clear. It goes without saying that you have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG in soliciting help for Lyme disease. Only a heartless or incorrigible type — someone along the lines of what I’ve described above — would demand accounting or, heaven forfrend, a “reward” (Christ, isn’t your life enough?) for having the audacity to say, “Guys, I REALLY need help.”

Claim, ¶74: “On at least two occasions Champion called his threats of violence towards other writers ‘performance art.’”

SPECULATIVE, MISLEADING. There are only two “threats of violence” that McArdle can conjure up and, even here, these are predicated upon the mythical assumptions that there were dozens more. I have responded to McArdle’s wrong, patently ridiculous, and outright defamatory ideas of violence in ¶90.

Claim, ¶76: “Champion made a practice of violating the boundaries between public and private. When some would ignore him, it was not usual for him to contact their siblings or spouses. The message would inevitably reach its intended recipient, Champion’s original target, and speak its true meaning: no one is safe.”

PATENTLY FALSE AND DEFAMATORY. She cannot cite any true example to uphold her claim that I terrorized families or contacted siblings and spouses with malicious intent, especially with the “no one is safe” interpretation. The Freeman story is patently false and debunked at ¶77. The Lennon story (¶79), which is the second worst transgression I ever committed to anyone in the literary world of a mere four that I have concretely determined to be over-the-line and in which I am contrite and ashamed about in every way, involved Lennon’s wife approaching me to mediate between the two of us. Beyond this, these claims, even if true, don’t really do the job of getting a transgressor to own up to how he has actually sinned and what might have triggered him to do so (which I take up at length in ¶79). The Kiesling interpretation in ¶92-93 of a satirical April Fool’s Day comment is a family member reacting to it, not me going after her family. But the article is framed to make it look as if this was my intent all along.

Claim, ¶77: “Champion, who attended high school with Freeman, has written over 100 blog posts that mention the critic since 2004.”

FALSE, MISLEADING. I have published nearly 8,000 posts since December 2, 2003, largely about the book world. John Freeman was an omnipresent part of this and he practiced as a highly prolific critic swirling around in dozens of newspapers. Thus, by Freeman’s sheer ubiquitous presence, he was inevitably going to be mentioned on a regular basis if I wanted to cover the books world properly. I have conducted two independent searches through the entirety of my website. A mere 72 items show up. Many of these references are positive or neutral. Most of these references are part of link roundups I used to do, daily collections of useful articles that litbloggers often assembled in the days before Twitter which would often contain as many as 25 links in one post, such as this October 11, 2007 roundup (note the URL as well: “roundup-193”) in which I wrote, “John Freeman has a surprisingly decent report on the Frankfurt Book Fair.”

Claim, ¶77: “After Champion moved to New York around 2006, he began to show up to Freeman’s events, taking pictures of him, confronting him. Freeman made it a practice to ignore Champion, and so the blogger started reaching out to Freeman’s family members. ‘I wrote some personal essays about my family,’ Freeman told me, ‘and my mother was dying. Ed found my younger brother and started posting comments on his blog.’ Freeman, who had already endured some of Champion’s most extreme attentions, was shocked by this last violation.”

FALSE, DEFAMATORY, MISLEADING. I’ve tried to be very careful about this because I really want to be accurate. Because a source has informed me that Freeman once told the critic Carlin Romano that I was “stalking” him, which is the same suggestion implied by McArdle here. I’ve looked through past calendar entries and many years of emails, and I have concluded that I attended a grand total of four Freeman-moderated events, two during the same weekend when I was covering BookExpo America: (1) a June 1, 2007 BookExpo America panel on ethics in book reviewing (of which I wrote a two part report: Part One and Part Two), (2) a June 3, 2007 BookExpo America panel on the “crisis in book reviewing” (written about here), (3) a June 13, 2007 National Book Critics Circle panel called “Save Our Book Reviews,” in which I asked Freeman why book reviews were so dry and without any vibrancy, and (4) a January 23, 2008 event at McNally Jackson, attended with Levi Asher, largely because the two of us were curious about Lee Siegel (Freeman happened to be interviewing him) and this was a pit stop on the way to an event at the Boxcar Lounge. Why was I taking pictures of him? Because, as the links above demonstrate, I was reporting on the panels.

Tim Freeman, John’s younger brother, actually reached out to me through comments he left on this blog. On October 14, 2009, after I posted a video of an acting performance from my college days, Tim Freeman wrote, “Hah-hah, I like this! That’s exactly how I remember you.” He also left affectionate and cordial comments on another post, when I had put up a video from 1993. I liked Tim. He was a nice and enthusiastic kid. So I left some comments over at his blog not long after this cordial colloquy, which I regrettably can’t corroborate because Tim has made his blog private. (I emailed Tim Freeman to determine the date when I first left a comment on his blog. He did not respond.) John Freeman’s writing had nothing to do with this exchange.

It’s true that I did read some of John Freeman’s personal essays and wrote about this as an example of confessional writing’s dangers on February 8, 2007, in which I referred to Freeman twice as “a good guy” and openly asked “if Freeman’s personal confessions were creating more rancor than resolution.” But in McArdle’s characterization of my reporting – which involves taking pictures, asking questions, and writing lengthy dispatches – she is being outright defamatory and misleading with her language. And Freeman, claiming that my exchange with his brother had to do with him and by suggesting motives that he never took up with me and that were entirely nestled in his deranged imagination, is McArdle’s willing executioner.

Claim, ¶78: “Champion also made a practice of contacting his targets’ employers and—regardless of how unhinged he might sound in those emails—raised uncomfortable conversations for them in their workplaces.”

FALSE, DEFAMATORY, UNSUBTANTIATED. Her examples are fallacious, as the forthcoming responses will reveal.

Claim, ¶79: “On one trip to New York, however, [J. Robert] Lennon had become absorbed in a particularly painful family issue and emailed Champion explaining why they wouldn’t be able to meet up. Champion rejected Lennon’s reasons, called the family issue ‘a first world problem,’ and broke off the friendship. Then Champion forwarded the email in which Lennon had described this dreadful, and clearly private, situation to every contact he had at Graywolf Press, Lennon’s publisher. Champion demanded that they drop Lennon as an author: Graywolf could not in good conscience support the work of a person whose family was involved in such circumstances.”

PARTIALLY TRUE, PARTIALLY FALSE, MISLEADING, A RECKONING FOR WHAT I REALLY DID WRONG. In late 2012, Weinman and I were trying to help Lennon find another agent. We had hoped to meet with him. This was a series of misunderstandings on both sides, one in which Lennon’s wife, Rhian Ellis, attempted to intervene nearly two years later. I had total sympathy for his family situation, but I never sent these details onto Graywolf during our initial exchange. Still I did not appreciate it when Lennon emailed me on November 12, 2012, “Are you insane?” That was the source of my anger. I replied, “Only an inconsiderate and judgmental asshole spouting his litany of fairly legitimate First World problems would further sully the waters by broaching the question, ‘Are you insane?’” Note that, even with my vitriol, I did say that his problems were legitimate.

I never forwarded Lennon’s 2012 email to Graywolf, nor will I publish the details here, nor did I demand that Lennon be dropped as an author. (In fact, I interviewed Graywolf authors Kathryn Davis on September 9, 2013, Dorthe Nors on February 12, 2014, and Leslie Jamison on March 21, 2014 – a very long conversation that I never aired for stupid and irrational reasons chronicled below.) I did, however, contact Graywolf about Lennon two years later.

On March 29, 2014, Graywolf editorial director Ethan Nosowsky tweeted at me, suggesting that I could not read an essay by Geoff Dyer. He was egged on by Lennon. There had been an ongoing feud between Nosowsky and me. In a now deleted tweet, Nosowsky had belittled a thorough investigation I had conducted into the affairs of Dave Eggers, his former employer, in which I had discovered financial improprieties and reported on Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s violent assaults.

I wish I could say that I responded gracefully, but I didn’t. I tweeted, “Yes, @nosowsky, I read it through to the end, you imperious, cowardly, tweet-deleting, shit-talking, midcult cunt.” I was extremely stressed, writing a very difficult chapter, and was nearing the home stretch of finishing my novel (which I completed the next day, on March 30, 2014). I was very sensitive about my work. I should never have been on Twitter. I should not have tweeted what I did to Nosowsky. I also should never have telephoned Lennon that night to confront him about what he was doing on Twitter, in which both of us reacted to each other with outsize theatrical outbursts: he laughing diabolically and me responding with some melodramatic impression of a villain. This doesn’t excuse my behavior, for which I remain ashamed and slackjawed, but it does point to the beginnings of the burgeoning anxieties and path to self-destruction that led me to crack on the evening of September 25, 2014. Because the email I sent to Erin Kottke and Fiona McCrae – demanding an apology, not Lennon dropped as an author — makes absolutely no sense at all:

To: Erin Kottke

Cc: Fiona McCrae

Date: March 29, 2014, 7:51 PM

Subject: Unprofessional conduct from Ethan Nosowsky

Erin and Fiona:

I am very sorry to send this email, but Ethan Nosowsky is absolutely out of line.  He has spent much of Saturday harassing me on Twitter, tweeting abusive remarks at me and then deleting them.  Admittedly, I stepped over the line and responded with forceful language.  But Mr. Nosowsky has continued to badger and malign me, even as I have curtailed my efforts. This is absolutely unacceptable.  It’s worth noting that this is a continuation of Mr. Nosowsky’s efforts to impugn me for my journalism over a two year period (specifically in relation to an investigation into Dave Eggers’s The Zeitoun Foundation). He has also solicited J. Robert Lennon, one of your authors, to perpetuate these childish games.   I am sorry that one of your authors has to suffer, especially when she has produced a remarkable volume, but I refuse to air my Leslie Jamison interview (a two parter of 90 minutes) unless Mr. Nosowsky immediately apologizes for his misconduct.  And I will have absolutely nothing to do with Graywolf in any capacity unless Mr. Nosowsky (and Mr. Lennon) issues a public apology by Monday morning.  His conduct has effectively secured a Graywolf boycott unless Mr. Nosowsky can illustrate that he is an adult.

I cannot believe that Graywolf, a press that I have held in great esteem over the last several years, would allow one of its employees to make slanderous public remarks.  But if this is the way that it must be, then it is Mr. Nosowsky who has forced my hand.  And I will pursue with additional remedies if this egregious conduct continues.

Sincerely,

Edward Champion

Producer, THE BAT SEGUNDO SHOW

Nosowsky’s remarks were critical, but not slanderous. My ultimatum was ridiculous. In my self-loathing, my persona began to become a desperate place of refuge rather than a character to perform. It was to culminate in my total breakdown on the night of September 25, 2014, when, greeted with all manner of falsehoods on Twitter, I gave the crowd the villain it always wanted in a savage act of psychic break.

Lennon’s wife, Rhian Ellis, had sent a number of very kind, conciliatory, and compassionate emails, trying to bridge the divide. I had received a lengthy email from her on March 30, 2014 that I had intended to reply to in the morning. I wanted to sleep on it. But her husband beat me to the punch with a hurtful email that shocked me, revealing that Kottke (for whom I had nothing but kind and positive feelings and had several friendly conversations with in person and on the phone) and McCrae both viewed me as a crackpot. I have reproduced Lennon’s email below, along with my note to Kottke. I have elided the personal details that were inadvertently forwarded to Kottke, feeling shock at the news.

To: Erin Kottke

From: Edward Champion

Date: March 31, 2014 9:02 AM

Subject: Fwd: Twitter

If indeed you and Fiona consider me a crackpot, as Lennon claims in this nasty and accusatory email, I would appreciate the courtesy of a direct reply instead of hearing it from someone else. 

Sincerely,

Ed

——– Original Message ——–

To: Edward Champion

From: J. Robert Lennon

Date: March 31, 2014 8:44 AM

Subject: Twitter

Hi Ed—

I’ve publicly apologized to you on twitter for hurting your feelings. You won’t see it in your feed, because I have (and will always have) you blocked, but here’s a link: https://twitter.com/jrobertlennon/status/450613325303275520

I’m writing this against my better judgement, but I feel as though it’s necessary. I really am sorry that I hurt your feelings. But, true to form, your reaction was bizarrely, scarily extreme. Ethan gently mocked you on twitter and you called him a cunt. I told him to ignore you and you rage-subtweeted me and blasted off emails to my publisher and wife, saying god knows what. It doesn’t make sense.

When you originally decided to cut me out of your life, it was because I forgot to answer an email at a time when my personal life was in utter turmoil. I told you that [PERSONAL DETAILS REMOVED], and you said that you didn’t want to hear about my “first world problems.” It’s hard to imagine a more callous and insensitive response to the utter horror and tragedy my family was enduring. So, needless to say, our friendship was over. But I continued to get emails from people I know—writers, editors—telling me I should go see what you were saying about me online. Why, Ed? I forgot to answer an email (in fact, I never did find it, and suspect it never arrived). I was mildly rude to you, by accident. In exchange, you exploded with rage at me in public. (I still don’t know what you said, because I don’t read what anyone says about me on the internet, like any sane person.) People forget to answer my emails all the time, because they have complicated lives. I forgive them, without question. Because they’re my friends.

This is why you aren’t widely known as a writer. Your rage permeates every aspect of your personal presentation and your writing. Even your praise for writers is contextualized by this strange “us-versus-them” attitude. You do people “favors” that they didn’t ask for and don’t want and then you feel slighted when they’re insufficiently grateful, and they become “enemies” and you try to destroy them. Healthy people don’t conceive of the world this way. You’re an intelligent man who should be of real influence in the literary sphere, but you’ve opted to tear things down instead of making things of lasting value. Giving a shit that mediocre writers are famous is a waste of time. Who cares if Dyer wrote a boring essay, or at least an essay you think is boring? Who cares if Eggers and Franzen are overrated? Hell, man, Eggers actually, substantively hurt me back in the day, and do you see me denouncing him in public? I even positively reviewed one of his books in the LRB, because, to my surprise, I actually liked it, and was forced to man up and admit that a guy who was a jerk to me one time might actually write a decent book.

It genuinely shocked me to hear that you had written to Erin and Fiona, people I love, and with whom I have had an excellent relationship for five years. What makes you think that a bunch of invective from some random crackpot could change their minds about me? Because that’s what you are, to them. And now you have permanently lost the potential respect of these wonderful women.

In other words, you are not making my life a living hell. You are making your life a living hell.

I’m sure this will enrage you, but I want to beg you to try to get control of your life, to get some better meds, if you can (and this is not condescension but genuine concern—it’s obvious that you are at the very least bipolar, and I assume under care for it, but if not, please get help), and make amends, publicly, to the many, many people you have bewildered, hurt, and frightened. Rhian won’t tell you this, because she is too nice, but right now she’s in western New York with her sick mother, whose cancer has come back to kill her. That’s the real world your hurtful nonsense is casting its shadow over—it’s distracting my wife from her final months with her mother. I don’t want you in my life, but I care enough about you to tell you how things look out here in the world outside your head. It looks like this: people think you are crazy and dangerous. I know you’re a good person, but most people are not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. They’re just going to shun you.

I’ll unblock you from my email for the day, if you want to reply, but I won’t write again. It is too stressful.

Good luck—

John

I sent this email to Ellis on March 31, 2014 at 9:13 AM:

Rhian:

I received your email last night.  I had intended to sleep on it before responding, but this email from John is absolutely nasty, judgmental, out of control, and not reflecting the truth.  I greatly appreciate your kind efforts to intercede.  You have been nothing less than reasonable, cordial, and fair-minded.  I wish to point out that I never wanted to hurt anybody.  But when John is this obsessed with smearing me, backbiting, and trying to paint me as a crackpot who is off his meds, it is abundantly clear that I cannot communicate with him in any way. 

I am sorry that you have had to contend with this situation, as you face a very difficult time in Buffalo.  Again, I offer my greatest hope that your mother will recover swiftly and my gratitude for your efforts under the circumstances. 

Sincerely,

Ed

What was happening in March 2014 was this: I was a frail man who didn’t know what to do with his life, a man who had tried to evolve as an artist, but who was contending with the demons of his own self-loathing — demons that I confessed to and later came to terms with with this December 19, 2015 essay. In November 2012, I had shuttered The Bat Segundo Show. I needed to move on. I wanted to do more important and more serious work. I wanted to do more positive work. Because I was tiring of some of the anger and the negativity that was coming out in my writing. I began work on a documentary on Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs in the next two months, a positive work celebrating the silliness of blurbs and Shteyngart’s sense of humor about this, which was uploaded to YouTube on January 3, 2013. Then, when I was morally appalled by the Sandy Hook massacre, I started a new podcast, Follow Your Ears, opening with a two part episode on guns. While I enjoyed making this new radio program, it also became clear that the show was taking far more time than Bat Segundo to make.

So I started a benign Indiegogo campaign on March 18, 2013 to walk across the nation and collect oral history and was deeply humiliated. I only raised $3,185 of the $25,000 that I needed for six months of support – this after I had conducted three trial walks ranging from 25 to 40 miles (complete with photographs, audio, and written reports) that took every bit of mental, emotional, and physical energy I had. My best and my most good faith and my most ambitious work was not enough. It was a failure and that failure felt like the worst thing that could happen to me at the time. And I hated myself for being a failure. I also hated that my partner at the time had to live with me like this: the pathetic man pushing forty who had nothing to contribute. For by then, she was the one supporting us, not me. And that was equally shameful and loathsome to me. The only thing I had left was the beginnings of a second novel (the first had been rightly rejected by agents who were nice enough to read it). But I also had something else.

I revived The Bat Segundo Show, airing the first new episode in May 2013, when it became clear that my Indiegogo campaign was a wash. I needed something that I could do for which I could save face. But even though my interviews were always impeccably conducted, this was a step backwards. And, as I toiled to finish my second novel, I became increasingly sensitive to criticism.

Is any of this forgivable? Why wasn’t I grateful for what I had? I had a kind and tremendously understanding partner and a great deal of time to work on whatever I wanted to (and I worked sixteen hour days). Who was I to believe that I was entitled to some reward for good work when many artists, far smarter, more brilliant, and decidedly more talented than me, go decades without a shred of recognition? Why didn’t I reach out to more people? Why was I so obsessed with going it alone? Why did I throw myself into my labor with the resolute work ethic of a Victorian sweathouse?

Is this the mark of some awful, self-absorbed person? Maybe. Can that person be reformed? Yes. I have seen people more troubled than I am go on to do incredible things. And if he is reformed, if he does recognize and address his own failings in the worst way possible, how much punishment is enough? I’ve asked myself these questions hundreds of times in the past two years as I’ve learned why it’s important to stay grateful and humble and to be as kind as you can. Clearly, for Kevin Nguyen and the 182 people who want me dead (who include writer Warren Ellis, Metafilter founder Matt Haughey, Los Angeles Times books editor Carolyn Kellogg, The Theory of Everything‘s Benjamen Walker (a merciless opportunist who exploited me when I was recovering in the winter of 2014, by repeatedly hectoring me by telephone, feigning friendship, pressuring me for an interview shortly after I was released from the hospital and then humiliating me when I didn’t have a cent to my name by trying to cram my story into his preordained thesis and by showing up with one cup of coffee, just for him, as I took him to the place on the bridge where I tried to kill myself, and then editing the segment to make me look as lousy as possible), B&N Review editor Bill Tipper, writer Kelly Link (who I never uttered an unkind word to and for whom I once helped break down the Small Beer booth at BookExpo America one time), Slack developer Garrett Miller, transgender comedian Avery Edison, New Republic culture editor Michelle Legro, Quartz editor Jean-Luc Bouchard, “perspective counselor” Leah Reich, and Verge entertainment editor Emily Yoshida), who favorited an anti-intellectual December 19, 2016 tweet claiming that something I wrote was “a nonsense Ed Champion complaint” without actually unpacking it, no amount of humiliation is enough. The only thing I can do now, after divulging the underlying facts and emotions of this episode, is to not do anything like this again, to now publicly apologize to Ethan Nosowosky, the people at Graywolf, and J. Robert Lennon – for this very lengthy document is the more definitive and truer assessment of my character. But I’m pretty sure it’s not enough. I’m convinced that, no matter how hard I am on myself here (and I am doing my best to show no mercy), I will never be viewed as a human being. I am fated to be condemned to a lifetime of walking death, for which the parties I’ve cited in this very long piece would happily provide the pistol so that I might blow my brains out on a livestream for the benefit of maximum lulz from the public, ideally broadcast during the holiday so that the family can enjoy this bloodbath with some egg nog and a nice hummus spread just before going to mass. We can even hire James Urbaniak to narrate it! “Will he kill himself or won’t he? Find out if Ed Champion will figure out how to unlock the safety after this message from Blue Apron! Be sure to use the hashtag #killyourselfmisogynistscum!” But, of course, I can’t let that happen. I do, in fact, want to live. And, as someone who enjoys throwing dinner parties and attending potlucks, I certainly don’t want a company that makes cooking too conformist to be involved with sponsoring my death.

This was never about Lennon’s family. The above evidence and the soul-searching that I’ve just excavated makes that clear. This was about the considerable hatred I felt for myself. Before the Emily Gould essay published on June 27, 2014 and my subsequent suicidal ideation, before my Twitter meltdown and my subsequent suicide attempt, before the nine month debasement after I lost everything, I already had plenty of shame and self-destruction that I was inflicting on myself. It turns out that I had to lose everything to find out who I really was and how I needed to live.

Is this candor enough to overturn my mistakes? Or will this document be inevitably compared to the very long and quite frightening manifestos written by Jared Lee Loughner or Elliot Rodger? I haven’t killed anyone, nor did I ever have the desire to kill anyone other than myself. Instead of confirming my absolute misogyny, the hope here is that I’ve addressed some of the modest bits of misogyny, mostly expressed through a few sentences in my essay on Emily Gould, that are perhaps ineluctably intertwined with the unfettered and uncontrolled anger that I’ve tried not to summon (although I haven’t been entirely successful; I can cite one incident from September 2015 in which I got very heartbroken and very angry and very drunk after learning that a writer who I was once friendly with and had nothing but respect for had compared me with a creepy professor sleeping with his students and I made a phone call that I don’t remember and, after the recent presidential election, I did leave an angry voicemail to an Apple employee who called my family “racist”).

Claim, ¶81: “In Champion’s email to Nguyen’s supervisor, he claims he’s trying to take the high road. ‘Then he threatens physical violence against me,’ Nguyen told me. ‘It’s a gem.’”

FALSE AND DEFAMATORY. Kevin Nguyen has a wild imagination. I never threatened physical violence against him. I didn’t want to confront him, possibly in person, with harsh invective. And I had hoped that one of his co-workers, a very kind and far from retaliatory man who I was friendly with and who I will not name, might be able to intervene and find a peaceful resolution. Presumably, Nguyen is too graceless or too stupid to understand how clearing up matters works.

To: ______________

From: Edward Champion

Date: November 15, 2013, 12:45 PM

Subject: Kevin Nguyen

____________:

I’m sorry to involve you on this, but I was hoping you could help me clear up a matter with this guy you work with at ____________ named Kevin Nguyen, who has been tweeting about me in a manner unbecoming of an ____________employee.  I’ve never met the guy.  But it all started with this tweet back in August 30th:

Kevin linked to a tweet of mine directed at Emily Mandel, but did not comprehend the satirical intent.  (I was rereading ULYSSES at the time and was inserting various false interpolations in the style of “Wandering Rocks.”  As any basic chemistry student can tell you, it is physically impossible to swallow a glass of cyanide, let alone pour cyanide into a glass.)  Kevin decided to smear me as “the worst person in publishing.”  I didn’t respond, in large part because I was curious to see if anybody would question the premise of swallowing a glass of cyanide.  (A few did off the grid.)  I also wanted my Twitter feed to become a riskier place and I was simultaneously testing out some ideas about passive-aggression and subtweets that I later incorporated into this Salon essay:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/22/how_subtweets_are_ruining_twitter/

I ignored Kevin.  But he decided to keep at it, with this tweet from a few days ago:

I’m emailing you because I’m trying to take the high road here. If Kevin’s behavior continues, he is going to have face some very serious repercussions from me, likely face-to-face.  As you know, I’m not the type who takes who takes this cavalier smearing, which is patently false and arises out of circumstances that Kevin does not and refuses to comprehend, lightly.

So I was wondering if you — or, even better, one of his direct superiors — could have a talk with him and get him to stop.  It’s not worth my time to pursue this.  It’s not worth his time to perpetuate this nonsense.  And it’s not in anyone’s best interest to disseminate invective when it’s not predicated on fact.  (And if only my 2006 self heard my 2013 self typing that last sentence! Maturity or something close to it, who knew? Ha!)

Again, my apologies for bringing you into this.  I do hope that all is well.  Looking forward to more of your editorial efforts and, of course, your writing!

Thanks and all best,

Ed

To: Edward Champion

From: ______________

Date: November 18, 2013, 11:11 AM

Subject: Re: Kevin Nguyen

Hi Ed,

I would just let it slide — I’m sure Kevin will, too. We aren’t actually colleagues — I know him more from the writing world — but when I see him next I’ll talk to him.

To: ______________

From: Edward Champion

Date: November 18, 2013, 11:38 AM

Subject: Re: Kevin Nguyen

Thanks, ____. I appreciate any words you can offer.  You going to be at the National Book Awards?

All best,

Ed

I certainly didn’t want Nguyen to lose his job. I wanted his smearing to stop. I knew this contact to be a kind and reasonable man. But of course, this didn’t stop Nguyen from spreading the lie on September 26, 2014 that “Ed Champion tried to get me fired because I subtweeted him.”

Claim, ¶82: “I want to take a moment, here in the middle, to remind you that as Champion harassed, stalked, and threatened various members of the literary community…”

FALSE AND DEFAMATORY. A real journalist never has to remind her readers of the claims. But since McArdle has assembled more of a patchwork quilt of shoddy and unfounded allegations, she must drive home a thesis that is largely fallacious. So far in her essay, McArdle has failed to establish a clear case of stalking. I’ve debunked every single one of these claims except for four. Of the “threats,” one is a satirical tweet to Emily Mandel and another is a misunderstanding with Elyssa East (both of which I apologized for long before the publication of McArdle’s article and my crackup). The only real case that should trouble anybody, aside from Khakpour, is my reaction to Ethan Nosowosky and J. Robert Lennon, which we have already established never overtly involved revealing Lennon’s family secrets to his publisher.

I have owned up to the streaks of misogyny in the “Middling Millenals” essay. This leaves (so far) four outright factual errors, several cases of deliberately misleading the reader, insufficient psychoanalysis from a person who cannot count or spell the names of prominent online editors correctly, an overall failure to conduct due diligence, quotes from someone who was not privy to my professional life, a “witness” who reveals his partiality and his willingness to condemn quite easily, efforts to embarrass and humiliate, endless speculation from prominent authors without evidence, a thesis based on post hoc ergo propter hoc and inductive reasoning, defamatory accusations and suggestions of intent without evidence from (1) an aspiring media personality with 47,500 Twitter followers, (2) a book marketer, (3) a partial-minded publicist, (4) the head of a prominent independent publisher, and (5) a former literary critic who spews lies to sustain his precarious hold in the books world, insinuations that my work reflected my desire for violence from someone who has not read my novel, and three outright misunderstandings that have been forged into a conspiracy theory. And we are only halfway through the piece.

Claim, ¶83: “Fairly constant throughout his career, however, is the threat of physical violence, which seemed to hang about Champion like a shadow.”

FALSE, SPECULATIVE, DEFAMATORY. Once again, McArdle does not offer anything specific. She frames the threat against Khakpour on one night when I was having a nervous breakdown as indicative of a pattern that is reflected in all of my correspondence. This is just as defamatory as the claim in ¶49, where McArdle writes, “Nearly every person I spoke to had a story about Champion, how he threatened them by phone and by email, on Twitter and in DMs, in comment sections and on his own blog.…” I have rebutted all of these stories (the lies of Jessa Crispin, the unsubstantiated claims of Summer Smith, the gleeful misinterpretation of Kevin Nguyen, et al.) using the actual correspondence, the actual exchanges, and by corroborating the impression of my communications with other parties. The additional phrasing “which seem to hang about Champion like a shadow” suggests that threatening people was an inescapable part of my being, and is also defamatory.

An Interlude on the Subject of Violence and Satire

Is Jessa Crispin (or her critic J.C. Hallman, who parroted the same words to Crispin) “violent” for writing “I want to drown her in a bathtub” (arguably more severe than expressing a preposterously mock desire to put out a cigar in someone’s mouth)? Or what about Molly McArdle herself, who expressed a desire “to kill Thomas Jefferson” in order to change the course of history, suggested that Matt Mullin kill his doppelganger, and wanted to punch Jenn Northington’s ex-husband? By McArdle’s own standards, it sounds like she’s a violent monster with a “long history of physical threats” too.

Just as one would never accuse a standup comic who “killed” of harboring a murderous impulse, I don’t believe that we should hold the “homicidal” way in which we express certain frustrations about people up to such interpretive rigidities.

In May 2009, the writer Sherman Alexie got into trouble with the books world for saying that he wanted to hit a woman who was sitting on a plane with a Kindle. I recognized his remarks for the conversational theater that it was and made a point to contact him about it. Is John Lennon “threatening” when he sings “Well, I’d rather see you dead little girl / Than to be with another man / You better keep your head, little girl / or you won’t know who I am”? Or how about Brotha Lynch Hung when he raps “Cut niggas up, sector by sector / Next to her dead first cousin and nephew / Next to her head, bloody intestines / Next to her bed, other intestines”?

In a 2015 Supreme Court decision, Elonis vs. United States, the Court ruled in a 7-2 opinion that Anthony Elonis, in writing Facebook poetry shortly after a divorce (“There’s one way to love ya, but a thousand ways to kill ya / And I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess”) and serving prison time for it, did not commit an actual threat. The ACLU’s amicus brief in Elonis offers a very useful breakdown of the current free speech problem:

Online communications can easily become decontextualized by third parties. A speaker might send an email to one person, only to see that person forward the message to dozen of others or post it on a public mailing list. Or a speaker may post a comment on his own Facebook profile page, intending it only to be seen only by those friends he has allowed to view his page, and later find that one of those friends has taken a screen-capture of his comments and posted the image to an entirely different website. These actions, completely beyond the control of the speaker, place the speaker’s statements in front of audiences that the speaker had no expectation or intent to reach. Further, such decontextualization circumvents any effort by a speaker to provide additional context, outside the plain words of the statement, that would make the non-threatening intent of the statement clear. Different online communication fora will often develop their own conventions for expressing emotions and sarcasm.

It seems especially incumbent now, especially in an age where freedom of the press faces severe danger under a Trump administration, for any journalist examining a perceived “threat” to know precisely what its intent is before reporting on it. And as I have sufficiently established, McArdle (a) failed almost completely to get the words right, much less the context behind all this right and (b) failed to understand that sarcasm and satire have different conventions in different communities.

Nevertheless, in an age where cyberbullying and aggravated harassment is distressingly and increasingly more the norm, we should probably consider the context and the recipient whenever we do express violence in a verbal way. The point of satire is to expose human follies and vices through exaggeration. If there is an obsession or a relentlessness attached to satire directed at one person, especially satire that imparts violence in some way, then it seems fair and reasonable for the satirist to take some care to let the recipient in on the joke if it is misperceived.

In 2015, Jace Connors (aka Jan Rankowski) made a satirical YouTube video claiming to crash his car while he was on the way to Brianna Wu’s home. It caused Wu enough alarm for her to contact the authorities.

Wu, a prominent game developer, had every reason to fear for her life. She had been mercilessly targeted by 8chan, where users violated her privacy during the GamerGate campaign. She had received multiple rape and death threats. She was so frightened that, depending upon how many threats she would receive on any given day, this would determine whether or not she would sleep in her home or in a hotel. It is harrowing and despicable that any woman would fear for her life and have to adjust her daily existence this way.

Rankowski was not associated with GamerGate. He had uploaded videos of himself brandishing knives. And given Wu’s history, one must legitimately ask why she should be the subject of edgy satire. Is making fun of a frightened woman’s clear fear an act of cruelty? And if the violent impact of any expression is lessened or rendered more ridiculous – such as Bill Hicks’s famous bit asking advertisers to kill themselves – is the satire more acceptable?

Rankowski also suffered consequences for his videos, although hardly as severely as Wu. He was harassed and doxxed, forced to sign an agreement at work pledging not to make any further videos. “I didn’t take this situation seriously,” said Rankowskio to BuzzFeed, “but I see what it means now to be in the other person’s shoes. What her life must feel like. I have this newfound respect for the people who are having to deal with GamerGate, Brianna Wu and Anita [Sarkeesian].”

The question of where satire should function now is underscored, I think, by the following questions: (1) What is the nature of violence expressed in the satire? (2) Is the target of satire in a reasonable position to brace it? (3) Has the target of satire been made aware of the intent? And how close to the actual release of the satire was the underlying intent communicated? (4) How plausible is the violence?

In order for me to come to terms with a strain of writing and performance that has involved the satirical and comical expression of violence, one interpreted to be “threatening,” I am forced to examine the question of whether immediately informing the recipient of your intent and/or apologizing to the recipient actually lessens the perceived “threat” of the expression. I am forced to ask why so many people believed me to be violent when I was not a violent person.

At the time that I made jokes to Boris Kachka, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Mark Athitakis (see below), GamerGate did not exist. The ongoing harassment campaigns initiated bv trolls, as we now know and observe them, were inconceivable. Public shaming on Twitter, as documented by Jon Ronson, was in its infancy. I confined my communications to words and voicemail and I did inform Kachka and Seitz of my true intent. In the case of Mark Athitakis (or even the absurdity of the comments I was leaving at The Millions, although editor C. Max Magee comprehended the comic message), I probably should have contacted him at some point to inform him of my intent. Since these people did not contact me, I had no reason to believe that they were being interpreted any other way other than in a light context. Had I known that my words were harassing people – and in the case of Athitakis, I was not informed until July 15, 2011 — I would have stopped or let them in on the joke.

There’s likely to be a contingent of people reading this essay who may very well ask, “Well, what possessed your mind to spout such crazy talk in the first place?” My immediate answers are “I don’t know” and “Because it’s fun” and “Because when I expressed similar sentiments to my friends, they thought it was hilarious.” Humor, of course, is subjective. Certainly, the outrageous and angry humor in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was potent enough to rightly earn that comic masterpiece the Booker Prize. I’d like to think that the literary world is intelligent enough to draw distinctions. I can only reply that I did not mean any harm by my comments and I felt that any reasonably intelligent mind would be able to suss out my theatrical hyperbole for what it was. It’s worth pointing out that C. Max Magee, editor of The Millions, did contact me on April 1, 2014, stating, “Can I get you to cut it out in the comments? I get your sense of humor and play and that you like to challenge people, and I think that’s great.” And I agreed to do so. We had a friendly exchange. (For more on what transpired with Magee, see ¶¶92-93.)

In the case of Ron Hogan, I was genuinely concerned about the situation because I feared for the safety of Sarah Weinman. In the case of Glenn Kenny, who continues to troll and obsessively delight in the misfortune of others, I was standing up to a bully who was disruptive to my work and that of others.

Claim, ¶90: “to punch blogger Ron Hogan in 2007”

MISINTERPRETATION; MY SIDE OF THE STORY. While working unhappily at Kinko’s in the 90’s, Ron Hogan spent a good deal of his spare time posting hateful messages under the pseudonym “Jesse Garon” — the misspelled name of Jesse Garron, Elvis’s twin brother who died at birth. “I’ve taken the Usenet by storm!” declared his website. Presumably, his hateful behavior came from a humiliating job.

Nasty messages under both “Ron Hogan” and “Jesse Garon” were both attributed to the email “grifter@primenet.com.” There were some 13,575 of them when I conducted a USENET search on April 5, 2009.

What were some of Garon’s stunts? Well, consider this testimony:

David joined in with Hogan (Garon) because he loves try to enlist people on his side, no matter how slimey. Hogan/Garon became infuriated when someone alluded to a bathroom tryst at the infamous party. The reference was so obscure no one would have ever guessed that anything had occurred if Hogan/Garon hadn’t made sure that everyone did find out. He attacked everyone who so much as liked the people he decided were his enemies, much like David did (and does). He even repeated [sic] taunted a woman, who had never done anything to him at all but was known to like the people he hated, for a miscarraige she had. He found out about it from searching dejanews (when it was called that) and finding posts from her to a support group and then he mercilessly taunted her from then on, although she had never done anything to him. And this was the person that David holds up as an innocent victim all the time. Ron/Jesse posted home addresses and did everything he could to destroy ASG for everyone there, attacking those involved and anyone who was friends with them no matter how they avoided the quarrel. All because of an obscure hint. Sure things escalated and the affair was spelled out eventually, but only because Garon/Hogan pushed the people involved into these actions that they are so vilified for.

Posting home addresses? Taunting women for their miscarriages? Humiliating someone by publicly mocking their efforts to seek support?

But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the helpful archive of Google Groups provides us with ample and concrete proof that Hogan used USENET as a blunt tool for harassment.

Here’s Hogan (as Garon) on June 8, 1997, making threats towards Melody Clark:

And if you persist in this attitude, we’ll have to find your home address and phone number and post it, which is okay, since you’re not famous.

Here he is again, weeks later, on June 25, 1997:

On the other hand, if you’re a private citizen they happen to resent, then ASG has no problem posting your home address and telephone number or issuing threats of physical violence. But stars are special, unless of course they’re conservative.

On February 1, 1998, here’s Garon responding to the idea of posting another poster’s home address:

Perhaps you should. I certainly have no objections to you doing so, and I gather that Judith cares even less for Desiree than I do.

Here’s what Hogan had to say on October 30, 1997 to Melody Clark:

If Melody Clark wants to run around telling people that she has the FBI investigating me for kicking her ass in a flame war, then tells people who disagree with her that they must be part of the plot against her, if they aren’t actually me in disguise — you know she’s still trying to convince people I’m Stephen Wellington? –, well, I’m just going to have to tell people what a fucking loonytoon she is. Apparently she either took too many drugs in the 60s or isn’t taking enough in the 90s. Either way, this doesn’t end until she admits her mistakes and stifles herself.

If you don’t like that, Monysmom, fuck you. Nobody asked to hear your useless opinion in the first place.

There are countless other incidents, including the following:

In which “Jesse Garon” attempts spin control concerning the bathroom incident.

Or consider this thread, in which someone from alt.showbiz.gossip left the group and Hogan responded with the heartless “Actually, the problem is that Melody Clark seems to have had problems getting her daily dosage of Zoloft calibrated, and runs around telling perfect strangers that (1) the I does her favors and (2) if you don’t agree with Melody Clark, you must be Ron Hogan in disguise.”

The late Steve Gilliard, a man who wrote with conviction, was forced to declare:

It’s time you take your leave of ASG.

Besides your mysoginist [sic] treatment of ASG women, both online and in person, you waste bandwidth.

Look, it’s no big deal you can’t deal with real women, have a small penis or can’t tell the difference between civil behavior and acting like a lovesick spoiled child.

You have no social skills, OK. We can all deal with that. But, you simply can’t call women bitches, beat up on them online and expect to be treated like a human. Sorry.

All this tapered off around 1998 because of the bathroom incident.

I was aware of all this creepiness when, at a cocktail party hosted by St. Martin’s at ThrillerFest on the evening of July 13, 2007, Ron Hogan took a picture of Sarah Weinman and me without permission and then boasted to her about publicly posting it, knowing very well that she was sensitive about such matters. She was Jewish. I was not. This was a delicate matter for Weinman’s family that I went out of my way to respect. Weinman and I had been photographed before by others, including Gawker, but the photographers at least had the decency to ask us if we could be snapped by a camera. But Hogan captured us in a private moment at the corner of the room. Hogan was drunk and slurring his words, lumbering up and down on the floor. It is possible that Hogan’s drunkenness contributed to his insensitivity. As my own incident on September 25, 2014 with Porochista Khakpour confirmed (see Appendix A), alcohol and mental affliction are a toxic mix.

Seeing Hogan glowing about the photo and seeing how hurt Weinman was, and witnessing Hogan’s failure to back off as Weinman became more visibly bothered and as we were both telling him that this was not okay, and observing his unceasing desire to hurt a person I deeply cared about, I couldn’t stand seeing Weinman hurt and humiliated. I walked up to Hogan and said, “If you fucking do anything to fucking hurt Sarah, I will beat the fucking shit out of you. You think that what you did over there was cute? You are persona non grata. Again, if you do anything to hurt Sarah, I will kick your fucking ass. Do you understand?” Hogan never offered an apology. All he said was a sheepish “Yes.” Sarah and I then left the party.

Is it acceptable to confront a man with a clear documented history of terrorizing women on Usenet in this way? I can understand why I said what I did, even if I’m not entirely proud of it. But this was a defense against a man who I knew for a fact to have harassed women online for years and who I had also heard stories about on the party circuit, which included terrible anecdotes of Hogan groping women, that I have been unable to corroborate. I didn’t want him to harass Sarah. And since Hogan was unremitting with the photograph, I reacted with strong emotions.

I believed in 2009 and I believe now that everyone (including Ron Hogan) is worthy of forgiveness. But forgiveness is tough when the transgressor continues to commit the same behavior in the present. This is why I have done serious work on myself to ensure that any behavior I commit which might even be perceived as a threat isn’t a part of my existence. The tricky problem with this, of course, is that the goalposts change from person to person.

The next day, after contemplating what I said, I emailed Hogan and apologized, making an effort at diplomacy:

To: Ron Hogan
From: Edward Champion
Date: July 14, 2007 2:55 PM
Subject: Last night

Ron:

I speak only for myself here, but I feel that at least one of us should take the high road.

First off, I apologize for my words to you last night.  I am not fond of seeing people I deeply care about hurt — particularly when the subject of the offense tells you in explicit terms that what you are doing is wrong, and you continue to do it anyway, and when you act without so much as a shred of empathy or human decency, or even attempt to patch things up on the spot (which you could have easily done; I’m not unreasonable).  Nevertheless, my own reaction was not the ideal one.

I was prepared, after you acted as if I were an eidolon for the second time — when I was standing right next to Sarah (the first, of course, was at the Mediabistro party at BEA; I had thought that rudeness more or less rectified after our friendly voicemail exchange; I had intended to follow up with a meetup; alas, health and freelancing circumstances got in the way, if this somehow contributed to your most recent spate of rudeness) —  to simply go about my business with other folks who were friendlier.  Being a more or less affable fellow, this is generally what I do in such circumstances.

But (and this is important) without discounting my own behavior, please understand that you stepped over the line in a very big way.  You crossed into a territory of inconsiderate behavior that good people do not wander in if they are interested in keeping the peace, as you have regularly claimed — falsely, I must now presume.  I am wondering if some similar event transpired between you and Dave Itzkoff.  I am wondering if you truly comprehend how many people don’t care for the way you conduct yourself.  (And I should point out that I have often defended you to these naysayers.)  You took me aside one BEA ago to admonish me about this sort of behavior.  And now I am asking you to consider long and hard about some of the reasons you’re in the spot you’re in right now.  And I don’t just mean between you and me, or you and Sarah.

To speak directly to the situation between you and me, I don’t know what particular personal circumstances you are going through or what has warranted your ongoing passive-aggressiveness towards me — which I trace back to December.  Before your actions last night, I was open to resolving these circumstances in some peaceful manner. But now I feel that this is no longer possible.  Thus, I feel that it would be best if we simply not speak with each other or refer to each other again, thereby ensuring that we can inhabit the same settings, as will likely be the case as long as you and I are on the literary beat.

The upshot is that I cannot trust you in even the smallest sense.  Your inability to own up to your own actions, your failure to come to me directly with any problems you’ve had with me, your propensity for passive rapids and rivulets over active resolution, and, to be perfectly blunt, your emotional cowardice leaves me to believe that you and I simply aren’t meant to tango.

