Year / 2006

by Edward Champion

Fantastical, My Ass

I must protest against Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl.

From today, NPR’s Morning Edition: “Because while these stories do have a touch of the fantastical, in Maureen McHugh’s hands, you start with these ordinary situations and when the fantastical occurs, you’re so comfortable with the world that she’s created that you don’t question it as being strange as unsettling.”

Um, isn’t this the point of all good books? That, irrespective of genre, the reader believes in the world created, whether it be Ian Rankin’s highly detailed Edinburgh or the preposterous premise of Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom which Thomson himself single-handedly gets you to believe?

While Pearl was likely trying to get the fuddy-duddy NPR listeners to consider the speculative fiction genre as they sucked down the morning’s brew from their expensive homemade latte machines, this still strikes me as an extaordinary conceit. Why must Pearl perpetuate the great white lie that anything dealing with the “fantastical” has to be subjected to these ridiculous handicaps? Cannot these books be considered on their own terms? Besides, isn’t truth stranger than fiction? Isn’t life “fantastical” in the curve balls it often throws? Or is literary worth at large now confined to such safe septuagenarians as Phillip Roth and John Updike. If so, so sorry to have muffed up that L.L. Bean scarf, old sport, with a bit of that New Crobuzon grit!

by Edward Champion

Catty Observation #482

Have you ever noticed, when an elevator is occupied by one person and the doors haven’t yet closed and you are running to get the elevator before the doors close so that you will not be late, how the elevator occupant stands near the back of the elevator, as if to suggest, “Well, I wasn’t close enough to the panel to hit the DOOR OPEN button,” should you run into this person later? 

In short, this type of elevator occupant clearly wants the elevator to himself.  But what’s funny is when you somehow manage to get inside the elevator by way of tripping up the sensors and you give the elevator occupant a smile and a how’d’ya’do, and the elevator occupant is momentarily ashamed by his rudeness, which you are now both aware of.  There’s no apology or anything.  Just stunned silence. Of course, the elevator occupant practices the same rude behavior the next time you see him.

by Edward Champion

On Tome Kvetchers

There is a peculiar type of literary snob which I’ll call the tome kvetcher: generally, a miserable individual so utterly stingy about books that they have almost completely lost the capacity to enjoy them.  Despite having a case stocked with 600 unread books, the tome kvetcher will never able to “find a book to read.”  And if we take this grievance at face value, it is as preposterous as suggesting that a deep sea fish will never be able to find an oxygen molecule to take in through its gills. For even if we apply Sturgeon’s law, 600 unread books turns up 60 very good titles.  And this is assuming that the tome kvetcher, who has already applied standards that are probably more elitist and ridiculous than the average literary connoisseur, has obtained or purchased all of the books himself!

Bad enough that the tome kvetcher fails to live dangerously and/or actively, simply pulling a random book from the shelf and seeing if it rocks his world, but the tome kvetcher often takes out this batty neurosis on peers (strangely similar to how trust fund kids complain about how “bored” they are, despite the fact that their parents have purchased every known possession and then some for them and have spent countless dollars on psychotherapy and antidepressants and acupuncture and various editions of the Ungame) and expects them to empathize with this horrible malady.  For the tome kvetcher, this apparent inability to take the plunge, something that most well-adjusted readers seem to manage on a regular basis without bitching about it, is an existence tantamount to starving in Ethiopia.  One often hears a tome kvetcher moaning loudly in a bookstore, often disrupting those who are truly excited to be surrounded by so many fabulous books, and one ponders calling the men in white suits. 

Maybe my own thoughts on tome kvetchers are heavily influenced by the considerable galley guilt that has kicked in and because I am touched by the fact that so many nice people send me books while also saddened that I cannot possibly read them all and that I must purge (and possibly because I was raised polite and am, in general, a veritable ball of enthusiasm), but by what right and for what purpose do these tome kvetchers exist?  Do you mean to tell me that of all the great books published through the past few centuries that you cannot find even one to satisfy you or give you pleasure, wisdom or joy?  Do you mean to suggest that you are wasting hours of your life shifting books around just to find one that will fit your finicky standards, which will of course change later because your tastes are about as dependable as driving a Kia cross-country? 

Well, if that’s the kind of gloomy life you lead, then why the hell are you reading in the first place?