by Edward Champion

My Terrible Thirty Year Love Affair with Cigarettes

For thirty years I was a slave to cigarettes, falsely believing that nicotine could disguise (and even cure) my anxieties and insecurities. But there was a real and better me beneath all that the entire time and I am now ready to tell my story.

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it worked.

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

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

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

IV

But there has been something else I’ve learned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

by Edward Champion

Why Repeatedly Kicking Jonathan V. Last in the Balls Gives Me Hope

Jonathan V. Last is a prominent grifter who, like all prominent grifters in media, should be kicked in the balls — whether in real life or within your demented imagination.

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

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

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

Let us state the truth plainly:

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

Back to Mr. Last’s gonads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Edward Champion

Charlie Kirk Was Not a Hero

Many leading figures on the left and the right are falsely claiming that the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk was some kind of hero. Kirk was anything but a hero. And his legacy of hate, racism, and white supremacy must be denounced with the same vigor as the political violence that ended his life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Edward Champion

“Libromendel” — A Modern Day Retelling of Stefan Zweig

This is the story of how a 1929 Stefan Zweig story became a vital inspiration for an epic audio drama depicting the cost of removing people from American life. (You can listen to the audio drama at the bottom of the post.)

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

The Making of Libromendel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Writing and the Casting

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

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

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

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

The Music

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

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

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

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


The Sound Design

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

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

Putting It Together

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

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

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

The Show

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

Written, produced, and directed by Edward Champion

Adapted from the short story “Buchmendel” by Stefan Zweig

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

CAST:

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

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

Café songs licensed through Epidemic Audio

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

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

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

Libromendel (Download MP3)

Listen: Play in new window | Download

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by Edward Champion

Zuleika Dobson (Modern Library #59)

Max Beerbohm’s singular novel remains a lively satirical masterpiece, with its musings on romantic obsession probably just as relevant to our time as it was during its original 1911 publication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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