But, more than any pedantic quibbles that I have, you hurt someone who is very important to me.

I’ve done my best over the years to highlight your achievements, to draw people your way, to treat you seriously as an author by opening up a Segundo slot for you, and to funnel your name under the radar.  Under the present circumstances, this is no longer possible.

I find this all to be a great shame.  But as Andre Gide put it, “It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.”  I am more forgiving than Gide.  I do not hate you, but since you cannot be true about who you are or what you feel towards me — well, Gide does have a point.

Sincerely,

Ed

Hogan chose not to reply. But he did reply to Weinman, accusing me of “morning after” behavior:

To: Sarah Weinman
From: Ron Hogan
Date: July 14, 2007, 11:56 AM
Subject: [None]

Just before the two of you left the party, Ed came back into the room and suggested to me that you had been upset by the incident with the photo. I had not sensed any genuine discomfort on your part, and I’m sure you know that I would not have run any photo of you without your approval, no matter who was in it, so I’m genuinely sorry for any distress you felt during that situation.

You should know, however, if Ed didn’t inform you of this himself, that in order to communicate what he perceived as your emotional state, he interrupted an informal interview with two writers and threatened  to “beat you to a fucking pulp” if I “ever pulled a stunt like that again.”

Setting aside the issue of your boyfriend threatening your friends–it is totally Not Cool for your boyfriend to threaten your professional colleagues with physical violence, no matter what your emotional state may have been. It is beyond comprehension that he would do so while your colleague is working, no matter how informal the setting, and in the presence of your industry peers. Obviously, I’m not going to hold Ed’s behavior against you, but if he ever pulls a stunt like that with Dylan or any of your other editors, the consequences for your career as well as his could be much worse than ensuring that two thriller writers now know Ed primarily as “Sarah’s psychotic boyfriend.”

I had hoped to be able to speak with you directly about this last night, and was concerned that I was not able to reach you until I realized what night it was. Please do touch base with me this weekend when you get a chance.

Yours,

Ron

I regrettably don’t know the identities of the two thriller writers who Hogan was talking with. And I really wish I could corroborate what happened with them. But I wince at the threatening tone that Hogan uses against Weinman, hoping with all my heart that my own communications have not been perceived the same way. But the one thing I am capable of doing, that Hogan is not, is sincerely apologizing when I do wrong and owning up to my bad behavior in the most forthright way I can.

Claim, ¶90: “to punch New York magazine writer Boris Kachka in 2008″

FALSE: Boris Kachka regularly harassed me. In addition to leaving vituperative comments on this website during 2009 (“Hey loser, did you even read the whole review?”), he also called me multiple times at insanely early hours (6:00 AM) on the morning of September 14, 2005. Since Kachka would not stop, it became necessary, at least to my mind at the time, to have a bit of fun with him. The one thing I did not do was threaten “to punch Boris Kachka.” However, I did leave a highly theatrical voicemail to him, which Kachka understood within hours of my message to be “an interesting and frighteningly convincing homage,” as is reflected in the below email exchange.

To: Edward Champion
From: Boris Kachka
Date: April 21, 2009, 4:26 PM
Subject: Threats of physical violence?

I think this proves my point–there is indeed something wrong with you that can’t be worked out no matter how many convoluted Thesauran passages you spew at the expense of others. Now you have to leave profanity-laced tirades on my voicemail. Stay classy, bud. My recommendation: start smoking again, or consider the patch.

I wasn’t being anonymous, you idiot. I just didn’t want your assinine [sic] website showing up in my Google alert. How many Borises who despise you are in regular contact? Wait, don’t answer that. You’ve posted on my stories, I’ve posted on yours. So I don’t see what there is to get huffy about. The only difference is I’ve only posted on yours when you’ve personally attacked either me or other people. But fine, let’s agree we’ll never be in touch in any form, ever. If I ever meet you, I won’t be throwing the first punch. I have other things to get excited about. That said, I’m sure you wouldn’t amount to much in a fair fight, in person, in print, or anywhere.
Now back to work…

To: Boris Kachka
From: Edward Champion
Date: April 21, 2009, 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: Threats of physical violence?

It doesn’t prove anything, except that you are so literal-minded that you did not hear the specific aural clues I placed in that voicemail. Play it again if you haven’t deleted it (I presume you have). You assume my tone to be rigid and sociopathic, but are you so certain? Do you truly know the full range of the emotional spectrum from the sad small sinecure from which you now sit? If you weren’t anonymous, why then did you not leave your last name or your URL at New York Magazine? (Oh, that’s right. There’s this thing called the yearly review, not to mention keylogged emails.) And why did you feel entitled to call me at 6:00 AM Pacific Time so many years ago? That was quite rude. You chastise me for resorting to ad hominem, and yet here you are with “idiot” in this email and “loser” in the comment. I have specific observations. You have hollow schoolyard nouns that mean nothing. All cowardice and hypocrisy. Just as you assume that writing a book about a publishing house that hardly anyone in Middle America knows or cares about — will it even sell a thousand? — represents some meaningful journalistic contribution. Oh, to be so enslaved to a day job you clearly despise and a medium you clearly loathe. To feel not one ounce of joy about books! No, you’re too uncomprehending for pity.

To: Edward Champion
From: Boris Kachka
Date: April 21, 2009, 5:16 PM
Subject: Re: Threats of physical violence?

Of course I didn’t delete it! It’s fucking hilarious! I’m playing this thing at parties, then for the authorities if a restraining order is deemed necessary.

Well, I hope whatever books you end up writing do fantastically (maybe you’ve written some already–I don’t know, and I don’t really give enough of a shit to find out. Because I hate books, they give me no joy!). I’m sorry to disappoint you by writing about an obscure topic. Here I thought I was at fault for only covering the big stuff–but there’s no pleasing you, no matter how hard I try!

To: Boris Kachka
From: Edward Champion
Date: April 21, 2009, 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: Threats of physical violence?

Well, let me know if you need a remix.  Not sure if you’ve heard this clip, but I am known to do mash-ups that turn out to be quite prescient months from now.

Anyway, Boris, you’re a funny guy.  I’ll make sure they name a drink after you at a bar in Peoria.

To: Edward Champion
From: Boris Kachka
Date: April 21, 2009, 5:38 PM
Subject: Re: Threats of physical violence?

Okay, you can’t expect me to pick that up from a simple string of profanity (though I’ll grant you “What don’t you fucking understand”). I don’t see the leap from “have you heard the Christian Bale rant” to “sad small sinecure,” and all the hating my life stuff, and it’s those little leaps of logic that concern me.  (I don’t know what it takes to make you believe that being paid decently to read books and see plays and do interviews is really not all that bad.) But I grant you, it was an interesting and frighteningly convincing homage…

Claim, ¶90: “to put a cigar out in critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s mouth in 2010”

FALSE, MISLEADING. On the evening of November 16, 2010, Matt Zoller Seitz tweeted a number of sentiments that I interpreted as comical tough guy trash talk.

seitza

I replied back with equally preposterous imagery. This was never a threat. I truly did not comprehend how any mind, especially one who had been been a Pulitzer finalist, would take the idea of “using a mouth as an ashtray” seriously, and was careful to preface my ridiculous description noting the “faux trash talk.”

seitzb

seitz1

seitz2

seitz3

But Matt Zoller Seitz is a violent and deeply angry man. Unlike me, he actually has inflicted violence and bullied upon the weak, openly seeking out violence. He wrote about this in an August 19, 2014 essay called “Different Rules Apply” that was published on rogerebert.com:

When I came out of the deli, this man said something about my shoes and my hat, and because I was looking for a reason to hit somebody, I put my grocery bags down and confronted him. We cursed at each other for a while, puffing up our chests and barking threats, and then he poked me in the chest with his index finger.  I knew the second he did it that he didn’t actually mean to touch me, that he was probably just jabbing at me for emphasis and misjudged the distance between us, because it wasn’t a hard impact and the contact seemed to surprise him, too. But I hit him in the face anyway. He stumbled backward, turned around in an attempt to regain his balance, tripped and fell face down on the sidewalk. I jumped on his back and put my forearm around his neck and locked it, to keep him from getting up again. It was a chokehold.

Seitz, in his own words, was “looking for a reason to hit somebody” and went out of his way to be violent towards another man. This is arguably a far worse transgression than anything I have ever done or am alleged to have done (where’s the McArdle hit piece on Seitz?), yet Seitz’s essay was highly commended upon its publication as “one of the best, most compelling essays I’ve read about white privilege written by a white man” and “the difference between knowing and understanding.” But has Seitz truly reformed? And does he really know and understand? He remained so much a bully, presumably “looking for a reason” to be angry, that, on the night of my suicidal ideation of June 26, 2014, when I was recovering and when even my most vociferous and nastiest critics had long stopped commenting upon my Emily Gould essay, sending me the following message to me at a very late hour threatening to beat me up and insisting that my very real emotional problems involved “pretending.”

Contact Form Submission
Date: June 27, 2014, 1:30 AM
From: Matt Zoller Seitz

Message:

Anytime, anyplace, Flatbush Eddie.

I am so confident in this that I promise not to put my hands up.

Stop pretending.

Ed

I decided at this point that the best thing to do was to own up through a peaceful and good faith resolution. What followed were more threats by Seitz.

To: Matt Zoller Seitz

From: Edward Champion

Date: July 1, 2014, 11:20 AM

Subject: Re: Contact Form Submission from matt zoller seitz

Dear Matt:

On November 16, 2010 — nearly four years ago — we had an exchange of tweets on a late night. I was drinking. I suspect you might have been too. I replied to your tweet with macho imagery intended to come across as preposterous, “I’ll be happy to use your mouth as an ashtray for my blunt to keep it real.” You responded with a series of tweets in which you took what was intended as a joke seriously:

There was also a comment I left at the L.A. Review of Books on a Calum Marsh piece, but it appears to have been scrubbed. So I can’t reference the context.

Because you have intermittently nettled at me ever since, and won’t let this go — even going to the trouble of threatening me with the below email on a night when I experienced a suicidal ideation, which I foolishly expressed online — I haven’t exactly felt inclined to apologize for what I tweeted. It is a low blow indeed to want to inflict violence upon a man who has hit his lowest point.

Nevertheless, I was the first to strike. More importantly, it was a low blow for me to ridicule your Salon memoir to your late wife. That was tremendously insensitive of me, even in the impulsive heat of the moment. Who the hell am I to tell anybody how to grieve? What kind of a prick does one have to be to dictate feeling like this?

I sincerely apologize to you for these tweets.

Please understand that I am working very hard right now — with current therapeutic help — to understand how my behavior sets people off. But I cannot issue empty apologies. Because that would satisfy neither of us. I need to understand what I have said and, more importantly, how the other person felt so that I truly feel the searing sting of my impact.

This may not be enough for you, but it’s the best I can do during this time of healing. I assure you that I’m far more effective than you can ever be in destroying myself.

Take care, thanks, and all best,

Ed

To: Edward Champion
From: Matt Zoller Seitz
Date: July 1, 2014, 2:12 PM
Subject: Re: Contact Form Submission from matt zoller seitz

Ed:

Does Ed Champion, writer, understand that words have meaning? The answer, apparently, is no. You thought you could insult a fellow writer who live less than a mile from you on social media and it would not provoke a response. Then you thought you could challenge me to a physical confrontation and I would not accept. You were wrong. Now you come at me with the contrived language of therapeutic apology, though filled with mealy mouthed excuses and passive-aggressive “but remember, you’re just as bad” formulations, and characterize the cigar line as “a joke.”

There are a great many people in this world who do not joke about violence. I am one of those people. I don’t make jokes about that. I respond to threats.

You are a bully. Since your most recent public meltdown I’ve been contacted by six people, two of whom I barely know, who have shared their own versions of being harassed, insulted, stalked and threatened by you, at home, at work, and on social media. One man was reduced to tears by your viciousness. A woman feared for her safety.

My response to bullying is simple: destroy the bully.

Don’t peddle your emotional manipulation here. That email was sent knowing nothing except that you’d melted down (again) and that, unbeknownst to me, you’d been insulting me in the comments thread if the LA Review if Books. I don’t know you. I know nothing of suicide threats or your private demons and I don’t care.

You insulted me, my work, and my marriage, publicly. You pissed on that which is sacred, and you did it knowingly and with glee. When I challenged you to put actions to your words, you hid for for years. And now I recently discovered, through that ridiculous comment on Marsh’s piece, that you have been representing your cowardice as mercy, the classic move of a bully who’s been called out.

Bottom line: I’ll give this “new Ed” a year and see how it goes. If you haven’t terrorized anyone I’ll accept an apology from you, provided it is free of emotional manipulation, equivocation, excuses, and thinly veiled critiques of me that you don’t currently have the moral standing to offer. Until then: don’t write me or contact me or tag me on Twitter or so much as say my name out loud. If you see me coming, cross the street. If you are ever in the same room with me, leave immediately. I consider you a violently disturbed person, and I will deal with you swiftly.

I am saving this email, so that in the event that I ever need to deal with your in person, there will be a record of my warning you exactly what would happen, and under what circumstances.

Matt

Seitz then followed up this violent message with the following two emails:

To: Edward Champion
From: Matt Zoller Seitz
Date: July 1, 2014, 2:49 PM
Subject: Re: Contact Form Submission from matt zoller seitz

You know what? On second thought, I’m sorry about everything, including my own anger management failures. I apologize unreservedly for anything I’ve said or done that might make your healing harder.

I’m in Dallas with my Dad, who just suffered a stroke and might not play piano again, so my own judgment is poor.

My Dad just said, apropos is nothing, “Some depressed people feel better when they act line assholes, but not me,” and of course I instantly wished I could take that email back.

I bet we’re the same person in a lot of ways.

I withdraw any and all promises, threats and bad vibrations.

Matt

Sent from my iPhone

To: Edward Champion
From: Matt Zoller Seitz
Date: July 1, 2014, 3:23 PM
Subject: Re: Contact Form Submission from matt zoller seitz

Also I’m using an iPhone in a hospital, so my typing sucks.

Sent from my iPhone

To: Matt Zoller Seitz
From: Edward Champion
Date: July 1, 2014, 2:52 PM
Subject: Re: Contact Form Submission from matt zoller seitz

Matt:

First and foremost, I’m really sorry to hear about your father. That can’t be an easy situation and, when it comes to ailing family, all emotions are on the table. I do wish you and your father the best. My grandmother has gone through several strokes. So I’m well aware of how they can change people and how important it is to encourage the people you love to live.

I know that words have meaning and that, very often, attempts to communicate sincerity come across as trite, especially through instantaneous mediums like Twitter. I have not stalked anyone. I have never been in a physical altercation with anyone. One can only come across as a defensive lout when there is a witchhunt. But I’ll just say that my partner and my friends can back me up on this, and I will leave it at that.

The suicidal ideation I experienced was real. It was certainly selfish, but it was too caught within the mesh of raw absolutist emotion to be consciously manipulative. I am seeing a therapist.

I don’t think you’re a bad guy. And I certainly haven’t felt any anger towards you. I recognize the same fierce desire to fight when provoked. But I think that the people who love us in the real world need both of us. So I’m going to sign off, wish you well and your father a speedy recovery, and again offer my sincere apologies for any impulsive sentiments that hurt you.

Thanks, take care, and all best,

Ed

Despite this good faith exchange, Seitz continued to express no empathy, even as he continued to spout forth the lie that I had threatened him, not pointing to the above exchange. He has shown a complete incapacity to not only present the facts as they actually happened, and the context that I carefully explicated to him directly at length, but to feel any compassion for a man who he continues to view as one of the greatest villains in the New York culture world. Matt Zoller Seitz is forgiven for actions far worse than mine. I am not. I still forgive the man, even though he threatened multiple times to fight me.

Claim, ¶90: “to promise ‘serious consequences’ to critic Glenn Kenny”

FALSE, MISLEADING. Glenn Kenny is an irascible and often compassionless critic whose Twitter feed is a one-man three-ring circus for vitriol and invective. He has sustained an indefatigible feud with Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells extending for years that can be beningly described as overzealous, nasty enough to mock Wells’s sex life and make other untoward suggestions that are decidedly below the belt. He is a self-professed troll who revels in violent imagery, such as presenting Mike Daisey’s scalp to Ira Glass, and telling Emily Gould, “Um, not to put too fine a point on it—and believe me, I know this is going to sound ‘mean,’ but there’s just no way around it—but could you do the rest of humanity the favor of, like, throwing yourself in front of a bus or something? Thanks.” (Kenny later apologized for this.) When the distinguished critic Scott Esposito attempted to inform Kenny that he had written for several esteemed places, Kenny ridiculed him and has gone on ridiculing him, as recently as November 20, 2016 – more than three years after the exchange. Kenny is a man who cannot let things go. And this behavior comes not from some hopped up kid trying to make a name for himself, but a man who is nearly sixty, one who is widely published. He is a prominent example of what I never want to become.

So when Kenny loudly badmouthed me in public, as I was attempting to cover the New York Film Festival, I sent him this email on September 22, 2011:

Glenn:

I’m writing to you with a calm and level head, so that I might give you the benefit of the doubt. This email is written in confidence. It is between us and not to be forwarded to anyone. And if I hear you talk of it, then I will consider it rescinding on good faith.

Here’s the deal: I’m trying to cover a film festival. And that means using those intervals between movies to compose my thoughts.

You are an ostensible professional, but in recent days you have demonstrated a full-fledged commitment to amateurism, speaking loudly of “Guys like Champion” while I was sitting a few rows away. And this behavior has to stop. You can have any thoughts and feelings you want about me. I don’t care. But I will not tolerate efforts to disrupt my work. I certainly would not do that to my worst enemy. If you talk about me in earshot (as you did a few days ago before the Nicholas Ray film) or you encourage a peer to read my tweets aloud while I’m working,then there WILL be serious consequences. If you do not say a word about me, then we can both go about our work and there is no need for either of us to speak with each other or mention each other ever again. As part of the deal, I will not mention you at all at Twitter. Nonoverlapping magisteria is the operative term.

I trust that this clears up this matter. And I trust that both of us can work the rest of the festival in a professional manner rather than give into petty personal grievances.

Thanks,

Ed

Kenny replied on September 22, 2011 at 9:37 AM:

To Edward Champion:

I apologize that my voice carried as it did. But as it happens the discussion to which you refer pertained to matters that, for better or worse, had become part of the public record. I suggest that if you don’t want your tweets or writing discussed, you do not tweet or write.

If I receive any further threats from you referring to “serious consequences” they shall be conveyed to parties appropriate for dealing with threats. For the nonce, though, I will conditionally accede to your request pertaining to confidentiality. I get one phone call that’s a hangup, however, and I’ll have to reconsider. You have crossed a line here, Ed. You can’t not be aware of that.

I HAVE shared your threats with a family member, for that person’s information in the event that anything happens to me. And that is our “deal.” And that is all.

Glenn Kenny

I replied on September 22, 2011 at 11:47 AM:

To Glenn Kenny:

Thank you for your apology. To reiterate: You can have any thoughts and feelings you want about me. I don’t care.

The issue here is behavior along the lines of a few days ago: “in earshot” harassment, which I will not tolerate from you or anybody else. You have just confessed that you knew I was there. Please know that I am fully aware of New York Penal Code Section 240, recent legislation passed in Albany, and that I am prepared to consult with third parties if there are any continued infractions on your part.

So long as you keep your mouth shut about me in my presence and as I am trying to work, we won’t have any problems. It’s as simple as that.

Sincerely,

Edward Champion

Kenny replied at 12:00 PM:

I did not confess that I knew you were present. I was both unaware of your presence AND unaware that you were in earshot. You have now gone and created a situation wherein I absolutely do not wish to be made aware of your presence in any way.

We have no “understanding” from hereon in. I consider you a threat to my personal safety going forward. I will take appropriate steps as I deem necessary.

Glenn Kenny

I replied on 12:28 PM:

To Glenn Kenny:

This correspondence, like all, is personal and confidential.

As a point of clarification, please be advised that I have not made any “threats” to you at all. These emails were sent to rectify a grievance in a civil and timely manner, and adhere to [sic] the standards of information gathering and dissemination followed by reasonable parties. I presented you with a solution and you have responded with false and defamatory assertions.

Please be advised that I will seek appropriate remedies in numerous venues if you continue to slander, libel, defame, and harass me, or if you proceed to mischaracterize my actions as “threats,” in any form and in any medium.
Sincerely,

Edward Champion

Kenny replied on 12:43 PM.

Let it go, Edward. You’re clearly enjoying this far too much. If you don’t believe that your emails are threatening, I’d be glad to take the matter up with Lincoln Center security (for starters) which I shall do if I receive one more email from you. Now. Do YOU understand? We’re done.

Kenny, an angry and dishonorable man responding to Champion, phrasing a request in aloof and bizarrely formal terms, was quite happy to twist a civil if oddly worded effort to clear up a grievance into a “threat,” did not respect the “personal and confidential” nature of this preposterous exchange and willfully violated it on September 30, 2014. It is unknown whether Kenny forwarded the part to McArdle where I clarified that I did not make any personal threats, but his accusation that I was “enjoying [Kenny’s harassment] far too much” speaks to his obsessive mind and his willingness to demonize, which is further buttressed by his own threats.

To his credit, Kenny did once ask for compassion for me. But it seems pretty evident that his obsessive streaks of behavior greatly outweigh whatever benevolence he may possess. Kenny is a man who, like Seitz, is deeply enraged, unwilling to own up to his own part in his many vituperative exchanges and unwilling to see how his own nasty remarks might be perceived as “threats” to the many people he has insulted over the course of many decades. Glenn Kenny, a man now wasting his time and talent on insignificant and often invented beefs through Twitter, is what happens when you live a life where you hold onto grudges and refuse to grow. I feel nothing but empathy for him and hope one day that he will stop being such a mean-spirited person.

Claim, ¶90: “His history of explicit physical threats is long: to punch blogger Ron Hogan in 2007, to punch New York magazine writer Boris Kachka in 2008, to put a cigar out in critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s mouth in 2010, to promise ‘serious consequences’ to critic Glenn Kenny and decapitation to blogger and critic Mark Athitakis in 2011. Athitakis was one of the very few people who notified the police of Champion’s threats. Champion took to his blog to mock Athitakis for overreacting to what was ‘really a bunch of silly performance art.’”

FALSE, MISLEADING, AND DEFAMATORY. I have already addressed the illusory “physical threats” issued to Kachka and Seitz and the justifiable defense against now documented predator Ron Hogan. I have done a website search of Athitakis’s blog in an attempt to determine when or if I (jocularly) called for Athitakis’s decapitation. Aside from the comment for which I’ve provided a screenshot below, I can find no trace of directly “calling” for Athitakis’s death. Here is an excerpt from a December 9, 2011 essay, “2011: The Year in Broken Windows,” in which I articulate the truth behind the Athitakis spat:

On the afternoon of July 19, 2011, I was contacted by a detective from the Cheverly Police Department. The detective was a nice and reasonable guy. He explained to me that blogger and critic Mark Athitakis was accusing me of harassment. What was so harassing? Several comments — all under my real name, really a bunch of silly performance art that I had been leaving intermittently over the last few months, nothing intended to harm and more than a bit absurdist — one evoking a fictitious Shakespeare quote reading “let’s kill the critics” and the like. I told the detective that these comments were clearly satirical. That a comment containing the lyrics for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” could not possibly be written with violence or threats in mind. The detective agreed that he and I both had better things to do with his time. He was merely checking up on the complaint that he received.

At no time did Mark ever contact me personally to (a) clarify the beef that he has with me, (b) state that I was harassing him. He did email me on July 14th, writing, “Your behavior is abusive, disrespectful, and unacceptable. It has to stop.” I emailed him a suggestion on how to clear things up, writing, “If you want to use this email as an opportunity, then I’m all ears.” He repeated the same line in another email on July 15th. I replied, “This comment is not abusive. Here are the facts: you have no sense of humor, you are disrespectful of my thoughts and voice, and you cannot take criticism.”

That was the last direct contact I had with Athitakis. I did not visit his site again until July 19, 2011, when I was attempting to explain the situation to the detective. So Athitakis must have filed the complaint with the Cheverly Police Department after this exchange.

Claim, ¶92-93: “In response to a March 31, 2014 post, Champion speculates on where he’ll be in a year. ‘I am certain that it will involve answering a judge in a courtroom as Lydia’s attorneys stare at my manacled bulk with an admixture of vengeance and purchased alacrity. It will be ‘a hell of a legacy.’’ ‘This comment made my mom call me with real concern,’ Kiesling tweeted on June 28, 2014. ‘I’ve fielded plenty of critical comments without wanting to pack it in; the ones he left during his feud with the Millions made me dread opening my email the day I posted something.’”

MISCHARACTERIZATION, MISINTERPRETATION, MISSING CONTEXT. In October 2011, after a Year in Reading entry on “overlooked books” proved very popular with the readers, I spent a great deal of time writing an essay for The Millions on 20th century critic Dwight Macdonald. I pulled the essay due to editorial differences I had with C. Max Magee, who wanted to play it safe and remove the political elements and unethical conflicts of interest that I had included, which I felt were essential to understanding Macdonald. (The essay can be read here.)

In hindsight, I’m sure Max meant well, but his remarks rubbed me the wrong way. I declined his subsequent request to participate in the Year in Reading series. Magee approached me again in May 2012 to write a polemical piece about science fiction and I was bothered by the request, given that I was asked again to neuter my voice, which seemed contrary to the whole purpose of writing an essay that would work people up..

I suppose all this rankled me because I really liked The Millions and still feel that it publishes quality essays. But I started a playful comic feud with The Millions shortly after this problematic exchange to protest The Millions‘s failure to publish dangerous viewpoints. I left deliberately strange and increasingly odd comments in response to threads, which were taken seriously by people who didn’t know the backstory or who didn’t like my writing. (Mark Sarvas, who was one of my most obsessive haters, as chronicled below in ¶161 and ¶166, left numerous comments under pseudonyms.) Amazingly, Magee let all these comments stand, which I think is a tribute to his tolerance for other viewpoints. This “feud” culminated in an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke on April 1, 2014, in which I left comments on nearly every single thread, which includes the comment cited by Lydia Kiesling (time stamp: April 1, 2014, 12:03 AM). Magee emailed me shortly afterwards asking for a truce, which I agreed to.

Had McArdle actually interviewed Magee (whose first initial she cannot even get right; see ¶53) or even paid attention to the timestamp, she might have learned about this vital comical context. I was not “speculating” on where I would be in a year. I was playing a character. I was not going after Kiesling’s family. Kiesling’s mother, who falsely interpreted it without seeing the time stamp, reacted to it.

Claim, ¶96: “’It’s 100 percent mental illness,’ Porochista Khakpour agreed, ‘and I write a million tweets about misogyny.’ She paused. (We were on the phone.) ‘But Ed actually,’ she said, ‘there’s definitely a sexually violent angle to how he attacked Emily [Gould] and I.’”

FALSE CHARACTERIZATION, SPECULATIVE, UNSUBSTANTIATED. I have addressed the irresponsible and problematic approach of asking a person who is not an expert in psychology to opine upon my mental health in ¶136. And I establish, in ¶4, that my Gould essay, which contained some subconscious misogynistic language that I now own up to, was more rooted in baptismal imagery rather than a desire to inflict sexual violence. As I establish in Appendix A, what sent me over the edge were the lies that Khakpour was disseminating about me. If there was a “sexual violent angle,” then it clearly did not have anything to do with inflicting sexual violence on either Gould or Khakpour, but, in the case of Khakpour, using a humiliating piece of information to retaliate against someone who humiliated me by leading a campaign on Twitter to destroy me with misinformation. But I was drunk and not in my right mind on the evening of September 25, 2014. This was wrong.

Claim, ¶99: “In his writing, Champion regularly drew from a deep well of sexual hyperbole. Though men were subject to this kind of attention, women—far more often—have been subjected to Champion’s explicit descriptions of their bodies and of sexual acts involving them.”

along with Claim, ¶100: Jessa Crispin quote: “There’s something sexual in the way that he imagines a woman and writes about her.”

FALSE, DEFAMATORY, UNSUBSTANTIATED, NO QUANTITATIVE MEASURE, REBUTTED BY EXAMPLE: This rebuttal is very much about reckoning with who I am, and who I am alleged to be. I do not believe that writing from a place of sexual hyperbole automatically makes one a misogynist. But to consider McArdle’s viewpoint, I have cited below every example from my blog of how I described a woman from January 1, 2014 through September 25, 2014 (the night of my crackup), under the theory that examining how a man (i.e., me) describes women in his worst state is probably the better benchmark for what kind of “misogynist” he happens to be. I have omitted the Gould essay (already covered above in ¶4) because this has already been trotted out as the casus belli against me. If the below results damn me, then I clearly have a problem that I need help with. But if they do not, then McArdle is clearly at fault here for (a) not producing evidence and (b) falsely smearing my character to feed a monstrous and libelous myth that has perpetuated to the present day.

The below table is also a solid overview that demonstrates what I was spending most of my time doing: reading and writing about books, conducting journalism, and thoughtfully interviewing authors.

January 14, 2014 Operating Instructions (Modern Library Nonfiction #99) “as brave women document their battles with cancer and callous columnists bully them for their candor” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “It is also true that she attracts a large reading audience, a sin as unpardonable to hoity-toity gasbags as a man of the hoi polloi leaving the toilet seat up. Much as the strengths of Jennifer Weiner’s fiction are often dwarfed by her quest for superfluous respect, Anne Lamott’s acumen for sculpting the familiar through smart and lively prose doesn’t always get the credit it deserves.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Yet one is fascinated not only by Lamott’s unshakable belief that she will remain a single parent for the rest of her natural life” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Compare Lamott and Dooce‘s Heather Armstrong (perhaps the best-known of the mommy bloggers) as they describe contending with a breast pump:” VERDICT: Not sexualized. This is an effort to show the influence of Lamott on mommy bloggers.
February 5, 2014 Diane Johnson (The Bat Segundo Show) “Diane Johnson is most recently the author of Flyover Lives.”

“Diane Johnson is best known for her comic novels centered around France”

VERDICT: Not sexualized.
February 13, 2014 Jenny Offill (The Bat Segundo Show) “Jenny Offill is most recently the author of Dept. of Speculation.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Anyway, so the wife — I’m going to call her “the wife” because she’s the unnamed protagonist of this novel — she has this very unusual relationship with John Keats.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.In fact, Offill even cracks a joke during this chat that McArdle would likely interpret as someone possessing “violent impulses.”

Offill: That’s why I’m holding the knife to your throat and making sure that you start to praise the book really soon. But I do think…

Correspondent: Can’t I just give you twenty dollars instead? Maybe a hundred?

Offill: Are you kidding? Yeah, when I’m done. I’ll take twenty dollars.

February 17, 2014 Sarah Churchwell (The Bat Segundo Show) “Sarah Churchwell is most recently the author of Careless People.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
February 24, 2014 RIP Harold Ramis “coaxed Imogene Coca to appear as Aunt Edna in National Lampoon’s Vacation, despite Coca’s reservations about the character being too vituperative.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
March 11, 2014 Julia Angwin (The Bat Segunod Show) “Julia Angwin is most recently the author of Dragnet Nation.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
March 13, 2014 Save NYPL: How an Organized Movement to Stop the Destruction of Libraries is Being Ignored by Mayor de Blasio “I was fond of the Raging Grannies. Despite the insinuated belligerence, the Raging Grannies were a calm and lively group of women with an affinity for music.” VERDICT: Not sexualized, although I suspect describing these women as “calm,” even if it is meant to clarify the Raging Grannies’ temperament in relation to their name, would likely cause McArdle to declare me a “sexist” for “being fond” of calm women.
March 19, 2014 Dorthe Nors, Save NYPL, and Blake Bailey (The Bat Segundo Show) “Dorthe Nors, who is most recently the author of Karate Chop.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Locking Liv Ullmann up. “ VERDICT: Not sexualized. If anything, this was a pushback against Ingmar Bergman locking Liv Ullmann up when they lived together.
March 20, 2014 Fred Phelps, Hateful Homophobic Monster, Dead at 84 “When Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, was asked how she felt about Phelps, she replied..” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
March 25, 2014 Dinaw Mengestu (The Bat Segundo Show) “It’s the first of your novels to feature the first-person perspective from a woman, “ VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “So Helen. It’s interesting that it takes a woman for you to say, ‘I’m an American too!’”

“She’s a young American. She’s still trying to figure out how people work and how relationships work and where one’s place is in the universe. And I’m wondering why a woman’s voice was the best way for you to really show to yourself and show to the world that you were, in fact, an American as well. “

VERDICT: Not sexualized. Why was I asking Mengestu about writing from a women’s perspective? Well, because I was trying to offer a counterpoint to women writers who are often asked if they can write from a male perspective.
April 23, 2014 What Will Become of Uninformed Muttonheads Who Promulgate Misinformation on Slate About Public Libraries? “he once compared Lena Dunham’s artistic growth with ‘a kid playing with this incredible new toy.’” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Again, I was pushing back against a sexist dismissal of a woman showrunner’s artistic growth.
    “To say that Agresta gets public libraries very wrong is an understatement. It is like saying that Brad Paisley does not understand racism or Jenny McCarthy does not understand science. “ VERDICT: Not sexualized.
April 25, 2014 The Infinite Jest Review That Dave Eggers Doesn’t Want You to Read “this grown man remains a timid and irresponsible bumpkin who would rather pretend that his writing didn’t harm an innocent woman “” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Standing up for Kathy Zeitoun.
April 28, 2014 Yiyun Li (The Bat Segundo Show) “Yiyun Li is most recently the author of Kinder Than Solitude.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “All of the inferences she made are essentially thrown back into her face. And I think this novel dramatizes belief culture in very interesting ways.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
April 29, 2014 Evie Wyld (The Bat Segundo Show) “Evie Wyld is most recently the author of All the Birds, Singing.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “How much physical work have you done?” VERDICT: Not sexualized. An effort to ask Wyld about whether her compelling descriptions of physical exertion were rooted in experience.
May 13, 2014 Nikil Saval (The Bat Segundo Show) “Back in the late 1970s, Jane Fonda met Karen Nussbaum, a remarkable figure who organized women clerical workers in this Nine to Five movement. And Fonda and a screenwriter spent an entire evening talking with 40 office workers. “ VERDICT: Not sexualized.
May 14, 2014 Porochista Khakpour (The Bat Segundo Show) “Porochista Khakpour is most recently the author of The Last Illusion.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Older women?” VERDICT: Not sexualized. A followup on Khakpour’s observation on older women complaining about animal abuse.
    “And here you are blonde as well.” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Remarking on why Khakpour is unexpectedly blonde. Or is that too image conscious for McArdle?
May 19, 2014 Will the Cecily McMillan Sentence Dampen Occupy’s Future? “Cecily McMillan, a young woman who had been found guilty of assaulting a police officer on the most draconian and iniquitous of pretexts,” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    ” She is, after all, on a leash. Can she still be a revolutionary?” VERDICT: Not sexualized. I suspect McArdle’s disturbed and wildly imaginative mind would interpret “on a leash” as something kinky, but it’s clear from the contex that I was reporting upon a revolutionary’s activities being needlessly constrained.
    “I chatted with an African-American woman who identified herself as Aanis. She was waiting for another case in another chamber. She wondered if this seemingly indomitable group would stand up for her the next time she was arrested. But most ignored her.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
May 21, 2014 Why Trigger Warnings Threaten Free Speech, Original Voices, and Thoughtful Discourse “Loverin cited her own discomfort sitting through a film, one which she has refused to identify, depicting sexual assault. “ VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Loverin has stated that she’s a survivor of sexual abuse, but she has not suffered from PTSD“ VERDICT: Not sexualized, unless quoting how a woman is bothered by sexual assault in a piece on trigger warnings counts as sexualization. Which was certainly not the point of this essay.
    “She is a second-year literature major who has become an unlikely figure in a debate that threatens to diminish the future of free speech.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “In her thoughtful volume A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit examines numerous instances of people reacting to disasters.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “features the professor pushing Joan Short, one of the Christian activists and the person operating the camera, after she attempts to retrieve her sign from an elevator” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “But if an artist or a professor has to consider the way her audience feels at all times, how can she be expected to pursue the truths of being alive?” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Use of “her” as default pronoun.
May 28, 2014 Paula Bomer (The Bat Segundo Show) “Paula Bomer is most recently the author of Inside Madeleine.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Many of your stories here feature side characters who have their skin pocked or acned or stretched or otherwise maimed in some sense…. How much do you need to know a character physically before knowing her internally? How does a damaged physical appearance help you find unexpected internal qualities about a character?” VERDICT: Not sexualized. This question does concentrate upon Bomer’s aesthetics and resulted in an unsurprisingly thoughtful answer from Bomer related to Flannery O’Connor. A fixation on how people look in fiction does not necessarily mean that the person observing this is sexualizing characters. In this case, I clearly wanted to get a sense of how Bomer imagined her internally persuasive characters.
    “I love the way you fixated on a physical part like that.” VERDICT: Not sexualized, although asking an author why she started a story with a back is undoubtedly going to summon the people who think I am overly fixated on the body (thus, a misogynist), even though I used this observation to point out how I connected the hardened back to a Dorothea Lange photo.
May 28, 2014 How BookExpo America Turned Into a Ponzi Scheme for Booksellers, Exhibitors, and Readers “The annoyingly peppy moderator Dominique Raccah kept referencing a “pre-interview” she conducted with the five participants, as if this atoned for the vapid predictability of her questions.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Tattered Cover owner Joyce Meksis was rightly cheered for the 500 to 600 events she organizes yearly.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
May 30, 2014 BookExpo 2014: The Future of Gender Balance and Why Conversations Need to Grow Up “the justifiable grandstanding is getting in the way of building on heartening truths: namely, that women have gained significant (and in many cases dominant) ground as authors, as editorial tastemakers, and as reviewers in the past year. “ VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Paul picked up a recent issue of the Review and shuffled through the table of contents.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Later in the panel, Paul was to correct Weiner, claiming that the Review had full editorial independence.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Because unlike Paul, Weiner was willing to use case examples to bookend her thorny ideological sentiments.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “An amental agent, whose superficial sensibilities are writ large in her most recent sale.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “And the Women’s Media Group suggested that I was oppressing the room with my loud voice:” VERDICT: Nothing was being sexualized. I asked an honest question about ambitious novels written by women, which people were offended by.
June 3, 2014 Casual Sexism: The Author Gender Breakdown for the New York Times Daily Reviewers   VERDICT: No women was sexualized during an attempt to study gender balance in the New York Times.
June 5, 2014 Joanna Rakoff (The Bat Segundo Show) “Joanna Rakoff is most recently the author of My Salinger Life.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
June 19, 2014 Mimi Pond (The Bat Segundo Show) “Mimi Pond is most recently the author of Over Easy.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
June 27, 2014 Amanda Vaill (The Bat Segundo Show) “Amanda Vaill is most recently the author of Hotel Florida.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Virginia Cowles, on the other hand, she headed into the Nationalist zone and not only covered it, but did so when a Nationalist staff officer said, ‘You probably shouldn’t be writing about this.’” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
July 4, 2014 The Liminal Landscape of Valeria Luiseli “the perspicacious young writer Valeria Luiselli” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “the slipstream flow of an unnamed woman who has worked as a translator” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
July 5, 2014 Robin Black’s Parable of the Old and the Young “Between Black’s novel and Clare Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, characters named Nora are swiftly becoming the literary answer to NORAD, revealing cold domestic wars nearly as underestimated in their body count as some matter in the Balkans that will be surely resolved by Christmas.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “The book’s 47-year-old protagonist, Augusta, is known as “Gus” by her husband Owen — a teacher and writer whose birthday is strongly insinuated as Bloomsday — and “Augie” by everyone else.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “We learn she is an artist of some kind, yet she is diffident about the projects she has painted. Augie is Jewish.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Augie is hiding something: not dirty laundry, but an inner turmoil.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “For Augie, making art becomes a strange, seemingly liberating narcotic, a curious, ego-flexing gauze to throw over the more important gaze you need to direct at the world.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Black introduces a new neighbor named Alison, who has temporarily rented an adjacent house after retreating from an abusive husband.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Laine, the daughter of the man she had an affair with, offering her pointers on how to be a painter and she hasn’t told her husband about this.” VERDICT: Not sexualized. The novel is, among other things, about having an affair. Should I elide this detail from my description because the Literary Scooby-Doo Squad finds even an oblique reference to adultery “sexual”?
    “Nora, Alison’s daughter, who becomes smitten with Owen and who understandably takes up more of Alison’s time.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
July 17, 2014 The Journalist and the Murderer (Modern Library Nonfiction #97) “Malcolm is really exploring how journalistic opportunity and impetuous judgment “ VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “found MacDonald’s wife Colette, and their two children, Kimberley and Kristen, all dead in their respective bedrooms” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “she has called upon all journalists to feel ‘some compunction about the exploitative character of the journalist-subject relationship,’ yet claims that her own separate lawsuit was not the driving force in the book’s afterword. Yet even Malcolm, a patient and painstaking practitioner,” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “even if she believes herself to be morally or factually in the clear, the journalist” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Note again my tendency to use “her” over “his” as the default pronoun.
    “she is struck by MacDonald’s physical grace as he breaks off pieces of tiny powdered sugar doughnuts” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “another excellent book which sets forth the inherent and surprisingly cyclical bias in writing about Sylvia Plath” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Malcolm confessed her own disappointment in how Ingrid Sischy failed to live up to her preconceptions as a bold and modern woman” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “lining the crisp and meticulous forms of her svelte and careful arguments” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “other middling men who are inexplicably intimidated by women who are smarter, have attempted to paint Malcolm as a hypocrite, an opportunist, and a self-loathing harpy of the first order.” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Protesting sexism.
    “Malcolm is not James Wolcott; she is considerably more thoughtful and interesting” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Malcolm is not as relentless as her generational peer Renata Adler, but she is just as refreshingly formidable. She is as thorough with her positions and almost as misunderstood. She has made many prominent enemies for her controversial positions” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Adler was ousted from The New Yorker, but Malcolm was not. In the last few years, both have rightfully found renewed attention for their years among a new generation.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “One of Morris’s documentary subjects, Joyce McKinney, claimed that she was tricked into giving an interview for what became Tabloid” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Brabantio over why he had eloped with the senator’s daughter Desdemona” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
July 22, 2014 On the Cowardice of Literary Omphalskepsis “attacked Roxane Gay” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “cited Gay’s Goodreads review of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams (offering the additional claim that Gay never read the book), Gay’s response to an AWP questionnaire” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “This was not only disrespectful towards Gay and Taylor” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “or because of any allegiance I may have for Roxane Gay or Justin Taylor” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
July 23, 2014 The Human Value of Cultural Preservation “Petrusich is kind but keeps her distance. She does not encroach upon or judge her subjects, never painting them as freakish. She heeds their advice and is never condescending, even when they belch in her face.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Along the way, Petrusich is candid enough to contend with her own music listening issues as a young critic” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Petrusich levels, by her own admission, some shaky Asperger’s charges near the end of her book, but her vivacious reporting is better at answering these questions more than any armchair psychoanalysis.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “she is at a loss to pinpoint the methodology behind his passion VERDICT: Not sexualized.
July 24, 2014 Native Sons in Philadelphia: Why We Need More Novelists LIke Jean Love Cush “Malik’s mother, Janae, who works as a cafeteria worker, tries to rescue her son between work stints she is barely able to reduce to half-shifts. She cannot afford an attorney who can offer the appropriate defense on her meager salary.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “As Janae becomes a more uncomfortably visible participant in her son’s story, she comes to understand how the media has built a regressive belief culture on racial bias:” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
August 4, 2014 On Sworn Virgins and Albanian Tradition “a former woman who becomes the male household head in exchange for a vow of chastity, dressing as a man to earn the respect granted to a man” VERDICT: Not sexualized, although this is an essay on the “sworn virgins” of Albania and one must be clear in describing gender roles..
    “Sworn virgins, who are found mostly in northern Albania, act and carry on as men, but do not undergo any surgical change.”” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Declaration of facts.
    “The bride and the groom do not meet, with flirtation considered a boorish quality for a man. The bride sheds demonstrative tears when she leaves her family home and, as a wife, a woman is expected to perform quite a bit of labor, often more than the man.” VERDICT: Not sexualized. This is an anthropological description. Of course, those who wish to declare me a misogynist will use the description of gender to further declare me a repulsive oppressor of women.
    “Hana’s early years in America in 2001-2003 and her time in Albania, in which she becomes a sworn virgin (1986, 1996).” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “There is also the fragile health of Aunt Katrina” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “we see how swiftly Hana has changed, wondering if it will be easy for her to establish yet another new life. She must contend with shaving her legs and skirts that are too wide and operates having ‘no real experience of femininity,’ and she must figure out the new rules of the game before her job interview.” VERDICT: Not sexualized. This is an anthropological description. Of course, those who wish to declare me a misogynist will use the description of gender to further declare me a repulsive oppressor of women.
September 4, 2014 Battling the Digital Babysitter: The Case for Reading and Curiosity “he has gone out of his way to document his reading experiments with his daughter, Olive” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “through the statements of Lisa Guernsey,” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “If a parent is too beleaguered, perhaps she can find a bedtime solution with the physical book,” VERDICT: Not sexualized. Indeed, the pronoun choice I am fond of using is the female “her” rather than the male “his.”
    “Boog is extremely diligent in limiting his daughter’s digital usage” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Betty Hart and Todd Risley conducted a famous study” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Judy Blume’s oft-quoted suggestion that children should be allowed to read” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
September 9, 2014 Giving the Upscale Types the Graphic Novels They Want “Corrina Park, a young woman who works in an advertising agency. There is nothing interesting or unusual about her, unless you believe the occasional pilfering of a magazine from a convenience store to be jaw-dropping criminal mayhem.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Corrina is no different from millions of young bourgie aspirants whinging throughout North America.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
September 13, 2014 The Zombie Adulthood Ideal of A.O. Scott Was the choice of the accompanying photo featuring Scott with a leggy woman an attempt to sexualize her? It certainly wasn’t, but because McArdle is losing this quantitative count big time and I’m feeling generous, let’s say that it was and give her a complimentary “Sexualized.” VERDICT: Sexualized.
    “Rebecca Mead rightly called out Ira Glass…” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Ruth Graham telling Slate readers that they need to be ashamed of reading YA (a charge adeptly parried by the Washington Post‘s Alyssa Rosenberg) “ VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “He can commend Walter White on Breaking Bad as a seductive monster, but not examine Olivia Pope’s comparable qualities on Scandal.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Olivia Pope is arguably a “grown-up” character. Is it not fruitful to examine how Shonda Rhimes depicts adulthood in our culture?” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Olivia Pope is arguably a “grown-up” character. Is it not fruitful to examine how Shonda Rhimes depicts adulthood in our culture?” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
September 17, 2014 The Cultural Redemption of Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell, and George Prochnik (The Bat Segundo Show) “Anthea Bell, one of the best translators working today.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Anthea Bell is Stefan Zweig’s most renowned translator” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “why Lotte Zweig wasn’t just a factotum, attempts to undermine Lotte’s legacy” VERDICT: Not sexualized. (An attempt, in fact, to stand up for Lotte Zweig.)
    “the rigidity reinforced by this woman who goes to a luxurious hotel, is confused with upper-class, who then has to deal with the fact that she can’t pass that way, and is then forced back into this terrible existence where she has to work in this post office.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “And not even her fault. Because her family actually got a bad rap and she fell into this rote impoverished kind of existence.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
September 25, 2014 Merrit Tierce (The Bat Segundo Show) “Merritt Tierce is most recently the author of Love Me Back, a lively and fierce debut novel about a young single mother who works as a waitress and disguises her pain and humiliation behind a smile.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Although in Marie’s case, it becomes just utterly painful to read and to see what she’s going through.” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “where Marie subjects herself to self-harm, to cutting” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Marie’s life has been thrown into this degrading trajectory because, well, she’s been thrown into the wilderness without a handbook” VERDICT: Not sexualized.
    “Marie has to learn much of this at the behest of men.” VERDICT: Awkwardly phrased to demonstrate patriarchy, but not sexualized.

In the nine month period before my mental breakdown, outside of the Emily Gould essay, I described various women 114 times — never in sexual terms, never in body-based or violent imagery (except when the conversation pertained to descrbing an anthropological phenomenon). This proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that both Crispin and McArdle are absolutely inaccurate in their assessment of me. It also concludes that I did not sexualize women in my writing. These two casual defamers are relentless and inveterate liars who don’t have the evidence to back up their claims. A further quantitative breakdown of my “obsession” with sex can be found at ¶103.

Claim, ¶101: “In 2004, he talked about what he’d do to a then 27-year-old assistant at a literary agency in exchange for a look at his manuscript. “We here at Return of the Reluctant have offered to give 24-7 cunnilingus to Kate Lee, if only she’d check out our wares. She’s declined. She doesn’t like our tongue action.”

TRUE, TENDENTIOUS, TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT: This is taken from a satirical May 26, 2004 post and omits the fact that the post was celebratory of another woman – namely, Maud Newton – who was experiencing anxiety at the time. The idea was to cheer her up. Is a jokey reference to cunnilingus enough to mitigate a non-sexual paean of encouragement to another? You make the call. The commenters on the post certainly didn’t think so. Nobody had complained about this post, more than a decade old, at all until McArdle did. We have already established in ¶99 that I was not in the habit of sexualizing women. McArdle’s deep dive excavation is, in short, a desperate effort to find some scrap of evidence that will fit into her smear campaign like a stray number in a Sudoku puzzle.

Claim, ¶102: “But Champion did not reserve this pattern of deeply inappropriate sexualization to the relatively unknown and powerless. He describes a 2008 video conversation between America’s only living Nobel Laureate in literature and the then-editor of the New York Times Book Review with an equally repugnant image. The interview was so fawning, Champion writes, Sam Tanenhaus’s ‘lips nearly lick[ed] Toni Morrison to a needlessly sensual premature death.’”

TRUE, TENDENTIOUS, TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT: McArdle, in her eagerness to depict me as a repulsive satyr, fails to detect the clear John Updike parody contained within the December 8, 2008 post in question. This was a critique of then-NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus’s tendency to favor review coverage of books published by Knopf and used sexual imagery (in large part because this was a stylistic response to Tanenhaus’s love for John Updike, who was infamous for injecting strange sexual imagery throughout his books). It not only contained an “update” appended a month later describing “the concerns satirized below” to alert readers that this was a joke, but it was also careful to point to a well-written review of a book more pertinent at the time: Alison Bechdel’s The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. . I selected an incredible book by a gay woman to serve as counterpart for Sam Tanenhaus’s white heteronormative male emphasis. It’s a judgment call whether my Updike parody was “repugnant.” Certainly many considered Updike’s prose repugnant. I guess this means that I parodied Updike accurately.

Claim, ¶103: “Fun fact: if you search Champion’s website for the word “cunnilingus,” Google returns 187 results—twelve pages worth.”

FALSE, INACCURATE, INAPPROPRIATE CONTEXT, LIBEL, DEFAMATION: Fun fact: if you search Gawker for “cunnilingus,” Google returns 586 results.

Fun fact: if you search Thought Catalog for “cunnilingus,” Google returns 577 results.

Fun fact: if you search HTML Giant for “cunnilingus,” Google returns 32 results. So perhaps they are more enlightened than me. But I have been around many years longer. So maybe not!

Fun fact: if you search my website for “cunnilingus,” Google returns 121 results.

(The numbers reported above were from searches conducted on December 19, 2016. It is possible that the results may differ by the time that you read this. I have provided links above so that you can corroborate the data yourself.)

Fun fact: I have conducted two independent searches on my site. I have used the word “cunnilingus” a grand total of – hold on to your hat! – twenty times (not counting this referential essay). And what was the most recent usage of “cunnilngus”? February 23, 2010, in an interview with Kevin Sampsell, used in an informative context. Since McArdle has not been able to use her “Sexualized” card at ¶99 and six years is too long time a time for any self-respecting writer to refrain from writing about cunnilingus, I shall now give McArdle a more explicit opportunity to impugn me for generosity towards the genitals. In our age of selfish men who, despite possessing a plethora of online information (and we ain’t talking porn) on how to make a woman happier, never consider how light darts and angled lashes of the tongue sustains some orgasmic gender balance in the sack, one might think that anyone writing about this regularly in some capacity might be a blessing.

Fun fact: Google counts my use of “cunnilingus” many times because many posts are counted multiple times because of all the keywords.

Fun fact: Molly McArdle, in addition to not being able to count, is terrible with data and likes to fudge her numbers so that she can smear and libel a writer who wasn’t any more celebratory of “cunnilingus” than any other oddball website operating at the time.

This is the linchpin for which McArdle paints me as “a disturbing picture of a man who habitually describes or refers to women in a sexual manner in decidedly nonsexual contexts. Readers: this is misogyny.”

Readers: This is libel. This is defamation. This is reckless and absolutely irresponsnible journalism. This is the very sophist claim that people have used to falsely sculpt my largely innocent musings as the ravings of a misogynist. This is the sham onus I appear fated to carry for the rest of my life.

Claim, ¶111: “In 2007, when Little, Brown publicity manager Shannon Browne wrote a blog post for the National Book Critics Circle website critical of blog culture, she received a pointed email from Champion. ‘I’ll be sure to remember these words the next time you’re seeking an outlet, either print or online, for a thoughtful interview with Michael Connelly,’ a novelist who Browne did publicity for.

MISINTERPRETATION: This was clearly an ironic and self-deprecatory joke. Michael Connelly, being a best-selling author, hardly needed my help with publicity.

Claim, ¶124-126: “By the time Ed left an abusive comment on Book Riot, where Schinsky is content director, in May 2014, ‘I had heard enough versions of this story to know it was likely that he would respond publicly and that I would hear from Sarah privately as a follow-up.’ ‘I notified my colleague (and boss) Jeff O’Neal that I had deleted a comment from Ed and that he should keep an eye out for an angry email about it. And that’s basically what happened—Ed and Sarah both responded to me publicly and in DMs.’ Weinman criticized O’Neal and Schinsky for their zero-tolerance policy for abusive comments. (Champion had called another commenter a ‘preposterous and illiterate child’ and an ‘unthinking oaf’ among other things.) ‘Have a nice time on Sanctimony Island,’ she tweeted. Must be lovely out there.’”

PARTIALLY FALSE, MISLEADING, INCOMPLETE, A PROMINENT EXAMPLE OF WILLFUL DISREGARD FOR THE TRUTH. First off, this was a public dispute and my Twitter records indicate that I never sent a DM to Schinsky. So this is an outright lie from Schinsky. Second, it is clear that McArdle saw the full exchange behind this incident, as she quotes from the conversation in which I confessed my pain and the “zero-tolerance” moderators at Book Riot deleted a comment in which I had said some very forthright things about experiencing abuse. This pivotal context, of course, was elided from McArdle’s article. Because the article’s intent, carried out executed with the idea of leaving out any information that would mitigate the gravity of an alarming charge, was always make to me look bad.

On May 25, 2014, a commenter at Book Riot – one who was completely ignorant of PTSD – denied that I had experienced abuse. So I left a comment drawing upon incredibly difficult emotions about a physically abusive incident in the past and it was deleted. The claim by Book Riot was that, in using relatively mild language like “preposterous and illiterate child” and “unthinking oaf” while attempting to summon the horrors of being beaten by my father, I was being abusive. I received an extremely nasty and insensitive corporate response. The especially condescending message from Jeff O’Neal (“Repost your story without insults if it is important to you”) enraged both Weinman and me, and the whole “if it is important to you” line was extraordinarily callous by just about any standard. For it remains my belief that, when people are hurt or abused, all emotions, provided that they aren’t outright lies or wanton defamation, must be expressed in order to aid the victim in coming to terms with the suffering and have a thoughtful discussion. O’Neal then trotted out my attempt to stand up to someone who had denied my experience, which was akin to someone denying the Holocaust, and this was used to bolster the fictitious “Ed Champion threatens everyone” template upheld by McArdle. But it is clear that my anger had more to do with someone deleting and denying and cheapening a painful personal story.

Claim, ¶135: “It is impossible to ignore the current that runs through this whole story—that Champion is not well. Again and again I heard code words about his mental health: eccentric, unstable, manic. I also heard more explicit descriptors: mental illness, crazy.”

UNSUBSTANTIATED, HEARSAY. It is also impossible to ignore the current of assumption and speculation that runs through McArdle’s bumbling drive-by shooting. What McArdle is doing here is no different from what Pentagon contractor Camille Chidiac did in 2012, smearing journalists Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker by casting aspersions on their character when they reported on “information operations” campaigns. It is no differernt from the Baja California smear campaign this year against reporter Navarro Bello that tried to undermine her work by revealing “disgraces” about her private life or the intricate fake news recently used to tar Anne Applebaum. As Applebaum wrote:

As I watched the story move around the Web, I saw how the worlds of fake websites and fake news exist to reinforce one another and give falsehood credence.

As I have already documented, descriptive adjectives such as “unhinged” used to uphold these falsehoods were gleefully lapped up not by right-wing news sites, but by people who actually read books.

Did the people who uttered “eccentric” (and I certainly am a bit eccentric, but that adjective, which my Random House Webster’s unabridged defines as “something that is unusual, peculiar, or odd” or “deviating from the recognized or customary character, practice, etc.” is certainly no bearing on a person’s mind) actually mean to use it to describe my mental health? We’ll never know. Because there are no actual sources cited. And, as I document at ¶160, McArdle’s sources often did not espouse the positions that she imputes to them.

Claim, ¶136: Porochista Khakpour: “People aren’t crazy the way Ed was crazy. This is absolutely a story of severe mental illness.”

PARTIAL, UNSUBSTANTIATED, OPINION FROM SOMEONE WHO IS NOT AN EXPERT. Should I call Porochista Khakpour an unstable person driven by severe mental illness because she has confessed to suicidal ideation? Or because she expressed depression and a desire for “someone in NYC to calmly walk me to a psychiatric ward” in a Facebook thread from June 2014?

I shouldn’t. Because I am not a psychiatrist. If you present a case in court, and you wish to establish the defendant as someone who is suffering from “severe mental illness,” then you need evidence and an expert witness who can affirm the claim. If you were an attorney who brought in some unqualified person — whether a writer like Khakpour operating from a place of vengenace or some rando clod at a bar — to opine upon the mental fitness of the defendant, the judge and jury would laugh you out of a courtroom.

There might have been a ripe opportunity for McArdle to frame her speculations about me by actually talking with a psychiatrist who specializes in how suicidal people express themselves on social media. Had I been a journailst writing this article about Champion’s social media outbursts, I would have contacted Dr. Jan Kalbitzer of the Charité-University Medicine Berlin to get a sense of whether social media can accurately predict a bipolar episode or asked Dr. Vasanth Kaliasam and Dr. Erin Samuels to offer thoughts on Champion based on their work looking into how social media can anticipate and prevent suicide. I would have asked these psychiatrists if one can sufficiently diagnose a person through social media. I probably would have chatted up this trio, who have some fascinating thoughts on how social media can be used to diagnose someone (and who offer the caveat that a diagnosis via Twitter is not entirely reliable). Such an emphasis would have spawned a far more thoughtful, more interesting, and more credible article, steering McArdle away from her thuggish prerigged thesis to find some compassion or understanding for her subject, considering the ways in which social media is both accurate and inaccurate in drawing conclusions. Lacking the chops to conduct such basic background work, McArdle instead asks the victim of my crackup, who is not a psychiatric expert, for her opinion on my mental health.

Claim, ¶142: Eric Rosenfield: “he had a tendency to see slights where they didn’t exist, to see someone bumping into him as a personal attack rather than an accident, for example.”

FALSE, DEFAMATORY. To the best of my knowledge, I have never expressed any sentiment to Eric Rosenfield in which I told him that a deliberate bump into me was a “personal attack.” Having experienced physical abuse in my childhood, I am certainly a little sensitive to touch. But as I have documented here, the people interviewed in this article have clearly gone out of their way to make up lies about me and to use this as the basis for personal attacks on my character.

INTERLUDE: I shall ignore many of the speculations on my character contained in ¶¶142-171, including the completely insensitive remarks from Emily Gould on suicide (who publicly longed for my death on Twitter before she deleted her tweet; I truly did want to die after losing everything).

Claim, ¶146: “ so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened”

UNSUBSTANTIATED. Who are these people? On what basis would they make these base suggestions?

Claim, ¶152: “’The isolation of it,’ she said of being targeted by Champion. ‘The fact that nobody would talk about it in public. The way that there were real life repercussions to talking about it.’”

FALSE, DEFAMATORY, UNSUBSTANTIATED. We have already rebutted Crispin’s claims successfully at ¶¶51-52, Appendix B. But maybe there weren’t any “real life percussions” because I wasn’t actually a threat. (See ¶160 below.)

Claim, ¶154: Jennifer Weiner: “He was a scary abuser who was also a thoughtful, committed reader. What do you do with that?”

FALSE, DEFAMATORY, UNSUBSTANTIATED. Weiner continues with her unsubstantiated claims, carried over from ¶48, not citing a single example. Shall I accuse Weiner of trying to revive the Matamoros human sacrifice cult because someone told me that she’d visited South Padre Island and because some scabrous hack looking for dirt in the literary world wouldn’t stop pestering me?

Claim, ¶160: “Generally, people I spoke to who lived in New York City knew about Champion’s history of abusive, inappropriate behavior. ‘No one had to warn me about Ed,’ said essayist Sloane Crosley, who appeared on his podcast in 2008. ‘By the time I sat down to speak with him, I had been working in book PR for about seven years.’”

FALSE, QUOTE MANIPULATION, LEADING QUESTIONS, ASSUMPTIVE. In an email to me on November 24, 2015, Sloane Crosley told me that her statement had been willfully manipulated. “As I recall, the reporter asked if anyone had ‘warned’ me about you and I answered her. No one had to give me a heads up about anyone because I worked in book publishing, where everyone knows everyone. You have a sense of all these big personalities after a decade, good and bad, short and tall, everything in between. ‘Warn’ is obviously a loaded word and the better thing for me to do would to have just ignored her request.“ (See also ¶¶60-61 for a representative exemplar of my communications with publicists.) Crosley confirmed with me that, being a well-connected publicist, there was never any reason to fear me when she agreed to talk with me for The Bat Segundo Show. Because she knew everything I had done and everything that had been said about me, which did not include threats.

If McArdle phrased most, if not all, of her questions with such recklessly loaded verbs as “warn,” then this would account for the inaccurate, assumptive, and sensationalistic answers that did not reflect the truth. And speaking as someone who has conducted more than 900 interviews in his career, it is often important to be fairly open with your questioning at times, especially if you hope to get an accurate answer. In 1973, Richard J. Harris conducted an experiment which demonstrated that the wording of a question affected the answer. When his subjects were asked “How long was the movie?” his subjects responded with an average estimated running time of 130 minutes. When his subjects were asked “How short was the movie?” his subjects responded with an average of 100 minutes. There’s a big difference between asking, “Did anyone warn you about Ed Champion?” and “What were your feelings about Ed Champion?” One is a leading question that stacks the deck and misrepresents the subject’s position. The other allows the subject to accurately articulate how she feels.

Claim, ¶161: “I guessed—rightly as it turned out—that if I took away the oxygen and refused to engage with him, he would get bored and move on. That’s more or less precisely what happened.” Quote from Mark Sarvas.

FALSE, MISLEADING. For many years, Mark Sarvas was obsessed with me. To cite one of many examples, he became infuriated when I would not text him back within minutes (such as the fusillade of texts I received from him on January 5, 2009, to which I replied by email, “If you’re going to blow up at me over this, then, again, I think this says more about you than it does me. I’m going to chalk all this up to something else that is going on, something I’m happy to talk about with you. I’m not the one who wants to cut off the conduit here.  And I’m certainly not being the stubborn and inflexible one.  I suggest a cooling off period.  If you want to talk, I’m here.  If not, well then that’s your decision.”). I had to clean up many of his messes during the Litblog Co-Op days. I was never obsessed with him; it was quite the reverse, as the @drselfabuse Twitter feed that Sarvas co-created with Tod Goldberg demonstrated (chronicled further in ¶161).

When I sent him an email asking for a civil telephone conversation to resolve the @drselfabuse fiasco, Sarvas responded with the below email on August 13, 2009:

Gentleman? Civil? You are neither, not now, not ever.

How dare you write to me after your horrible, evil posts about me? You asshole. Go fuck yourself.

I apologize if I ever did anything to give you the impression I give the slightest shit about anything you say or do. I assure you I don’t.

I return to my policy of ignoring anything to do with Ed Champion and will not respond to anything else you say, however nasty, you evil goon. Harrass me [sic] and I will block your email and report you as a cyberstalker.  

Sent from my iPhone

Claim, ¶165: “When I saw he had interviewed Merritt Tierce [in September 2014]—how come nobody told her? What happened there? Reaching out to someone in retrospect saying ‘Ugh, I’m so sorry’—you know, no. That’s so pointless and useless. I think of them differently than I used to.” Emily Gould quote.

FALSE, MISLEADING. The Merritt Tierce podcast was not defamatory or threatening in any way. (The introduction pointed to 2 Broke Girls‘s sexism and celebrated Tierce’s novel as a corrective against this regressive portrait of women.) Merritt Tierce was not harassed, threatened, or bothered in any way. She agreed to talk with me of her own initiative. What precisely is the point of this quote other than to smear me? There are no examples taken from the podcast that could be used to demonstrate that I was a sinister misogynist interviewer.

Claim, ¶166: “Even giving him a taste of his own medicine—Mark Sarvas, with a partner, started an Ed Champion parody Twitter account, @drselfabuse, in 2009—failed to teach Champion a lesson. There was nothing you could do to make yourself safe, at least, not on an individual basis.”

drselfabusetitle

FALSE, MISLEADING. Mark Sarvas and Tod Goldberg created a vulgar feed that harassed me 24/7. It got very ugly. It often went above and beyond many of the claims that McArdle and company have made about me, as the below screenshots reveal:

drselfabuse1

drselfabuse2

drselfabuse3

drselfabuse4

Sarvas revived the @drselfabuse account in March 3. 2012. (I apologize for the poor quality of the screenshot. While I was able to save the tweets, I was not able to snag the accompanying graphics.)

drselfabuserenewed

I was more concerned for Sarvas’s well-being than anything else. I sent the following email to a friend of his, who shall remain nameless:

To: ____________

From: Edward Champion

Date: March 4, 2012, 6:58 AM

Subject: Mark Sarvas

____________:

I hope that all is well. I’m writing to you because I’m concerned that Mark Sarvas, who recently heeded your advice to join Twitter, may be in need of serious help.

You may be partially familiar with our previous history and our fallout, which arose after Mark harassed me through numerous text messages and emails. I’m not asking you to choose sides. This email is about Mark.

Mark and I had a lot of intense communication. But it got to the point where I was being used. I finally had enough and publicly called him out about his behavior in May 2009. I have not mentioned him since.

Shortly after my post, Mark started a number of pseudonymous Twitter accounts which attempted to defame me — for example, the @drselfabuse account in August 2009 (with a few others), the @AlfredYule account in April 2011, et al. He has left references to “champion” and “reluctant” in many of his Elegant Variation posts. (And, honestly, I’m not seeking this information out. Others have been sending along this stuff for years.) My response has been to ignore him and to never engage him publicly — a policy which I will adhere to, because attention is the very drug he craves.

I have learned this morning, however, that Mark has again been posting under the @drselfabuse handle. My present theory is that my recent appearance in the New Yorker may have tipped the balance. I realize that it has to be quite difficult for Mark right now — especially, because he doesn’t have a second novel and there have been radical changes to online literary discourse in the last three years. I also understand that there may be additional extenuating personal circumstances.

But I really think that Mark’s behavior needs to stop: not because I care about what he has to say, but because of the effect it’s clearly having on him. So I’m reaching out to you. Because I know he’ll listen to you.

When you’re bombarding Twitter with endless @ replies and you’re only getting a few polite responses back, that can’t be easy if you view online interactions as primary, rather than incidental elements of your life. The easiest solution for Mark would be to simply ignore the Troy Pattersons, the Bret Easton Ellises, and the Ed Champions of the world and get back to whatever is is he wants to do: literary criticism, fiction, whatever. That’s what well-adjusted and mentally healthy people do.

I realize that judging someone through online behavior is not always the truest indicator of where they’re at in the real world. But I’ve had my share of stalkers, and Mark’s obsessive behavior towards me has been going on for years. My hope is that you, as a friend, might be able to gently point this out to him. There’s no need to invoke this email at all, if you do decide to talk with him. And my apologies for getting you involved in something you may neither have the time nor the energy to pursue.

I’d be happy to speak about this by phone with you, if you require any further clarification or information. My number is (718) _____________ I’m sorry that it’s come to this. But I’d be plagued with considerable remorse if I didn’t do something to help someone who was clearly troubled.

Thanks again and all best,

Ed

Claim, ¶167: Quote from Khakpour. “These are only the stories we know. There might be double that number. This is a serious, dangerous situation.”

FALSE, MISLEADING, SPECULATIVE. This implies that I have been spending all of my time calculating how to hurt people. I was spending most of my time reading and writing.

Claim, ¶171: “I am more scared of silence than false or petty speech. At least, with the latter, we are talking.”

WILLFUL ADMISSION OF INCOMPETENCE. I can’t think of any self-respecting journalist who would willfully celebrate the possibility of being wrong like this. And yet, astonishingly, this fake news practitioner, who is as guilty and as invidious and as inveterate as any hate merchant toiling at Breitbart News, has parlayed this defamation into gigs at GQ, Travel + Leisure, and Nylon, leaving one to wonder if Jim Nelson, Nathan Lump, and Melissa Giannini actually care about journalistic integrity or maintaining quality control. Let me tell you about what’s truly scary and what’s really worth talking about.

When I was homeless, I discovered strands of invisibility and humiliation that I never could have envisaged when I was domiciled. I was debased, humiliated, further humiliated even after I had been thoroughly humiliated. Homelessness is a seemingly inescapable abyss that causes anyone locked within this sorrowful perdition to feel angry and shriek all manner of profanity and fierce words leagues beyond any of the remarks attributed to me. Even if you manage to escape this state, there is still a great deal of luck and chance involved. But grace is always the other side of rage. Grace is passion and the will to live applied in a more positive sense. This is something that our society does not observe because the homeless are always placed in an undignified and an invisible position.

We choose not to see them. We cavalierly cut benefits — such as Obama signing an $8.7 billion cut in food stamps in 2014 — and because this callous and inhumane bill is enacted with a pen stroke from a mighty hill, tall and far from the huddled throngs who long with every throe for a better life, we cannot acknowledge our potent culpability in this indignity. What nobody understands is that dignity is the way in which we transform rage into grace.

Now I am in another abyss. It is better than the pit I occupied before. But this one is more indomitable, more contingent upon other people granting me dignity. I have been fortunate enough to find some respect with the forty incredible actors who have graciously agreed to work with me on my audio drama project, somehow believing in my vision and tapping the heart that I poured into my stories in ways that exceeded my greatest expectations, and with those in the audio drama community (and a few literary people who took the trouble to meet me and communicate with me) who did not shut me out, knowing that the kind, smart (if a bit difficult), and humorous man is who I really am. But because McArdle’s article nests at the top of Google and because many of us only judge people by what Google says, I am fated to be hated and condemned. When I spend countless hours with potential new friends and we share a number of wonderful moments, and someone Googles my name, I cannot even convey the pain of seeing all that bonhomie painstakingly piled over a long period instantly demolished. How can I not be indignant?

When such compassionless industry people and willful liars as Emily Hughes, the social media person at Penguin Random House, accuse me of racism, misogyny, and homophobia that I have abundantly debunked above, how can I not be a little angry?

Calling Lisa Lucas a “cult leader” (not entirely true; I didn’t call her a cult leader, but used this as a metaphor in a December 15, 2016 email in which I wrote, “You’re as unifying as a tendentious cult leader who considers any view outside her own poison.”) or sending an email to Laura Olin with the subject header “Fuck you!” days after the 2016 presidential election (true) represents the rage I want to transform into grace. I had my anger mostly in check until Trump became President, where I was subsumed with a fury that I had not felt since my breakdown. I was reminded of the first abyss and began to see its connection to the second. The nation I loved was dying, careening towards an ineluctable despotism. But people like me are not allowed to be angry, are not allowed to be passionate, are not allowed to work through emotions, are not allowed to atone, are not allowed to apologize, and are not allowed to be themselves. In a 2003 essay, the great Tom Bissell described a pre-Twitter literary world that was decidedly friendlier than the junior high school online/real world amalgam that exists today. In addition to smartly observing that all literature is written by outsiders, he writes, “One explanation for why writers enjoy hanging around other writers is because writers often instantly forgive one another for being difficult or weird.” This is no longer the case. Among most people, I will always be known as the misogynist literary crank who terrorized women and tried to kill himself. There is no redemption. There is no forgiveness. There is no compassion. There certainly isn’t anyone considering the actual facts. There is no achievement or essay or positive gesture I can ever offer that will overturn my Google curse.

This lengthy rebuttal represents my efforts to finally put the many false claims that have been bandied about me to rest, to tell the truth (and if you’re looking for the real dirt, my real crime is contained within Appendix A), and to reveal the publishing world for what it is: a McCarthyist den where one’s every minor indiscretion is used in lieu of the actual work to impugn a voice who offers an opposing viewpoint, a place where one’s sins are neither forgiven nor forgotten years after a setback, a realm where insignificant and childish minds lash out at each other for small scraps, and where any perceived transgressor is considered the most vicious villain alive instead of a human being.

I have not suggested that women should be “grabbed by the pussy.” I have not sexually assaulted anyone like Devin Faraci. I have not tried to force my way into anyone’s bed like Stephen Elliott. These are thoughts that I have never had and actions that I have never committed. As my 2014 data breakdown in ¶99 clearly demonstrates, I have been a proponent of women writers, purely on the basis of their minds and their work, for more than a decade. My worst crime, memorialized below in Appendix A, was getting drunk and doing something stupid and unthinkable and wrong on Twitter.

All these lies, which grow with the ignoble horror of a flesh-eating virus to the present day, have made me very angry. I do not deny or doubt that. But if I’m to be judged, it must be on what I have actually done. But there’s no escaping the dreaded Google algorithim. Thankfully (and amazingly), I have not had any desire to kill myself. Some friends have described me as the strongest person they know. I don’t know who the hell they’re talking about.

I can’t control how people perceive me, much less the vile myths they wish to ascribe to me. Undoubtedly, most people reading this article, should they get this far, will have no compassion whatsoever for me, much less the other parties revealed here who are even more monstrous than I am, and will still despise me, even after everything I’ve meticulously documented and memorialized. And why not? In an era where fake news reigns over facts and the President-elect willfully tweets misinformation, it’s more comfortable, even among left-leaning literary types, to believe that someone’s an irredeemable monster rather than a human being. It’s more important to condemn a man rather than contemplate what he actually did or how he might contribute. It’s far easier and much more satisfying to wish that he did the world a favor and threw himself off a bridge. And should the sinister villain have the misfortune to live, it’s vital to ensure that he is considered purely as the awful troglodyte that the rumor mill claims him to be rather than the flawed and far from valueless human being he truly is.

But I’m going to forgive these people, including McArdle. And I’m hoping that you will too. It is Christmas Eve, after all. It is said that the purple saxifrage grows in the world’s roughest mountains, blowing bright purple stars from its stems with a sweet smell even while smothered by rocks and battered by the harshest snow. And if forgiveness is the fragrance from which a garden of crushed flowers might rise from the trampling boots of a brutish digital age, maybe all of us have a lot of potential blooming inside us, blooming that will not wait for a surefire spring to exude grace and plant a new field brimming with the beauty of inclusive dignity.

Appendix A: The Porochista Chronicles

SARAH: 98 was a bad year at that school. Either you were being bullied and picked on or you had to turn around and become the bully.

JULIA: Yeah. There was something toxic. Something dark.

SARAH: I think normal bullying, if there’s such a thing as normal bullying, you can identify the perpetrator and the victim and the, like, but it was just so pervasive.

JULIA: Do you remember the day that you realized I was gone?

SARAH: I don’t actually. No. I remember feeling like you were just sad all the time.

JULIA: I remember you being sad too.

SARAH: Yeah.

JULIA: One thing I remember, people would call you “Tubby Taba.”

SARAH: Doesn’t surprise me. Yeah. I remember a lot of stuff like that. I…I can’t help but think that our grade’s behavior had impacts on the staff.

JULIA: What do you mean?

SARAH: Well, actually, I assume — I’m assuming you knew this, but maybe you didn’t. But Miss McDonald killed herself the following year.

JULIA: [DEEP BREATH] Yeah.

NARRATOR: Miss McDonald was Julia’s favorite teacher. And Sarah’s too. Miss McDonald had gone to the school as a student and later returned to teach biology. She was the fun teacher. Who wore frog earrings.

JULIA: You think that there was something to do with what was happening in the school that caused her to, to commit suicide?

SARAH: I think it had a role in her, in her depression. She left right in the end of our good eight year. She…cause what I knew of her. And with her school, it was her passion. It was — she was an old girl. She was there teaching. She wanted to instill this love of animals and biology in all of us. And we were a bunch of brats. I remember there being a lot of associations between that pig that she had on top of her TV and her. A lot of comments about her weight. Yeah, it had an impact.

NARRATOR: Miss McDonald had been hospitalized over the summer. And when she came back in the fall, she was no longer the biology teacher, but a substitute. The last period of the last day she taught before she killed herself was a class called “Personal and Religious Communication.” The students considered the class a joke.

Heavyweight, “Julia”

On September 23, 2014, I left a lighthearted remark on a Facebook thread in relation to a Slate/Whiting Second Novel List celebrating second novels. Regrettably I don’t have a copy of the comment, but there was nothing ad hominem contained within it. I merely suggested that this would permit Dan Kois, the man behind the contest, to celebrate the overrated novelist Lev Grossman (who famously doesn’t list his first novel, Warp, in his credits). Khakpour deleted the comment and then immediately DMed me on Facebook. Here is the exchange:

porochista-facebookexchange

I sent the following email to Khakpour later that afternoon:

Porochista:

I apologize for my contributions to the fracas. It seems utterly stupid for the two of us to blow up some crossway above the River Kwai over what was essentially a miscommunication on both sides. What follows is an attempt to impart where I was coming from:

You deleted my comment because you placed what was essentially a modest spitball standing positively for literary standards on the same guttural level as the misogynistic venom from some #gamergate creep. Your followup IM to me was nebulous. So I clarified by replying, “Gee, thanks.” You then barraged me with more IMs, in which you ascribed some Machiavellian intent to my remarks (“you were commenting negatively so he’d see it”). If there was any subtext, and it seems especially odd to get into such an a posteriori speculation at this point but what the hell, it was my justifiable worry that you would fall into the same trap as Jennifer Weiner, Ruth Graham, Michelle Dean, and various other women who Kois has edited or distorted to look worse than they are for Slate clickbait. Kois is one of those guys who does “something nice” for someone, but who never defends or makes his writers or his purported inspirations look good — and he does so when these writers only collect a mere $300 per piece. He’s one of those despicable hucksters who deliberately promulgates anti-intellectual garbage, such as the “eating your cultural vegetables” nonsense, and actively contributes to a cultural landscape that is hostile to the kind of ambitious and quirky and alive literature that people like us tend to throw off our clothes for. Knowing that Slate has a certain reach, he pits certain literary crowds against each other — such as YA and literary or those who speak only English vs. those who speak multiple languages — because he knows that he can get clicks for fractious division. (Honestly, in thinking about this, he’s probably got a more devoted mission to making people feel upset than I do.) It’s true that he has used his position to foment lies and misinformation about what an “awful” person I am, much as Jessa Crispin did with her three-day torrent of false charges and defamation, but I am vocal about him, perhaps inordinately so, not because of his smears towards me, but because of his attempts to present himself as a legitimate house organ. (Ergo, “who cares if I despise the guy?” We all participate in threads in which people we don’t like show up. Can’t we have discussions anyway?) I will grant that I’m probably one of the only people considering the long-term ramifications of a Slate/Whiting admixture, but, for better or worse, I am fond of anticipating the chess game several moves ahead.

Which brings us back to idiocy, and why your deletion and ancillary charges greatly rankled me. Perhaps it’s overly idealistic of me to believe that those who read books or who are familiar with “stet” on a regular basis are capable of either accepting a comment, challenging a comment, ignoring a comment, or otherwise carrying on a conversation about what the Second Novel news means in various tones and forms. But I don’t think so. After trying to find out why I was so pissed off this morning, Sarah rightly reminded me that Facebook is not a medium where people can work out their differences, whether through IMs or threads. Like its more sinister cousin Twitter, Facebook turns even the finest minds into ravening monsters. The issue I have here is how you have tossed me into some inexplicable troglodyte category — namely, that I am some dilettante (probably) or arriviste (certainly not) whose every vaguely provocative sentence should be flensed from public consciousness and that your impression seems to be predicated on the summer’s events. Three months ago, I had one ideation that lasted five minutes. One. Five minutes. No more, no less. I never made any attempt to kill myself. I have learned in the subsequent months that this is more common than we care to know (and certainly Robin Williams’s suicide put much of this in perspective) and that there are plenty of people out there, people whom both of us know and love, who have it much worse than I ever did. We both know there’s no need for me to belabor the point, because I know you are doing far more research on this than me right now.

I sought therapy, have been writing my ass off (I have written, polished, and submitted four of the five short stories), and reclaimed my bridge walking through the 30 Days project — a kind of improvised exposure therapy — which was necessary after a tabloid jackal attempted to ascribe suicidal intent after the fact and made several false statements that were then mangled out of proportion by reporters from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and various parties with prominent influence. And even though we are both very aware by personal experience that there are people in the literary world who are far worse than me, I was still diagnosed by the armchair Scooby-Doo Squad as some lunatic stalker. The literary world regularly misreads my playfulness as baleful intent (much as you did this morning), overlooks the crux of an argument to find bits deemed misogyny (incidentally, the “slimy passage” line referred to a gender-neutral orifice), and has refused to rebut my argument at length. But then this world is composed of cutthroat jackals fighting for scraps. I’m not a depressive. I’m a very positive person, as I think the lion’s share of the essays and conversations I have published since (most of them women writers) demonstrate. PTSD is what I have, and, in lengthy and tearful talks with my therapist and through a great deal of painful off-the-grid writing, I have been forced to stare at the threads leading back to an especially traumatic and deeply hurtful childhood, likely one of the reasons I am five to ten years behind everybody else. But I persevere anyway, even when I had one agent last week mutter inappropriate comments about my appearance and blurt about having my manuscript in earshot of prominent publishing people at a bookstore. It was deeply humiliating. When I returned home, I withdrew my manuscript from her submission. I offer this as some context as to why I am especially touchy right now.

On that June day, I could handle the many beeps and blurps and buzzes of hate and death threats that spurted from my phone for nine hours — it was hardly anything compared to the hell that Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn later went through, but quite rough all the same. When so-called friends joined the unthinking mob (they had books to hawk and crowds to court, after all) and went out of their way to condemn me, that was especially hurtful and led me to consider that I should throw myself off a bridge. So at the risk of coming across as melodramatic (although I prefer to see it as the mark of a highly sensitive person; it comes out when people I am fond proceed to backstab me, defying the Wildean definition of a real friend), when you elided my comment and continued to refer to it as “nasty” and “hurtful” — as if I had made some unseemly rape joke about Dan Kois’s family — this felt to me like a very deep betrayal, especially because I spent quite a good deal of time persuading people to read and/or talk about THE LAST ILLUSION and ensuring that people were aware of your prestidigitation on several fronts. I realize in hindsight how my rapid unfurling of “co-opted” (without the Kois intelligence expressed above) caused you to push back, much as I pushed back at your suggestion that my playful comment at the behest of upholding standards was a conspiratorial attempt to make Kois upset. The Facebook IM kerplunks that boomed through my speakers this morning, which I attempted to ameliorate by suggesting we take this to email, were a reminder of that unpleasant day of relentlessness in June and your words reinforced this infuriating impression that any vague razz I offer is a hundred times worse than the laziest Internet troll. That weighted consideration deeply infuriates me and make me feel that I am being unduly penalized. Yet I cannot allow my writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, to be defined by anyone else but me. I blocked you because you would not let this go.

I’m about to abandon the Internet for a while and I’m leaving my phone at home, as there are a few meetings this afternoon and I really do need a break from brawls on the battlefield of blips and pixels. But I am genuinely contrite. In the past, we’ve moved past bigger flareups than this. It would be utterly foolish if both of us permitted something this small to get the better of us. On the other hand, we’re both passionate people. I’ve been as transparent as I can about my part in this exchange. So however you want to resolve this, I’m cool with it.

Thanks and all best,

Ed

There was then the below exchange:

From: Porochista Khakpour

Subject: Re: one last note:

To: Porochista Khakpour

Date: 9/23/2014 1:12 PM

Ed,

I’m sorry my deleting the comment upset you and I’m sorry I’ve upset you in any way.

I don’t believe I barraged you with comments or “I would not let things go.”. My reading of our exchange reveals the opposite actually. It is clear from the transcript you though I called you an idiot and that’s why you blocked me in the end. I did not. And I actually had to go. I was very pressed for time and had to get to a meeting.

I also did not intend to bring up your past or this summer at all. YOU did with “I didn’t see you defending people when they declared me misogynist.” So then I had no idea why you were making this about something bigger. My feeling is that because of what happened last summer, you think people are constantly thinking of that and reacting to it. It makes you defensive and paranoid. You’ve sent me a few emails since then that seem to imply you think I am mad at you or don’t like you or am not your friend. I think you’ve been overly concerned about it and that’s what happened here. 

I’m only explaining what I think here, because you spent many (more) words below explaining what you think happened, or I would have preferred not to reach out today at all.

From: Edward Champion

Subject: Re: one last note:

To: Porochista Khakpour

Date: 9/23/2014 5:22 PM

Porochista:

Just to be clear, I was never mad at you before this morning.  I don’t know where you’re getting this impression from.  I didn’t hold any negative feelings against you at all (although I was very pissed off at you this morning). Maybe this is something that should be clarified and resolved with a phone call or a coffee or something?  Let’s pick this up later. You have a big HarperPerennial shindig tonight and I’ve got a cold and a few deadlines to beat.

Take care and all best,

Ed

There was no response from Khakpour until September 25, 2014 at 12:55 PM:

khakpourtweet1

I emailed Khakpour at 5:54 PM that day. At this point, I was heavily drinking due to a series of attacks orchestrated that afternoon from Emily Gould in response to my Merritt Tierce interview, to which I tried to reply with grace:

I was in low spirits. My initial email to Khakpour was reasonable, but I overreacted in my subsequent reply:

From: Edward Champion
Subject: Shockingly nasty?
To: Porochista Khakpour
Date: 9/25/2014 5:54 PM

Saw your tweet.  I was not “shockingly nasty.”  We apologized to each other, but apparently you prefer to shit talk me rather than hash things out.

From: Porochista Khakpour
Subject: Re: Shockingly nasty?
To: Edward Champion
Date: 9/25/2014 8:35 PM

Yep, “FUCK OFF” is “shockingly nasty.” I’ve never said that to anyone. Plus the deleting and blocking. That’s not shit-talk. That’s reality.

From: Edward Champion
Subject: Re: Shockingly nasty?
To: Porochista Khakpour
Date: 9/25/2014 9:10 PM

Porochista: “Fuck our banks & our public transportation.”  (https://twitter.com/PKhakpour/status/506969004934561792)

Porochista: “and i’m fucking proud to be “NPR” by yr def. violently fuck up any racist, misogynist, homophobe that gets near me, the end” (https://twitter.com/PKhakpour/status/490217577725960192)

Porochista: “oh fuck that trash, I’M TALKING SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, DUDE (had to google that)” (https://twitter.com/PKhakpour/status/479827698248728576)

Porochista: “It’s not even food. It’s just . . . WHIMSY or some shit. Fuck yr whimsy.” (https://twitter.com/PKhakpour/status/477466513356505088)

Porochista: “also fuck Amazon while i’m at it, but that seems obvious” (https://twitter.com/PKhakpour/status/470256377211125760)

Porochista: “Men can all go to bro hell for all I care, but when you fuck with young women, I take that seriously.” (https://twitter.com/PKhakpour/status/469495249094864898)

That took all of 20 seconds, by the by. 

Don’t paint yourself as the virtuous sweetheart, you shockingly nasty, shit-talking hypocrite. 

I didn’t delete a goddam thing.  YOU did.  THAT’S reality.

Don’t contact me again.

Have a nice life.

From: Porochista Khakpour
Subject: Re: Shockingly nasty?
To: Edward Champion
Date: 9/25/2014 9:15 PM

Yeah there are many uses of the word “fuck.”  I don’t say it to my friends.

You are now being an embarrassing asshole, Ed. With some time I thought I could come around but now I can’t.

You did EVERYTHING. 

 I am not alone in the long list of people you have alienated and frankly many times I thought this day would come.

You are the one who FUCKING contacted me. You are delusional to think I contact you. Please stop.

From: Porochista Khakpour
Subject: Fwd: Shockingly nasty?
To: Sarah Weinman
Date: 9/25/2014 9:21 PM

I’m sorry, Sarah, I no longer can do this. I took your advice to not contact him and he contacted me repeatedly and I replied. Today was too much. He has been monitoring my twitter for a misstep and frankly “shockingly nasty” was the kindest way I could put his behavior.

Please know I adore you hugely. I have incredible respect for you. I just can’t do this anymore with him. He is abusive I am now seeing, to pretty much everyone–I just hope not you.

In the last month two agents and two editors–unrelated–came up to me to ask me about Ed, knowing I was his friend. I recommended him hugely, wrote them long emails, begged them to give him a chance (they had ALL read of the summer’s events, all it takes is a google) and one even said “It is not great for your rep to be associated with this crazy person.” And still I pushed for him.

But to see his hugely awful behavior, now firsthand–I’m done. I’m sorry. Because I think the world of you–and really did Ed as well. But I’m sorry he’s being so reckless. This is not good for him in the least. But he obviously knows this. I cannot do this many favors for someone, be such an intense ally, and see him crash and burn everything after he made a disgusting misstep on my FB page.

I am cc-ing because I have nothing to hide here. I don’t want to go behind his back. But I will go public with this if he keeps pressing and provoking me.

I totally understand if you choose not to talk to me again. But I will miss you and I am grateful for all your kindness.

thanks, P

Khakpour is establishing a narrative that is grossly out of proportion with the crime, a false narrative that was later lapped up by McArdle: the idea that I was abusive to everyone, that I am a “crazy person.” I also overreacted and was lubricated by drink. While I take full responsibility for the unspeakable mistake that followed, this exchange, and the events that followed, might have ended if Khakpour and I had talked it out over the phone like regular people. At this point, I had said nothing public about the exchange.

Minutes after this email to Weinman, at 9:35 PM (please note that the below screenshots were taken with Twitter reflecting Pacific time), before Weinman even had the time to compose a response, Khakpour took to Twitter to memorialize what an apparently horrid person I was:

porochistatweet2

And this was just the beginning of Khakpour’s distortions. A volley of tweets from Khakpour followed, suggesting that I was a stalker, that I was “abusive and cruel,” of committing “horrible things behind closed doors” when, in fact, the worst of my sins was telling Khakpour to “fuck off” and calling her a “shockingly nasty, shit-talking hypocrite.”

And when Khakpour wasn’t spinning an incredibly wrong and remarkably malicious portrait of me as a monster publicly, she was doing so privately in emails to Weinman, who was painfully fighting a two-front war involving my anguish at the response and the remarkable Twitter shitstorm that followed Khakpour’s baseless charges. Khakpour, claiming that Weinman had been cast under the spell of a “dangerous” man, was incapable of independent thought, and was not a strong woman. As someone who knew and lived with Weinman, I can assure you that this was absolutely wrong.

From: Porochista Khakpour

Subject: Re: Shockingly nasty?

To: Sarah Weinman

Date: 9/25/2014 10:28 PM

See, Sarah, at the end of the day we are all human. Ed is not the only person who gets to be human. He namecalls, harasses, insults. Ruins people’s days. For me, much of this week has dissolved in his manic hysteria. Never sees any real consequences. Helplessly, people can only tweet. This is the bare minimum I can do to stay sane. Sorry if that seems too much.

He crossed way too many lines over and over.

You have done way too many years of damage control.

I considered you a strong woman and even a feminist. But you seem to me like someone under siege.

I understand and except you not to be my friend. But I do feel for you. You are allying yourself with someone who has now proven—to all sorts of people, no patterns, many who were originally his friends (HOW CAN WE ALL BE WRONG??!)–that he is unstable to the point of dangerous.

I went public because I don’t trust him. He freaks me out. That is an acceptable reaction. And now I see why others have gone public.

I will be happy to talk to you again once he is not in your life. I do believe that day will come, but for now, I totally understand.

I am not in the mood to talk to anyone on the phone or spend another minute on this. Thanks, P

Upon seeing this email and all of these malicious tweets from someone who I had thought my friend in a highly drunken state, I cracked and, at 10:50 PM in a terrible act of self-destruction and harm that I have spent two years regretting and hating about myself and trying to come to terms with, one that I have already issued many apologies for, tweeted sentiments (now deleted) that were absolutely over the line, catered to the very charges that Khakpour had leveled at me, and that was the worst mistake of my life:

From: Porochista Khakpour

Subject: Re: Shockingly nasty?

To: Sarah Weinman

Date: 9/25/2014 11:06 PM

Okay, his fucking twitter went too far. There will be police and lawyers–I ACTUALLY HAVE EXPERIENCE WITH THAT. IF HE WANTS TO GO TO JAIL, CONTINUE. I KEEP ALL FILES TOO.

I confirmed with the New York Police Department that Khakpour did file a complaint on September 27, 2014. The investigation did not result in any criminal charges against me. It scarcely mattered. Because I was locked up in a psych ward, having lost everything I had: my home, my partner of nearly nine years, my reputation. I was homeless for nine months. I applied to nearly 200 positions and went on dozens of interviews before I landed the job I have now.

If McArdle’s article had focused on these facts, it would have been fair game. I have certainly received any number of unwanted and often hostile attentions from the media and from numerous parties pining for my demise by email.

It is not for me to answer whether any of the consequences for my abominable act, which I assure you were felt very painfully by me, are punitive enough. But it is clear that, more than two years later, I will only be known for what I did to Khakpour. In the eyes of the literary and media worlds, I am a savage mongrel who must be put out at the pound. I must continue to suffer because I am apparently beyond repair.

This is what social justice and reform is in the digital age. This is what “community” means in the literary world.

I have confessed to everything, which, notwithstanding the awful response to Khakpour, is far lesser than what McArdle has charged me with. I have been forced to expose what others have done in an attempt to provide the complete context. It is all a wretched and sad business, one predicated on a belief that people cannot change, because none of us can forgive or understand each other. We cannot believe in redemption. We cannot believe that we can learn from our mistakes. Not when there’s a vile social medium that allows us to channel our inner id without reflection. Believing the worst in people is the most seductive part of expressing yourself online.

Appendix B: The Jessa Crispin-Edward Champion Correspondence

Two reliable sources close to Crispin (I am protecting their anonymity because I don’t want them to experience any defamatory retaliation) informed me that she spent every day reading my website because she hated me that much. The following Google Instant Search screenshot, taken on August 6, 2014, is a good litmus test for how obsessive Crispin had become:

jessacrispingoogle

For a three day period, beginning on June 28, 2014 at 10:57 AM PST and concluding on July 1, 2014 at 9:20 PM PST, Crispin spent nearly her entire time on Twitter writing about me, expressing outrageous untruths about me over the course of three dozen tweets. The spurious charges included the false claims that I stalked John Freeman in 2007 and 2008, showing up “to every event John Freeman hosted for months, simply to intimidate and harass” (untrue: as established above in ¶77, I attended a grand total of four Freeman-moderated events, two while I was reporting on BookExpo America. Crispin’s charge is an insult to bona-fide stalking, such as the one that Helen DeWitt wrote about for the London Review of Books), that I had “threatened friends” (conveniently, no friends were named and no examples were tendered), that I had sent “threatening emails” to Crispin in 2003 (Crispin, of course, could not produce evidence and wrote “I really wish I had not deleted them”; unfortunately, for Crispin, I have the tendency to save everything and I have produced the entirety of our correspondence below, dating back to 2003: it is clear that there were no threats).

When Crispin posted her defamatory tweets, I emailed her for the first time in six years, respectfully asking her to remove her tweets and issue an apology. Instead, she continued to promulgate untruths.

Crispin’s reckless recalcitrance inspired Jane McGonigal to spread defamatory untruths about me, including such extravagant claims that that I had sent her an email that I was a “huge fan” and proceeded to threaten her. Not only have I never sent McGonigal a single email (I don’t even have her email address), but I have never claimed to be a fan of her work. All of my communications in setting up the interview were through the publicist. Here is the email that I sent the publicist on November 15, 2010:

Edward Champion here from The Bat Segundo Show here. Hope all is well.

I’m looking at 2011 guests right now, and I was wondering if you could direct me to the appropriate publicist who is handling REALITY IS BROKEN. I understand that Jane has an event at Fordham on 2/2/11, and this definitely sounds like the kind of book/guest I’d be interested in covering. Can you let me know about what the current galley situation is and so forth?

McGonigal also claimed that her publisher, The Penguin Press, had stopped sending me books or booking authors on my podcast, The Bat Segundo Show, because I had written a lengthy criticism of her book, Reality is Broken. This too was the kind of delusional thinking that runs counter to the facts. I worked closely with The Penguin Press, an imprint that I respect, to include many of their authors on Bat Segundo since, including Eric Schlosser (airdate: September 24, 2013), Sarah Churchwell (airdate: February 17, 2014), and Ben Tarnoff (airdate: April 22, 2014). The truth of the matter is that I had done a great deal of research on Reality is Broken for a Bat Segundo podcast, discovering many lines of specious reasoning and sloppy thinking. I had hoped to discuss this with McGonigal. I am a journalist, not a publicist. McGonigal canceled at the last minute. Because I had spent about ten hours of my life reading about gamification, it seemed profitable to reclaim some of my lost labor by writing about it. McGonigal took offense to her views being challenged, because she lacks the maturity to have a conversation with anyone isn’t a fawning sycophant. I publicly challenged her to a debate on Twitter in a playful nod. She blocked me. She continues to block nearly anyone who disagrees with her (including a few friends of mine). Years later, I continue to receive emails on the McGonigal essay from frustrated grad students contending with lackluster assigned reading, video game designers, and numerous other readers. Instead of responding to my essay, McGonigal has opted to invent libelous untruths. As we have seen, this is a common tactic in the literary world: if you can’t challenge someone on the facts, sketch a fresco of him as a monster.

But the true source of this defamation is Jessa Crispin, an incoherent fabulist who is so conspiratorial minded that she can’t even represent the facts in an essay for the L.A. Review of Books:

Every other issue of The Atlantic carries a cover story on the topic. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” “The Confidence Gap.” “All the Single Ladies.” Then there are the checklists. How many women are heads of Fortune 500 companies? In Congress? Published at The New York Times? Is this men’s fault or women’s fault? And then the surveys. How many women in positions of power at work are married? Unmarried? Have children? Is having children hard? Do women feel conflicted? How is their work-life balance?

The Atlantic essays were respectively published in July/August 2012, April 14, 2014 and November 2011. Three articles published over a three year period do not constitute a cover story that appears “every other issue.” As the complete correspondence between Crispin and me will reveal, not only does Crispin take offense at anything that enrages her, but she maintains the kind of wild and childish grudges that have no clear source of enmity and no grounding in facts.

The first time that I ever contacted Crispin was over a Laura Miller review of Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary, which Crispin was condemning on her blog on August 2003. I had emailed Crispin because she claimed that Salon had not printed her letter to the editor.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 8/21/2003 11:19 AM
Subject: The Salon flap

Jessa:

Thanks for chronicling the Miller piece.

I’m going to write Salon a very thorough letter about the Miller piece, but I’m wondering if you can send me a copy of the letter that you sent Salon. I suspect there’s more going on here than we realize, but I’d like to be able to respond with as informed an opinion as I can muster.

Additionally, I would suggest that if you want to get Salon’s attention, flummox them with faxes or physical mail. Blockading their phone banks and offering some physical indication of their failure to conduct proper criticism is the way to draw attention to this issue. (Even if 500 people were to send them a letter, and they ended up in some physical form, that would certainly give them food for thought.)

Their fax numbers are:

San Francisco
(415) 645-9204

New York
(212) 905-6138

The addresses are:

Salon.com
22 4th Street, 16th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103

Salon.com
41 East 11th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Talbot’s in SF and I think Miller’s in New York. Might be wise to hit both of them by fax AND snailmail.

All the best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 8/21/2003 12:35 AM
Subject: Re: The Salon flap

I wish I had kept a copy of the letter I sent. Here’s basically what it said:

I know that Salon.com has a long history of giving review assignments to people you know will write negative reviews. Stephanie Zacharek seems to have a personal vendetta against Wes Anderson, which she chronicles through her reviews of his films and also brings up how much she hates him in reviews of other movies. And yet you continue to assign her to review his movies. Charles Taylor has written articles basically stating there hasn’t been a good movie released since 1960, and yet he continues to review films, spewing his bile all over my screen.

And now you give a Laura Miller the new Chuck Palahniuk book to review. She spends the first two paragraphs detailing how much she hates him. It almost appears to be personal. I mean, she uses the word “execrable.” And then someone decided to make this review the lead story. Isn’t there a war on? Wasn’t there something more important you should be covering?

Perhaps you were simply trying to get people’s attention. Writing a review like that certainly gets people’s attention, especially a cult writer like Palahniuk. You get word of mouth, your hits go up, and maybe some of those people nod in agreement and decide to stick around. Unfortunately, it makes you look like the crazy old man in his bathrobe, yelling at his college aged neighbors to, “Turn that noise down!” It’s a cheap way to get attention, and it makes me embarrassed to be a subscriber to your premium program.

Jessa Crispin
Bookslut.com

When you send me a copy of the letter you send them?

Jessa

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 8/21/2003 12:10 PM
Subject: Re: The Salon flap

Jessa:

Thanks for the summation. I think I should be able to proceed with it. But on the flip side, dear me, ALWAYS keep copies of your outgoing correspondence. You never know when you might need to clarify something you’ve said, particularly if, like me, you’ve done the human thing and come across as an idiot. 🙂

I’ll send you a copy of the letter either tonight or tomorrow. However, the more I think about this, the more I may want to frame this with the Believer essay, Orwell’s “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” and the larger problem of book criticism, and why Dale Peck’s New Republic piece (which I’ll have to nab from the library because it’s not online) works as a rant that attempts to clarify, while Miller’s piece is attention-seeking vitriol.

All the best,

Ed

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 8/21/2003 1:20 PM
Subject: An age-old dilemma

Jessa:

Speaking of this, have you checked out Jack Green’s “Fire the Bastards!”?

It goes out of its way to illustrate how inefficient the reviewers were for Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.”

Here’s the complete text:

http://www.nyx.net/~awestrop/ftb/ftb.htm

All the best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 8/21/2003 2:51 PM
Subject: Re: The Salon flap

I usually do keep copies of correspondence. But I’m running on very little sleep. Here’s a hot tip: Don’t ever take an important freelancing assignment that is due three days before you move across the country. It slipped my mind.

Your letter sounds very involved. Good luck with it. I look forward to reading it.

Jessa

[EDITORIAL NOTE: On an old blog (“Plight of the Reluctant”), I had written an open email to Steve Almond, published around mid-September 2003. Unfortunately, I lost many of the blog entries in a data crash and have not been able to find the specific blog entry referenced by Crispin in the following email.]

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 9/19/2003 3:22 PM
Subject: Your comments to Steve Almond

Honestly, I was surprised to read your e-mail to Steve. It seems much more hostile (over typography? Is it really worth getting pissed over?) than I would have expected from you.

Jessa

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/2/2003 1:17 PM
Subject: e-mail

I’m not ignoring your e-mail. I’m about six weeks behind on responding to anything that’s not from my writers. I just haven’t had time to write back to anybody.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/2/2003 1:17 PM
Subject: e-mail

I’m not ignoring your e-mail. I’m about six weeks behind on responding to anything that’s not from my writers. I just haven’t had time to write back to anybody.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/2/2003 1:17 PM
Subject: e-mail

I’m not ignoring your e-mail. I’m about six weeks behind on responding to anything that’s not from my writers. I just haven’t had time to write back to anybody.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/2/2003 1:19 PM
Subject: e-mail

I’m not ignoring your e-mail. I’m about six weeks behind on responding to anything that’s not from my writers. I just haven’t had time to write back to anybody.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/2/2003 1:20 PM
Subject: e-mail

I’m not ignoring your e-mail. I’m about six weeks behind on responding to anything that’s not from my writers. I just haven’t had time to write back to anybody.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/2/2003 1:26 PM
Subject: e-mail

I’m not ignoring your e-mail. I’m about six weeks behind on responding to anything that’s not from my writers. I just haven’t had time to write back to anybody.

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 12/2/2003 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: e-mail

Not sure if the five replies I received were automatic replies to all remaining emails in your inbox or not, but it’s all good. Just pointing out that unreasonable people like this Badgley dude sometimes need strange placating that you can never possible anticipate or predict (and of course the fact that HE’S not on the cover probably pisses him off to no end).

Plus, because of the lack of response, I wasn’t sure if you were still pissed about the Steve Almond thing (a truly idiotic move on my part).

Regardless of all this, congrats again on the Chi Reader cover. And to hell with this Badgley punk. The thing about the book world is that, for no apparent reason, sometimes columnists feel the need to make personal attacks. And they will continue to make personal attacks the higher you go.

(Witness the ridiculous Tom Wolfe-John Updike-John Irving thing from years ago, which had established authors calling ad hominen potshots, or, most recently, the King-Bloom thing, which was less about pointing out the strengths or the flaws of King than it was about Bloom making a ponderous appearance.)

Anyway, will stop blabbing. We cool.

All the best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/3/2003 10:59 AM
Subject: Re: e-mail

Sorry about the multiple mails. I was using webbased mail for a while, but it was deleting messages and sending multiple copies so I broke down and started downloading my mail at work. Tricky, but better than losing everything.

Did you see Neil Gaiman linked to the whole fiasco? Made me feel all warm inside.

Best,

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 12/3/2003 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: e-mail

Jessa:

Wow. Just read Gaiman’s entry. The man’s a class act. I don’t think you could ask for a better write-up than that.

On an altogether different note, have you considered having someone at Bookslut review the 3,299 page Vollmann treatise? (Assuming, of course, that someone would be that devoted or masochistic.) Perhaps you can get seven people to review one volume a piece and then attempt to explain how it might make sense as a whole.

All the best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/4/2003 7:19 AM
Subject: Re: e-mail

McSweeney’s won’t send us review books. Too small, I guess. Ironic, eh?

Anyway, ain’t no way in hell I’m paying $120 for one goddamn book.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/6/2003 10:40 AM
Subject: Re: e-mail

Hey, any idea why you were included on an invitation list for the Austin Chronicle holiday party? Or for that matter, why I was invited?

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 12/10/2003 10:11 AM
Subject: Re: e-mail

Jessa:

Was meaning to ask you this, but, outside of the Vollman suggestion, are you interested in more reviewers for Bookslut? I’d be happy to review “Everything and More” or “Wolves of the Calla” or the new Didion, or something else recent in my bookpile.

All the best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/11/2003 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: e-mail

I could use a review of Wolves of the Calla. Do you think you could have it to me by Dec 20? I prefer text attachments.

J

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 12/22/2003 1:02 PM
Subject: Re: Calla?

I sent you a “Wolves of the Calla” review on Sat. and you’ve been incognito via email, though posting public on your blog. I’m forced to conclude either (a) you’re swamped in holiday madness, (b) you didn’t receive it, or (c) you concluded that the review was terribly written, printed it off, tore into small bits, and burned it in a pyre with leftover copies of random mission statements. Vot hippent? 🙂

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 12/22/2003 2:00 PM
Subject: Re: Calla?

That would be a I’ll get around to it.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 1/6/2004 3:51 PM
Subject: calla

Just so you know, I really liked the review. It’s going up with only minor changes.

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 1/6/2004 3:52 PM
Subject: Re: calla

Okay. Cool beans. If you’re interested in any additional reviews (I spy with my eye the Clarke/Baxter collaboration, the new Leonard, the new Wolfe or Wolff — that is, “Wizard” (hubba hubba) or “Old School,” — a potentially disastrous run-in with the Tyler book, or “The Lady and the Unicorn” or that “Hunt Sisters” book with the little girl on the cover that’s everywhere all of a sudden), let me know.

All the best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 1/6/2004 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: calla

The only one I would say no to is Old School, as we’ve already reviewed it.

But I would run any of the others you mentioned.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 1/27/2004 2:18 PM
Subject: hunt

Sorry, I’ve had two author interviews over the past three days. It was pretty hectic. But I have some marks on this review. If you could get me draft 2 by this weekend, that would be great.

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 2/10/2004 5:27 PM
Subject: Ollie Ollie Tivoli

Has anyone called “Confessions of Max Tivoli?” If not, I can get you review late next week.

Hope you landed the job.

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 2/11/2004 9:37 AM
Subject: RE: Ollie Ollie Tivoli

Already been claimed.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: On February 23, 2004, I made a modest joke about a feud between Jessa Crispin and Terry Teachout and received the following email. Note how Jessa implies that I “get snippy” when I don’t respond to her emails, inferring that my jokey blog post meant that I was upset at her. I wasn’t.]

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 2/24/2004 7:43 AM
Subject:

I know you get snippy when I don’t respond to each of your e-mails. (This is what, the second time?) But no hard feelings. I went after Terry Teachout because he’s smug and he tries to lay down too many laws on the blogging community. I don’t feel that “poaching” links is on par with plagiarism, which evidently many bloggers do.

Anyway, sorry there is animosity and you will not be submitting reviews anymore. I enjoyed having you write for me.

Best,

Jessa

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 2/24/2004 12:59 PM
Subject: Re:

Jessa:

I’m sick as a dog, but, I’m going to try and answer in brief:

1. As far as I know I haven’t nailed your photo to a dartboard (even with the antibiotics), nor have I removed a link to Bookslut or stopped regularly linking it or suggesting it as a place to go for people who need more. The major thing I took umbrage with was the blogosphere comment. And was surprised when Terry framed what I said as “shooting prisoner.” See most recent entry for attempt to clarify. As I said, this ain’t Manichean.

2. I’ll have to go into the link poaching argument and the e-mailing thing later. Because it’s a complex issue, and I would like to address it. But I’m trying to rest right now.

3. Never have I said that I would no longer write for Bookslut. I don’t know where you got this from. I queried you on the Max Tivoli thing. You told me someone had it. Was meaning to get back to you on that. But then I got sick. Plus, this big Fringe thing happened. Bad timing. So apologies on my front for being non-responsive on my score. Needless to say, no, there aren’t hard feelings here at all. Disagreement, yes. But nothing to start a Montague/Capulet style feud here (as I tried to preface my entry, contentiousness was last on my mind). And I can understand the immediate emotional impulse to respond to Teachout’s entry. I was definitely guided by a similar one when you singled out the blogosphere.

Anyway, hope this makes some sense. Will try to respond more completely when I’m feeling better.

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 2/25/2004 12:00 PM
Subject: Re:

A little background on my reaction:

In the past week, I have gotten many e-mails accusing me of stealing their links. Without exception, they were from blogs I never read. Also, I dislike Terry Teachout. I dislike him a whole lot. His first round of “rules of blogging” got on my nerves, so his second round just infuriated me. His constant references to his favorite bloggers and then a snide comment about “other bloggers” that he disapproves of didn’t help.

And I don’t like the idea of a blogging community. I’m with Jennifer Howard on this one, and I still feel a bit bad about not supporting her while she was being ripped apart on blogs. (And not just because she’s my editor at the Washington Post and has twice thrown work my way.)

Anyway, get well. Rest, fluids, all that bullshit.

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 2/24/2004 12:59 PM
Subject: “Love Monkey” review

Jessa:

Will respond to other emails later. But, for now, here’s a review of “Love Monkey” for Bookslut if you’re interested.

All best,

Ed

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 2/26/2004 1:21 AM
Subject: Re:

Jessa:

Okay, getting better. Will address first part of these e-mails.

I didn’t realize the level of enmity you had for Terry. But as I said in previous post, it was a highly emotional response.

Personally, I think the whole link-poaching issue got a little out of hand — largely because there are limited newspapers and limited book coverage, and Google News ensures that almost everyone gets the same tags to cut and paste. However, stealing phrasing or context — that’s a whole different ball of wax. I think Ron over at Beatrice.com said it best: “My actual words, now those are copyrighted.” And since the context comes somewhere between the two extremes of something anybody can find and something an individual applies context to (itself, a form of discovery), when another person appears to abscond with that context without credit, the initial individual is probably going to feel a little miffed.

You may not realize this, but I’ve received several e-mails from people (well before and entirely independent of of the Terry post, along with a sizable deluge following my response to your post) who have been extremely upset by what I think is a perceived context theft. I’m not so much bothered by it, but I can certainly relate to their feeling. Particularly when it comes with a habit of not returning other people’s e-mails over issues that involve carrying out a favor, which, I’m sorry to say, is just plain rude. (What’s the old quote about wandering large in the world by saying something as small as a thank you. Can’t remember.)

The more aggravated ones react like Shawn Badgely. And this is the kind of thing you can either blatantly disagree with (and maintain enmity) or work something out by finding a microscopic, exceptionally minor compromise within yourself that will get you more respected and probably a lot farther. (Would Robert Redford or Lorne Michaels have been the butt of so many recent attacks if they hadn’t kept people waiting so long?)

The most immediate context analogy I can use is with roommates (or relationships). You wouldn’t walk into your roommate’s room, grab his keys, and run off with the car just for the hell of it. Just as you wouldn’t directly intervene in the way they come to a conclusion in their personal lives. You respect their space, their property, the way they make particular decisions, and their tics, and they (in turn) respect yours. You communicate when necessary. You put everything aside to make the living situation work, to talk things out, and to hash it out for the greater good of everybody.

The blogging community may not impress you as an idea, and you may not relish being part of something crudely formed or vague in nature (and there’s definitely a side argument over whether the blogging community is as abstract or as delineated as its supporters or naysayers expostulate). But I would contend that dismissing a community runs counter to the nature of blogging. Because blogging, and definitely topical blogging, is link-heavy, special interest based, and networked by nature. Other blogs support you, and you support them. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. And since in the book blog world, everyone here has the common goal of pursuing the same ideas and exposing the same stories, many of the lit bloggers go beyond the link, pull up their sleeves, and try to apply context. And in the process they recognize or refer to each other, the same way that decent people do in everyday life. (If Tommy is an expert at the cross-stitching club or Alexia has the killer chicken recipe and you publicize it among friends, well, the decent thing to do is to point to them.)

Of course, a community, not to be confused with an amorphous, all-agreeing gestalt, also means that you can have healthy disagreement and discussion on particular issues (such as the whole link poaching thing or the Naomi Wolf deconstructions). It doesn’t preclude you from agreeing with Jennifer Howard or Caitlan Flanagan or, in Terry’s case, trying to work out some ground rules for blogging, even if he may not realize that people have tried this before. But why not encourage others to take the positions you might completely oppose? To stand on one’s own feet without a sense of community is to turn one’s face to the development and open discussion of topics. To not acknowledge one’s peers and jump off the boat giddily with their context is to say no to a really nifty developmental valve. And I highly encourage you to reconsider. Because you may find discoveries higher than the Post in the process.

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 2/26/2004 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: “Love Monkey” review

Sorry, but I’m really not interested in running a review of this book on the site. It’s not our thing.

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 2/26/2004 8:34 AM
Subject: Re: “Love Monkey” review

So callout titles before? Ollie ollie oxenfree? Current Bookslut policy? Let me know.

Thanks,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 2/26/2004 9:33 AM
Subject: Re: “Love Monkey” review

That’s usually best, if only to make sure that no one else is working on the same review.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 2/26/2004 2:25 PM
Subject: Re:

I think something needs to be explained. I’m not really like the other litbloggers. I don’t have a day job that I blog during, something to fill the time. Not anymore. My schedule is to only be on the computer from 8:30 to noon. Instead of just blogging during that time, I’m contacting publishers, editing, working on my website template, screwing with Movable Type, proofreading, writing for other publications, transcribing interviews, answering e-mails, etc. E-mails from readers and other bloggers are my lowest priority. I get a hell of a lot of e-mail in a day, and most of it cannot possibly be answered. If I’m not off the computer by noon, I get frustrated. Today I’m only on at one because I was gone all morning, and I’m about to go to the living room and finish my book. The rest of the day I come in every once and a while to see if something needs to be taken care of, and the rest of the time I’m reading. Because it’s the books I’m interested in, not the community. So I didn’t have time to read the entire story, yes, I took your word for what happened in it, didn’t notice it was tongue in cheek because I was busy. Yeah, it was dumb. No, I didn’t credit you because I’m not religious about that and I don’t see the overwhelming importance of it, and I wanted to finish up the day so I could get to reading. I didn’t reply to your e-mail because I didn’t see why it was important. You corrected me, I changed it, done.

The blog is my least favorite thing about Bookslut. But that’s where the links to Amazon mostly come from, which gives me enough money to keep the website running and that’s where the attention comes from. That’s the only reason I blog as much as I do. So I don’t see myself as a lit blogger. I’m much more interested in the other parts of Bookslut.

I’m also not interested in getting all personal on the blog. I don’t write about my life. I provide links. But the lit blogging “community” seems to be all about talking about “cute little Maud” or Terry Teachout’s penis or dishing on which blogger had lunch with Old Hag this week. It’s boring. I stopped reading several of the lit bloggers a while back once I realized they were never going to stop writing about their mothers. I don’t want to participate.

I have had links poached. Months and months ago, a story I dug out of the archives of a website and linked to showed up on both Maud and Old Hag without mentioning me. Neil Gaiman links to things he found on my website frequently. But I don’t approach them and say, “Hey, you got it off my site, link to me.” It’s not important to me. After all, all I did was do a goddamn Google search. If someone quoted an interview I did on Bookslut without credit, yeah, that would piss me off. But that’s about it.

This is the most tiresome conversation I’ve had in months. Feel free to respond, but don’t expect any more from me. I was never interested in this in the first place.

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 2/27/2004 12:16 PM
Subject: O’Hara

Jessa:

Would you be interested in a Yardleyesque John O’Hara retrospective? Not his New Yorker stories mind you, but covering his work as a novelist, the idiosynchracies of his prose, the way his characters carry burdens and interesting vicious qualities, and the like. Dealing primarily with “Appointment in Samarra,” “Butterfield 8,” and “Hope of Heaven.” If so, let me know. Turnaround time frame — probably week and a half.

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 2/28/2004 12:136 PM
Subject: Re: O’Hara

Sounds good.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: The following email was sent by Crispin in response to one of my blog posts, where I criticized Jennifer Howard, who wrote an article complaining about the blogosphere’s “coziness,” only to turn around and pimp her newspaper’s articles during a guest turn at Bookslut’s blog.]

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 3/2/2004 9:46 PM
Subject:

Lay off. Jesus. I asked Jennifer to guest blog because she’s a friend and she’s in the book business. She’s not a blogger.

First you attack Steve Almond for not putting enough lines between paragraphs, now you’re attacking Jennifer for referencing one of the most influential book reviews in American newspapers. Don’t you have anything better to do?

J.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 3/8/2004 1:19 PM
Subject: O’Hara update

Jessa:

To assist with your timing, which I don’t know, it’s coming your way by Wed., Thurs. at latest. Will involve both stories and novels, and eschew the “Art of Burning Bridges” angle to dwell on the work (which apparently even Ben Schwarz overlooked). Sorry it’s slightly later than I initially promised, but I had to mop up some other deadlines this weekend.

On a side note, has anyone claimed “The Epicure’s Lament?” If not, I’d be happy to cover that one for April.

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 3/9/2004 5:06 PM
Subject: Re: O’Hara

Epicure is already being reviewed.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 3/9/2004 10:31 AM
Subject: Re: O’Hara

Please note that I’m withdrawing my planned O’Hara profile.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 3/9/2004 11:25 AM

Subject: Re: O’Hara

Okay. I’m beginning to think your taste in review books doesn’t really match up with what I want to cover on Bookslut, either. I read about the memoir you suggested, and it really doesn’t sound like the type of book Bookslut would review. I know we do the occasional fluff review, but your submissions have consistently been books I have no interest in for the site. I just don’t think you can be a regular reviewer.

Jessa

[EDITORIAL NOTE: After the above exchange, it did not seem especially fruitful to contact Crispin again. This did not stop her from contacting me over the years over any perceived slight. Nevertheless, I still wanted to give her a chance and, in the following excerpt of an email I sent to The Litblog Co-Op on November 18, 2004, I argued for Crispin to be approached and included in the group.]

From: Edward Champion
To: The Litblog Co-Op
Date: 11/18/2004 5:34 AM
Subject: [litblogs] Greetings and an opening sally

III. The Jessa Crispin/Michael Schaub Question

Many of you are aware of my position w/r/t Jessa Crispin. I have, in fact, had email discussions with her before hoping to argue for a sense of community rather than inexplicable anger and solipsism. To understate the obvious, they did not go well.

The fact of the matter is that Jessa doesn’t share the same values that we do. Or so our PERCEPTION would dictate.

However, I think it would be hypocritical NOT to invite her into this group. I like Michael Schaub too, but Bookslut’s editor is not Schaub. It’s Jessa Crispin. And like her or not, Jessa Crispin was one of the earliest voices in the litblog community.

If Jessa acts uncivil or spiteful, or exploits this group in some fashion, then a case can be made for her expulsion. But I truly think she deserves a chance here. It is important, I think, to include voices who are passionate about literature, but also varied voices (say, for example, a Banville hater or a Mitchell hater, both of whom I’d welcome). I’d hate to see a group that failed to include dissent amongst

its members. And for that reason alone, I think inviting Jessa (and perhaps Kevin of Collected Miscellany) would be an attempt to fulfill some of the unique possibilities envisioned.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: On April 19, 2005, I published a blog post pointing out that many of Bookslut’s contributors were unpaid and received the following email from Crispin, claiming that I had “talked shit.” As the correspondence (and the updated blog post) show, I updated the entry to reflect the correct information.]

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 4/19/2005 4:11 PM
Subject:

Oh, Ed. Talk shit about me if you like, but do some fact checking first. Bookslut pays for features. We don’t pay for reviews or columns as of yet, but we’ve been paying our writers for features since January.

Jessa

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 4/19/2005 6:02 PM
Subject: parasites

Jessa:

Thanks for letting me know about your payment procedure. I’ve updated the entry.

As for talking shit, this is yet another classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. You were the one who called us “parasites.” I felt the need to clarify what a parsite truly was.For what it’s worth, despite the fact that I’ve experienced nothing but solipsistic rage and rudeness from you, I was actually one of the people who suggested that you be included in the Litblog Co-Op. Not that I’d ever expect someone who has remained continually belligerent and dismissive of the litblog community to understand such a nuanced position.

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 4/19/2005 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: parasites

You should check the article again. I did not use the word “parasite,” Joy did, which you seem not to have noticed. And that whole conversation was taken way out of context anyway, not that I’m apologizing for it.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 4/19/2005 5:35 PM
Subject: Re: parasites

A journalist’s job is to provide context. And I’d be inclined to agree with you, IF your direct quote hadn’t undermined the efforts of other people, while showing a wholesale lack of knowledge about the many reviews, interviews, and essays that are posted on a DAILY basis completely independent of media outlets.

And, if you don’t apologize for how you were portrayed, then you’re essentially agreeing with the statement.

If you’re “hurt” about why you weren’t included in the LBC, then you might want to examine the lacuna curves regularly spouting out of your mouth. Your continued lack of consideration for others often leaves them disinclined to consider you. That’s hardly rocket science. Without naming anybody specific, there’s more people than you think who you’ve brushed the wrong way.

But then that’s not really my problem, is it?

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 4/19/2005
Subject: Re: parasites

I never said I was hurt. Just to clear that up.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 6/6/2005 5:26 AM
Subject: your mention of sacco

It’s not actually a follow up. It’s two previously comic book-length pieces being collected. The material is actually about ten years old, I believe. (One of them was the first Sacco I ever read.)

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 6/6/2005 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: your mention of sacco

Jessa:

Thanks. I will correct this. The laptop was dying and I was speeding through my transcribing. Did you see the new small-sized reissues of Sin City (with the oversized slip covers) at the Dark Horse booth? The guy there, Lee, was very cool and I passed along your name to him.

Good meeting you.

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 6/6/2005 11:22 AM
Subject: Re: your mention of sacco

I did see them, but I was disappointed in the quality. The binding is cheap, and the size makes some of the lettering difficult to read. But they are pretty from the outside, that’s for sure. I had the distinct pleasure of having drinks with Frank Miller during BEA, which was definitely the highlight for me.

J.

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 6/6/2005 12:07 PM
Subject: Re: your mention of sacco

And by the way, if you want to know what happened at the 18 to 34 year old panel, let me know. It was a freak show of the highest order from the very beginning stages to the minute where I lost the will to live. Since you keep referencing it, I thought you might be interested.

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 6/7/2005 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: your mention of sacco

Jessa:

Big-time backlog here. So pardon my inconsistent response time.

You lost the will to live? Jesus, what happened at the panel? People kept mentioning it to me. What I heard from several folks was that there was a good deal of craziness from the crowd concerning what 18-34 readers actually read. In fact, at the Generation Text panel, pretty much all of the editors there were adamant about not confining their work to just 18-34 titles, but, rather interestingly, they were very willing to dismiss this audience altogether with moribund ideas about video games and the like.

The big impression I got out of BEA (and this is reflected in one of my longass posts) is that the publishers not only don’t know anything about their audiences, but that they seem to view the 18-34 label as some all-encompassing demographic, rather than an interesting confluence of MANY types of people (there are your genre geeks, there are those who could care less about reading, there are those who are staunchly literary, et al.). It really is all about the mass demographic (the people who shop at Wal-Mart), rather than the subcategories of audiences and how some of these subcategories cross over. It’s pretty damn hilarious to me that the publishing industry STILL flourishes despite being completely disconnected from people who read.

All best,

Ed

From: Jessa Crispin
To: Edward Champion
Date: 6/9/2005 12:35 PM
Subject: Re: your mention of sacco

If you want to know what I did for fourteen hours yesterday, you can see Bookslut’s new issue. Now that it’s up, I can finally write some e-mail.

So Mark asked me to chair the panel, but I was, of course, not given any input into who was asked to participate. When I saw that three of the five participants worked at least somewhat in young adult books, I called Mark to find out why they were all invited, and I was told they wanted to talk about finding the bridge between YA writers and the 18-to-34 demographic. But when I got there, they didn’t want to talk about that at all. All they wanted to talk about was how YA novels like Gossip Girl are “really big” with my “demo” as well as self-help books. I tried to steer the conversation into something at all interesting, but there was no hope. There was some clashing, and about halfway through it I kind of just gave up and we just did audience questions. Many of the audience questions were along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with you people?” mostly directed towards the woman responsible for the Gossip Girl series.

It was really painful, especially considering there was just no hope. Audience members started leaving, I was called names by one particular woman on the panel, and there was no real discussion. The marketing folks really wanted to stay on message and just keep repeating the same bullshit over and over again. “The 18-to-34 year olds don’t read books, unless it’s YA or self-help.” After the panel, I was stopped over and over again by people at BEA saying they felt bad for me having to moderate that crap.

I don’t think I’ll be asked to moderate anything again. Mark saw me later on, said, “I heard about your panel!” and just started laughing…

J

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 06/11/2005 11:47 AM
Subject: RE: your mention of sacco

Jessa:

No worries. I’m still trying to conquer this vicious post-BEA email backlog right now and it’s still kicking my ass. As if the FedEx packages of booty weren’t enough, there was this morning’s balancing act from PO box to apartment. Quite literally, I had about five feet of books that I was only able to carry back by taking all of the tomes out of their packages and stacking them in a precarious vertical pile. Incredible, these publicists. They move quick. Now I have a sense of the mail you’re getting.

Anywho, wanted to say really quick that the new Bookslut issue looks nice and wanted to thank you for the interview. The wine had gone to my head too and I tried to make that clear in the edit by including my own rampant stammering.

As for the panel, I’m very sorry to hear about what happened. You mean that you didn’t get to hand pick your panelists or get an email dialogue going on in advance to at least acclimate these folks into thinking about the question you were propounding? What in the hell do YA writers have to do with the 18-34 demographic? The big question: was the 18-34 approach locked in when you proposed the panel? It makes no sense to me whey they would do something like this.

For what it’s worth, the blog marketing panel I attended faced a similar identity crisis. The panel attracted people who wanted to use blogs as marketing tools, but they didn’t understand them and MJ Rose was left there resorting to mighty pronouncements of how blogs are important without actually engaging the crowd, much less the panelists, about the conversational niche. I was about to jump in myself and point this out to these folks in the form of an audience question, but I had only just arrived that morning and I had only had about a half hour of sleep on the red-eye and was still figuring New York and the BEA out.

The sense I’m getting here is that the people who run the panels aren’t completely connected to the audience who pays for these panels. They’re shelling out meager resources to get information. Not all of the panels were like this, but much like the publishing industry itself, it seems that some of the BEA panels completely misunderstand their audience. If you have a panel on the 18-34 audience, you get people who write for that audience (a hot young writer, I suppose one of the “young hybrid editors,” and someone who does publicity for that crowd). If you have a panel on the marketing of blogs, you prepare case examples in advance and get the appropriate people to talk about them.

Unbelievable.

All best,

Ed

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 10/24/2007 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: Condolences

Jessa:

Sorry to hear about the death in the family. Please take good care and be gentle to yourself.

All best,

Ed

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 6/9/2008 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: Condolences

This Mary Roach item has been showing up in your feed since April. Thought I’d bring it to your attention.

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/index.rdf

All best,

Ed

jessaattachment

From: Edward Champion
To: Jessa Crispin
Date: 6/28/2014 3:44 PM
Subject: Re: Libel and defamation

Jessa:

I have all of our correspondence going back to 2002. [Editor’s Note: This was a mistake. I communicated with a different “Jessa” in 2002 and it was in the same folder. My first correspondence with Ms. Crispin was in 2003.] Attached is a screenshot of one of our exchanges from 2003, pointing out how you “usually do keep copies of correspondence.” It is clear from my files that I never sent you any threats.

I did not stalk John Freeman. He and I resolved our differences years ago.

I did not write an “inappropriate” takedown of Boris Kachka. I stuck with the facts.

You did not name “your friends” that I purportedly threatened. You have not produced proof.

This is outright defamation — unfounded statements that you cannot back up, a combination of deliberate untruths and actual malice, seen clearly in your tweet to Boris Kachka — and, since you are in Germany, even more defamatory under Criminal Code §186 and §187, which affords greater protections for defamation of character and deliberate untruths. I am sure that either a German or a United States court would be interested in how you set out to deliberately malign me with malice and that you did not stick to the facts, especially after my (now deleted) tweets on Thursday night.

It is one thing to use ad hominem or declare me “monstrous” or proffer any number of opinions. That is perfectly within the legal limits. It is also perfectly reasonable to offer an opinion, even a belligerent one, on established facts. But you are now making claims that run contrary to facts. You are most certainly acting out of malice. New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) established the malice standard for defamation. If you don’t have the emails or the specifics, then it is clear that you, as publisher of the tweets, are acting in reckless disregard of the truth.

I respectfully request that you remove your tweets and issue an immediate apology for your lies and defamation. Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.

Sincerely,

Edward Champion

jessaattachment2

The Mark Twain Special (The Bat Segundo Show #552)

This special program devoted to Mark Twain features an interview with editor Benjamin Griffin, who is part of the Mark Twain Project and discusses Twain’s legacy and his work on the three volume Autobiography published by UC Press, a conversation with historian Ben Tarnoff (The Bohemians), and a discussion with filmmaker Adam Nee and actor Kyle Gallner about Band of Robbers, the Nee Brothers’s very loose adaptation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and other Twain writings.

* * *

Music used in this program is licensed through Creative Commons and includes the following:

Lost Radio, “Mnemonic Presence”
The Raymon Lazer Trio, “Lola”
Kevin MacLeod, “Dances and Dames”
Sakee Sed, “Mrs. Tennessee”
Adrianna Krikl, “Say Goodbye”

The Bat Segundo Show #552: The Mark Twain Special (Download MP3)

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The Cultural Redemption of Stefan Zweig: Anthea Bell and George Prochnik (The Bat Segundo Show #550)

This special two hour episode of The Bat Segundo Show details the life and work of Stefan Zweig and may quite possibly the most epic consideration of Zweig ever committed to radio. Zweig is an author I became obsessed with this year not long after a large box showed up at my doorstep containing many Zweig volumes because of an offhand comment I made to a savvy individual while sitting on my stoop. (Let this be a modest parable in publicity and obsession.) This radio program, which became far more ambitious than I intended, is the result of many weeks of reading and serves as a comprehensive overview for Zweig neophytes and experts alike. Zweig is a greatly underestimated writer, despite the fact that he was popular in Austria until the Nazis decimated the nation and even after many literary people have labored very hard to ensure that his work is properly remembered. Zweig’s books can be obtained through NYRB Classics and Pushkin Press.

If you’re new to Zweig, a good place to start is Chess Story. It is a thin and extremely compelling volume and a very good Zweig introduction that will have you wanting to read all the other ones. (Thousands of pages were read for these two interviews.) For adventurous readers, Pushkin Press’s excellent “orange volume” — The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig — is highly recommended. My thanks to NYRB Classics for igniting a Zweig obsession I never thought I would catch and to Pushkin Press for helping me get in touch with Anthea Bell, one of the best translators working today. (She’s also translated W.G. Sebald and Freud, among many others.)

Anthea Bell is Stefan Zweig’s most renowned translator. Our conversation with Bell begins at the 2:23 mark.

George Prochnik is the author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, which is available through Other Press. It serves as an invaluable companion book for Zweig enthusiasts. Our conversation with Prochnik begins at the 26:26 mark.

Guests: Anthea Bell and George Prochnik

Subjects Discussed: The friendship of James Joyce and Stefan Zweig, exiles and “languages above other languages,” Zweig’s obsession with cutting large chunks of text from his work, how complicated narrative structures and smooth language make translation tricky, preventing Zweig burnout, not knowing how much Zweig cut from The Post-Office Girl, how translators sometimes get their hands on a more expansive manuscript, why Bell didn’t translate The Post-Office Girl, coordinating translation of Zweig’s work with other translators, the mythical transatlantic English divide, why readers are suspicious of Zweig because of the popularity during his time, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Michael Hoffman’s preposterous LRB Zweig essay, Hoffman’s charge that Zweig is “the Pepsi of Austrian writing,” why people are eccentrically hostile towards writers who get through to people, eliding sentences and passages from the original manuscript, balancing the spirit of the work and the letter while translating, the tragic ending of Beware of Pity, the novella buried in Beware of Pity (aka Impatience of the Heart), similarities between “The Governess” and The World of Yesterday, the condescending attitude towards Malaysians in “Amok,” how to contend with discomfiting colonial language as a translator, Joseph Conrad, the double standard contained within Confusion, G.K. Chesterton, anti-Semitism in English writing during the time, why Bell doesn’t translate serious poetry, translating a Zweig play for Jewish Book Week performed by Henry Goodman, Zweig’s politics, silent humanism as a response to fascism, W.H. Auden and the Spanish Civil War, the salubrious qualities of delusion, the considerable observations about class trappings in The Post-Office Girl, Hitler turning Vienesse cultural centers into Nazi base camp operations, Nazi resentment, the invasion of privacy as depicted in The Post-Office Girl, Zweig’s prescience on the pervasive way in which people are observed, Heinrich Mann’s notion of “the vanquished being the first to know what history has in store,” Zweig’s ideas of luxurious torture, feeling smothered by bourgeois comforts, Zweig’s views on comic books, the arts as a vehicle for freedom, Zweig’s time in Berlin, the benefits of hanging out with monomaniacs, having Theodor Herzl as an editor, relying on Herzl’s approval, Zweig’s struggles with his Jewish identity, Zweig being mocked by Karl Kraus, Kraus’s anti-Semitism, Zweig’s relentless travel, Zionist discussion between Zweig and Martin Buber, Herzl’s funeral, community bound by death, suicide as a motif in Zweig’s fiction, the “happy corpse” notion and Vienesse spectacle, Zweig’s reclusiveness in New York, Zweig being besieged by European refugees after his escape from the Nazis, Zweig’s problems in Petropolis, letters and loneliness, helping people, guilt accompanied by taking on too much responsibility, Beware of Pity as a way for Zweig to bifurcate his emotions, the politics of Beware of Pity, Zweig demanding to know where Walt Whitman’s grave is the minute he hits New York, how Zweig saw Whitman as the connecting threat to America, ineluctable Freudian themes disseminated among Austrian notables, the influence of Emerson on Nietzsche, when the Nazis burned Zweig’s library, Zweig’s gloomy acceptance and his capitulation to anti-culture developments, Berthold Viertel’s observations of Zweig’s manic collecting, Zweig’s invasive remarks at a press conference concerning the Nazis, Zweig’s aspirations to be a “moral authority,” Hannah Arendt’s brutal review of The World of Yesterday, Jules Romain’s valedictory lecture on Zweig’s 60th birthday, Zweig’s moral dilemma of not being able to validate the destruction of life in any form during World War II, the beginnings of Vienesse anti-Semitism, why Vienesse intellectuals underestimated anti-Semitism, Arthur Schnitzler, perverse Vienesse humor, the Dreyfus affair, Englebert Dollfuss’s blunder with the progressives and Austria’s alliance with fascists in the early 1930s, right-wing nationalism, the end of Austrian radicalism after the socialists have fled, Prochnik’s family history in Austria, Zweig and Turkey, the McNally Jackson Zweig panel, Andre Aciman’s dissing of the “Eros Matutinus” section of The World of Yesterday, why even the staunchest Zweig lovers find some work of Zweig’s to dog on, when people read the wrong “first Zweig book,” Zweig’s astonishing polished prolificity, being ranked with major literary figures through the odd metric of what the Nazis decide to burn, appealing to the twee crowd and the reading audience courting despair, Zweig’s suicide, the haunting photo of Stefan and Lotte Zweig after their double suicide, Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, why Lotte Zweig wasn’t just a factotum, attempts to undermine Lotte’s legacy, the Stefan Zweig Collection in SUNY-Freedonia, Duck Soup, Zweig’s biography of Balzac, and unpacking the final moments of the Zweigs.

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Both James Joyce and Stefan Zweig were exiles when they met in Zurich. And they got along so well that Joyce lent him his only copy of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. And Joyce famously said to Zweig, “I would like a language above other languages. A language serving them all. I can’t express myself completely in English without making myself part of a certain tradition.” And I’m wondering. Since you’ve spent a lot of time looking at Zweig’s language, do you think Zweig suffered from the same problem? That as different as Joyce and Zweig were, they were both confronted in their own ways by belonging to a kind of tradition that language enslaved them to some degree.

Bell: Yes, I think you’re right there. And Zweig was himself earlier in his life, he did quite a lot of translation. And he recommended it as a way for a writer to get better acquainted with his own language, which I find very interesting.

Correspondent: What is it about his language? I mean, I’ve read your translations. I’ve read the translations of various others, such as Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt, Joel Rotenberg, and all that. And yet the romantic feel and the class and the despair of Zweig’s stories still manages to come out in much the same way. What is it about Zweig’s German that creates these parallels? And what do you do to find your own spin as a translator?

Bell: He was very, very scrupulous about his use of language. And as you probably know, he cut a great deal from everything he ever wrote. And that is one reason, I’m sure, why he wrote so many novellas. And some of them could easily developed into full-length novels and probably would have done in the hands of many another writer. But he cut and cut and cut, except with Beware of Pity. But he cut so many of the others. He didn’t let them out of his hands. And so he would just cut everything he could and still get what he was saying across. He didn’t want to say too much. And that is, I think, what gives to the irony in his fiction and makes it so compelling.

Correspondent: That’s interesting. I mean, I’m wondering first and foremost how you came to Zweig and what the first story that you translated of his was. It seems to me that you developed a great intimacy with his life and that’s part and parcel with accurately conveying his stories in English.

Bell: Well, the first one that Pushkin Press asked me to translate was the one that is called Confusion in English.

Correspondent: Oh yes.

Bell: The German means Confusion of Feelings, but it’s just Confusion in English. And after that, Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman.

Correspondent: Yes.

Bell: Which I think is a remarkable piece of female impersonation.

Correspondent: I think it’s a masterpiece, that story.

Bell: He’s very good at getting inside women.

Correspondent: How did you first discover him? And what compelled you to carry on translating him?

Bell: Well, I had read him earlier, in the past. But it was when I got to translate him, you get a completely — well, not a completely different angle, but a much deeper view of a writer when you begin to translate him. There’s an American scholar who I’ve got on my bookshelf — I’m just getting up to look at the title of it. Anyway, he writes that the translation is a particularly intensive form of looting. And I think he’s quite right there. And you do. You get to know something far better as you translate it. Now when I had read, I don’t know how Zweig strikes you reading it, but he looks as if he would be easy to translate. Because it all flows along very lucidly. But he’s difficult as a matter of fact. More difficult than you might think.

Correspondent: What steps do you take to break down his stories? I mean, very often, you see these intriguing narrative structures that begin his stories. I think of, of course, Beware of Pity. I think of Letter from an Unknown Woman. I think of Twenty-Four Hours as well. This notion that you have some person talking about something else, who then talks about something else, who then goes into the past and then possibly creates a letter or sits in a room discussing a story. This is an extraordinarily tricky thing that Zweig does. And I’m wondering. What does this mean for you as a translator from a language standpoint? You mentioned earlier that Zweig took great care with his German. What care do you have to take on top of that to ensure that this meticulous narrative grabs the reader in the same way that it does in the German?

Bell: Well, a translator is always trying to get inside the head of an author. And, of course, it’s very helpful if your author is alive and you can ask him questions. But if your author is dead, well. His favorite adjective, whenever I come across it, is dumpf. And that means dark or the sound. But usually he uses it to mean somber in some ways. Either literally or metaphorically. And whenever I get to that adjective, I think, oh, come on, Stefan! Which sort of dumpf have we got this time? There are layers in that writing. And by always cutting, I feel he was smoothing things together, if you see what I mean.

Correspondent: So you’re saying there’s almost this false cognate situation when you translate Zweig.

Bell: Yes. Yes. He’s a very, very interesting writer to translate. And obviously I enjoy translation. But obviously also it’s when translating somebody who I feel is writing well.

* * *

zweiglotteCorrespondent: Let’s go ahead and start with his very unusual political relationship. He was acutely aware of class trappings. We see this in The Post-Office Girl. But he seemeed to believe that the high culture or the good life could in fact be used to combat forces as nefarious as National Socialism. As you point out, he believed this as late as 1935 and this led him to be mocked later by Hannah Arendt in her brutal review of The World of Yesterday. You point to Zweig’s alliance with Richard Strauss, which backs up this tendency. And certainly much of this grew out of Zweig’s involvement with the Vienesse Secessionists. But how do you feel this approach developed over time? How did exile contribute to this undoing? Was this kind of political incoherence part of it?

Prochnik: I think it’s wonderful what you’re asking and it wraps together a number of different characteristics of him. Intrinsic psychological characteristics and also acquired traits, as it were. I mean, Zweig says explicitly in his memoir when he describes the option that he had at the start of the war to have refused service in a bold gesture. He said, “I don’t mind saying right out that there’s nothing heroic about me and I will evade, wherever possible.” So on the one hand, he had already also made the decision that, somehow or another, he was not going to end up on the battlefield. But he knew that the grand refusal was also beyond him. So part of Zweig’s difficulties, particularly over time when the Nazis, when the ascendency of Hitler and of all of the values for which he was associated became intractable and unavoidable problems. Zweig had already adopted his stance, which was not a stance, however, of pure cowardice. He had a very developed conviction that served his interests and also, I think, spoke to a real belief of his. That it was impossible ultimately to obtain a just, more tolerant world through violence. In other words, even if you were faced with a horrific form of government, a set of ideological beliefs, what he always tried to do was to garner support for his pacifist, humanist positions through positive achievements. He felt that whether through cultural acts of creativity, whether through the arts, or whether through forms of education that were explicitly devoted to promoting tolerance. That by trying to call on people’s better instincts, you ultimately got further than through nefarious denunciation. The reality is that at the very start of the Second World War, in 1939, at least when England declared war on Germany, there was a brief period when he wavered on this and said, “I don’t understand how any young Jew of age can at this point in time not enlist.” And I think at that point Zweig himself would have enlisted to fight. He grasped that Hitler was another problem, another order of destructive intent. But one of the aspects of Zweig’s stories that I find inexhaustibly interesting is the way that he tried to apply lessons of history unsuccessfully. It was not that he was denying history, but what he learned, for example, from the First World War is what madness war is.

Correspondent: We’re talking generally. Not his autobiography. Just his life philosophy.

Prochnik: Exactly. As his evolving life philosophy. He had learned very well the utter ruin to which civilization could tumble as a consequence, even if you had a relatively just aim of setting out with a gun to impose that. And that just didn’t necessarily serve him well in all instances. I mean, W.H. Auden, the poet who Zweig came to know in the summer of 1941 in New York, ran into at least a similar problem. There’s a line from Orwell. This is grossly paraphrasing, but he always knew to be where the trigger wasn’t being pulled. Something like this. That because Auden, who had initially been so supportive of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, had then gone to Spain and seen the humiliation of the Clarets and the destruction of the churches, he was then very resistant to taking up a strong outspoken stance against Hitler at the start of the Second World War, for which Klaus Mann and others really took him to task.

Correspondent: I think what fascinates me about this is this cognizance of what war can do, especially the Jewish identity. It’s there in “The Miracles of Life,” this amazing novella that he writes when he’s only 22, I believe, in 1903. And if he cannot remember the lessons that his apparent subconscious set down in fiction thirty years later, I mean, what accounts for this almost Wodehousian type of obliviousness to war, to anti-Semitism, to being uprooted, to being exiled?

Prochnik: I don’t think he was at all oblivious. And there’s evidence of that in his letters, in particular. But here and there, as well as in the memoir, I think that one of the most important passages in the opening section of that work is something that’s so brief that it’s easy to overlook. It’s where he goes on about “the world of yesterday” and the security in particular and the ways in which everyone in Vienna got along. They only chafed mildly against each other. In this fashion, he was attacked for what seemed a willful gilding, of nostalgiacizing, of an ideal tolerant Vienna that never existed. But in reality, there’s this moment where he says, “This was a delusion, but, if so, how much more of a noble and more fruitful delusion it was.”

Correspondent: It was also his delusion to keep.

Prochnik: It was his decision. Not only delusion, but his decision to keep it.

Correspondent: He was cognizantly myopic.

Prochnik: Well, whether myopic or…I think of it more in terms of his idealization. He talks about the need, particularly in his very interesting biography of Erasmus, for world leaders who hold onto these utopian visions of humanity’s possibilities, even if those must always remain to an extent a myth. Because he says, “If we don’t essentially have overreachers in imagination, we’re never going to get anywhere.” So he uses that term, the delusions of the world of his father, in a very pointed way as a fruitful, fertile delusion. That it leads at least, he says, relative to the slogans being bandied about, when he’s writing this in 1941. So that idea is really interesting about Zweig not as someone who didn’t see, but as someone who saw and saw such ugliness and such abomination unfolding around him. That it seemed ultimately to have more, it humanity was ever going to dig itself out of that ditch, that perhaps it was necessary to paint these pictures of what the world of yesterday had been in such glorious language and scenes, some of which are semi-fabricated. That after the blaze had begun to die down of the conflict, there would be sign posts. Something for humanity to look at as a way of trying to reconstruct a more humane society, a future.

Correspondent: This was his idea of idealism, basically.

Prochnik: I think so. It could actually perform a real world work. And that for me is the critical distinction in terms thinking about what Zweig did or didn’t do. And this comes into your original question. I don’t want to live it without touching on Zweig’s real philosophy of silence, which was a belief that, if someone was screaming horrible forms of abuse at you, that you never really defeated them by trying to scream louder. That in fact it was by adopting a stance of dignity and of disproving by embodying a different set of values to that. The only way to oppose it. And this was something that got him into such difficulties, with the Nazis in particular. Hitler fetishized the notion of hardness. And hardness comes up again and again, literally as a term with different sorts of German words in Mein Kampf, but again and again throughout the rhetoric of Goebbels and Göring and all the main ideologues. Rosenberg. They use this term of hardness to define essentially the ethical worth of the human being. And so Zweig, I’m certain, saw that you can’t oppose hardness with hardness. He felt you oppose hardness with softness, with pliancy, with receptivity, with a set of values that are much more associated stereotypically with feminine values, but with an idea that you came at that obliquely and proved yourself able to essentially to be metamorphic in your character, as opposed to absolutely rigid. It’s an idea with a certain Jewish resonance also. In Jewish thought and history.

vienna1914Correspondent: Sure. But I would argue, especially with a novel like The Post-Office Girl, we see the rigidity reinforced by this woman who goes to a luxurious hotel, is confused with upper-class, who then has to deal with the fact that she can’t pass that way, and is then forced back into this terrible existence where she has to work in this post office. And, oddly enough, the last half of that book sort of becomes, especially with that manifesto at the end — I don’t want to give it away — a very deliberate effort to contend with reality and becomes extraordinarily bleak, devastating, and heartbreaking. And it leads me to wonder how committed Zweig was to his delusion or whether he needed to have certain kind of historical modes or present times with which to oscillate between the delusion that he deliberately courted and the realism he seemed to be aware of with that manifesto at the end of The Post-Office Girl.

Prochnik: That’s interesting. And I like very much how you’re approaching what that book is. I think the remarkable thing about what he achieves in that book is, without saying in so many words that this is what’s happening, he’s giving one of the best explanations we have for how people in Germany and Austria might have adopted these fanatical positions. You pointed to that scene early on, the definitive moment in that book, of setting events in motion for the girl herself at least, when she has a taste of the high life. A taste of how good life can be for those who have money. Really simple. There was such intense interwar poverty in Austria. And people don’t look at that enough. And, in fact, as I’m sure you know, it’s one thing that Zweig was accused of neglecting. But we see how her mean circumstances from this provincial place…

Correspondent: And not even her fault. Because her family actually got a bad rap and she fell into this rote impoverished kind of existence.

Prochnik: Not her fault at all. Then she gets just a hint by visiting this aunt in a glamorous hotel of how wonderful life can be. And then she’s flung back through a series of unfortunate events into the mire of her previous existence. And that gnawing sense of exclusion is something that I think is critical for understanding what the Nazis fed on.

(Loops for this program provided by danke, mmilka, boysurgeon, and 40a. The track “Tom’s Lullaby (with Les Gacuhers Orchestra)” provided through Free Music Archive.)

The Bat Segundo Show #550: The Cultural Redemption of Stefan Zweig (Download MP3)

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A Conversation with Jack Butler (Bat Segundo Special)

This one hour radio special is the first in a series of “at-large” conversations presently categorized under the old “Bat Segundo” label. It features a rare interview with Jack Butler, author of Jujitsu for Christ, a highly underrated novel that has recently been reissued by the University Press of Mississippi.

Author: Jack Butler

Subjects Discussed: Moving west over a lifetime, having a double bachelor’s in English and math, the yin-yang existence, reading science fiction as a boy, why the stars are so inspirational in the Delta, using the Holy Ghost as a narrative device, Lautréamont, narratives within the Bible, Ulysses and The Waste Land, theological implications within fables, Finnegans Wake, speaking in tongues, starting a book with only 60 pages, becoming an accidental novelist, the poet’s life, the strange yet highly modest financial incentives of novels, the Judo for Christ Club, Tom LeClair and “prodigious fiction”, comparing novels with a 7-Layer Burritos, how to present information within a story, the College of Santa Fe, Los Angeles as a source of escape, why Butler’s fiction left the South, writers who become unintentional spokesmen for the South, not being bound by assumptions, “authentic” vs. “smart,” Eudora Welty, Faulkner, science fiction and Southern literature as lowbrow inspirational territory, literary authors who scavenge from genre and write unsuccessful novels, how genre can be used to write meaningfully about humanity, African-American stereotypes, caricatures, missed opportunities because of bigotry, living in shanties, common experience, scavenging from comics and used books to form a borrowed bedrock of knowledge, the character “Jack Butler” in Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, “autobiographical fiction,” the neediness of novelists, combating desperation in a world that increasingly devalues risk-taking authors who don’t sell, Bum Festrich modeled on the Clarion-Ledger‘s Tom Etheridge, using racist newspaper rhetoric as an unsettling guide for fictional perspective, writing about sex, religious blasphemy vs. sexual blasphemy, Hugh Hefner’s philosophy vs. the Baptists, being part of the way actuality goes, why religion in fiction often causes the author to create a comparative ideological construct to present contrast, gay rights, the Belgian Malinois making mysterious noises in the back, corporeal collision in debut novels, approaching the holy through the material, chalk talks, tragicomic side characters, when the ABA voted Jujitsu worst title, mixing the funny with the repulsive, writing about humidity in Mississippi, massive IBM clone computers in the 1980s, writing a book on a 400 pound computer, slowing down writing speed, whether or not a writer needs a sense of compulsion, chasing down a locale in one great shot, allowing the reader to experience life as Butler saw it, The Illumination of Elijah Lee Roswell, what happened with Butler’s agent, the dangers of writing with the idea of money in mind, the virtues of academics, forbidden styles, the benefits of rebellion, people who sell out, clearing the head of extraneous voices,

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EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to first of all talk about how you got your start. You were a poet before you were a fiction writer. And I also know that you have a bachelor’s in English and a bachelor’s in math. And I was wondering. How does a guy like you have the yin-yang thing going on here? It seems that you have a yin-yang thing in terms of what you studied and what you ended up doing as a writer.

Butler: Yeah. A lot of that — at least as far as math and the arts go — is that I loved science fiction as a kid. I used to read it all the time. Most of it is literarily horrible. But I was in a Baptist conservatory in Mississippi and they weren’t really aware of science fiction. So that was something I could get away with and what I really loved was just the ability to speculate. You know, that the world might be different from what was right around you. For pretty obvious reasons. But I’ve always been interested in mathematics. I think one of the sad things about our culture is that we have such a dichotomy set up between art and science or math. I mean, the two things I say that people are most afraid of are poetry and mathematics.

Correspondent: Yeah. How has math and poetry encouraged you to speculate? Both in terms of your imagination and in terms of, for example, books like Nightshade?

Butler: I guess it’s just that they give me the tools. I’m pretty picky about details, even though I do get some things wrong. Just in case there’s anybody listening, I’m not a medical person at all and I gave the exact opposite cure for angina. I said digitalis. And that will kill you. (laughs)

Correspondent: (laughs)

Butler: Aside from that, I had to not only get the gravity of Mars right. I had to allow for it in every action. Which you just don’t really see very much. So it’s more nearly that it’s given me the tools to do what I’m psychologically inclined to do.

Correspondent: So with science fiction, do you feel that it’s that speculative nature that really makes it fiction or meaningful? That this was the drive for you when you were growing up reading a lot of it as a boy, as a young man. That kind of thing?

Butler: Yeah, right. And as I said in the interview with Brannon (PDF), I believe, the Delta had a big wide sky. Because of all the flatland and not too many trees. So in spite of the humidity, you could really see the stars. And I loved the stars. That got me going on that.

Correspondent: Your first three novels (Jujitsu for Christ, Nightshade, and Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock) all feature some intriguing narrative mode somewhere between direct first person and a quite literally godlike omniscient voice. It almost reminds me, to some degree, of Lautréamont’s narrator in the way that you suggest to the reader that the narrator has lived and this allows the narrator to share some experience with the reader. And I’m wondering. Why did you need this particular type of halfway narrator to tell a story for these first three books?

Butler: Well, I’ll go back to — it’s not really an anecdote, but when I first thought of having the Holy Ghost — and I hasten to add that I mean this as a model of the Holy Ghost. I’m not pretending to represent the actual thing, if it even exists. But it’s like what Wallace Stevens said. “Not as a god, but as a god might be.” Well, not as the Holy Ghost, but as the Holy Ghost might be. And I couldn’t believe that nobody had ever picked up on it. You had the ability to have both first-person narration and a justified reason to switch personas. It was wonderful. And, of course, I got all that Holy Ghost stuff, a lot of it, growing up. It was drilled into me. So it was a chance to play with that a little bit. The Holy Ghost is narrator in Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, but one of the main problems with Westernized Christianity is that we don’t have a trickster god. And of the candidates, I felt the Holy Ghost was the best candidate for that. So the Holy Ghost is kind of a trickster there. As for the other, one of the things I really like to think about is the nature of individuals. The nature of the individual. Mind. And so playing on narrators lets me play on that.

Correspondent: I’m wondering if this reflects any kind of storytelling you heard growing up. That when people told you stories, either around the house or around the town, that people were telling you the absolute truth or perhaps inserting their own asides. Was it something like that?

Butler: Well, it’s true that people love anecdotes in the South. I think I’ve really gotten more of my tendencies from the fact that my father stood up in the pulpit every week and talked. So that’s always seemed to me to be a natural thing to do. And like you point out, there were a lot of things that didn’t scan for me with the stories I was told. And the Bible, it’s stories. I love the Bible. But I view it as a library, not as a book. It was written over several hundred years, maybe a thousand or more, by different people with different conceptions. And it’s more fascinating as a narrative than anything else. So my storytelling probably had more to do with that. But there’s a background nature that Southerners in general love language and they love to tell stories and there’s a premium put on wit. So I think that was so naturalized without thinking of it.

Correspondent: So if the Bible is a library, what is the Ulysses or The Waste Land of the Bible?

Butler: Well, it’s more beautiful than The Waste Land. Ecclesiastes is one of the more beautiful things ever written in my opinion and it’s very much — not quite nihilistic, but Ecclesiastes very plainly does not countenance belief in an afterlife. It says people are just like grass. Like the grass of the fields. We come from the same kind of place and we go to the same kind of place when we die. Nobody imagines a heaven for grass. So if we’re the same as grass, that has a lot of theological implications.

The Bat Segundo Show Special (“#499”): Jack Butler (Download MP3)

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Michael Apted (The Bat Segundo Show Special)

This 30 minute radio special serves as a transitional episode between The Bat Segundo Show, which aired its final episode last November, and Follow Your Ears, a new thematic radio program that will be premiering this month. It features an interview with Michael Apted, director of the Up movies. His latest installment, 56 Up, is now playing in select theaters in the United States.

Guest: Michael Apted

Subjects Discussed: How intimate documentary competes with YouTube and viral video, the creative solidity of a long-standing broadcast guarantee, the Five Guys Burgers review, whether the Up films an appeal to a younger generation, the heightened political nature of 56 Up, why Cameron’s austerity measures affected Apted’s subjects more than Thatcher, pressing Tony on his possibly racist suggestions, avoiding predictability, conflict as the stuff of drama, how Apted’s subjects collaborate beyond being in front of the camera, how Apted is a part of the Up subjects’ lives, self-editing, behaving yourself in front of subjects, efforts to include Peter and Charles, Apted’s anger towards Charles, Charles’s lawsuit against Apted, being transparent with documentary subjects, why the Up subjects didn’t have a choice, persuading the subjects to appear in each new installment, the Up subjects’ sense of ownership, Neil confronting Apted about the filmmaker not knowing anything about his personal life, whether snapshots are fair representations of people, knowing that every grimace or every emotion on camera is going to be dissected by audiences, the ubiquity of the camera (and smartphones) in everyday culture, trust, taking risks, the degree to which people lie, the skill of interviewing, doing a disservice in not being open, why Apted credits himself as researcher, carrying on the legacy of 7 Up, fact checking and corroboration, the difficulties Apted had with 49 Up, passion vs. obligation, and the textures of lives.

peter56up

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: So there is a big question I wanted to ask you — and, regrettably, I did not talk with you for 49 Up, but during that particular time, we were in a stage where YouTube and viral videos were mere striplings compared to what they are now.

Apted: Right.

Correspondent: And this has led me to ask you, especially with these Up films, how a movie that deals with how humans evolve over nearly six decades of their lives — does a filmmaker like you compete with something like that? Or reality television? Of which interestingly, Peter, one of your subjects, seems to be using some of the moves normally one would associate with reality television for you, of all people. So what do you do to adapt? Or do you not really change up the setup you’ve had going now for several films here?

Apted: No. You see, I think I’ve got one huge advantage over everybody. I am at least thirty years ahead of the game.

Correspondent: Aha.

Apted: No one’s got what I’ve got. You know, and, uh, I think that’s what’s unique about it. That’s why of all the work I’ve ever done, this is to me the most precious. Because it is entirely original. And people have only copied it. No one has really come anywhere near to equaling it in longevity, nor do I think will they ever. Because as much as you talk about modern media, modern media is nothing as unpredictable, on marshy ground, can sink and dive and whatever at the drop of a hat. There’s about seven mixed metaphors in there. But the solidity which was in the broadcast world when we started, which guaranteed it at least into, say, 35 Up without any question about “Should we do this? Can we raise the money to do this in particular version of it?” has given me a running start. And I don’t think that anybody will ever catch me up. So I look at these newcomers with sort of a blase way and say, “Off you go.”

Correspondent: But aren’t you concerned with — for example, there’s — I’ll give you one example. There’s a viral video going around. It’s amusing enough. It’s a guy who is reviewing Five Guys Burgers in the back of his car. And he goes, “DAYM!” And this gets remixed over and over. And then weeks later, we see that he’s now a fixture on Jimmy Fallon.* And then he’ll be forgotten. And whatever natural exuberance he had is almost stifled instantly. And so, yes, I grew up on the Up movies. I watched them throughout my life. And it’s always a pleasure to go back every seven years. And it’s sort of like going to church, except on a seven year schedule. But simultaneously, I mean, doesn’t this bother you? I mean, how can you woo, for example, a younger generation of viewers when presently it’s really all about reducing human behavior to novelties, to something that’s kind of an ephemeral indulgence as opposed to really exploring the depths of someone?

Apted: (laughs) That was a bit of a mouthful. I don’t know. I suppose you’re right. I’ve never lost the audience. I always thought I’d give the series up if the viewing figures dropped away. And they don’t seem to have done. So whether young people are attracted to this, I don’t know. It’s almost staple stuff in teaching, you know, all sorts of sociology and whatever. You know, I don’t believe everything just disappears with the bathwater. I think people do have a sense of the past and a sense of history, especially when they cease to be teenyboppers and then become people with children and people with mortgages and all this kind of stuff. And this is the drama — this is, I call it, the heroism of everyday life of this series And I think everybody responds to that at some point. I mean, maybe nobody between the age of 11 and 25 will want to watch this. But there will come a time when they’ll discover it later on. And because it’s in a sense, without boasting, so rich because it covers so much of people’s lives, which no one else has ever covered, you know, I’m optimistic that it will stay around. So I don’t feel threatened by it. I know what you mean. About how can I attract a young audience, competing with Youtube. I mean, this is all over YouTube from the minute I practically finished editing it. So anyway, it’s a good question. But I’m not worried about it.

56 Up

Correspondent: So this seems to me a far more political installment of the series than previous ones. I mean, we have Jackie, who is on disability, and she excoriates [Prime Minister David[ Cameron at one point. You have Lynn, who we see after she has lost her job as a school librarian. There seems to be a great concern, at least on your part or on the camera’s part, on capturing the consequences of various austerity programs. And I’m wondering why the film tended to shift this way. I mean, these were going on under Thatcher. These were going on under a variety of…

Apted: You’re missing the point. The point is that how does it affect their lives. I’ve never been interested in any of the series of objectified politics. Politics only appears in issues when it affects their lives. Now certainly Thatcher was doing all sorts of bloodthirsty work. But these people were very young then. And it didn’t affect them. These people are now 56 years old. Their pensions are going out the window. Their salaries are going out of the window. The future of their children and their grandchildren is going out of the window. So that’s why it’s in this film. I don’t ask them political questions. They talk about it. Because I gave up asking politics in 42 Up when I foolishly asked them about Princess Diana, who had just been killed, and I threw it out, threw it away, because I was asking them their opinions on something that weren’t organic to their life. I’m not interested in their political opinions. I’m interested in how politics determine their life. And in this generation of people living in the United Kingdom, which is going through a worse time than here and will go through an even worse time and you’ll go through an even worse time, it’s of profound importance to people’s lives. And so my films — this generation from 56 — reflect the personal effect of this political kind of fallout that’s going on. But this is the first time this has ever really happened in the series. Because I haven’t found that politics has so interested or determined or, you know, concentrated itself in people’s lives as it is now.

Correspondent: Politics is only a concern for the Up series when it is personal.

Apted: Yes. Because the politics of the film are their lives. They are the political statement of the film. They’re not objective opinions. I’m not interested in opinions. I’m interested in the organic manifestation of politics in people’s lives.

Correspondent: I’m glad you brought up the Diana moments in 42 Up, which…

Apted: I thought I cut them out. Are they still around?

Correspondent: I’d heard about this. But you do leave the moment with Tony here where he’s very defensive in relation to certain racist connotations of immigration. So in a situation like that, that’s kind of a political..

Apted: Yes. But again, it’s organic. It’s about the culture he grew up in. It’s about the society that he feels has been degraded. Where he grew up, his roots have been degraded by immigration. And, you know, I called him out on it basically. And, you know, it was a pretty scary moment for him and for me. Should I ask the question? I thought, “Sod it. I will ask the question.” I think it’s the question everybody was asking. Is he racist? Or was he not? Does he have a fair point? Maybe he does. He has a right to express it. He was. People were turfed out of their habitats by a great invasion of people from other countries and whatever. And maybe he has a point. So with him, you know, the whole idea of racial integration is very, very crucial. Because it did transform the whole community that he grew up in.

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Correspondent: How do you decide what questions to ask of the subjects? Is it largely intuitive?

Apted: Yeah.

Correspondent: I mean, clearly, you’re still getting into trouble after all these years.

Apted: It is intuitive. And it’s…it’s…I wish I could think of an amusing way to express it, but basically I assiduously do not prepare for it. I do not go back into the old films. I do not say, “Oh my god! They’ve said this in 49. What are they going to think about it in 56?” Because I’ve noticed over the generations that the films change tone. They’re not the same films. And I thought the only way to preserve that is to make each episode as fresh as I can. To sit down like we are now and talk and not know which way the conversation’s going to go and what you’re going to ask me, what I’m going to answer you. I’ve no idea. And that kind of spontaneity, I think, is kind of crucial. Because it’s not predictable. Once this series becomes predictable, then I think I’m sort of dead in the water. There’s an element of predictability built into it — i.e., the whole idea that from the minute you’re born, you know what kind of actions you have. But given that, and that’s become kind of less important — again as the series has gone on. Because English society, the society of Great Britain, has changed a lot. Social mores are much more flexible. Education’s much more flexible and all this. These people came into life at a certain period in time in the English class system, seem to be very, very strong. And there’s still a class system. But it’s changed. It’s become more Americanized. It’s more to do with money than it is where you were born and whatever. So I’ve forgotten what the question I’m answering is about.

Correspondent: No, no. I was very curious about forgetting the previous films.

Apted: Ah yes!

Correspondent: I mean, there’s this aspect too. Do you carry enough of a reliable familiarity with the material? Or do you find that the relationships, both positive and fractious, are enough to steer you into the next installment?

Apted: No, it’s both. I mean, I have a huge amount of information in the back of my brain. I mean, I know what the great iconic moments are. What each character, what’s been there, kind of a few key moments. And I know that without having to think about it. But, you know, the provocative fractious stuff that I have with them, I think that’s what gives it life. And that — you can only approach that by having a genuine conversation and surprising each other.

Correspondent: Because conflict is the stuff of drama, it should be the secret ingredient of your relationship with your subjects for the Up movies.

Apted: Yeah. It is. And, you know, there’s lots of ground for conflict. There’s an overwhelming sense of trust, which is why they’re all in it pretty much and how it continues. But on the other hand, there’s also conflict. There’s a residual anger from them, I think. Because they were — they were press ganged into it. They didn’t make a decision at seven to do this. They didn’t make a decision at 14 to do this. And then when they became adults, suddenly they were in the middle of this rollercoaster and sort of stuck with it. So there’s still an anger, I think, which I still find with them about that. But generally I think that’s been kind of now overtaken with a sort of a sense of a trust. And the trust they have in me is that if they’ve got something to say, I’ll let them say it. And I’ll answer it if I can. Or acknowledge it if they’re right and I’m wrong.

Correspondent: But Nick in this movie, he says, “This is not a picture of me. It’s a picture of somebody.”

Apted: Yeah.

Correspondent: He complains that he doesn’t have any control over how he is actually being presented. Suzy says, “Well, I don’t think this is presented as a well-rounded picture of me.” So it’s very interesting that your subjects seem to complain or, at least, I noticed their complaints more this time than I did in previous ones, although you have had skirmishes with them in the past. I mean, what do you do to placate them? I mean, do you allow them to see elements of the film or how it’s actually taking place? And, of course, Charles, he threatened to sue you. And he’s….there’s no trace of him in this movie. I was sort of surprised.

Apted: And do you know what his job is?

Correspondent: He’s a TV producer. I know.

Apted: Documentary filmmaker.

Correspondent: Yeah. But does that recuse him from…

Apted: No. Of course not. It makes it unforgivable. If you live by the sword, you have to die by the sword. But you’ve asked me about a thousand questions in the last twenty seconds and I’m trying to figure out — I mean, what you missed out is the point that Nick is making. He’s saying, “No, this isn’t a proper representation of me. But it is a representation of somebody.” I.e., it isn’t the details of him. But it’s some iconic representation of what he stands for and who he is. Which is what all these things can be. Of course. How can I put people’s lives into eighteen minutes? Or whatever, however long I give them? Of course it’s my judgment. It’s my taste to decide what goes in. That’s true of any film ever made. Whether it’s a documentary. The only film that doesn’t qualify is Andy Warhol pointing at the Empire State Building for 24 hours without changing the film. Everything is a cultural or judgmental decision and I make those and, if I”m wrong, I’m wrong. But all I can say is they’re all still here. They haven’t been so offended by it that they’ve gone away and dumped me, as it were.

The Bat Segundo Show Special (“#498”): Michael Apted (Download MP3)

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* — Note: The broadcast erroneously referred to “Jimmy Kimmel” rather than “Jimmy Fallon.” The transcript reflects the facts, but we apologize for the on-air error.

End of the Bat

The last episode of The Bat Segundo Show will air shortly before Election Day. The schedule for the last few shows — and I’m not sure how many there will be — will be intermittent and irregular. The time has come for me to move on. This wasn’t an easy choice, but it was a necessary one.

History has demonstrated that a specialized dirigible of this type can float in the air for only so long. Tom Snyder’s The Tomorrow Show — which aired an especially gutsy interview with Charles Manson and opened its forum to in-depth talk with emerging musicians and cult figures — carried on for eight years, despite constant creative interventions from NBC. Dick Cavett’s ABC incarnation — the version frequently held up as primo — lasted six years. The Mike Wallace Interview, despite the indelible onyx background and the jasper smouldering in the tough interlocutor’s hand, lasted a little more than three years.

Stacked against these models of smart and engaging conversation, nearly 500 installments of The Bat Segundo Show aired over eight years isn’t bad. I’ve put out more episodes than This American Life, although it took Ira Glass and company seventeen years to hit half a grand. My rate of productivity was also slightly better than William Buckley, who pumped out 1,504 episodes of Firing Line over 33 years. These guys had a staff. I didn’t.

I also did not have Wallace’s Parliament Cigarettes to hawk. (I kicked smoking more than two years ago, which may explain why my slight rasp turned somewhat nasal and mildly mellifluous in the last 150 shows.) There was a long period where, despite hundreds of telephone calls and emails, I could not persuade a single advertiser to sponsor the show, although I did have some advertising on this website for a while and, near the end, sponsorship arrived through the good people at Litbreaker. Some income came from turning these programs into newspaper profiles or abridged bits that did not reflect the totality of these in-depth talks. But that’s to be expected. Because the dirty little secret about radio is that many of its finest practitioners can’t even turn a dime. This is a medium designed to be cut into manageable bits, arranged around selling things or hawking selves rather than the other way around.

I fought against these conditions for a long time, but the time has come to move on. If Bat Segundo’s end is how I get somewhere grand or more meaningful, then I would rather risk everything than mope about what I did not attempt or bray about what I did not have the guts to grow into.

* * *

I was told by one radio program director that I was “too intellectual” — even though I don’t consider myself much of one. I just read the books, thought about the ideas, staked out original angles, and did independent research. There were some email volleys with another station manager who inveigled me with the prospect of a weekly unpaid slot, but only if I didn’t talk books and only if I dumbed things down. I was never contacted by a single mainstream outlet during the eight years I ran the show, although a handful were kind enough to mention me.

I certainly never set out to dismiss Michael Silverblatt or Robert Birnbaum, who both still do first-rate erudite work. (I have been fortunate to have wonderful conversations with both gentlemen, on and off air.) I worked damn hard to keep Bat Segundo going, often when I had only a handful of dollars in my checking account. I always insisted on high standards, and maybe that was part of the problem. I read the books in full for every guest who appeared on the program, no matter if the volume was 200 pages or 1,000 pages: sometimes twice, sometimes taking notes, sometimes in tandem with other tomes. Sometimes I photocopied interesting articles and gave them to authors. I felt that anything less than this minimum industry was an insult to the author. But what use is a work ethic in an attention economy?

With rare exceptions, I met each author in person. Because that was the only way to do it. This often allowed for unusual encounters, such as the award-winning novelist who I once telephoned from a hotel lobby as his attentions were diverted by a prostitute (to his credit, he did the interview anyway) or the author who was so needlessly nervous that he showed up stinking of redolent weed (I said nothing, but was happy to see him clean up his act years later) or the guest who was so insecure that he asked me to feel his bicep (I did; why not?). Such human moments allowed me to care more about the authors, even as I maintained a febrile curiosity and did my best to ask honest questions, finessing some of the more challenging and critical queries with this ethos in mind.

Each installment took me a minimum of 20 hours to produce. This ranged from booking the interview (which could be anywhere from 5 minutes to three hours to negotiate; it was always the midlisters who gave me the most trouble, not the big names), reading and research, preparing about two single-spaced pages of questions and bullet points that I often disregarded, and mastering the rattly audio that I recorded in cafes, restaurants, hotel lobbies, mysterious rooms, parks, graveyards, laundromats, and any practical location I could discover in a pinch. There’s the maxim touted by reductionist thinkers that 10,000 hours (20 hours x 500 shows) make one a success at any given field. Well, if that’s the case, then Malcolm Gladwell should see how much I earned out.

* * *

I grew up doing this show. Perhaps the real commodity I’m considering is time and how to invest this precious and fast-flowing measure with greater sagacity.

I do know that a number of authors were greatly helped by these conversations. I do know that a number of listeners were inspired to pick up books. I do know that there are groups in Switzerland and Norway who are huge fans of the show. I have been genuinely surprised and humbled and moved by the numerous kindnesses expressed by many over the last eight years. The opportunity to connect with so many great books and great people behind the books has been truly incredible.

On the other hand, why should I expect anyone to engage with the history of credit or a conversation revealing what one man has spent forty decades to put together when they can have something more soothing and less challenging? Television, +1 culture, distracting smartphones, and the need to zone out are the present villains against American engagement. Only two of these were around when I started out. It wasn’t as if I didn’t try to make the pith I had seductive or entertaining. Loyal listeners reminded me that I cracked jokes throughout, even when the elaborate Bat Segundo intros became less frequent.

It’s possible that I’ve exhausted my thoughts on literature in this form. My passion for books hasn’t waned, but I may have become too polished, with each interview becoming something akin to slipping on a comfy pair of shoes. If you’re getting closer to forty and you’re going through the motions, there’s a good chance you’re erecting a massive obstacle preventing you from blossoming. I don’t want to stagnate. I want to up the ante and stop repeating myself. My general sense is that this nice round number of 500 is telling me to move on.

The final episode of The Bat Segundo Show will be recorded at McNally Jackson on October 3, 2012 with J. Robert Lennon, who is a deeply underappreciated writer who has taken more lumps than a man of his talent has any right to deserve. Lennon, who appeared previously on the 300th episode of The Bat Segundo Show, is one of the most underrated writers working today and I can’t think of a more fitting way to end the program. Please stop by and say hello if you can.

This was a very fun part of my life, but I’ve got to move on. Thanks to friends and loved ones who put up with me. Thanks to the writers and other folks who came on the show, and the publicists who took chances with my format. Thanks to everyone who listened.

The Bat Segundo Show: Susan Cain

Susan Cain appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #430. She is most recently the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts.

SPECIAL BOOK GIVEAWAY: Are we all prone to the malady of the introvert who turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within? Perhaps this conversation about introverts will clear up this Bertrand Russell idea. And perhaps you, dear listener, can weigh in. The Bat Segundo Show is giving away two copies of Susan Cain’s Quiet. All you have to do is email ed @ edrants.com with the subject line QUIET GIVEAWAY before February 7, 2012. Tell us when you first knew you were an introvert or an extrovert and what effect this has had on your life. Don’t worry. If you’re feeling shy, you can stay anonymous and we’ll keep your names confidential. We’ll read some of the stories on a future program and give away two copies of Quiet to two random people.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if Zeno’s paradox is applicable to social types.

Author: Susan Cain

Subjects Discussed: Establishing terminology of introverts and extroverts, David Sloan Wilson, new Kinsey scales, Carl Jung, Jonathan Rauch’s “Caring for Your Introvert,” Google and Apple offered as “introvert comeback” examples, introvert glamour in the 21st century, how the loner idea has changed in American culture, Steve Wozniak, Edward Bernays, Western culture founded upon Greco-Roman ideals, how oratory has driven the spread of Western culture, going to business forces and corporations to understand introverts, Tony Robbins seminars, the self-help industry, the ideal self as a marketing device, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow, Peter Hills and Michael Argyle on happy introverts, how flow and happiness differs between introverts and extoverts, responding to myths that introverts aren’t social, the fine line between introversion and misanthropy, Jason Fried’s “No Talk Thursdays” idea, Wozniak’s Homebrew Computer Club, extreme positions from introverts and extroverts, “how to talk to strangers” workshops, the Solomon Asch experiments, conformity and groups, mimicking the opinions of other people, “fitting in,” Gregory Burns’s experiments with the amygdala and groups, high reactive types, shyness, introverted Asian-American populations in Cupertino, pluralism movements involving introverts and extroverts, Jerome Kagan, nature vs. nurture, interactionism, Alex Osborn and brainstorming, Robert Sutton’s response to the brainstorming dilemma, the problems with multitasking, group cohesion in brainstorming, avoiding lopsided perspectives, parents with introverted children, the No Child Left Behind Act, the advantages of role-playing and improvisation, smiling, public speaking as the number one fear, introverted actors and the performance mask, Brian Little looking into introverts being overstimulated, stage fright, being a member of Toastmasters, impromptu speaking, the advantages of anarchy, intense curiosity, Picasso, connections between solitude and creativity, and answers to charges that introverts are filled with hubris and narcissism.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I should point out that, as an ambivert, I’m one of those types who swings both ways. I go ahead and ingratiate myself with all forms of version. I’m wondering if it’s entirely productive to divide the world into these two austere bipolar categories. As you point out in the book, David Sloan Wilson applied these labels to the fruit fly. And I’m wondering if, say, a Kinsey scale of 1 to 6 — to pound the metaphor in here further — is probably more applicable for this kind of thing. I mean, why should introverts of all stripes be lumped together?

Cain: Yeah Okay. So that’s actually a really important question that you’re raising. And the reality is that there’s an introvert-extrovert spectrum and that we’re all situated on different points of the spectrum and that even people who are on the extreme end of the spectrum, whether introverts or extroverts, have sides to themselves that are the opposite side. And Jung — Carl Jung, who is the psychologist who actually popularized these terms — speaks about that. And he says that there’s no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert and that such a man would be in an insane asylum. So it’s an important question that you’re asking. But at the same time that this is true and that we’re all a glorious mishmosh of traits, there is also a reality to what it means to be, in general, oriented towards the outer world or, in general, more oriented to the riches that are inside your own mind. And these things I believe, these orientations, shape who we are in ways that are as profound as our gender shapes us.

Correspondent: But gradients of orientation. I mean, that’s the key thing. Jung, of course, as you point out, he popularizes the terms in 1921. You have Hans Eysenck doing research in the late 1960s, hypothesizing that humans sought “just right” levels of stimulation. And he ran some tests. So where do we, I suppose, calibrate ourselves if we’re all going to all refer to people as “You’re only an introvert” or “You’re only an extrovert.” I mean, we could get vertist, so to speak. (laughs)

Cain: Right. I guess I would take the “only” out of that formulation. It’s not “you’re only an introvert” or “you’re only an extrovert.” You’re a million other things as well. But I guess a metaphor that I could give for you, that I think is helpful here, is gender. So if I had written a book that presumed to say, “Here’s what men are like and here’s what women are like,” I probably would have been able to get it mostly right describing these categories as groups. But in the case of any one individual, there are going to be men with all kinds of female characteristics and women with all kinds of male characteristics. That doesn’t mean though that there’s no such thing as maleness or femaleness. And that doesn’t mean that these things aren’t hugely important and shape our lives in ways we need to pay attention to.

Correspondent: Yes, but such a book would spawn a million Jezebel threads.

Cain: (laughs)

Correspondent: There’s a danger, I suppose, in cleaving to these labels. And I guess maybe another way of trying to figure out what’s going on here in terms of the schism between the introverts and the extroverts is through a wonderful 2003 Jonathan Rauch article in The Atlantic, not quoted here.

Cain: Yes. Fantastic article.

Correspondent: “Caring for Your Introvert.” He was willing to go on the line and say that introverts are oppressed. I’m wondering if you would go on the line as well. You didn’t in this book. But to what degree are they oppressed? I mean, since 2003, we’ve seen Google and Apple, products of introverts, spring up. And we’re all enslaved by them. So I think the balance may be more or less stabilized. What do you think about all this?

Cain: Okay, so first of all, I would say I did go on the line in this book. And the central thesis of my book really is there is a severe bias against most introverts in this society and that operates to all of our losses. Certainly to the loss of introverts who get the message in a million different ways that there’s something wrong with who they are. But I think it operates to the loss of everybody. Because when we set up society in a way that depletes the energies of half to a third of the population, that’s not in anybody’s best interest. So that’s my feeling about it.

Correspondent: But no real oppression. I mean, if the extroverts are in control, do you think that there’s been enough of a comeback of the introverts in the years since that Rauch article?

Cain: Well, okay, so I think it’s an interesting thing. When I talk about a bias, I’m not saying, “Well, therefore introverts have had no happiness and no success in society.” And the examples that you just gave are very interesting and apt ones. But here’s the thing. Those examples, they’re not accidents. We tend to have respect for the loner who’s operating in his garage and is about to launch a fabulously successful company or who holds the promise of launching such a company. We have respect for that person. Because that person carries with him the whiff of great wealth or power. But what I’m talking about is something that operates at a deeper level of self. And the fact is that if you look at our schools and our workplaces, the institutions where we all spend our lives and where our daily happiness is shaped, those institutes are set up for extroverts. In ways that we’re not aware of. So children from the time they go into preschool at a very early age, they are going into an environment that is a group environment where they are expected to behave in certain ways. I’m not saying this is all a bad thing. But I am saying that it’s set up in such a way that introverted children from the get go are kind of expected to act in ways that are being not themselves.

Correspondent: Yes. But it’s interesting to me that the loner has moved from the sort of James Dean Rebel Without a Cause/Marlon Brando kind of thing to the guy going ahead, like Wozniak, and fiddling around with tools in his garage, in his bedroom, starting a company. And I’m wondering if the loner model has always been associated with introverts or whether there has been some outsider label instead. It seems to me that, because the idea of being a loner was predicated in some way on being a loner in relation to society, you weren’t entirely an introvert. You were more an outsider. You were still an extrovert in some sense. And yet it has moved in the decades since to the Wozniakian model, where you’re tinkering with some massive project that’s going to change the world in your garage. I’m wondering if you had some thoughts on why “loner” has almost been co-opted and has become more related to this introversion idea.

Cain: Oh, that’s interesting. I think that’s probably just a function of the role that technology has played in the last decades. You know, what you’re talking about really is ways in which we have shifted notions of glamour as attached to individual people. So in the ’50s, the decade of conformity, there was a glamour attached to the figure who could stand outside that and still have sex appeal. And then what happens in the decades of technology is suddenly we have introverts who, just because of their great technical competence, can create wealth and power. And so glamour attaches to them.

Correspondent: Introverts aren’t sexy? I think they are. I think they’re being celebrated in our culture. The “Think different” billboards that we got with Apple. It’s been all about “Yes, introverts are sexy. But we just don’t communicate with other people.” You think that they aren’t sexy these days?

Cain: No, what I was saying is that what was happening as technology grew up was that there was a glamour that was attached to that. But what I still believe is that that’s a subset of the reality of what it means to be introverted. And even if you go out to Silicon Valley, the heart of the subset where you would say that this glamour model for lack of a better word is operating — you know, even in Silicon Valley, I went out there while I was researching my book. And I talked to many introverts who were working there. And even there, they feel that their personality style is not validated, that it’s not celebrated. And they’re constantly exhorted to act in a way that’s not natural to themselves.

Correspondent: I suppose this relates to the initial line of inquiry. When you are talking about introverts, when you are promoting introverts, they inevitably feed into this marketing, advertorial sort of approach, where it’s not so much about trying to understand the introvert’s place. It’s more about promoting the introvert. This leads me to also name a figure who you didn’t name in the book — Edward Bernays. I mean, we were talking about Jung earlier. But he relied upon Freudian ideas to promote the idea of being empowered, that manipulation could be used to factor in the herd crowd. “Herd” is a word used frequently in your book. Do you think that one of the problems with introverts being misunderstood or not accepted has a lot to do with this maligning or skirmishing of psychology with these larger marketing forces?

Cain: Well, I think that it goes back even earlier than that. It starts out with there being this kernel in our society. We are a culture that is grounded on Greco-Roman ideals. And these are ideals that celebrate oratory and celebrate being able to declaim in front of people. So that’s a piece of it. But that’s only a small piece really. Because what really happened was, at the turn of the 20th century, we moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character and we moved into a culture of personality. And this happened because suddenly we had the rise of big business. And we had urbanization. So you had people flocking into the cities. And instead of living in small towns and working with people they had known all their lives, they’re suddenly in big cities applying for jobs at corporations, where everything depends on their abilities to shine at a job interview and to be able to sell their company’s latest gizmo and, of course, to sell themselves. At the same time, you have the rise of movies. And movie stars are the perfect model for this.

Correspondent: Of course.

Cain: They are the ultimate role models of this kind of charisma that people are starting to feel they need in their everyday lives. And so in a way, there used to be in the earlier years of this country’s founding, where it used to be that these oratorical skills and this ability to command a crowd was seen as being important only for political figures. Now it was something that everybody suddenly had to have. And at the core of all this was the corporation really. That was why people started to feel that they needed to have these skills.

The Bat Segundo Show #430: Susan Cain (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Weird Al Yankovic

Weird Al Yankovic appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #418. His most recent album is Alpocalypse. Many thanks to Jay Levey for helping to make this unlikely conversation happen.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Got skills, he’s a champion of D&D.

Guest: Weird Al Yankovic

Subjects Discussed: Whether most people in the world are doing okay, Weird Al’s longevity, a fastidious concern for the English language, Weird Al as a storyteller, epic songs, writing about human behavior vs. writing about food, thinking of new ways to be funny, narrative songwriting, parodies in which words are transposed, Freytag’s triangle, recording dates, why original songs and style parodies are recorded for explicit parodies, trying to finish an album while responding to present a musical trend, how Al studies an artist’s oeuvre, earlier songs as prototypes for later songs, “One More Minute” to “You Don’t Love Me Anymore,” “It’s All About the Pentiums” to “White and Nerdy,” confronting the defects of earlier material, the number of lists that Al keeps, when your laptop is more organized than your life, Amy Winehouse, keeping up with the increased cycle of emerging artists, the Arcade Fire and Muse, Weird Al’s criteria for selecting hits to parody, finding number one hits despite the rise of Internet culture, rap and polka medleys, attempts to break into long-form film and television, UHF, parts in movies that Al turned down, clearing up several suggestions made by the critic Sam Anderson, whether a gang of barbarians will delete the Internet to the ground, efforts to clarify Weird Al’s vegetarianism status amidst recent self-allegations of cheating, spouses who salivate in response to billboards depicting prime rib, not forcing children into a specific dietary direction, Matt Stone’s tendency to eat junk food, references to bowling in Weird Al’s work, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, watching 100 episodes of The Flintstones for “Bedrock Anthem,” whether intense research gets in the way of spontaneity, fake educational films, the Prelinger Archive, responding to charges that Al is “a parasite of ubiquity,” “Dare to Be Stupid” and The Transformers, Michael Bay, digital distribution, maintaining a long-term legacy, the accidental iconic nature of songs, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Mick Jagger, Weird Al’s confidantes, how Weird Al listens to music, including burps and other delightful gastrointestinal sounds in songs, avoiding profanity in work, Shel Silverstein’s “Get My Rocks Off,” the pros and cons of being family-friendly, Radio Disney asking Al to change lyrics in “The Saga Begins,” Nickelodeon asking Al to remove “gay,” why doesn’t Weird Al always call the shots, art vs. commerce, lines that Weird Al won’t cross, multiple versions of “The Night Santa Went Crazy,” choosing edgy animators for music videos, John Kricfalusi and the “Close But No Cigar” video, why there isn’t an Al TV installment for Alpocalypse and why these haven’t been released in video, taking advantage of blanket waivers, why Al took so long to sit in the producer’s chair after Rick Derringer, “Don’t Download This Song,” applying mainstream cultural values to hip-hop, whether “I’ll Sue Ya” props up reactionary values, unanticipated advocacy of the status quo, tort reform, Hot Coffee, attempts to keep songs non-political, fans who defaced the Atlantic Records Wikipedia page, the consequence of words, political groups who made Weird Al as a poster boy for tort reform, donating proceeds of songs to charity foundations, morality and the gray areas of parody, the breakdown of revenue, contemplating the end of albums, digital distribution, whether Weird Al will reinvent himself on schedule on January 24, 2018, William Shatner’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Has Been, playing the camp card, how Weird Al has stayed sincere over the years, and “Since You’ve Been Gone.”

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Weird Al, how are you doing?

Yankovic: I’m doing well. Thank you for asking. Yourself?

Correspondent: Oh. I think I’m doing okay.

Yankovic: Good. I’m glad to hear that.

Correspondent: I’m glad we’re on the same page.

Yankovic: I’m glad we’re all doing very well.

Correspondent: Do you think everyone’s doing okay in general?

Yankovic: In the world? Probably not.

Correspondent: Okay.

Yankovic: If you go with the percentages, there are certainly some people in the world who are not doing well currently.

Correspondent: Yeah. I hope you don’t mind. But I may have to — well, actually I will. I will start this off on a tenebrous tone. We’re talking about a year of heavy losses. We have seen the end of REM. The end of the White Stripes. The dissolution of the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. And I look to you, Weird Al, and I say to myself, “Wow, this guy’s been in business for 28 years. He’s had the same manager. The same band.” How do you do it, Al?

Yankovic: Yeah. Everybody’s wondering. When is Weird Al going to break up?

Correspondent: Yes.

Yankovic: And I don’t know. I keep waiting for my limbs to fall off. It just hasn’t happened.

Correspondent: Really? Really? Your mind perhaps?

Yankovic: You know, I have actually had the same band from the very beginning. Which in rock and roll terms is pretty unheard of. But I just still enjoy doing what I’m doing. And apparently the world at large hasn’t gotten completely sick of me yet. And the people that I work with still enjoy working with me. So it just seems to have all worked out. It’s pretty ironic. Because a career like mine, historically speaking, should not have lasted more than a few months. And here I am still.

Correspondent: Well, how do you avoid the fights and the fractiousness? Or is it all very carefully concealed so that the public doesn’t know about how dangerous things are backstage?

Yankovic: Well, I’ve got incriminating Polaroids of everybody in the band and crew.

Correspondent: Oh, I see.

Yankovic: If they don’t want them in public, I’ll play nice.

Correspondent: I’ve detected a fastidious concern for the English language in the course of my research. There was, of course, the infamous 2003 interview with Eminem that you did in which you corrected his triple negative.

Yankovic: Yes indeed.

Correspondent: But also, in an interview with Nardwuar, who I like quite a bit, you actually repeated “Otis Wedding’s Riffs.”* Where he said that to you. And you were very

Yankovic: Don’t remember that. Otis Wedding…what?

Correspondent: He said to you, “Otis Wedding’s Riffs.” And you corrected and repeated that back to him.

Yankovic: Oh.

Correspondent: But the point I’m trying to make here, Al, is why, in an age of increasing illiteracy, would you be concerned with such quaint things as English grammar?

Yankovic: I don’t know. You pick your battles, I guess. I mean, I’m one of those kind of guys — you know, I will not ever text the letter U instead of writing out “Y-O-U.”

Correspondent: Oh yeah?

Yankovic: I am not Prince and I’m not a 13-year-old girl.

Correspondent: You’re not Prince? I’m getting out of here.

Yankovic: Oh, sorry. Sorry. Waste of time. No, I don’t know what it is. It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction. I mean, I just enjoy the English language and several other national languages as well. So I prefer not to bastardize it.

Correspondent: Does it relate to your increasing need for precision in your audio, in your shows, in your songs…

Yankovic: It’s probably an extension of my whole OCD, anal retentive, compulsive control freak personality.

Correspondent: You’re a control freak. Well, how so? How do you keep it at bay? Because you have to work with people.

Yankovic: No. I mean, it’s not obnoxious. Or at least, if it is, people aren’t telling me about.

Correspondent: Oh, I see. You have handlers to prevent people from getting the truth.

Yankovic: No. But I mean, I work with people who understand that what I do is very precise. When we do parodies these days, we’re trying to emulate a sound exactly. And I don’t have to crack a whip. Everybody in the band knows. They know what we’re looking for. And they’re as OCD as I am. They’re very fastidious about getting it exactly the right sounds.

Correspondent: I want to ask you. Two recent songs, as well as your children’s book, suggest that what you’re really working toward more as an artist is storytelling. I’m thinking of “Skipper Dan” on this latest album, which transcends the Weezer style parody to become this really harrowing tale about this poor man. This guide. As does “Trapped in the Drive-Thru,” where it isn’t really about the R. Kelly parody after a while. You listen to it and you say to yourself, “Wow, this thing’s going on for eleven minutes. And I’m not conscious of it.”

Yankovic: (laughs)

Correspondent: Which is kind of a carryover from “Albuquerque” from the album before. These songs seem to me more about human behavior than your typical obsessions with TV and food and the like. And I’m wondering if these are efforts to get away from the fact of “I’m stuck in parody and I’m stuck of having to replicate things.” And also, in contrast to things like “The Saga Begins” and “Ode to a Superhero,” which are really just cultural retellings of what we already know. I’m more interested in this new Al that’s talking about human behavior. Are we moving towards that? Are you consciously trying to move?

Yankovic: Well, it’s not conscious or calculated. But I’m always trying to think of new ways to be funny. Because I get stuck in ruts sometimes. Like in the ’80s, I wrote a lot of songs about food. And that was pointed out to me by a number of people for a few years. And then I wrote a lot of songs about TV. And currently I think I’m stuck in an Internet/nerd culture era where I’m writing a lot of songs about that. Because I surf on the Internet for a disproportionate amount of time per day. And you write what you know about. But I’m always trying to figure out different ways to be funny. And the nerdom style is a classic way of being funny, of telling a joke, doing a song. I’m a big fan of all those narrative songs from the ’70s. Like, you know, Gordon Lightfoot and Harry Chapin and things like that. And every now and then, I’ll throw a song of that ilk. “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota” is something along those lines as well. Again, I try to mix it up and be eclectic. And I wouldn’t want to do all narrative songs. But every now and then, it’s nice to throw one in there. Because people like a good story.

Correspondent: Well, why not? What’s so wrong about these really quirky behavioral narratives that we’re talking about here? I mean, why not more of those? The problem here is that, when you think of something like “I Want a New Duck,” well, that whole humor thing comes from transposing “drug” and “duck.” And it doesn’t always work. Although in the case of “Trapped in the Drive-Thru,” which I think is epic and wonderful, that just transcends the parody. What of this conundrum?

Yankovic: It really depends from song to song. “Trapped in the Drive-Thru” — I mean, the reason I wrote that particular narrative was because I figured I needed to do something with the R. Kelly song. It was such an iconic song. It was such a big part of the zeitgeist at the time that, you know, what can I do with this? Because it’s already pretty much about as ridiculous as it can possibly be. Kind of the same problem I had recently with Lady Gaga. How do you go a step above? So instead of even attempting that, I decided to go the other direction and make the song as banal as possible and do a very dramatic, a melodramatic eleven minute song where basically nothing happens. So that was my challenge there. To try and keep a compelling narrative and still have the story be pretty much about nothing.

Correspondent: But I would argue that actually is about something. Because it subscribes to Freytag’s triangle. You have escalating conflict from absolute banality.

Yankovic: Yes.

Correspondent: So as a result, I would say, “Well, despite the fact that he tried to bore the tears out of the audience, you’re absolutely hooked on every consequential step forward!”

Yankovic: Very much like Waiting for Godot or Seinfeld.

* — Yankovic scholars may wish to consult the source to determine if indeed Our Correspondent has his facts correct. Additionally, one word has been uttered throughout this program exactly 27 times.

The Bat Segundo Show #418: Weird Al Yankovic (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Alexander Maksik

Alexander Maksik appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #411. He is most recently the author of You Deserve Nothing.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Staring into unreliable news outlets for confirmation of existence.

Author: Alexander Maksik

Subjects Discussed: Writing an anti-Parisian novel in Paris, experiential qualities that find their way into fiction, being seduced by a cliche, reading Camus in the original, English prose that is deliberately written as if it is translated from another language, thinking and feeling in French and writing in English, broaching philosophy in the simplest possible manner, designing a perspective that don’t seem like a voice, depression, whether a character’s fall from grace interpreted as “devastating” can also be liberating, institutional trappings in teaching, whether a novel about depression can be a positive book, explicit revelations toned down over the course of many drafts, the finale as a revelatory meter, experiencing fear as a novelist, being edited by Alice Sebold, character change, nervousness and writing a novel within a vacuum, being fearless, existentialism and being judged by others, Sebold’s editorial emphasis on sound and language, the similarities between changing lives and leading cults, living with a directionless viewpoint, dead characters as models, introducing monstrous characters to sympathize with “less monstrous” actions in a protagonist, pushing readers into a mode of sympathy vs. challenging a reader’s assumptions, working without outlines and without moral points, time, location, and place as the best narrative confines, seeing a situation unfold from two perspectives, worrying about playing into moral ambiguity, sex and affection portrayed as directional, the teacher-student power dynamic, using minor characters to depict interpersonal tragedy, John Fowles’s The Magus, worrying about protagonists being perfect, and parallels between the voluntary senior seminars class and the voluntary reading experience.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to first of all start off by discussing the experiential requirements in writing an anti-Parisian novel in Paris. You told Largeheartedboy that you made it a point to avoid certain music while working on the novel. Now I’m going to have to ask you — do you also have to avoid certain people or certain locales when you’re writing this kind of novel? From an artistic position, isn’t avoiding some of these normal or privileged aspects of Parisian life just as bad as the other side? How do you fashion a perspective — or several perspectives, in this case — when you ignore certain aspects of Paris? Can’t you mine something from the totality of experience? Just to start out here.

Maksik: Yeah. I mean, I have to say that I lived in one of the most, if not the most, expensive neighborhoods in Paris. But I lived on the top floor of a building without an elevator, which allowed me to pay a lower rent.

Correspondent: Just like Will.

Maksik: Yes.

Correspondent: It makes me wonder about other experiential qualities. (laughs)

Maksik: Well, we can talk about that. We can talk about that. But when I first moved to Paris, I had this very clear sense of the kind of Paris I wanted to experience. And very quickly, it was boring to me. And I started to explore. Particularly the northern parts of the city. And I found those parts of the city to be far more interesting, and spent more and more time there, and started to read at a bar in the north of Paris. A bar called Cabaret Populaire. It was sort of there that I started to see the city as it really is. Because when I first moved to the city, it was all Hemingway and Boulevard Saint-Germain and all of that. And now I see the city in a far more different light.

Correspondent: What bored you specifically about the neighborhood you had to escape from?

Maksik: I mean, it is wonderful. Because it is a cliche. Because it is, at least physically, exactly as the postcards make it. The Luxembourg Gardens looks exactly as I imagined it would look. And the cafes remain — at least outwardly — Parisian. Like a Robert Doisneau photograph. And now it becomes — Paris is often criticized now as a museum city. Where there’s nothing behind those beautiful facades. I don’t think that that’s true. I just think that it requires a little investigation.

Correspondent: Well, you could have perhaps knocked on a few doors and asked to see the insides, introduce yourself…

Maksik: Yeah.

Correspondent: I mean, this whole idea of “I’m bored; I have to go somewhere else” intrigues me. Because a lot of novelists are determined to get at the wonder underneath the boredom or just find something that’s interesting.

Maksik: Right.

Correspondent: Why couldn’t you have found something that was interesting?

Maksik: Well, I did! I did. And, of course, it is simplistic to say that everything in the 6th [arrondissement] or the 5th or the 7th is one thing. I can’t make that argument. But because there’s so many tourists, because the city uses the center of Paris as an advertising campaign — you know, it’s very well preserved. It’s very clean. All of the gold is polished. All of the doors are kept in a certain fashion. And the outskirts of the city, in large part, are ignored by the city and by the government. Things are dirtier. The river is less elegant at the outskirts of the city.

Correspondent: It’s fascinating to have this conversation when we’re here in Midtown, which some might argue is the most boring aspect of Manhattan.

Maksik: Yeah, I would tend to agree.

Correspondent: Well, what of this? Do you think that hitting the outside of a city is really the only way to understand it? Both as a novelist and as a human being? Has this been the sort of pattern throughout your life?

Maksik: I mean, I don’t think. No. There’s never been a place in my life ever that has held so much appeal to me from afar. You know, I was never sort of caught up in New York, for example. It’s the city for many people. But I was never really seduced from afar by New York. So Paris is very particular to me.

Correspondent: What was it about it that seduced you?

Maksik: All of the cliches. All of the cliches. And I’ve said this before in other interviews. But Hemingway and Shakespeare & Company and Gertrude Stein and the whole deal. And I read A Moveable Feast many times. At a time when I was very impressionable. And I had these notions of wanting to be a writer. And I just thought — somehow it got in my mind that Paris would be the answer to all of my questions, all of my problems. This is where I would be my truest self. And that’s a recipe, I think.

Correspondent: Has this been the pattern throughout your life? Of essentially being seduced by a cliche and then pursuing the cliche and then finding out what’s around it? That this is really the only way for you to find this identity here?

Maksik: Yeah. I mean, I think I have this tendency to imagine that a place will solve the problems of my life. I will be another person in this place. Wherever it is.

Correspondent: A topographical panacea, basically.

Maksik: Yes. Absolutely. And I love to make plans. And I love to travel. And I think part of that love is this sense of reinvention. That I can be a different human being. That I can wipe the slate clean. And, of course, as I discovered in a very concrete way in Paris, you are who you are wherever you go.

The Bat Segundo Show #411: Alexander Maksik (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: James Marsh

James Marsh appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #401. He is most recently the director of Project Nim, which opens in theaters on July 8, 2011.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Pondering unethical experiments that might slide by today’s authorities.

Guest: James Marsh

Subjects Discussed: States of exhaustion, Project Nim’s purported origins of the 1970s hippie residue, scientific ethics and Columbia code of conduct, attempts to teach a chimpanzee to use sign language, Professor Herb Terrace, the transgressive aspects of ripping an animal from his mother, Skinner, Harry Harlow’s experiments, Terrace’s efforts to seek media coverage, Nim Chimpsky’s attacks on grad students, Terrace’s concerns for insurance issues over harm and suffering to students, Washoe, a filmmaker’s obligation to history, contending with demands from studio executives, when Marsh recreates moments in a documentary, dramatic reconstructions, murdering poodles, the inherent danger in cutting too much, audience imagination and the dangers of being too literal, balancing the needs of individual perspective and audience reaction, having ongoing debates while editing a documentary, some of the qualities that cause a documentary filmmaker to become prickly, the potential conflict of interest of obtaining film clips from the very subjects you’re interviewing, having sexual feelings for a chimp, being faithful to the honest confessions of documentary subjects, viewing documentary subjects as actors, earning trust as a filmmaker, Philippe Petit, whether discomfort is required in the questioning process, asking a question in ten different ways, trying to get a scientist to reveal he committed an affair, why people should trust James Marsh, the moral implications on Catfish, the possibilities that Catfish is a fake documentary, and phony indignation.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You don’t bring up the Washoe project. Allen and Beatrix Gardner and Herb Terrace had a huge rivalry going on at the time. And it’s almost like East Coast/West Coast, Biggie/Tupac…

Marsh: Well, there’s another film to be made about all that stuff. There’s quite a few PBS type documentaries that get into the whole language experiments that Washoe, the Gardners, and that whole debate. That would be a film about science, a film about ideas. And our film is a drama about a chimpanzee and people. So I was aware of that context and many people spoke about it in the course of our interviews. But I thought it was going to be a blind alley for me as a filmmaker to get into that too much. It may be an oversight on my part. But that’s a different film. If you want to go see that film, someone else can make that. That’s not my film.

Correspondent: But don’t you think you have an obligation to present, to some degree, the history…

Marsh: No.

Correspondent: Of all of these animal language…

Marsh: Why?

Correspondent: Why? Because Washoe ended up having 350 words she “learned” of sign language. You can just do a brief mention.

Marsh: Well, you see, here’s my feeling about that. It’s that a brief mention is not good enough. That’s when you’re playing with it. If you’re just trying to flirt with something and say, “Well, I can mention Chomsky and I can mention Washoe and the Gardners.” You may know about that. But my brother watching the film won’t know anything about that. So I’m not trying to be — I’m being a little defensive here. But that wasn’t the film I wanted to make. That’s a different kind of film. And that film? Go online. Nova has done that film. Washoe, the fucking dolphins — you know, the Gardners, signs. But the bottom line is that the experiment failed. And that chimps do not learn language. So I can get caught up in this whole discussion about who was right and who was wrong, and who learned the most words. That’s not a story. That’s a discussion about the practice of science and the nature of these experiments. And so I wanted to focus on a dramatic story as opposed to the issues and the context. And, of course, someone like yourself, who is very….who is familiar with this stuff, probably feels a bit cheated. Because I don’t explain and give you the context you are sort of dimly aware of or know a little bit about. But that’s a very conscious choice on my part. Not to get caught up in things you can’t really fully explain and will, I think, be a sort of sideshow to what I think my interest in the story, which is my interest in the drama of it and the life story of this chimpanzee. Now if you’re a Nim, what does he fucking care about Washoe and dolphins and the Gardners? He isn’t going to know nothing about these things. So I’m trying to put you. You know, his life story is where I’m focused here. Not so much on this whole fascinating internexual climate that you’re aware of and the film doesn’t really get into.

Correspondent: To go ahead and correct your impression that I felt cheated, what I’m actually talking about here is how you as a documentary filmmaker make the choice to not include Washoe. Is it really a consideration of “Oh, well here’s a rabbit hole that will create a three hour film”?

Marsh: Yeah. Or where is my interest in this story? Where do I think the narrative is in this story? As opposed to — I think you could cram the film with reference points to other experiments and to other thinkers and linguists. And on and on. But that isn’t the film that I think would work for me as a filmmaker, or the one I’m interested in making. And so to distill my view into I want to tell you the story of this from the point of view of the chimpanzee, who would have no awareness of the other chimpanzee lab experiments and no interest in them either, I think.

Correspondent: So to some degree, it sounds to me that when you make a film — especially one that deals with science as opposed to, say, an event that numerous people see such as Man on Wire — your problem, I suppose, is that you’re enslaved to narrative to some degree. Is that safe to say?

Marsh: Well, that’s my interest in narrative. I guess I’m a little prickly about this. Because there’s quite a lot of pressure around the making of the film of this sort. Explaining to people. “Give me more context. Give me more science. Show me the scientific debate here.” And so I’m prickly about it because it caused me a lot of trouble as I was filming it, getting these comments from people — executives involved with the film — that they wanted more of this stuff. And they’re saying, “Well, I want a narrator for the film.” And I began to get quite pissed off about this. Because it wasn’t the kind of film that I was making, nor did I say that I was going to make this film. I was making the story of Nim the chimp. And films tend to not deal with ideas terribly well. It’s not what films are good at doing. I mean, some films do it extraordinarily well. But it’s not what they’re best for. I think film is best as a medium for storytelling. And so that’s where my interest is in this particular story again.

The Bat Segundo Show #401: James Marsh (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo: Aimee Bender II

Aimee Bender appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #400. She Bender is most recently the author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #16.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Feeling his inner cake and eating it too.

Author: Aimee Bender

Subjects Discussed: Fantasy and magical realism being contingent upon reader belief, domestic realism and fantasy, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake as a Los Angeles novel, foodies, apartment complexes in Southern California, high school reunions, sustaining fairytale magic in a longer work, how a shift in an author’s temperament affects a writing project over several years, positive pessimism, parallels between writing process and psychotherapy, Adam Phillips and boredom, the fine line between attention and concentration, staying put, believing in the details, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Plausibility in Fantasy,” Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, writers whose complete works you can’t read all at once, author doubt and faulty fiction premises, Kafka, early attempts and restarts on Particular Sadness, the dangers of ranting, the relationship between empathy and fantasy, reverse engineering the human relationship with food, Rose’s early form as an older man on the make for soup, MFK Fisher, the materialistic impulses of Rose’s parents, bottom-feeding consumerism and garage sales, the consumer as an eater of another kind, qualitative precision vs. quantitative precision, mathematics and fantasy, people who love making food, Cafe Gratitude, feeling simultaneously appreciative and cynical about hippie ideologies, grandmothers who send strange packages, Edward Hopper, fatalistic determinism, Hemingway’s iceberg theory, the visual advantages of not using quotes, Bender’s experience with chairs, the McSweeney’s logo, whether Hopper’s paintings are truly lonely, “The Lighthouse at Two Lights,” artists who don’t enjoy being photographed, whether movies are destroying imagination, shorter attention spans, memorizing poetry, Wallace Stevens, Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel, Kay Ryan, students who can’t remember the questions they are about to ask, and whether or not the United States is presently suffering from a short attention span epidemic.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We were just joking about this being a few years since we last talked. This leads me to ask: I know you to be an optimist, both in your previous books and in our previous conversation, which was quite jocular. But with this book, I almost get the sense that you’re exploring this positive pessimism with the Rose perspective. And I’m curious how much that may play into this. The idea of exploring a perspective that’s just a little different from your own. Or perhaps I have misjudged you and you have been a closet pessimist the entire time!

Bender: Well, both! I think I’m both. So it’s both exploring a point of view that’s different from my own. But of course, for any of it to ring true, it has to ring true to me in some way as well. So I think that there’s something of that balance of seeing things cynically and seeing things hopefully. Depending on the day. Will it end in a different spot? But I guess I did feel really focused in this book maybe, in particular, about what would be burdensome for that character. And also what would be burdensome for the brother. And maybe the tone again of the magical quality about her and her brother feeling different. Like hers feeling dark and his feeling darker. I somehow think of them as triangles feeding into each other. Hers is the smaller shape and his is the darker shape in some way.

Correspondent: But what do you do if you’re trying to channel this positive pessimism and you’re in an absolutely peppy mood that day? Because I think that of all your books, this is tonally very, very specific. And so what do you do to maintain that tone? Especially since it’s several years of trying to get this right.

Bender: Exactly. Well, I have this kind of system that has worked for me so far, which is to write a couple hours in the morning. And the rule — a friend of mine from grad school named Phil Hayes said if you write what you’re interested in writing each day, writing will have life in it. Which is great. It seemed simple on the surface advice, but I think it’s pretty deep. Because the idea that each day, you can generate whatever is happening on that day — it means that on the optimistic days, I probably wasn’t working on that book. But the thing is getting a good work day in feels very optimistic and hopeful, even if the work itself is kind of dour and sad and bleak. A good work day feels so good no matter what. So there’s kind of a contrast there already. But let’s say I’m in a really upbeat mood and I just can’t get into the sadness of the book. Then I would work on a short story. So it was all very mood governed. But I think once there was enough material to work with, it didn’t feel sad to work on. It felt like explorative.

Correspondent: Well, that’s interesting. Because I’ve always wanted to talk with you about the two hour session.

Bender: Right.

Correspondent: Which sounds almost like expansive psychotherapy.

Bender: I’ve wondered about that. I think that’s a bit of a model. Yeah. (laughs)

Correspondent: But I understand, and I just want to get this totally clarified, you sit on the couch.

Bender: Chair.

Correspondent: You want to channel your mind into boredom.

Bender: Right.

Correspondent: And I’m curious about this. It seems to me a more reasonable answer to, say, Jonathan Franzen blocking all sunlight from the room, which I think is really quite intense. I mean, I understand the need.

Bender: And I think he has headphones.

Correspondent: Exactly. Earplugs.

Bender: Yeah.

Correspondent: There are bats that fly in his cave. I don’t know.

Bender: Right. (laughs)

Correspondent: But the point is that your level of trying to remove yourself from distraction seems infinitely more reasonable. You’re in this fixed location. How do you will yourself into filtering these ideas? Or if you’re in a situation where you have so many ideas, so much information, so many emotions that you’re writing, that you just need to sit still in order to just access it during that two hour period?

Bender: Yeah. I think you said it in an interesting way. “Channeling myself into boredom.” But it’s not. The boredom happens.

Correspondent: (laughs) Oh come on.

Bender: The boredom does not need to be channeled. You know, there are those people who say, “I never feel bored.” I’m definitely not one of those people. So in some way, for me, it feels like a dance between boredom and concentration. And I think my concentration can feel thin. So the idea is blocking out the amount of time so that I’m going to try to concentrate. But I don’t know that I will. And inevitably I get bored. And then hopefully on the other side of boredom is something. There’s this great quote by Adam Phillips, who is a British psychoanalyst. He talks about boredom as a waiting space and as this interim place for a kid where it’s not something to be filled or plugged in. It’s something actually to sit through. And that’s often where a kid will get really creative. And they’ll be like, “Okay, I’m bored. Now I’ve created this land under the kitchen sink.” Whatever.

Correspondent: I use the term “channeling” or “willing yourself” into this concentrated focus. Is it a variation of the Flaubert maxim “Be calm and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work”?

Bender: There is something to that. I do believe very strongly that structure helps creativity and boundaries in that it is like a therapy hour. The boundaries of a time, a creative space where I can go to someplace that is potentially revolting to me and leave. And knowing that I will leave. There’s something very helpful about that. But still, it’s not even that I can focus myself into concentration. It’s just that the only rule I really have is that I have to stay put. And then they’ll be many, many bad days.

Correspondent: So if you stay put, you can confront any emotion. It’s like running the gauntlet here.

Bender: I think that if you stay put, stuff comes up. I think eventually stuff will bubble up and there will be things to write about. But it’s not as if I bravely have the sword in hand and I’m rushing forward into the forest.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Bender: I’m sitting there feeling like I want to get up. I want to get up. I want to get up. And the only weapon I have is stay put.

Correspondent: Got it. Is it a matter of ADD or distraction? Or what?

Bender: It’s not ADD. But I just do feel easily distracted. There are other writers who will say, “I need time to relax. And then get into it. And then I take eight hours. And then I get lost in the world. And I feel all my characters.” And I don’t have that at all. Maybe I’ll get lost into it for ten minutes. And that’s thrilling. But I get a lot done.

Correspondent: Oh, I see.

Bender: So it will be ten minutes. Boom. Productive. And then space out.

Correspondent: Ninety minutes of thinking, thirty minutes of writing. Something like that?

Bender: Yeah. And looking at old files. And rereading, rereading.

The Bat Segundo Show #400: Aimee Bender II (Download MP3)

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Jason Allardyce: How a Sunday Times Journalist Ripped Off Ian Rankin, Bat Segundo, the Observer, and an Australian Producer

On April 24, 2011, the Scottish edition of The Sunday Times published “Rankin admits Twitter addiction” on page 21. It was written by Jason Allardyce, a 40-year-old who was named “Scottish Journalist of the Year” in 2003. His MySpace page states that he likes to go by the name “wolfspider” and that he is based out of Callander. But “wolfspider” is a lonely man. He only has two friends on MySpace: the ever-popular Tom and MySpace UK.

On Easter morning, I knew nothing about Allardyce. A friend had forwarded me this Deadline News report by Peter Laing, in which I recognized quotes identical to my conversation with Ian Rankin on The Bat Segundo Show. The conversation was not accredited. As someone who had investigated the Cooks Source scandal and who remembered the online tarring and feathering, I was appalled that anybody would still consider that ripping off other people’s journalism — even from behind a paywall — would still be okay. But this time, I was on the receiving end for a project that I make little to no money on. For the Rankin show, I had devoted perhaps 25 to 30 hours of my life to reading Rankin’s books, conducting research, interviewing the man for an hour, and mastering the audio. My labor was being exploited. I immediately contacted Laing by email. And on an Easter Sunday, a little less than an hour after I contacted him, he replied back on Twitter:

The Sunday Times? Murdoch’s newspaper? I told people on Twitter about what had happened and asked if anybody could send along the article. And a very friendly pescatarian vegetarian in Scotland going by the name of @SeymourSunshine located the article and photographed it for me.

I transcribed the article. I was stunned to learn that 215 of the 758 words in Jason Allardyce’s article were taken directly and without attribution from my Bat Segundo interview with Ian Rankin. I emailed Alladyce and his editors. And then I discovered that I wasn’t the only one getting played by the wolfspider. An additional 126 words in Allardyce’s article were lifted wholesale and without attribution from two whole paragraphs that Rankin contributed to this Gaby Hinsliff compilation in The Observer from February 13, 2011. To add insult to injury, Allardyce plagiarized a third source, pilfering a good 74 words from this Lisa Zilberpriver piece from World News Australia (January 18, 2010). For all three original pieces that Allardyce has used, a copyright notice was clearly listed on each of the pages.

In other words, Allardyce did not obtain a single original word from his subject for his article.

Ian Rankin was kind enough to confirm with me that nobody from The Times had contacted him. So if we add up the tally, 415 of Allardyce’s 758 words, or 54% of his article, were taken from three separate sources. That’s considerably more words than a famous fair use case here in the States, where The Nation published 300 to 400 words of verbatim quotes from a 500 page Gerald Ford memoir without obtaining permission, was sued, and lost. So that it can all be made clear, here is a breakdown of Allardyce’s liberties (with the unattributed quotes indicated in bold and, for Bat Segundo, the specific times in the program where the words are mentioned):

The writer admitted that Twitter was “taking up more of my life than it should.” [Bat Segundo interview, 27:08-27:09]

He added: “I’ve a kind of addictive personality so I’m always very careful to try to avoid things that can become addictive. [Bat Segundo interview, 27:01-27:06] It’s like a diary. I used to keep a page-a-day diary when I was a kid from the age of 12 till I was 29 and I had to fill up every single page. I couldn’t leave any blank space.” [Bat Segundo interview, 27:49-28:00]

He conquered the diary addiction after moving to America with his wife for six months. [This part is paraphrased from Bat Segundo interview, 28:00-28:30]

But I use Twitter like it, as a kind of memento mori of everything I have done. [Bat Segundo interview, 28:33-28:37] When I started writing a new book, I made a vow to myself that I wouldn’t go near Twitter until the end of the working day and I kept that up for about three weeks. Then, if I stopped for a cup of coffee, I would check Twitter; stop for lunch, check Twitter. I have to be careful about how many people I follow because, having an addictive personality, I feel the need to read every single tweet on the timeline so if I’m following 300 people that’s potentially 300 people’s tweets I’m reading in any one day…. [Bat Segundo interview, 30:24-30:49]

I’ve got to go back and read them all. When I wake up in the morning, I’ll go back to the night before and scroll through the night to find out what people were up to.” [Bat Segundo interview, 30:51-31:00]

Rankin said he went through a stage of having a similar addiction to viewing bids on eBay, and that he cannot play computer games because he believes he would be unable to stop, having gone without sleep as a student in order to play them. “It’s insane,” he said. [Bat Segundo interview, plagiarized paraphrase, “I went through a stage of buying vinyl on eBay, buying records…,” 31:02-31:09; “…if I finished browsing eBay…,” 31:10-31:12; direct “It’s insane,” 31:21-31:22]

He recently wrote: “I work from home and work on my own. Twitter connects me to the outside world, and makes it feel as though I’m in a huge, airy office full of funny, well-informed people.

“It gives me instant news, clever jokes, views, and reactions. Fans of my books can contact me, and I can let them know what I’m up to.

“Twitter is also my diary. I can scroll back through my tweets and recall what I was up to on any particular day. I keep in touch with friends make new ones, renew old acquaintances, and sometimes am even gifted ideas for stories. All from my office chair, in 140 characters – which also makes it a fantastic daily exercise in editing and concision.” (The last three paragraphs taken entirely from this Guardian article.)

Internet addiction is well recognised, and has even led to the residential treatment programmes in America to help people wean themselves from obsessive use of Twitter, eBay, Facebook, texting and video games. Research published last year suggested that the speed and unpredictability offered by social media stimulates dopamine, which can create an addiction to seeking, rather than finding, contact through them. It added that as more people join in, the scope for overuse grows. (Taken from World News Australia article.)

While it is true that Section 30 of the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act of 1988 specifies a fair dealing exception “for the purpose of criticism or review,” the attribution must contain “a sufficient acknowledgment.” Furthermore, according to English law, there’s very little I can do to stop Allardyce or any other person “reporting current events” from infringing upon copyright provided that “it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgment.”

What is a sufficient acknowledgement? Well, unlike much of the American tax codes, you can always count on English law to be concise and thorough. Here’s Section 178 of the CDPA:

“sufficient acknowledgment” mean an acknowledgment identifying the work in question by its title or other description, and identifying the author unless—

(a) in the case of a published work, it is published anonymously;

(b) in the case of an unpublished work, it is not possible for a person to ascertain the identity of the author by reasonable inquiry;

It may very well be a common practice for some UK journalists not to provide attribution. But when they don’t, they are clearly breaking the law. And they are exposing the newspapers and outlets that they write for to considerable legal liability. But more important than such legal propriety, it’s just plain rude and antithetical to the spirit of human togetherness.

But Allardyce’s failure to credit any of his original sources extends far beyond the prospect of fair dealing and fair use. His disingenuous usage could be interpreted as an intent to deceive.

Let’s approach the question form a practical position. Why is attribution important? Well, take this UPI report from September 5, 2010. The UPI quotes Cardinal Keith O’Brien: “Our detailed research into BBC news coverage of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, together with a systematic analysis of output from the Catholic church, has revealed a consistent anti-Christian institutional bias.” That’s an extraordinary statement. If you’re at all interested in the many opinions, you’ll want to know where it comes from. And the UPI, because it is a responsible service, notes in its article that The Sunday Telegraph first reported the Cardinal O’Brien quote.

Jason Allardyce, on the other hand, doesn’t make such a distinction when he produces the same quote in his article, and he doesn’t attribute The Telegraph. This causes the Richard Dawkins Foundation (where I found Allardyce’s article, now conveniently hiding behind a paywall) to believe that Allardyce is conducting original reporting. This also causes confusion for the BBC, which erroneously reports that Cardinal O’Brien said these words “in an interview with the Sunday Times.” So Allardyce and The Sunday Times gets credit for a quote that they cut and pasted from another newspaper.

Now let’s say that, several years from now, a historian is looking into biases against religion (or the mythical claims of biases) during the early 21st century. The historian will want to go straight to the original source so that she can ensure that the quote and the context is accurate. But if she has to wade through Allardyce’s misleading attribution, this is going to cause needless work for the historian. Allardyce’s misleading attribution also creates the false impression that the Sunday Times was the central place for that news story.

And because Allardyce has published his “article” in a prominent newspaper, with anyone who reads the article believing that the interview comes from him, there’s very little that I can do to get proper credit or compensation.

I have emailed Allardyce the following terms for resolution:

(a) a public apology, both prominently in print and online, for taking my quotes without asking or attributing;

(b) the issuance of a correction, both prominently in print and online, indicating that the Sunday Times and Jason Allardyce lifted quotes from my radio program, along with a URL directed to my site,

(c) a donation of £500 (as compensation for using my quotes and others without permission or attribution) to Reporters Without Borders.

It’s impossible for me to be entirely objective in this report. I am doing the best that I can to keep a level head. Still, in an age where Arianna Huffington insists that it’s “wrong and offensive to insist that HuffPost is exploiting journalists,” the time has come to stand up against anyone who believes that they can get away from stealing anybody’s labor. If ostensible professionals feel that they are above the law and above the decency of community, then what’s the purpose of their collective existence?

[4/26/11 UPDATE: As of Tuesday afternoon (UK time), Jason Allardyce has not returned my telephone calls and emails.]

The Bat Segundo Show: Jaimy Gordon

Jaimy Gordon appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #391. She is most recently the author of Lord of Misrule.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Praying to equine gods for a better motel room.

Author: Jaimy Gordon

Subjects Discussed: Dancing with award winners, the Gargoyle interview from 1983, how “the best young writers” change in an instant, Michael Brondoli, Tom Ahern, on not being terribly prolific, being cherished by 25 people, Shamp of the City-Solo, battling procrastination, subterfuge by husbands and publishers to get Lord of Misrule finished, inspiration points from John Hawkes, learning Italian, the use of Yiddish words in Lord of Misrule, referring to the same character from multiple vantage points, creating inconsistencies, Two-Tie’s philosophy of the world, private people who scheme, passing time and stories before radio and television, Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, the pre-Internet storytelling culture, Steven Milhauser’s Edwin Mulhouse, Kellie Wells, the use of television in fiction, DH Lawrence and sex, staying “young” as a novelist, hanging out with criminals, being preserved by immaturity, the problem of not working enough, joy and ecstasy as a requirement, Nicole Krauss’s refusal to dance, Janet Maslin’s sense of “the exotic,” the National Book Award judges, Gordon’s explanation of her “churlish” speech, “A Night’s Work” as the origin point for Lord of Misrule, characters who escaped the novel, Two-Tie vs. Batman’s Two Face, the problems of drinking a lot, having an uncle as a loan shark, the multiple meanings of dirty books, the many ways that a grown man can get into trouble, using one’s own life as material, being a dark romantic, on not believing in real life, discussing opera with Bill Clegg, challenging Jane Smiley’s notion of the “narrowness of the world,” colors and description, the dangers of falling down the linguistic rabbit hole, unexpected methods of attracting regular readers, astute reviews from horse racing people, happy accidents in the author/reader relationship, vulgar desires to see one’s novel at an airport, the need to love literature, Donald Westlake’s Parker novels, how popular literature chronicles the underworld, Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, Balzac, the myth of pulp, loving horse racing despite its corruption, Czeslaw Milosz’s notion of America as a moderately corrupt country, the complicated emotional connections between humans and animals, and the paucity of fiction dealing with animals.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Gordon: I didn’t think I was writing this for the small presses. I thought that this was a book with some commercial potential. And I eagerly gave it to my then agent, who showed it to a few places and came back and said, “You know, Jaimy, I think you have to face it. You’re still a small press author.” I was very depressed and very mad. My agent and I — she’s a very nice woman, maybe not good for that kind of book — we parted company at that point. And I worked on the manuscript again for a few years. Sporadically. Took out of it some of the Medicine Ed material. About this 72-year-old illiterate groom who knows how to work roots, knows how to do folk magic, and is looking for a home. Trying to make this big score for that purpose. I reworked some of that Medicine Ed material into a separate story, which came out in Witness and I loved the way that that chapter came together. I decided I had to redo the novel that way. But I didn’t finish it before I was overtaken by the deaths of my two parents and other things that happened in the last decade. But anyway.

Correspondent: Did it require an ultimatum from McPherson? “Hey, Jaimy, you better finish this book!” Is this the only way to finish a book for you?

Gordon: At some point, I must have rashly promised him that he could have it by the summer of 2010. I’d even kind of forgotten about that. Because I’d many times vaguely told him, “Well, if no one else will do it, you can have it.” But I had meant to get it out there and sell it. And I do think that I could have probably found someone if I had really asserted myself. Gotten a new agent and so on. But I’m a procrastinator and easily distracted. And I forgot about it. And suddenly McPherson said, “Well, it’s going to be this summer, you know. It has to be this summer because I think this book could be a contender for the National Book Awards.” After I stopped laughing, I said, “Well, alright.” I figured this book has been sitting there. An unmovable, implacable obstruction on my writing table for the last ten years. At the least, I gotta get rid of it. I’ve got to get it out of my way. I said, “Alright. I’ll start revising it.” This was maybe back in May. But I didn’t start revising it. And I found out later that he and my husband, who’s also a writer — a German writer, Peter Blickle — were having conferences. “What are we going to do to get this woman back to work? She has to finish this manuscript!” And somehow McPherson got the brilliant idea of sending me galleys with this corrupt early manuscript. It was even the earliest manuscript.

Correspondent: (laughs) Oh really?

Gordon: They must have sent him the file back before I even took the Medicine Ed material out. And so he sent me galleys. I mean, it’s easier now to generate galleys than it used to be. But he sent me galleys and he said, “Well, this is the book.” This is the book coming out in July. We’re sending this to press on such and such a date. And I was absolutely horrified. The biggest problem in getting back to work on it had been that, for five years, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I could not make — I mean, it’s really hard to revise a book without reading it. And, for some reason, I just had an aversion to it. I know why it was. I’ll explain in a minute. But at this point, I was galvanized, horrified into reading it. And when I did, I thought, “This is not bad at all actually.” I had even forgotten a few subtle points of the plot. I found that I cried twice when I read it. I thought, “Well, you know, I must really have something here.”

Correspondent: Crying for the good reasons, I hope.

Gordon: Yeah, that’s right! I wasn’t crying because I thought it was so bad. I cried because I was moved at the plights of some of the creatures therein. But anyway.

Correspondent: Ten years of procrastination. I mean, that’s a lot of procrastination. Especially since the book here…

Gordon: Oh, that’s nothing for me.

Correspondent: Really? Nothing? Why do you require publishers and husbands to play such tricks upon you? I mean, some writers make up the excuse, “Oh well, I’m always thinking about the novel!” or “I’m submerging myself in the novel when I’m not doing anything related to the novel.”

Gordon: How about “I was occasionally thinking about the novel?”

Correspondent: Yes!

Gordon: Occasionally I thought about it.

Correspondent: Essentially, you’ve got a “My dog ate my homework” here. So what’s the real excuse?

Gordon: What do I do?

Correspondent: Yeah.

Gordon: Well, both my parents had lingering last illnesses. And they required care. But I was not — I’m one of five siblings. There were plenty of others. But nevertheless, there were very big events in my life. And then there was another family member who was sick. That took time. But what did I do to make myself better? Did I go into my study and write? No. I took Italian lessons. I got passionately involved in opera. In fact, I have to write some kind of a book about opera because I’ve spent so much of my time following opera in the last ten years. It’s the way horse racing was for me at a certain stage. So it’s going to be absolutely necessary for me to make use of it at some point.

Correspondent: Who was the novelist who said that the novel is everything that an author has been thinking about for the last five years?

Gordon: Who was that?

Correspondent: I’m blanking out on the name.

Gordon: The way I heard it, it was ten years.

Correspondent: Ten years. There’s variations of this quote. It seems to me that, for you, it’s actually the five years from forty years ago. Is that safe to say? Do you require a long introspection time before finally getting the project nipped in the bud?

Gordon: The truth is: this novel was substantially written between 1997 and about 2002. I know exactly the date because I was in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown as a returning fellow on the beginning of a sabbatical in fall 1997. And it just so happened that John Hawkes, who had been my teacher at Brown, was there on a senior fellowship for the month. And I always associated my passionate interest in horse racing and my urge to write about it with him. Because he had written about racetracks in Sweet William and The Lime Twig. That’s probably the most famous of his novels that concern horse racing in any way. He was kind of a fantasist about horse racing, although eventually he bought a crippled old, once great stakes horse. Whereas I had actually worked on the racetrack. And when I saw him in 1997, I said, “I’m finally going to write that racetrack novel. I’m here to start it.” And he said, “Well, make sure you make the horses into real characters in that book.” Which I did, I thought. But it didn’t take an extraordinarily long time to write an advanced draft. I don’t write early drafts. I don’t tear through 400 sheets of paper never looking back. I construct every page and work on every sentence a long time. And I’m really fairly well along by the time I get to the end of the book the first time. But I also do a lot of new writing when I go through those pages again.

The Bat Segundo Show #391: Jaimy Gordon (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #387. He is most recently the author of Galore.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if you can rent a motel room in the whale of a belly.

Author: Michael Crummey

Subjects Discussed: Childbearing in poor families, grisly deaths and irresponsible life decisions, infant mortality in the early 20th century, the relationship between historical investigation and magical realism, Crummey’s intense dislike of the term “magical realism,” dominant spectres and other ghosts, how the stench of death encourages the reader to get acquainted with new characters, the complexities in basing novels on historical events, aligning Galore‘s narrative to the Great War, not mentioning dates, the advance of religion before medicine in 19th century Newfoundland, the dissolute nature of Father Phelan, the netherworld beneath the real world, the truck system and fishing unions, whether Yoknapatawpha-like organization is required in building a world, avoiding Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and learning to love it, alcoholic opera singers, balancing multiple characters into a narrative coherence, being saved by having family characteristics, being influenced by Marquez, another book as a road map, the unavoidable serendipity of reading, “happening” onto books with which to inspire a novel, Moby Dick, riffing on other people’s work, being suspicious of magical realism, magical realism as a cheat, not being able to talk about Newfoundland folklore, the importance of mechanical laws in the telling of the story, what readers are willing to accept, the song “Jack Was Every Inch a Sailor” as an unexpected inspirational force, magical realism as an interpretive notion similar to the Bible, and having faith in characters and fakery.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: In terms of character balancing, if you’re running into the jungle and wildly whacking around with a machete, there needs to be something systematic. Particularly if you hope to arrange it in any sort of coherence.

Crummey: (laughs) Right. Well, I definitely had particular themes the book was following that, in a way, matched the trajectories for each of these characters for each of the generations. I was playing with the whole notion. Newfoundland is a tiny place. About a half million people. I mean, it’s big geographically. But it’s a tiny community. Half a million people today. A hundred years ago, I think it was less than half of that. And a hundred years before that, it was miniscule. Maybe twenty, thirty thousand people. So everybody’s related. And the gene lines between those generations. I mean, there are researchers from all over the world in Newfoundland studying because they can map how these genes crossed generations. Because there’s been so little contamination. For lack of a better word. So I wanted to play with that in the book. So when I started off with Judah, for example, I knew that the book was going to end with a direct descendant of Judah — and, of course, some of Judah’s characteristics; the smell, the white skin, and all that sort of stuff was passed on. And I knew that I wanted the book to end with someone who was in some way saved by being the direct descendant and having those characteristics. So all the way along, of course, I have this map to follow where these particular characteristics had to be passed down and then to do something interesting with those characteristics, all the way along, before I got to this end point.

Correspondent: Does this explain in part some of the copious cock imagery throughout the book? I mean, lots of blades and penises.

Crummey: Right.

Correspondent: Lots of propagation I found.

Crummey: Yeah. Well, I mean, partly that was homage to [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez as well.

Correspondent: Yes.

Crummey: Because every penis in Marquez is monstrous.

Correspondent: Yes. No pun intended.

Crummey: It’s huge. And that was just something else again I stole from Marquez. (laughs) But the whole sense of propagation — I mean, this was a place that was incredibly difficult to survive in. And my sense of it is that only people with an incredible life force in them would have made it.

Correspondent: This explains in part the considerable virility of many of these characters.

Crummey: That’s right. And it is rather astonishing when you go to the old graveyards in Newfoundland. The graves seem primarily to be divided into two categories. There are people who died before they were fifteen, often of some disease or drowning or whatever. And then there are people who died when they were ninety-eight. So the people who were strong enough to survive past the fifteenth year seemed to go on forever. So there is a sense of unbelievable stubborn virility in these communities. And often, sometimes there’s not much life-affirming about it even. I wanted to get that sense across and, in some sense, it just seems like a stupid animal stubbornness that keeps these people going.

Correspondent: Well, based off your research, what’s the dip like in terms of the middle aged? In terms of death.

Crummey: Well, I mean, to be fair, I would say that most people didn’t live much past fifty-five. Right? And that fifty was considered to be old. And in every community, there’s this group of people who live to ancient years. But for most people, I think they were broken by the life they were supposed to live. By the time they were fifty, they were probably crippled by the work that they were forced to do and by the fact that women, in particular, probably started having children in their teens and would continue to have them until it killed them almost.

Correspondent: I’m curious. You’ve brought up Marquez a couple of times. And I’m wondering at what point during the writing did you shake off the inevitable yoke of influence?

Crummey: Right. Well, I mean, I was a little concerned when I first started talking about this book with people about even bringing Marquez up.

Correspondent: You brought him up here. Just for the record.

Crummey: I’m much more comfortable with it now over time. Because it’s ridiculous. There’s Marquez and then there’s me. But I think the thing that gave me the courage to try the book was the fact that I felt like Newfoundland and Newfoundland culture was every bit as rich and bizarre and otherworldly and maddening as the world that Marquez was writing about. And I trusted that to create its own uniqueness as I wrote the book. So it made me unafraid to steal what I needed from Marquez and to see that almost as a road map for a way to tell the story. Because I knew that the stories and the places I was writing about were so unique onto themselves that they could create their own. If I let them be, they could create their own world. And I feel like I did that. A lot of people when they read this book, I think, think of Marquez. But I haven’t — at least I haven’t heard anyone yet — heard anyone say it’s just a Marquez knockoff. Because the place itself is so completely different. It stands on its own feet as a culture.

Correspondent: It was more of a narrative canvas. A map on the wall with which to go ahead and put your pushpins in.

Marquez: Sure.

The Bat Segundo Show #387: Michael Crummey (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: TC Boyle IV

TC Boyle appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #385. He is most recently the author of When the Killing’s Done. This is his fourth appearance on the program. He has previously appeared on The Bat Segundo #273, The Bat Segundo Show #70, and The Bat Segundo Show #10.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Considering a savage swim to the Channel Islands.

Author: T. Coraghessan Boyle

Subjects Discussed: Whether one can look dapper while being under the weather, Boyle’s powerful immune system, connections between Wild Child‘s stories and When the Killing’s Done, fishing expeditions gone awry, early subconscious efforts to hone the narrative framework, the short story “Anacapa,” “Question 62,” who has the ethical result to control all creatures, details on the next novel San Miguel, the Channel Islands, the bleak winds of San Miguel, straightforward historical narrative vs. exuberant adventure, Boyle’s prodigious description of hair, folk singers and massive hair, writing about women, Ruth Dershowitz in East is East and Dana in Talk Talk, basing When the Killing’s Done on news accounts without meeting anybody involved, Dave LaJoy and megalomaniacs, readers who take hard sides in response to the book, whether the portrayal of an exuberant megalomaniac causes an unintended ideological tilt, sympathizing with an animal rights activist, not being able to look at the PETA slaughterhouse videos, Diane Johnson’s essay in the New York Review of Books, whether Boyle’s sense of the ridiculous overcomes moments of gravity, the role of literature within Killing, Madame Bovary “in the Jean Renoir original,” Island of the Blue Dolphins, Boyle’s pessimism, being thrust into the lap of the existentialists, Jeffrey Dahmer, the comforts of irrelevance, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” spirituality, feeling the pulse of nature and being humbled by it, Boyle’s pilgrimages, blocking out terrible news, the role of art in a nihilistic viewpoint, the geography of Santa Cruz and Anacapa, Boyle’s mother-in-law, the degree of geographical exploration required for Drop City and When the Killing’s Done, the Judas pig, Tom Wolfe’s journalistic approach to novel writing, passages written by “Boyle the historian,” being in the clear when using real people for fiction, when fiction is more real than reality, riffing on history, Home Depot as “the loneliest place in the world,” not having material goods, and escaping to the mountain.

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to remark upon a recent essay by Diane Johnson in The New York Review of Books. I’m sure you’ve probably seen it by now.

Boyle: Yes, I have.

Correspondent: She wrote something that I happen to agree with. “Because his sense of the ridiculous usually overcomes his moments of gravity, he rarely departs from a comic mode that precludes tears even in the most tragic circumstances.” I think that this is a fair point, especially in this book. But if your book is informed with this sense of the ridiculousness, I’m wondering if this is going to impede upon writing in more serious or greater turf.

Boyle: It might. Which is precisely why I’m doing a non-comic straightforward historical narrative right now. Just to see how that might be and what might happen. Don’t forget. I’m the guy who wrote Water Music as my first novel, which turned the historical novel on its head and subverted and pulled the rug out and nudged you constantly about the unreliability of fiction and of history too. Now I am trying to write something without any irony or any comedy. Straightforward drama. Straightforward realism. Just because I’ve never done it before. I’ve done it in short stories. But I’ve never done it at length. And I found this wonderful story, a historical story, which I’m telling as best I can. We shall see what the results are. In fact, if we’re very lucky, you and I will be sitting here in three years discussing that one. And we’ll find out. (laughs)

Correspondent: Well, maybe we will. But I want to see if we can get to When the Killing’s Done and this problem of adopting the comic exuberant tone. I think this book does really present some very important issues, which we were getting to earlier, about how does humanity play god in the animal kingdom. I mean, this is a very serious topic. And the comedy is almost a mask over something which is — well, if you think about it from either side — really depressing. So I’m wondering if, in not permitting us to share tears (as Diane Johnson believes), it almost trivializes the issue to some degree. Does it present a problem? Or is your strategy more laying a few comic exuberant bombs to blow up in the reader’s head in about a week or so?

Boyle: Wow. Neither of the above. I’ll go for Choice C. I don’t see this as necessarily a comic novel. Certainly there are many varieties of comedy, of course. And I’ve used every possible mode I can think of. This has its moments, of course. And I think it allows the reader to stand back at times and view the characters with some kind of ironic detachment perhaps. But I don’t see this as essentially a comic novel. I see this as a dramatic novel. And further — and we’ve talked about this in the past — I often find that using the comic mode can be more emotionally wrenching then writing a straightforward drama. Because it subverts your expectations. And in this one. Well, look at the ending to this book. It should punch you right in the heart. I hope it does.

Correspondent: But I don’t know. From my standpoint, it read very much like a comic novel. To me. Particularly every time LaJoy came up. I mean, this guy is such a hilarious…

Boyle: Because he’s exaggerated to a degree. And yet, and yet, he’s also real. And I wouldn’t want to say, as I said earlier, that he represents a large part of me. But certainly that part is there. And certainly, Ed, we are both of us pretty much perfect and beautifully emotionally adjusted. But a lot of people out there are not. There are a lot of people out thee who make LaJoy look calm.

* * *

Correspondent: Do you have anything that you feel optimistic or joyful about?

Boyle: No.

Correspondent: No? Nothing optimistic?

Boyle: No. Since I discovered death at a very young age, it has obsessed me. And the whole purpose of our endeavors obsesses me. And in a larger scale, of course, our human endeavors on the planet, which will of course be burned to a cinder in there and a half billion years anyway. So what does anything matter? Etcetera. As I probably have said to you before, you know, I went from a Roman Catholic boy with god and his heaven and Santa Claus at the age of eleven or twelve or whatever, realizing that it’s all completely phony and it’s just some myth that we’ve been fed to prevent us from committing suicide at a young age. And within three or four years of that, I was thrust into the lap of the existentialists. And I’ve never come back.

Correspondent: Then is work really the only way, the only reason to stay alive?

Boyle: All work is irrelevant. Everything is irrelevant. Our conversation is irrelevant. Literature is irrelevant. Films, love, everything is utterly irrelevant in the face of utter meaninglessness and death. That’s what we live with. Everybody lives with every minute of every day. On the other hand, if you’re not going to shoot yourself tonight, do what satisfies you. What satisfies me is making literature and then sitting here with you talking about it. And also I have honor. I really believe in the power of literature and I like to promote it. I’ve never cheated anybody or hurt anybody — you know, that sort of thing. And that’s simply because that’s my own code. It doesn’t make me any worse than Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance.

Correspondent: Who’s dead.

Boyle: It’s just my point of existence.

(Image: Mark Coggins)

The Bat Segundo Show #385: TC Boyle IV (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Insulted by Authors

Bill Ryan recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #384. He is the proprietor of the website Insulted by Authors.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Insulted by humorless people.

Guest: Bill Ryan

Subjects Discussed: Taking unexpected tumbles in life, why insults are the best way to pop the cherry of the author-reader relationship, being the son of a scientist, dodging dodgy publicists, being identified as “The Bill Plus Insult Guy,” picking away at the celebrity industrial complex that has been built up around the author, being frightened by Salman Rushdie, whether there is something inherently wrong in asking an author to insult the reader, difficulties with humorless authors, Nicole Krauss’s post-profanity titter, how the prelude to an author interaction sets up strange expectations, Rick Moody’s refusal to sign older books, book autograph prospectors, being afraid of preconceptions, taking the denial of an insult personally, when joie de vivre is mistaken as a threat, hero worship and naivete, the protective personality traits of authors, looking at the dilemma from the “why not an insult?” position, ideal readers vs. material readers, Banksy, being inclusive of quirky ideas within a marginalized medium, non-monetary value and books, and the dangers of being drawn too close to the apotheosis of fame.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Ryan: Salman Rushdie was in my top four of insults I’d love to get. The Mount Rushmore of insults or whatever. I was so frightened ahead of time for some reason, despite the fact that this is a guy who’s reading a children’s book in front of a crowd of people who showed up at an art gallery. To hear someone read a children’s book. I was nervous! Because it’s Salman Rushdie. And I approached him. And I have tweaked my approach, depending upon the author. Like with Salman Rushdie, I was very deferent. “Mr. Rushdie, I’m sorry to be the kind of person to ask you this. But if you have a moment, if that’s okay, could you add an insult to my personalization?” And I’m worried almost that the fact that I’m scared, intimidated by the very thing that I kinda want to break down, is maybe a problem with my scientific approach. (laughs) Do you know what I mean?

Correspondent: Well, maybe it’s an emotional approach. Because here you have Rushdie. You hope that he will defy your expectation, that he will insult you. And what does he do? He decides, “Why do you want to do that?” And it’s sort of a big letdown. It’s almost like maybe you were nervous about setting yourself up for this letdown. Is that safe to say?

Ryan: It’s like: What did I do wrong? Okay. Exactly, yes! The scientific approach where I was waiting in line and I had everything lined up like a series of actions that I had just lined up in my mind. And I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to approach Mr. Rushdie. I’m going to set down my book. Very gently.” I’m going to say, “Mr. Rushdie, thank you very much. Blah blah blah. By the way, my name’s Bill. Insulted by Authors.” So I went back over after the fact. And for whatever reason, I got really really nervous and really excited. Just the fact that I’m disrupting whatever silly little convention that there is behind the whole signing of a book. I may be blowing it up way, way too big in my mind. But afterwards, my heart was pumping. And I was like, “Okay, what did I do wrong? What was it that Mr. Rushdie didn’t understand about….”

Correspondent: Just call him Salman. (laughs) Mr. Rushdie? He won’t appear on this program. So we can go ahead and be informal about him. If it’s any consolation.

Ryan: (laughs) So Salman. Yeah, I had to go over for the next twenty minutes. And I actually, literally, sat right outside the signing — or stood right outside the signing — and was breathing deep. And all these people.

Correspondent: Breathing deep?

Ryan: Yeah. I was breathing deep. I was actually…

Correspondent: Hope you weren’t hyperventilating.

Ryan: A little bit! A little bit, man. This is how much I put into this for whatever stupid reason. And all these people who had heard me talking to myself in line slowly filtered out around the corner. What did I do wrong? How can I perfect this asking for an insult? How can I make this more accessible to the Rushdies of the world? But also equally accessible to the AL Kennedys of the world.

Correspondent: Or the Amy Sedarises.

Ryan: Exactly. Exactly.

Correspondent: Well, on the other hand, what do you to deal with the reality that some authors — particularly the Old World, anti-online, anti-Tumblr, anti-Twitter types — they’re going to go ahead and say, “I’ll never stoop to that. Because I am an author.” Rushdie may be one of the last ones. Along with say, maybe, Richard Ford. I don’t think he would insult you.

Ryan: Probably not.

Correspondent: Philip Roth might, I think.

Ryan: I’d like to think that.

Correspondent: (laughs) I’d like to think that he would. Cynthia Ozick might, if you could get her.

Ryan: Yes!

Correspondent: But, on the other hand, you’re dealing with a lot of self-important authors who, let’s face the facts, are humorless. So where does the challenge kick in? Is it less about trying to bump your head against the wall? And more about seeing how they will react? I mean, it was actually rather astonishing to me to learn that Allegra Goodman would refuse to insult you and that post has not gone up, I noticed.

Ryan: Not yet. Not yet. I went through a transition between — I still don’t quite know what I’m trying to do with all this. Like I’m just trying to have fun. And I’m a book collector, in general. And I treat books as objects in addition to being books. Which is somewhat tragic, I’m sure. But also — whatever. I mean, everybody has something they’re trying to change about them. But I feel like everyone would be able to give me an insult if I somehow approached them in the right way or it was the right situation. Or something. There’s all these other outline — like little things that can mess with my amazing idea, incredible idea for insults.

Correspondent: You think you can develop the perfect pretext for any situation.

Ryan: (laughs) Exactly.

The Bat Segundo Show #384: Insulted by Authors (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Toby Ball

Toby Ball appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #380. He is most recently the author of The Vaults.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Spilling green ink all over the public records.

Author: Toby Ball

Subjects Discussed: The descriptive connection between sound and voice, Ball’s background in teaching, envisioning a scene before writing it, devising a 1935 parallel universe, alternative forms of photography, prethinking information technology, children who intrude upon the conversation and ask about the microphones, telling an old-fashioned pulp yarn, the Berlin Document Center, the Nora chapters as placeholders within The Vaults, the frantic qualities of pulp literature, characters locked in location, Hard Case Crime, Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature, detecting another person’s typing from observing the strokes, keylogging, Suge Knight as inspiration, the Anti-Subversive Unit inspired by 9/11 propaganda, designing a three book arc, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, marijuana cigarettes, Hearst and the criminalization of marijuana, mentioning alternative countries (Poland, et al.) instead of the key players in World War II, the city as physical space, ideological information, character life that comes from specific limitations in vernacular, turning a preexisting rumor into narrative fodder, working at Congressional Quarterly, Red Henry’s mistress reading Nietzsche, and tight consequential corners.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: It is interesting how the voice — somebody’s voice — tends to be imposing. More so than the bigness of Big Henry and the like. It’s very interesting to me that sound seems to be the linchpin. Particularly because the technology in this book is rather interesting. I mean, here we are roughly around 1935. A little parallel universe. And we don’t really have motion pictures. We have some possible version of photography with the replacement system that comes in the Vaults. And that’s why it is very interesting to me why sound is such an important quality. It’s almost as if sound in your world matters more than image to a large degree.

Ball: That’s an interesting idea. And I think a lot of the book is about information. Both the information that is overt and then there’s a certain amount of information that has to be gleaned from other pieces of information. And I think that the idea that people can assert powers in ways other than the physical or through violence or through having political power or whatever sometimes comes through. Certainly with your ability to dominate things vocally. Maybe not even verbally. You don’t have to necessarily have a great way with words. But if you can take up more space around you than the other person to serve as an alpha male thing, I guess.

Correspondent: Well, did you prethink any of the technology in the book? Or for that matter any of the history? We do have allusions to the Great War. We also have the Birthday Party Massacre, which is both a funny and a grisly idea. And it makes me wonder whether you had any masterplan for this alternative history or you were inventing things and filling in the gaps as you went along?

Ball: Well, what I was most interested in, I think, was how do you organize information. And because of that, it had to be before a certain period. Say the 1960s. And moving it back to the ’30s and combining it with these ideas we have about the ’20s and ’30s gangs, and things like that, I think that that was the first step in doing it. But I also wanted to create a complicated and…

[Two children walk up to the table and start staring intently at the microphones.]

Child #1: Where did you get that?

Correspondent: Well, hi.

Ball: Hi.

Correspondent: There’s a…

Ball: The microphones?

Correspondent: Yes, the microphones. You can get these microphones at just about any audio place. We have a child here who’s decided to…(laughs). Hi. What’s your name?

Child #2: (more aggressively) Where’d you get that?

Correspondent: Well, we got these through — I got these through an audio supplier. So.

Ball: Pretty cool.

Correspondent: But anyway, you were saying?

Ball: Well…

Correspondent: We have an audience. (laughs)

Ball: We have an audience of two. So from there, while I kind of wrote and sort of developed some more things I was interested in writing about, I think that’s where things kind of move on. What’s the importance of having accurate information? What’s the value of that? What can you get by taking discreet facts? And simply by organizing them, by insuring their purity, how does that in itself become information? And to try and combine that with — you know, I think there’s a certain fun aspect to the ’20s and ’30s. Where you can get this noir-y feel abut things. To a certain extent, the book has to be fun too. You have to want to read it, and the atmosphere, and things like that. Does that kind of answer your question?

Correspondent: It sort of does. I think what I’m also kind of curious about — since you are talking about information as a starting point, when did you drift off this focus on information and more into just telling a good old-fashioned pulp yarn?

Child #1: (still enraptured by microphones) Do those really work?

Correspondent: Yes, they do.

Ball: Yup, they work.

The Bat Segundo Show #380: Toby Ball (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Paula Bomer

Paula Bomer appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #375. She is most recently the author of Baby.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Pondering whether producers will declare him a “bad radio show host” for thinking terrible things.

Author: Paula Bomer

Subjects Discussed: Prethinking a story involving an uncomfortable situation, whether smashing a baby against a brick wall constitutes shock value, Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, the stigma on maternal neglect, Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother, whether or not “mother” means good, differing childhoods in South Bend, Indiana, the Catholic idea of whether or not we are our thoughts, guilt and bad thoughts, the paragraph structure of “The Mother of His Children”, plot vs. consciousness, going places you’re not supposed to go, trying to keep terrible thoughts within a character’s head, Patricia Highsmith, Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith, implicating husbands, the relationship to thought and action, Mary Gaitskill’s “The Girl on the Plane,” potshots toward the rich, Jean Rhys as a main inspiration, characters as writers, Nathan Zuckerman, Bomer’s secret novels, writers who write about painters instead of writers but who really wish to write about writers, editors who have accused Ms. Bomer of being a “bad mother” to her face, agents who have declared Ms. Bomer of being offensive, brutal rejections, whether or not offending people matters, attempts to not go to the uncomfortable, Scott Smith, horror writers being nice people, the autobiographical qualities of “The Second Son,” trust and crushing emotion, Iris Owens’s After Claude, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, brutal birth scenes, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles, Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, sexual frustration, and perverse imagery.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You have this extraordinary moment where a mother wishes to smash her baby against a brick wall. I’m wondering to what extent you prethink a situation where you’re writing about an uncomfortable situation. Is there an inherent risk to some degree in exploring what might be argued as “shock value” behavior? How do these things come into your head? (laugh)

Bomer: Well, I had a lot of fun writing that story [“Baby”]. I think it’s one of the funnier ones. And that one was basically pure satire. But there’s also, like any good satire, there’s elements of truth and real emotion as well. And actually a lot of women have written about that exact same feeling in nonfiction books. So that was a bit of the inspiration. Anne Lamott wrote a book called Operating Instructions and Louise Erdrich wrote a book called The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. And both of them discuss in nonfiction wanting to smack the baby or hit the baby, and having this real incredible moment of frustration. So it had been done before. But I think in the context of “Baby,” the title story, it’s not this lovely nonfiction book with nuances of other emotion. She’s not a very likable person. And so I think that giving her those thoughts make it even harder to take. Because she’s not very sympathetic.

Correspondent: Well, there’s certainly a stigma upon any kind of thought of neglect. Ayelet Waldman got into a lot of trouble with Bad Mother.

Bomer: Oh right!

Correspondent: “I would rather be with my husband than my children.” That kind of thing.

Bomer: Well, you know, when I — this was fifteen years ago; I have teenagers now. But still I remember. The pressure to be — there’s this strange idea that “mother” means “good.” And actually mother just means that you had a kid. And lots of people have kids. And it doesn’t automatically make you a good person.

Correspondent: The Manson Family!

Bomer: Yeah, right. (laughs) I was in the trenches of the playground and I was hoping that this was a time for people to be loving and supportive of each other. Because it’s an incredibly difficult time. You’re not sleeping. Your life has changed. So on and so forth. You have this incredible responsibility that gets sick a lot and cries. And yet in the playground, it was more like high school all over again. It was just really hard to find people who wanted to be understanding instead of pick at your weaknesses. And that might be a New York thing. I said in my Publishers Weekly interview. I’m from South Bend, Indiana and it’s a different childhood. And it’s a different way. New York. New Yorkers — sometimes, they just can’t turn it off. It’s always got to be like some competition. And even motherhood — like I said, I think it’s a corruption of a difficult but beautiful experience.

Correspondent: But not just motherhood. What constitutes abuse? Does a thought constitute abuse? Does a homicidal consideration of your born child constitute abuse?

Bomer: That’s funny. Because Giancarlo DiTrapano asked me something similar to that. And that’s a Catholic idea. That we are our thoughts. And I don’t think we are our thoughts. All sorts of things go through your head. And we are our behavior. So having a bad thought can make you feel terribly guilty. But I don’t think it makes you a bad person. Why I think that character is bad isn’t because she has a tough moment with her baby, but it’s because she’s so shallow. It’s a satirical Upper East Side mom. Even though I think she moved to Tribeca. Everything’s about one-upping someone else. Even having kids becomes a part of it.

Correspondent: Well, I’m glad that you mentioned whether a thought translates into an action. Because there is something very interesting you do in these stories. I want to point to two of them. In “The Mother of His Children,” the second paragraph could almost be the first paragraph the way it’s written when it describes Ted Stanton. But then you have the first paragraph, which is very consciousness-heavy, and that really is the story. And that is the motivation for it. You do something similar with “A Galloping Infection” where the first paragraph reads as if it’s the beginning of a noir story. With the wife’s body dragged out of the two bedroom house. And then you have the second paragraph that begins with the sentence, “He no longer would have to disappoint her.” My question is how you arrived at this bifurcation between plot and consciousness. It’s almost as if you’re suggesting with these stories that narrative can’t always capture these more unpleasant and seamy sides of consciousness.

Bomer: You mean narrative can’t capture it. You mean, the plot?

Correspondent: The plot. Yes.

Bomer: I like getting inside the heads of my characters. It’s not the only way to write. Okay, “Galloping Infection,” in particular, the man’s in shock. Because his wife dies. And I think anyone who’s experienced the death of a loved one — even though he also discusses his lack of love for her because relationships are complicated — but I kind of wanted to capture that shock. And so I think you really need to get inside someone’s head. Because the things that go through your head when someone dies — it’s funny. Some of the darker stories, I had a lot of fun writing. Like there’s another story about marital rape. “She Was Everything to Him,” which originally appeared in Fiction. And it’s not a funny story. Some of the stories are funny. But this one is not. And yet I was giggling the whole time I was writing it. Because I knew that I was doing something subversive. And it was fun. For me, it’s fun to go places where I’m not supposed to go. I’m too old and I don’t want to be a rebellious teenager anymore. So I get to be really wrong in my work. And it’s wonderful fun for me.

Correspondent: Wrong? I’m wondering…

Bomer: Bad. How’s that?

The Bat Segundo Show #375: Paula Bomer (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Susan Straight

Susan Straight recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #367. Ms. Straight is most recently the author of Take One Candle Light a Room.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Exploding Roman candles overlooked by the elite.

Author: Susan Straight

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Straight: I think what I’m trying to say about America is that it’s a series of villages. And everyone has a village. Again, people stay or people leave. But the idea that Americans want to forget that you come from a village — whether it’s the Upper East Side or Clackmannan Parish — that’s your village and you have to honor it. Fantine is the ultimate rootless traveler who goes on the road trip from hell with her father. Her father was really a pivotal character to me. I thought about Gustave and Enrique for months before I wrote this. And I wrote two short stories about them. The way that they became brothers was based to me on a true story told to me by an elderly neighbor. He came to my house for me to write letters to him. Because he couldn’t read or write. And I wrote letters to the VA. He was missing a little finger from the Korean War. And he was still trying to get money for it. And I grew up with his son. So he would come to my house. And I would write letters for him. And one day, we were sitting on the porch. And he told me this story of how he was an orphan. I mean, his dad was killed when his mom was pregnant with him. And he was seven years old. And he was hungry. And he wanted some meat. And nobody would give him any meat. No one would go get any meat. So he took a hammer. He walked three miles. He found a pig on a farm, killed it, dragged it three miles back to his house. Seven years old. And said, “Cook me some meat.” So that to me — the Enrique/Gustave — those are the men that I grew up listening to their stories of immense deprivation. Of walking fifty miles to go find a job. Of not ever having a mother and father, and making themselves into brothers. So that meant a lot to me too. That family at the end of the Clackmannan Parish Delta would say, “We’re still here.” It doesn’t matter what you do to us. We will still be here. Enrique was a big part of that for me.

Correspondent: Related to this desperate hunting, I have to ask you: Where did you get the idea of wrapping bacon around a gunshot wound as a home remedy? I asked a forensic science masters. I asked a medical student. And they had not heard of this. And I had not heard of this.

Straight: (nodding her head)

Correspondent: Aha! You did.

Straight: My mother-in-law told me that. My mother-in-law, I miss her so much. She died the year that that youngest child was born. And the last thing we whispered in her ear was that I was pregnant with her third granddaughter of our family. I mean, she had twenty-five grandchildren. My mother-in-law could have been born in Mississippi. She could have been born in Arkansas. She could have been born in Calexico. Nobody ever knew where she was born. We had to get her a birth certificate when she was fifty. My mother-in-law told me that when they were so poor — probably in Mississippi — that you would wrap bacon around the wound or salt meat. More likely salt meat. And that the salt pulled out the infection. She told me that when my children were really, really young. I mean, I knew her from the time I was sixteen on. And [my daughter] Rosette had this horrible infection on her leg. And we couldn’t figure out what it was. And we had tried everything. Antibiotics. Everything. One night, it was as if my mother-in-law spoke to me. And I had a piece of maple cured bacon. Farmer John. Stupid maple cured bacon. And I took that part. And I put it on Rosette’s wound. And I wrapped a dish towel around it. And the only thing I had to tie it with was Christmas tool. Like wrapping ribbon.

Correspondent: Wow.

Straight: She kept it on all night and all morning. Pulled it off. And the infection came out with the piece of bacon. It was the most disgusting thing you can imagine. And her wound healed over. And I just thought, “Okay, this is Alberta telling me what to do from the beyond.” And that’s exactly where that came from.

Correspondent: I’m shocked that, if this has happened, no mystery novel has picked this up. Or anything like that.

Straight: Exactly!

Correspondent: It sounds like the coolest way to get rid of a wound.

Straight: I took her to the dermatologist, who was Chinese. And she was like, “No, that’s not true. That’s not true at all. It couldn’t have happened.” And she dug a big hole in Rosette’s leg after that. And Rosette has a horrible scar now.

Correspondent: Oh wow.

Straight: So for us, the bacon. We should have just stuck with Grandma Alberta.

Correspondent: Quite literally, you must bring home the bacon.

Straight: Well, the sad thing is that that is one of those folk remedies that was passed down to me from my mother-in-law. Along with the title of the book. Take One Candle, Light a Room is something I’ve heard some older women say at some family reunion. And someone said, “Oh, is that your only child?” And she was like, “Take one candle, light a room.” And I was like, “Wow.” That’s the best phrase I could ever imagine. In a kind of defiant way to say, “Yes, I have one child. And that’s all I ever needed to make my life.” So everything I’ve been given like that is kind of like a gift from listening, I think. I’m the person who listens.

The Bat Segundo Show #367: Susan Straight (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Matthew Sharpe II

Matthew Sharpe appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #358. He is most recently the author of You Were Wrong. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #132.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Abandoning the animal experiment.

Author: Matthew Sharpe

Subjects Discussed: [The truth of the matter is that there doesn’t appear to be enough time in the day for me to summarize subjects anymore . Again, I am sorry and can only offer the lame “forthcoming” answer. Please beat me with a pool cue should we next meet, if this proves unsatisfactory for your capsule needs.]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Does this improvisational nature explain in part why the book is so violent? I mean, it has the rather extremely creative usage of a pool cue against a gentleman’s head. Which I thought was a very idiosyncratic form of violence. I’m curious why the book was so violent, number one. Number two, how you settled on the pool cue to the head?

Sharpe: Um…

Correspondent: That’s not an easy thing to do, you know. The head is going to move around.

Sharpe: It’s not an easy thing to…

Correspondent: To hit the head, yes.

Sharpe: To brain someone with a pool cue?

Correspondent: Yeah, I know.

Sharpe: Well, if it’s an old guy and he’s not expecting it. (laughs) Let’s see, why was it so violent? That’s a really hard question to answer. I really — it’s not a part of my temperament as a social being or even as a private individual in this house. For whatever reason, when I write fiction, I guess I’m on the lookout for conflicts. And in some way, pain and impediments — as my friend the writer Lynne says, the body is the first and last metaphor. And if you want to show someone in difficulties, show somebody whose body is being impinged upon.

Correspondent: But you also are playing a bit of a marionette with these characters — the characters serve as marionettes. Because you often have Sylvia, for example, you are extremely specific about the way she sits on the bed, about her posture. And speaking of the body, there’s also much imagery with the face. Particularly with relation to Karl and how he views people. In fact, one of the curious things about this book that I have to ask you about is that Karl perceives Sylvia only in terms of the color and the generic item of clothing. Like “a blue shirt” and “an indigo bra” or what not. And that goes on throughout the entire book. There’s probably about seven or eight of them. So how did you arrive at that generic syntax? That shorthand for Karl perceiving Sylvia? And what of this idea of these characters placed in very specific forms of posture? I mean, to some degree, it’s very hyperspecific. To some degree, it’s almost mathlike in its generic description as well. From Karl’s perspective.

Sharpe: Yeah. Wow, you notice stuff that nobody else notices by the way. So I have to think about these answers. But I just actually want to circle back to a question I didn’t answer, which is the pool cue. You know, I really wanted to place the pool table and the piano next to each other. Because I wanted this very much to be a novel about a bourgeois home. Of the kind that I grew up in. Though luckily I didn’t grow up with the kind of family that Karl had.

Correspondent: (laughs) I would hope not!

Sharpe: But I was thinking at that moment of the beating on the head of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. Which I’m sort of deciding whether to give away a major plot surprise. I think I probably won’t give it away. But that’s a play in which a guy walks into a bar in a strange town at the beginning, having just beaten his father with some kind of implement. I can’t remember what kind. But he beats him in the head. And so I was thinking, okay, how do I transpose Synge’s rural Irish play to Long Island at the beginning of the 21st century? And I thought, okay, I actually can’t remember right now what he beats him with. Maybe a farming implement? So I’m thinking, okay, what would be handy in a house like this? So that’s the answer to that question.

About the careful description of the people’s bodies and their posture, I think I just became fascinated through Karl’s eyes with the body of his beloved. Which he is very, very attuned to. Because he really, really digs it. And he’s constantly looking at it. He just is fascinated by her body. And Karl knowing in a sense that maybe he has something like what we could call Asperger’s. Or some kind of weird disorder where he’s not very good at reading faces. He’s always trying super hard to read faces and he really thinks, “If I can only learn the vocabulary of facial expressions, I will finally be able to decipher what the hell people are ever intending toward me.”

(Image: Felicia C. Sullivan)

The Bat Segundo Show #358: Matthew Sharpe II (Download MP3)

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Video: Bat Segundo Visits the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival

On Sunday, September 12, 2010, Bat Segundo — or some gentleman claiming to be him — went to the Brooklyn Book Festival to conduct some slipshod journalism. While Mr. Segundo did catch sight of a television truck, he did not observe any attractive reporters walking the quad and talking to the many amicable literary people who had taken the time to congregate in the rain.

Fearing that there was a journalistic vacuum, Mr. Segundo attempted to fill in the gap. He did not know how to hold an umbrella and asked the authors to do this for him.

In his first interview, Bat Segundo met up with Karen Lord, a very friendly woman who happened to be a novelist. She identified herself as the author of Redemption in Indigo, a novel put out by Small Beer Press. Mr. Segundo learned more about the book, but proceeded to complain about New York literary snobs who look down on genre. Despite this apparently egalitarian position, Mr. Segundo failed to understand his philosophical hypocrisy when considering who was actually holding the umbrella.

More rain poured. And Mr. Segundo had more interviews to conduct. The precipitation did not deter Mr. Segundo’s efforts to talk with Sean Ferrell, the author of a novel named Numb. Mr. Ferrell had a booth of his own — quite far away from the Harper Perennial booth. Yet while Harper Perennial had a tent covering, Mr. Ferrell was provided with no such protection, save for a dutiful smile and a can-do attitude. The two gentlemen discussed the weather and just what it takes to attract a literary crowd on a rainy day. He too proved unexpectedly cooperative in holding the umbrella above Mr. Segundo’s head.

In the early afternoon, Mr. Segundo accosted a very excitable gentleman named Michael Northrop. There was apparently something called a “flashmob” set to go down at the stroke of two o’clock. And Mr. Segundo had the good fortune of arriving only a few minutes before the momentous clang! He remained uncertain as to what a flashmob was, but he was informed that some fly-by-night outfit called One Story had set it all up.

The Bat Segundo Show: Scarlett Thomas II

Scarlett Thomas appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #357. Ms. Thomas is most recently the author of Our Tragic Universe. She previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #117.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Unusually pedantic about modifiers.

Author: Scarlett Thomas

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to address one review. Jessa Crispin in The Smart Set. She said, “Well, you adhered to the two laziest storylines that the world of fiction has ever thrown up. Love Conquers All and Secretly a Princess.” But to my mind, I thought this was a severe misreading and misunderstanding of the book. I mean, the book is very much concerned with how narrative must rely on contrivances in order to present life. On the other hand, when you have, for example, the deus ex machina of the magic money appearing in Meg’s account, this is something of a risky proposition for someone who is accustomed to the page-turning of your previous books. So I’m curious as to how much you worried or agonized over this, coming off of a fairly substantial success — particularly in the UK and particularly here among bloggers and the like. Did you just not care? Or did you worry about people misreading this? Because you’re presenting narrative within narrative within narrative and some people are clearly not picking this up.

Thomas: Yeah, I mean — God, there’s quite a lot there. I read the Jessa Crispin piece and I feel quite frustrated with it. Because the reading that she presents is the reading that’s set up for you in the book. That, in fact, it’s one character’s analysis of what’s happened. But the book sets it up as probably wrong. The reading that’s there –- I mean, this is just my own reading. Everybody is welcome to read it the way they like.

Correspondent: Sure.

Thomas: But the idea is that you actively go through and think, “Oh! Aha! So it was the cosmic ordering that gave her the money. And then this and that and the other. Oh my god, everything’s prearranged. And there’s no free will and everything’s perfectly placid. And it’s just like Kelsey Newman. Do I actually want to live like that? Or would I rather read it a different way?” So that’s what you’re supposed to be doing with those ideas. And Jessa seems to have stopped a bit too early. The money device – it’s not really a deus ex machina. Because Meg has written these novels. And they have been optioned for TV. And she has got the money for it. And I think, as most writers know, you do these things. And everybody’s always talking about optioning this and optioning that. And you might get some money. And you never do. And one day, you open your online banking. And there’s some money. And it does kind of change your life. For me, The End of Mr. Y did so well in the UK and Europe that there were days when I’d open up my bank account and think, “Whoa! Where has that come from?” For the first time in my life. Because, you know, I’ve always been pretty poor. And I wanted to try and write out that experience of suddenly having some money. But, of course, it’s really hard to do in a novel. Because the novels are supposed to be about drama and struggle and conflict, and somebody striving. You’re supposed to get the money at the very end of the book. I wanted to play with the idea of getting the treasure in the middle. And then what happens to life after that? But I have to say that Meg is not really a princess. Not for me anyway. What was the other thing?

Correspondent: I was going on about how narrative has to rely on contrivances to some degree in order to represent life. But to phrase that in light of your last answer, what I think we’re talking about here is the problem with coincidences, which occur in reality and life all the time. And yet when you put them into a novel, then, all of a sudden, it seems like “Oh, that can’t possibly happen!” And that’s the problem with structure, I suspect.

Thomas: Well, you see, another thing I’m trying to do in the novel – maybe not so obviously; well, maybe it is obvious – is to look at coincidence. Is the world and our experience of it – is that somehow structured in a scientific or positivist and rationalist way? Is it structured on the spiritualists on some level? Because that’s also a structure that’s imposed. Is it completely random? Or the fourth option – I may have just said there are three.

Correspondent: Well, that’s okay. We’re not counting.

Thomas: (laughs) Yeah, I don’t think you can count. But the fourth option is more interesting to me. And I think that there is no structure. But there are lots of people who are aware of lots of different structures. Which is interesting. And there are things that happen that aren’t pure coincidence. So that things don’t just happen out of nowhere. But they happen through plots or series of events leading up to that that are so minute that you almost can’t see them. So, for example, towards the end of the novel, Frank and Vi turn up miraculously on the River Dart, where The Beast maybe is, and end up taking place in some action there. And for me, I really liked putting them there. Because I thought they were there because they read Alice Oswald’s poem about the Dart. So it’s not that they weren’t there randomly by complete chance. Everybody does everything for a reason. I’m really interested in that. And so looking at the reasons for why people do things, and why that might lead to something else, that’s what’s really fascinated me in this book. So I really don’t believe in complete coincidence. I believe in choices and desire and motivation of characters, and just how interesting it is when you look at the tiny aspects of that.

Correspondent: You’ve created almost by necessity, however, a system. And life is what happens when you make other plans. So I’m not certain if I entirely buy your causist explanation for these characters. Because I think you also portray much of the attempt to explain the universe, or explain the world around us, as a trap. And a way to avoid living without absolute cognizance. So I’m curious about how you managed to depict this double-edged sword here.

Thomas: Yeah, it might. I don’t know. I mean, you don’t have to buy it. But it’s absolutely how I wrote the book. That okay, on some level, when you write a novel, you do have to impose some kind of scheme on things which don’t have a scheme like that. You need a beginning, a middle, and an end. You need to choose when you take up with the carrots. When you let them go. All of that. Yes, you do impose a structure. But for me, one of the most interesting moments in the book was when I realized that Arthur Conan Doyle, when he believed in the Cottingley Fairies. For him, the fairies were more believable than these working-class girls who could actually forge pictures of fairies. I found that so fascinating. Because for that to be your explanation – because it was impossible for him to believe in the motivation of the girls, for him to think his way into their lives and the way they would have planned something, wasn’t just a coincidence. They didn’t just happen upon the pictures. They actually made them. And that’s a wonderful thing to imagine. I think it’s great and so inventive. And then, for him, it was easier to believe in the fairies. For him, the more believable plot or the more believable story is that the fairies exist. And, for me, that was a really central image in the whole book.

Correspondent: So even if you don’t clutch to the Kelsey Newman-like idea, you still can find solace in either the Conan Doyle fairies or, as Meg has in this childhood flashback, where there’s this guy who says, “I can teach you magic.” Which is interesting in light of the fact that her father is very much about finding an explanation for the universe with numbers. And so it seems to me that the burden of these characters is very much to find any kind of explanation –- or even the self-help books that Meg must review for this particular column. That this is really the onus for almost all the characters. Either that or you have the option of just tossing your car into the river.

Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. I’m fascinated with the process of looking for explanations for things, and understanding things scientifically. Which has always been my urge. Even though I’m not into the kind of — this nouveau atheist movement is not my thing at all. Because any explanation that makes sense would be okay for me. Usually it’s a kind of scientific explanation. Sometimes, it’s not. But if I’m up in a plane, I want to know how it flies. I want to know why I’m not crashing.

The Bat Segundo Show #357: Scarlett Thomas II (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #356. Ms. Kowal is most recently the author of Shades of Milk and Honey.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Confusing magic with milkshakes.

Author: Mary Robinette Kowal

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to start with the specific language in this book. The specific Jane Austen template that you laid out. You took great care to mimic Jane Austen’s particular spellings. You used chuse with a U instead of choose with double O. Shew instead of show. Surprize and teaze spelled with a Z. But on the other hand, you didn’t, for example, hyphenate today. And things along those lines. And nuncheon! Jane Austen never used nuncheon!

Kowal: That’s not true. She used it twice.

Correspondent: When? And where?

Kowal: She used it in Lady Susan and Sense and Sensibility.

Correspondent: Ah, okay. Well, in any event, the hard choices of vocabulary. I wanted to first of all start with how this came about. Why go ahead and emulate this language? Was the idea here to create a series of limitations with which to approach a long-form novel? What came first here?

Kowal: I thought that language reflects society very closely. The reason I wound up using some of her spellings, it’s really an affectation. I am trying to pretend that this is something that could have been written then. I deviated from her spellings in places where I thought it would be confusing. In places where I didn’t feel the word was going to appear often enough for a reader to get used to it. An example of a word that was confusing was that she spelled stayed – like stayed at home – S-T-A-I-D.

Correspondent: That’s right.

Kowal: Which is a different word now. The word sofa appears, I think, once in the novel. And she spelled it S-O-P-H-A. And there’s not actually a reason to stop people. I actually thought that they were going to make me change all of the spellings. But I guess you can think of it as dressing up in Regency clothes, but remembering of course that it’s still going to a costume party.

Correspondent: By “they,” are you referring to Liz Gorinsky?

Kowal: Yes.

Correspondent: Or the copy editors?

Kowal: Well, Liz Gorinsky. The production department. I thought that someone in the editing line was going to say, “Hey, we need to change that.” The copy editor, once we had decided with Liz and marketing to keep the spellings — and we did lift out some of them – then I gave the copy editor a style sheet that said, “These are the correctly misspelled words. Please do not change them.”

Correspondent: Which words didn’t make the cut? I’m curious.

Kowal: Sopha. Staid. All of the to-days and to-morrows.

Correspondent: Oh! So those were originally spelled that way in your original draft.

Kowal: Yeah.

Correspondent: Okay. Wow.

Kowal: I can’t remember what some of the others were. But I did a find/replace. I can’t remember where I found it, but I found a Jane Austen spelling list. And I went through and did a find/replace on everything. And then they went back and undid that. So it’s funny. There’s a couple of places. I know that there’s at least one chuse that we missed and it’s still spelled with two Os. But you know.

Correspondent: Well, goodbye to that, I suppose.

Kowal: You know. Second edition.

Correspondent: Well, this is interesting. Because I’m wondering if it took you several practice tries to write in this particular meticulous style.

Kowal: I would read a chapter of Jane Austen and then write a chapter of Jane Austen. So I was reading Persuasion while I was writing this. And one of the things I picked up from the puppetry is that I frequently have to mimic somebody else’s style. So once I decided to do this, I sat down and started reading Austen. And then the reason that I was writing right after finishing reading a chapter was because I knew that the language would stick and the rhythms would stick. But I don’t really think I did a practice run.

Photo: Annaliese Moyer

The Bat Segundo Show #356: Mary Robinette Kowal (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segudo Show: Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #355. She is most recently the author of The Cookbook Collector.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Confusing cookbooks with novels.

Author: Allegra Goodman

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Jonathan’s dialogue is so reflective of Sergey Brin. I mean, he says things like “Introduce me. I’m serious.” Very Star Trek-like in his dialogue.

Goodman: Actually, I’m glad you raised that. Because in terms of research into the dot commers, I did not go to libraries obviously and do that kind of research. You can’t research them like you would a group of rare cookbooks. But my research consisted of listening to the way they talk. I’m very interested in voices. The way somebody like Bill Gates talks. The way somebody like Sergey Brin talks. I’m interested in their militant casualness. They’re very bright. They’re very ambitious. They’re very driven. And they’re very chummy and casual. Like “Let’s all just make this happen.” In a way, anti-intellectual in some ways. In their rhetoric. Not that they aren’t intellectual, a lot of them. And I don’t mean to lump all of them together. But I listened to the rhetoric that they used.

Correspondent: Who did you listen to? Specific tapes or recordings?

Goodman: I was interested in Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and some of the younger voices that I was reading in interviews in magazines at the time. The way researchers talk. The way techie people talk. The way programmers talk. Not necessarily just the powerful ones. But these are the words that they use. And I was interested actually – you know, Jess and George are very literary. And their dialogue and their banter has a lot of references to books and things like that. People have mentioned this about my book. But there’s a counterweight that people don’t mention. Maybe they don’t hear it because it’s so obvious. It’s like what we hear all the time. It doesn’t stick out. But it’s very not literary. It’s very anti-intellectual. Techie.

Correspondent: Well, Jonathan quibbles with “tenuous” at one point, looking at it like a mystified word. But this is interesting. Because I’m wondering if one of the motivating factors to write this novel is because the 1990s – God, that time was incredible in the way we documented everything about the dot com era. We documented everything about our culture. We wanted to publicize our own vacuity, so to speak. I’m wondering if this made things easier from a novelistic standpoint.

Goodman: Well, it’s really interesting. Because we did document that era and we still do. It’s been so well documented. But what I always thin is, “Well, what can my contribution be as a novelist?” As opposed to being a historian or an economist. Or even a psychologist. A sociologist. People talked about the different syndromes of sudden wealth at the time. There was a tremendous amount of journalism at the time. And after. The aftermath. The postmortems. So what could I contribute as a novelist? And what I contribute is to write about it from the inside rather than the outside. To give an intimate portrait rather than the broad overview. And as I did in Intuition, to talk about motivation. Which journalists are really not allowed to talk about, but novelists get to do.

The Bat Segundo Show #355: Allegra Goodman (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Prince of Broadway & Adam Langer II

Sean Baker, Darren Dean, and Adam Langer all appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #354.

Sean Baker is the director and co-writer (among other things) of Prince of Broadway. Darren Dean is the producer and co-writer of that same film.

Adam Langer is most recently the author of Thieves of Manhattan. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #175.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for princes and publishing insiders.

Guests: Sean Baker and Darren Dean, and Adam Langer

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Because this was a low-budget operation, I have to say that there had to be at least one moment where it was guerrilla shooting.

Baker: Oh yeah.

Correspondent: Could you talk about this? I mean, how much of this was sneaked….

Baker: Do you want to talk about it?

Correspondent: Can you talk about it?

Baker: I don’t know if we can talk about this.

Dean: (laughs)

Correspondent: You can hint at it.

Baker: The fight scene.

Dean: Yeah, we can talk about it.

Baker: I think so.

Dean: We had permits for everything. Which fight scene? The first fight scene or the second fight scene?

Baker: No, the second fight scene.

Dean: We had permits for everything. And we just ran up against the wall. And at the very, very end, we were like, “Oh my god! We forgot this fight scene!”

Baker: Yeah.

Dean: But we shot in the parking lot. We got up that day and we said, “Well, we need to shoot this scene.” Our permits were gone.

Baker: We ran out of insurance that morning.

Correspondent: Wow.

Dean: Everything was gone. This was the last scene we had to shoot or one of the last scenes we had to shoot. And we got up. We went to Prince. And we said, “Here’s $10. Or $15. For each guy you can find. Tell them we need them for twenty minutes. There’s going to be a fight. And meet us at that garage over there.” I went over to the gate of the garage, talked to the guy who was working the garage. I gave him twenty bucks. I said, “We’re going to be here shooting for fifteen minutes and then we’re out.” Shot the scene and literally took off. And that was it.

Baker: That was the one point where we just had to resort to that. Because we were running out of money. We ran out of insurance. And to get the film completed, it took those drastic measures.

* * *

Correspondent: John McNally at the San Francisco Chronicle called you a “publishing insider.”

Langer: Oh yeah.

Correspondent: And I’m wondering why he thought this. This is a book, after all, that has the rather implausible idea of US News & World Report having a books editor. I thought that was rather absurd, I have to say. If you’re a “publishing insider,” that should have been the big tipoff.

Langer: Yeah, I know US News & World Report. But that’s also from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know a hell of a lot about the book industry. The guy who identifies himself as a US News & World Report guy. But publishing insider? I mean, I don’t know. I write books. So I’m inside publishing that way. I’ve never had a job in publishing. I worked as an editor for a book magazine. I don’t know. If you’re a sportswriter, are you inside the sports world? Maybe. I don’t know.

Correspondent: It could very well be that the literary world, or the publishing world, has only so many cliches or is so diaphanous in its subject matter that anyone could, by way of delving into it, could become a publishing insider.

Langer: Yes. Guilty as charged. But I never really thought of myself that way. And I wish I had a few more editorial jobs to give myself a little more streetcred in that regard.

Correspondent: Well, going back to the names of people you brought up, did you have to go through Legal to get permission in house? Was anything considered to be defamatory in any capacity?

Langer: No. Not everything is defamatory in the book necessarily. I mean, I really didn’t want to slag individual people in the book. But at the same time, I wanted it to be taking place in the real publishing world. So I didn’t want anything in there fictional. I mean, if someone’s at a party, I wanted people who would be at these parties intermingling with fictional characters. In the same way I like to talk about how you have Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But you also have Jessica Rabbit running around. So I like the intermingling of cartoonish and reality. But I had no desire or interest in ragging on anybody specific in publishing. And anyone who is libeled in the book is fictional, I would say.

The Bat Segundo Show #354: Prince of Broadway & Adam Langer II (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #345. Mr. Chaon is most recently the author of Await Your Reply.

[PROGRAM NOTES: This conversation, conducted in May, was almost lost when a Seagate drive bit the dust. Considerable gratitude to data recovery specialist Wayman Ng, who managed to resuscitate this conversation from the grave. My apologies also to the very kind and patient Dan Chaon for the unanticipated two month delay, which came after an aborted attempt to talk with the man during the book’s hardcover release. Additionally, during a moment in which the conversation shifts to Lost, narrative momentum, and concision, the Correspondent misidentifies Charles Beaumont’s “The Howling Man” as “The Wolf Man.” The short story, not to be confused with the Twilight Zone adaptation, can be found in Beaumont’s Night Ride and Other Journeys, along with several collections and is well worth reading (along with Dan’s books, for that matter).]

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Tired of waiting on dying hard drives.

Author: Dan Chaon

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I have to remark upon the frequency of auto accidents in your work. In Await Your Reply, Lucy Lattimore’s parents die in an automobile accident. There’s the car accident excuse offered by Jonah in You Remind Me of Me. The car accident identity similarly appropriated by George Orson. And all this reminded me of Charlotte Haze’s death in Lolita. Similarly, in You Remind Me of Me, Jonah kidnaps Loomis in a car. And this reminds me very much of Humbert Humbert taking away Lolita. And, of course, the epigraph for the second part in Await Your Reply is from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is a manner of being – not a constant state…” So I must ask you, first and foremost, about the Nabokov influence in these books and whether this preoccupation with cars is sort of a Lolita thing. I’m curious.

Chaon: The car thing is not a Lolita thing. It’s just that I spend a lot of time in cars. And when I was in my twenties, a psychic told me that I would die in a car accident.

Correspondent: (laughs) Really?

Chaon: I haven’t yet. But I have a fear of car accidents. Partially because I do a lot of driving, but I’m not known as the best driver. I’m a spacey driver. My sister has me listed as one of her top five worst drivers that she’s ever driven with. I’m only at five though.

Correspondent: This psychic premonition — were there any other premonitions? Did they have any effect on your stature as a writer? “Go write, young man?”

Chaon: No. It was one of those things where it was like this weird friend of my wife who fancied herself a medium type person and was always making pronouncements and things like that. But it did stick with me. So I guess car accidents are one of my fears, along with being in a house that’s burning down. Which is also something that I tend to write about a lot. Burning houses. The Nabokov stuff though — I mean, I do feel like it’s a big influence on me. I mean, both Lolita and Sebastian Knight. Despair as well. Which is also about identity theft. I don’t know if you’ve — have you read Despair?

Correspondent: I haven’t.

Chaon: It’s about someone who switches identities with a hobo. So, yeah, I definitely think about the big in quite a bit. In terms of people that I’ve read over and over, he’s one of the main ones.

Correspondent: Was Despair one of the guides for this particular book? Or the plot?

Chaon: I guess I had it in mind to some extent. I mean, I don’t feel like I have the same kind of intellectual or verbal chops that Nabokov does, of course. But I certainly admire his work and I think about him a lot as a writer.

Correspondent: I wanted to also ask, since we were on the topic of mediums and the like — I mean, there are a lot of aphorisms contained in this book. The Eleanor Roosevelt maxim “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.” And these aphorisms are almost out there — little driftwood that the characters can clutch upon. But they don’t actually take heed or comprehend the aphorisms. And I’m curious how that came about.

Chaon: Well, I wanted the book to be full of a kind of webbing of different references and a level of gamesmanship that was thinking about the ways we put together ideas about the self and ideas about our lives through various quotations and mediums, and the way that that’s actually encouraged in our education, right? We’re being presented with various models about how to behave and how to think about ourselves, and so on and so forth. So I had a lot of these things that I was playing with. I mean, there’s self-help stuff. There’s the kind of quotes that you see in high schools to encourage kids to be good citizens or whatever. And there’s the kind of things that people try to pull out when they’re trying to make intellectual pronouncements — some of which are real and some of which are made up. And some of them — I found some interesting quotes that are misattributed. There’s a [Anais] Nin quote in there that is often attributed to her. But she never really said it. And that’s another fun thing. There are all these quotes out there that people get attached to, but they don’t really belong to those people.

Correspondent: This may be an obvious observation, but I wanted to compare You Remind Me of Me with Await Your Reply. You Remind Me of Me reveals, to my mind, how characters cannot fit into the world before them. And then in Await Your Reply, you have a situation in which, well, let’s go further. Now you have to invent an identity to fit within the world. And I’m wondering if the idea here with Await Your Reply was to approach the same idea of You Remind Me of Me in a manner that was (a) more representative of 21st century life and (b) represented a greater pigeonholing of possibility through this invention of identity.

Chaon: Yeah, I think to some extent. You Remind Me of Me is very much a regionalist novel in some ways. I mean, I think I was still thinking about myself in terms of the Midwest and in terms of what the possibilities of the Midwest are. And Await Your Reply, I think, comes out of having, for the first time in my life, traveled a lot. I mean, in some ways, it comes out of book touring.

Correspondent: (laughs) Free research. I know David Mitchell, he keeps meticulous notebooks when he is on tour.

Chaon: Yeah. But I guess I started to think about the way the characters — even in Await Your Reply — would, by this point, be in larger touch with the world. Whether they wanted to or not. In Await Your Reply, people are affected by the globalization of media and by all that stuff in a way that probably the people in You Remind Me of Me weren’t — only because of the time period that they were living in.

Correspondent: I’m curious about this Midwestern jumping point. I’m not sure if that was really a straitjacket for you. But I’m curious if it was difficult, when you’re starting to envelop a larger world with this book, to really keep those limitations which you set up in You Remind Me of Me — the bar and so forth. I’m curious to what degree this was a challenge with Await Your Reply.

Chaon: Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s a challenge. A lot of the energy that I get from the landscape of the Midwest is fed into my inspiration for writing. A lot of times I’ll start out with landscape. And a lot of times, I’ll start out with these isolated places that, for whatever reason, are emotional touchstones for me. That’s the place where I’m usually starting. It was fun to start to branch out and start writing about places that I never tried to write about before. Like the Arctic. Or like Ecuador. Or like Las Vegas. And it was also fun realizing that I didn’t necessarily have to have lived in those places to write about them. I think there was a part of me that always felt that you had to have this deep instinctive sense of a place before you could write about it. And I guess I feel, after writing this, less constrained by that sense.

The Bat Segundo Show #345: Dan Chaon (Download MP3)

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(Image: ALA)

The Bat Segundo Show: Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thirlwell appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #332. Mr. Thirlwell is most recently the author of The Escape.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if a piña colada might serve as literary escape.

Author: Adam Thirlwell

Subjects Discussed: The narrator device in Politics and The Escape, not understanding an early attempt to write a Henry James novel, the S&M of a writer being both eager to please and eager to annoy, Lautréamont and the bifurcation of voice, self-indulgence, the ethical concerns of Politics and The Escape, total selfishness and hurting others in the pursuit of pleasure, Western society and the hedonistic ideal, Goldwagen and Yiddish opera, character names lifted from cultural references, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, defending immaturity from the prism of not being able to tell the difference between the past and the future, Velimir Khlebnikov’s imagery transformed into narrative structure, “plucking” and collage, defining magic in The Delighted States, anticipating what people on television are going to say, the uncommon joys of predictability in pop culture, trying to write a novel that felt like a coda, Gertrude Stein’s idea of methods of the 20th century being used to advance the 19th, attempting to pinpoint the artistic methods of the 21st century, Geoff Dyer, Reality Hunger and appropriation, singularity, Barbara Wright and translation, the difficulties of finding “Beckettian style” in untranslated Beckett, the problems with the chronology of a style, being obsessed with the present moment, the Tea Party, great artists and plagiarism, creative theft, reading a phrase containing “blowjob” before an audience of 500 people, the unanticipated boundaries between private amusement and the public dissemination of literature, degrees of literary intimacy, the 1925 crash as “the Universal Crash,” elegant style and originality, style and unseen neurotic drama, short sentences and rhythm, the evils of passive construction, originality as fluke, unplanned sex scenes, Edmund White, Bohemian as a way of being the “absolute insider,” pithy maxims, blasphemy and belief, the classical equaling the decadent, Lives of the Caesars, Caligula, salacious gossip, and reader motivation.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Thirlwell: I think there are similarities between Politics and The Escape in their ethical concerns. In both cases, weirdly, but through different routes. They’re about saying, “Well, what if you were to be totally selfish? Why is it so wrong to not follow your appetites or hurt people? Is it genuinely bad to hurt someone in the pursuit of your own pleasure?” And whereas in Politics, it’s because there are these cute kids who are incapable of hurting someone else, and thus create a nightmare scenario for themselves, which they think iis a kind of utopia, here you get the kind of old guy who is an entirely selfish person. Or seems so. And so I suppose it’s true that I definitely thought that one of the problems for the reader was going to be that what I wanted to do was present this character who would at first seem mildly repellent. This voyeur in a wardrobe staring at two strangers having sex. But by the end of the novel, if it worked, you were going to actually feel both that he did have a coherent moral structure and also is rather likable. And I suppose, yeah, the game of Politics was that they were like words. So all of the exhibitionists who are going to like these people was because there was a sense that this was . Politics was set in a likable world. It was set in a Coetzee, hipsterish world. Whereas this is much more slightly. There are things about Haffner that, I suppose, I myself don’t like. And I wanted to create a character where I wasn’t as sold on the character myself. Though I wanted to create a little machine where you would have to actually change your moral values, or examine your own moral values as a reader.

Correspondent: So this is your worldview. With decades of experience comes decades of a capacity to hurt other people? (laughs)

Thirlwell: (laughs) I’m only thirty-one!

Correspondent: Okay. (laughs) All right.

Thirlwell: No, I have no conclusion. I am interested in hedonism, I think, and why there seems to be two levels of it. On the one hand, it seems that our society — that English/American society, in particular; Western society — is deeply devoted to some ideals of pleasure. But I think there’s a real Puritanical core actually to a lot of the ways in which we still value the couple, the family. There is something that is very much about: that you should be altruistic and you shouldn’t hurt. And in one way, I suppose, I think that’s slightly immature as a moral system. There are going to be conflicts. And where Politics, I think I was interested in showing some kind of self-destruction in that, here you have someone who seems to be outside those moral values. So, no, it’s not like I’m saying, “Everybody should now go out and be horribly unfaithful to everybody.”

Correspondent: It was a bit of a joke, you know.

Thirlwell: But on the other hand. (laughs) It’s maybe not such a terrible thing.

Correspondent: I wanted to ask about the names. Goldfaden, of course, is the guy who came up with the first Yiddish opera.

Thirlwell: Yeah.

Correspondent: You have, of course, Haffner. Which is close to Hugh Hefner. And which is in fact mentioned in this book — that particular association. And I don’t think it’s an accident that Benji might, in fact, be construed with Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” of which this book does considerable reproduction. I’m curious why you were interested in using character names that were essentially lifted from popular and cultural references. And also this note at the end of the book, in which you say that you quote all these various people. Digging through it, it seemed to me as if you didn’t so much quote them, as take stories and shift them around. At least, it didn’t feel like this. Either you pulled one on me. I don’t think it was absolutely paraphrased or even remotely paraphrased. So I was curious about why recycling of this nature occurred, both with the names and also with the so-called quotes.

Thirlwell: Wow, that’s huge. On the names, I think names are really odd. Because there’s something, I think, almost Freudian about it. You’re not always aware about why a name feels right to you, I think. And Haffner, I actually chose — I’d always wanted to write an ambivalent character called Haffner. After a boy who bullied me at school, who’s called Haffner.

Correspondent: Named close to Haffner?

Thirlwell: No, he was actually called Haffner. It was his second name. So that was when I was nine. But I also actually rather liked it as a name. And then, it was actually only halfway through writing the book that I thought, “Oh fuck. Everyone is going to think that this is a joke on Hefner.” So that’s why I put the joke in. To defuse it.

Correspondent: Nullify it.

Thirlwell: To nullify that one. Goldfaden was deliberately the Yiddish dramatist. And Benji, it wasn’t so much from Walter Benjamin. Although I’m sure that was at the back of my mind. That wasn’t deliberate. But I’m sure it was there unconsciously. But certainly the idea of the Biblical younger son. And I think that with the names — with the very Jewish names like “Goldfaden” — that was because I was very interested in almost doing a caricature of Jewishness. Or a particular type of East European Jewishness. Of immigrant Jewishness. Because one of the things that this novel is in dialogue with, and what Haffner the character is in dialogue with, is a particular version of Jewishness. So I think the Jewish names, they were there as deliberately East European. There was an air of competition. I mean, the other source of the names that I’d completely forgotten about, but only remembered recently when I saw this film again. To Be or Not to Be. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be. And for some reason, I’d seen it early on when I was writing this book. I mean, just before I started the book. And I had a kind of cast list. Some handout that I’d got. And so a lot of the names were actually from that. Like Tummel — Frau Tummel — is taken from someone who’s like the production manager on To Be or Not to Be. But then the names come from this locus of Central Europe. And it’s true. And I suppose that leads to the quotations. Because there was a way in which I was definitely interested in doing a miniature recapitulation in this book of my entire literary past. I think, slightly to then move away from it. To finish with it. So that hopefully, what I’d then write would be freer or something completely different.

The Bat Segundo Show #332: Adam Thirlwell (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Chang-Rae Lee

Chang-Rae Lee appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #327. Mr. Lee is most recently the author of The Surrendered

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for the middle-ground between “beat” and “sweet.”

Author: Chang-Rae Lee

Subjects Discussed: The similarities and differences between writing in first-person vs. third-person, the advantages of sitting in the god’s seat, infinite choices within sentences, the difficulties in pursuing the “inner life” on the page, becoming imbued by character consciousness, feeling obliterated when writing about the ravages of war, Brian Evenson, Lee’s ongoing fascination with violence, pursuing time and space within sentences, contending with false starts, agonizing over sentences, Lee’s perfectionism in relation to revision and line editing, the reasons behind the two year publishing delay for The Surrendered, the problems with possessing a hard work ethic and producing slow, writing the first chapter in a swift period of time, distrusting prose results, the difficulty of final chapters, writing as a medium for thinking and character development, character names and historical references, the Battle of Solferino, Hector as a Jean-Henri Dunant type, Hector’s creative origins as a guy from Southwest Texas, the town of Iliad, New York, Hector’s design as an immortal, the double-edged sword of persistence, the influence of Cheever and Updike, and the need to mature (as a writer and as a person) before tackling a serious story.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Lee: I’ve always been very conscious of language. It might seem silly of me to say, given all of the things that have happened in my books. I’m not terribly interested in plot. (laughs) I mean, I enjoy it. But I find, for me, the real action in drama is in the play of the sentences and in the play of the words. That’s what draws me through the story too. I mean, in some ways, unless I hear the sentence, I don’t understand what it really means. And even back in school, when I was writing a lot more essays, I would always try to craft it so that it felt like something and it sounded like something to me, rather than just said something. And particularly vis-à-vis the scenes of violence, I wanted — I think in this book and in A Gesture Life — I tried to think to myself, “What was the most, in some ways, unlikely way to describe this?” With perhaps spare and beautiful language that would add a layer of a different kind of horror to the moment. Just the contrast between how not lovely, but how handsome everything seemed and normal, given what was happening.

Correspondent: Well, that’s interesting. It also makes me ask whether you could ever possibly stop work in the middle of a sentence or whether this would actually drive you insane over the course of a day.

Lee: No, no. I can never do that. That’s my problem as a writer. I work the sentences so long. And even the very plain ones that probably don’t seem to anyone to be worth it. (laughs)

Correspondent: A five-word sentence? (laughs)

Lee: (laughs) I work them and work them until each one satisfies certain requirements and follows up the last sentence, and fulfills and promises something about the next one. You know, it’s not a great way to write in some ways. Because at the end of a paragraph, I often feel, “Okay, this is a pretty good paragraph.” But sometimes that paragraph is completely useless. Because it’s irrelevant or it’s not quite looking at the right thing.

Correspondent: Well, let’s expand this to chapter units. These are rather lengthy chapters. And so this also makes me wonder when you knew the chapter was done, if you’re constantly working and crafting these sentences.

Lee: Well, let me tell you. I threw away chapters. I threw away many chapters. They do get done. But often they’re just irrelevant. And this has been my mode in all my novels. (laughs) And it’s a maddening, frustrating mode. Because I do tend to write chapters that are a little bit longer. It just appeals to me somehow. The rhythm that I get in having a little full narrative in each chapter. A fully detailed scene. And again, for me, they’re all like little tiny books.

Correspondent: Well, this also leads me to ask quite naturally, there has to be an advantage in tossing away a chapter. Because you didn’t get it this time. But you may have had a rough idea of what worked. And you know that you can possibly recapture those particular elements and try again and get it right. Or does the process work like that for you?

Lee: No, no. It definitely helps. I mean, the second time around, you’re much more aware. You have to get over the excruciating pain of having thrown away that chapter and feeling as if there were good parts of it, but that I probably can’t use anymore. Because the whole thing for me is — again, the whole chapter has to feel that it has a certain kind of rhetorical orchestration. And even a musical orchestration, for me at least, that I hear. And maybe it’s because I grew up writing poetry first. And, in some ways, I was raised by poets as I was learning the craft. And I’m still learning. But I’ve always been attuned to meter and a certain kind of stressing and a certain kind of musicality.

Correspondent: So you cannibalize essentially with the subconscious. With these second attempts. Is that how you might put it? You throw it away. You don’t look at it again. The false starts.

Lee: I’ll sometimes look at them. But again, it’s painful to look at them. Because in and of themselves, they seem okay. And that’s what I tell my writing students. It’s not a matter of writing well ultimately. I mean, that’s not the only matter, right? It has to fulfill all the things that you’ve been writing to up to that moment and connect up in a mysterious way, in an ineffable way, with what you’ve laid down and what you might lay down. So I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if maybe that’s the way I have to do it. I have to write every novel four times. Not four different novels. But in the process of it. Just kind of work it and work it and work it. And I’m a slow writer too. I’m pretty methodical. I’m not the sort of writer who can jam out 2,000 words and then go back and fix them and be happy with it. So it’s coalmining. (laughs)

(Image: Daniel Hulshizer)

The Bat Segundo Show #327: Chang-Raee Lee (Download MP3)

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